My dad refused to be rushed. In most cases, he thought before he spoke. As a youngster, I sometimes took his silent consideration to mean he wasn’t going to respond to my question, but as I matured and learned to wait for the answer, his silence became dear to me, because I knew he was giving me his best answer.
The only times I heard my father lose patience and let those silent words fly, they were directed at the cows of our dairy farm. Those were also the only instances when I heard my father inject a curse word. To be fair to my father, I only ever heard him use the “D” word. I wouldn’t want you to think he was “running amok” with every epithet in the English language. But, as you can see from the photo above, other farm animals were welcomed into the kitchen on occasion, but I do not remember a cow being ushered in, neither do I have any photographic evidence of such an event.
I, personally, felt cursing at cows was justified. The term “bull-headed” wasn’t coined for nothing. If a herd of cows decided to trample a fence, they moved in concert to accomplish it, but if I opened a gate to let them pass, they’d stand in the field, casually chewing their cud. They could crush a toe with one step of a hoof. They could leave a welt with one swipe of their tail. And speaking of tails, if you’ve ever seen a real cow tail, you would NEVER eat a candy named Cow Tail. Seriously gross.
My dad worked very hard to keep the barnyard and corrals clean, which was a lot of work. He refused to let the “muck” build up. In the summer, it was manure. In the winter, it was muck. He never called it the sh_ _ word. Even in January, when cleaning the corral was a messy, mucky challenge. Cow tails, indeed.
Now that I’m a city girl, I only chance upon a field of cows at a distance from my car window. (That statement will make my family laugh, because I live in a little town, not a city, and there is a dairy farm a quarter-mile away, but Dad would still call me a city girl for sure.)
When I happen to glance at those cows from my car window, I silently call them “damn cows” in Dad’s honor, and I will never purchase a Cow Tail, either. This city girl knows what’s what.
But don’t we all have a certain amount of January muck to wade through? Here, where it gets cold and snowy, January holds physical muck in the form of ice and slush and sandy/salty/grimy snow leftovers we must get through to reach our destination. Mucky.
January also holds some mental muck, don’t you think? January can feel like it lasts 60 days. It can feel like the first mile of a long hike, or how my kids would ask “Are we there yet?” ten minutes into a four-hour drive. January can be slow-motion muck. January can be the bull-headed cow that takes some prodding to get through the gate. It may be a slow start, but if other years are any indication, January will eventually get us to February.
At other moments, January feels too quick, like the 30-day trial period to try something new before you’re automatically charged for it, or the stampede that occurs when one cow finds a break in the fence.
January is our chance to try something new with our year—crisp, cool, new days full of possibility. An empty calendar ready to fill.
In Dad’s silent considerations, if I’d asked how he felt about this first month of the year, I wonder if he would have called it “Damn January” or “Fresh Start January?” Definitely the latter, because, like I said before, he only ever swore at the cows, and he only ever gave me his best answer.
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