Kowzerout!
Decades ago – before we were even engaged – I told Farmer Gary if I ever wrote a memoir, the title would be Kowzerout!
We’d been dating for a few months, so Gary invited me to the farm for Sunday dinner. It felt like something out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder story, as his mom, Rita, put on a nice spread.
After we finished dinner, Rita shooed us into the living room while she washed the dishes. (She refused my offer to help.)
It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes later when an alarm went off:
KOWZEROUT!
Gary jumped to his feet and, without a word to me, ran into the kitchen and out the back door. His mom was already gone. Apparently, that petite woman was capable of making quite a sound when the situation called for it.
Knowing the Werne family members still spoke the language of their ancestors, my first thought was that kowzerout was the German word for fire.
As I stood looking out the kitchen window, it gradually came to me: kowzerout was a sped-up version of “cows are out.”
When you own a dairy farm and are located on a fairly busy state highway, your life (and bank balance) flash before your eyes in an instant when those moos escape. Because cows love to explore what’s on the other side of the fence, especially when there’s a roadway involved.
The event ended without any casualties, thankfully. Forty-five years later, Gary’s moo cows are gone, but his wife is still here.
And that wife has convinced Gary to sit and record some of his stories. Touchingly, our sons presented us with recording equipment last Christmas, so we’re going to give it a try.
Eventually, we’ll record longer stories and host them on YouTube. But to start out, we’ll embed a few rather short audio clips here on the blog.
Let’s start with Gary explaining when he and the moo-cows first made their acquaintance.
He was quite young:
Gary says he was eight or nine when he started actually milking the cows.
And no, not by hand (everyone asks that).
They had milking equipment all the way back in the mid-1960s:
Perhaps it was a coincidence, but 2012 was also the year our grandson was born. So before you start to worry about what Gary now fills his hours with, it’s me, crop farming, logging, reading, and Cameron.
And not necessarily in that order.
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