Mooove it!

I lost the perfect opportunity for a great photograph today. Didn't have my camera! It would have been so cool. Let me set this up for you: Right now we're living out the country - I mean way out where nothing else is except cows and chickens, a few houses, and a whole bunch of trees. So many trees, in fact, that my cell phone doesn't have a signal! Anyway, one of the things I liked about living in the suburbs for the last 16 years is the way I could just take a walk. You know...just take a walk on the sidewalk, wave to the neighbors, hey how ya doin' - the whole deal. Get a little workout, socialize, walk the animals. Great fun.
It took me nearly six months to remember that when I was a child, I used to take walks out here too even without a sidewalk or streetlights. There's a creek that runs alongside my grandmother's property and it's just a short walk down the road. The woods are too thick to take that route. So in the last week or so, I've started taking Sarah out for little walks down the hill to the creek and then up the hill along the pasture where our neighbor (a third cousin) owns a whole bunch of cows. It's a gigantic pasture that spans both sides of the road after the trees end. There are gates right across the street from each other that allow my cousin to let the cows walk back and forth between pastures so they can graze on fresh grass every couple of weeks. So today, as we were walking up the street, one of the mama cows spotted us just as we were crossing over the creek and started mooing at us. I didn't know or remember all the stuff about the gates connecting the pastures, so I looked down at Sarah and said, "see, that cow's saying hello to us!" Sure enough, a few more cows close to her took the lead and started watching us and mooing too! Before long, they started following us as we walked up the hill on the roadside, just a few yards away in their pasture. By the time we topped the hill, the whole herd was right there mooing at us! We walked a little further and they very excitedly walked too, some of them ran! It was so weird. Then I noticed that they'd all bunched up right there in front of that gate - staring and mooing at us. It was so funny. Just a bunch of cows mooing all at once and looking right at us. There must have been 30 or 40 cows! Some of them were babies too - with their cute little baby cow faces. That's when it hit me. Where's my camera? Oh what a cool shot that would have been! Just then the cousin drives up with his truck and I quite stupidly ask him why they are all staring at me and mooing that way. "Oh yeah, he says, they wanna go over to the other side to get that fresh grass! I'm gonna move them over in a couple of days." We stand and talk for a minute - I have not seen this man since I was a child living at home.
Later, we go out to run an errand, and what do you think is in the middle of the road at the top of the hill? All those cows crossing over to the other pasture. Apparently they decided they weren't going to give up the mooing and just stood right there until their owner started feeling sorry for them and let them on over where the new grass was. So the grass is greener on the other side! Just ask the cows!