Herding Beans

I came to work looking tired and a little disheveled on that Friday in November. When my coworkers inquired why I was not quite my usual self I had to explain that I was up late ‘herding beans’. “Herding beans! What ever do you mean?” So here is the story. Since I left my father’s farm in Saskatchewan at age sixteen, I have not had aspirations to herd any kind of animal! Spending those first sixteen years of life living with and herding animals either convinces one that this is a great way of life, or not! The frustrating experiences of trying to bring the milk cows home from the grazing pasture and other herding adventures with chickens and ducks, which did not fulfill my teenage expectations, had convinced me that it was not! Back then the dog, Collie, usually helped with the chore of fetching the cows but he also liked to go off with Dad to the field where he could lay in the shade of the truck all day. There he could share Dad’s lunch and chase the odd rabbit that Dad would scare out of the stubble, if he had enough energy and the spirit so moved him. Anyway, the spirit did not move him to help me get those capricious cows home very often, so I was forced to run after them by myself.
There was one in particular, who, upon seeing me coming over the hill, would put her tail up and literally head for the hills at the opposite end of the pasture. Then I would be obliged to play the game of ‘round up’ until I was practically in tears with frustration. By the time I managed to convince her to get on home to the barn for milking I was calling her some pretty nasty names. This same cow did not like to be milked. I remember well, my older brother preparing to milk her. He would come with two sets of hobbles, which he applied to both front and back feet. Next, he would use a long piece of rope to bind her bodily to the pole fence with several wraps. Then he would apply a well placed boot to her ribs making her deflate a little in order to pull the rope tighter, like a cinch, so that she couldn’t wiggle out of it while milking was still in progress. Then he would snub her head so close to the rail that she could hardly blink. Even then she would twitch and shudder like you were torturing her in the worst way. The last heroic measure was to capture her tail so that it could be tied to her leg very tightly with a good length of binder twine. That tail was not so much used to chase flies from her back as it was used to club the side of your head as you sat down to milk her. You see, she was really a very lazy cow. She only came out of her lethargic state, in a frenzy of bucking and kicking in order to torment the humans who were attempting to care for her. She had acquired that club-like tail as a result of her favourite pastime which was lying down to chew her cud and sleep on a pile of straw. On that fateful winter evening, she lay down for a long winter’s nap as usual. Her tail, however, was dangling into a puddle of water, where it was frozen fast by morning. Upon waking she rose, heaved herself free of its icy grasp but left a good length of the tassel and a broken and bleeding piece of her tail stuck fast in the ice. The tail healed. Her personality did not!
Anyway, if you didn’t snug that tail down quite right she would somehow wiggle it free by the time you were halfway through milking and lambaste the side of your head with it. On one such occasion, my brother could see her tail coming loose, so being unwilling to suffer another blow from it, he set the milk pail aside, leaving it near the cow to go into the barn to find a longer piece of twine. Upon his return he found our very spoiled, two year old sheep buck, Lambkin, who had been pail fed, shoulder deep, in the milk pail having breakfast. I don’t know if he was angrier with the cow, the sheep or himself for the loss of his hard won prize of half pail of milk.
Was it any wonder that this innocent looking, white and brown bovine with the big liquid eyes, earned the name Nincompoop? We called her Ninny for short. In our dictionary, the definition for the word “frustration” was comprised of just one word: Ninny!
I really don’t understand why Dad kept her except that she did produce a beautiful healthy calf every spring, which he promptly removed from her care and influence. To his credit, he had once tried to take her to town to “ship her” which meant that she would be sold to a packing plant for hamburger because she was old and of no particular distinguishable breed. On that occasion, he had spent most of the morning trying to get her loaded into the truck and after succeeding, went into the house to clean up for the trip to town. Upon his return, he found her hanging half in half out of the truck box. The wooden stock rack, which measured a good six feet high, was broken beyond repair. So he gave that up as a bad cause, fearing that she would hurt herself or cause him to have an accident while driving. Dad unloaded her back to a life of bovine pursuits; sleeping, chewing her cud and tormenting the humans who cared for her. Ninny continued to be the bane of our existence until she died of old age, lying quietly, chewing her cud under the poplar trees.
Now, considering my experiences with Ninny, you may understand why I removed myself from the confines of the family farm to attend school in the big city, where I married, had children and a business career.
Later in life, I found that the selective memory of passing time had sifted through all the events of my years growing up on the farm and having sifted, kept only a certain few pleasant, poignant, if somewhat unrealistic memories that evoked a longing to have cows in my life once more. The memories of the trials and frustrations of dealing with the herding, milking and caring for those cows had faded into the dull recesses of memory past. Only some of the more pleasant memories of living in the country remained. Therefore, here I was at the age of fifty-two leaping at the chance to buy a small acreage where I can build a country home.
My husband and I had talked of retiring to a country home during the years of working in the city and speculated on the ins and outs, ups and downs of owning a small acreage but that’s as far as that went. When he passed away quite suddenly in 1998, not only was I left alone and bereft at the age of forty-nine but I also found that all the plans we had made to sell our dry cleaning business and travel took a sharp turn to the left and disappeared. I now had no desire to travel alone and I had to take a long hard look at what my economic situation might be. In the first place, I was too young to retire and secondly, I needed to keep the business so that I could continue to work for mental health and financial reasons. During the first two or three years directly after he had passed, I threw myself into expanding my business and joined a ladies service club. This I found was a lot of busy work with very little by way of spiritual reward.
Then one fateful Sunday, I went for a drive back to the area in the foothills where my husband and I had often gone to have picnics on Sunday afternoons. The foothills of Alberta are not so different from the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan where I grew up. I had always felt the pull of the gently rolling hills with hay bales and cows in the fields. On this particular drive, the old dream to retire to the country came back stronger than ever. Why couldn’t I move to the country on my own? After all, this was this was the year 2000 and women in Canada had been living liberated and entrepreneurial lives since sometime in the sixties. The wheels were in motion, at least the wheels that generated ideas.