Feb. 06, 2003 ~ Cheating
This entry feels like I've cheated, because instead of writing something new, I've copied and pasted excerpts from yesterday's letter to Soldier boy. It's the same story I was planning to tell here, and it just seemed easier this way. Names have been removed or changed for reasons of privacy.
Also, after two months of sending the boy occasional emails, knowing that he would probably never get the chance to read them or reply, but HOPING that he just might, I sent one more little note yesterday. Last night there was a brief reply from him! It arrived just as I was shutting down the computer to go to bed. Everyone came and gathered round to read it. He couldn't say much -- he never can -- but he's doing okay. I LOVE email! By regular mail, it takes 2 or 3 weeks for my letters to reach him and vice versa. Yesterday we had one day turnaround time versus 4 to 6 weeks.
From yesterday's letter:
Now for the cow news. Last night our neighbor called to say that someone had stopped and told him about some cows out in the woods right in front of his house. They weren�t his, so he called here, and when he described one of them, it sounded just like the one we call Hoppy (so named because he once had a broken leg). He told me not to worry about it, that they�d probably be fine, and would probably stay in the woods overnight. But I couldn�t go along with that! They�re dark-colored cows, hard to see at night, and I would hate for someone to run into one. I also wondered how they got out. If the fence was down, maybe the whole herd could get loose. I remembered all the times that our other neighbor had come out, any time of the day or night (even at two in the morning), when we told him his cows were loose. College Boy was still at school, and Dad was at a church meeting. I took a flashlight and went out to the pasture to try to count heads. That�s hard enough in the daytime, but in the dark it�s a real challenge. Still, it looked like some were missing. When I checked the fence near them, four large expanses of fence were almost completely down! Just the top and bottom strands remaining, and in some places only the bottom strand. I don�t know what happened� maybe they were fighting or got scared, but it�s a miracle that the herd didn�t just walk right out of here.
I called Dad at church, and put the herd in the pen while waiting for him to get home. It sure was hard to count them! But it seemed like four were missing. We could hear some moos coming from the place next door, but at one time I�d heard moos from the other direction too, so when Dad got there, he went next door on foot and I headed the other direction in the truck. I didn�t hear or see anything, so headed back next door. Lots of mooing there. Dad flushed the cows out of the woods and got them on the driveway, then I drove behind them all the way home. It helped that the herd was mooing and griping about being in the pen. It�s like that showed the lost ones their way back. Turned out to be four medium-sized calves, and they were fine. But honestly, if I hadn�t been specifically looking for cows, I wouldn�t have seen them. Only their eyes showed up in the light of the flashlight, and just barely, at that. There was only a crescent moon, and it was foggy, so it sure was hard to see. As it happened, these calves were all solid brown, too, not a trace of white on them. Your brother helped me get them in the pen, and then Dad and I tried to count them. What a joke! We tried shining the truck�s headlights on them, but it didn�t help. We tried standing up on the fence and looking down; no luck. They kept moving around too much. Dad decided to give them another sack of feed, so we could, as he put it, �count butts� at the troughs. Even that didn�t do it, because they�d been fed not long before, and they weren�t all that hungry. They just kept milling around. Finally, I stood high on the fence rails beside the pasture gate, and Dad let them out, one by one. We counted them that way, and came up with a right count.
I still had my doubts about the numbers, so first thing this morning I called them up and counted them in the daylight. They seemed to all be there. But I got to worrying about it and made the poor things come up again. This time I had my list of names with me, and called roll. Checked off each cow and counted the calves, and sure enough, they were all there.
Did I mention that Dad and I fixed the fence last night? Did I mention that it was dark and cold? Do you remember when you were really little, playing soccer, and a lot of the kids spent more time chasing butterflies and picking flowers than they did watching the ball? That was me, last night. I kept getting distracted by the stars or the wind or fallen logs� anything and everything but the fence. Dad would say, �Honey� the fence?� Reminding me to shine the light on the fence, where he was working. It took about an hour and a half to get it all fixed up. But I think it�s fine now. I thought he�d wait till today and fix it in the daylight, but he wanted to just get it taken care of.
Word is that they have found shuttle debris here in our county. That�s to be expected. But something unexpected� there are reports of shuttle debris as far away as California and Arizona. If tiles or other pieces started coming off that early, it means a lot to NASA�s investigation.
A friend described driving by large pieces of debris on her way to work yesterday. It was covered with plastic and surrounded by police cars. Hearing about it on the news is different from seeing it in person. It doesn't feel like just another news story, it seems so... real. And so personal.
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