Some cousins kept cows, but my suburban neighborhood saw none, not even at the zoo where more exotic animals, crowded in cages, paced and stank.
I have eaten cow, I have drunk cow milk, consumed cow cheese, used cow cream to top my raspberries and make scones. I have even skimmed cream from the top of a milk bottle, watched my mother stir it into iced coffee, making liquid marble.
But until I moved (again) to Tennessee a bit more than a decade ago, I had never really looked at a cow, noticed its size -- its startling heft and height, admired its steady gaze and protection of calf, its gathering into groups, following a leader, its seemingly placid nature, endurance in storm, and habit of standing in stomach-high water on a hot hot day.
I like them, and I have been eating less and less beef because I think about their faces, their eyes, the trust of their encounter, like this afternoon, when, on taking the long way home from a necessary errand, I saw this dozen in an Alto field, not for the first time, but this time stopping my car in the middle of the road, backing up, parking, grabbing my camera, getting out, and standing for a long while, looking. At first, I heard one and then two lowing or mooing in the distance, then more loudly, until finally they had approached me, each of us on our own side of the fence. They stared and stared at me as I did at them.
Dinner time, I imagine, they thought; someone coming to see to our needs. And then I felt a bit sad that I wasn't the one who would touch them and feed them today, and also that I was the one who had needlessly brought them forward. I thought these things as I drove off, watching them in the rear view, watching me still.
I have a long commute (about 51 miles), but happily it's a beautiful one.
I begin atop a mountain and, on a good day like today, wind down Roark's Cove Road (also called the Alto Road), with switchbacks and dropoffs all the way down. Then I drive past a beautiful year-round garden into tiny Alto, where I turn right by the seedman and pass the peach-colored old house, circa 1900, with its five-grave front-yard cemetery. Then it's onto Highway 64 to the interstate at a Stuckey's where I've stopped for candy and, once, for lunch. After thirty miles on the freeway (by the Arnold Air Force and Arnold Engineering and then through Manchester), I turn off onto another Highway 64 (The Walking Horse Highway) and then Highway 82 (Sawney Webb Memorial Highway.
It's 82 that I enjoy most for its views of rolling farmland dotted with cows and goats and hummocks of green as far as my eye can see. This morning, I pulled off in the middle of the bent S-curve to take this photo, but it doesn't really capture the charm. Like rural England, rural Middle Tennessee is a verdant place indeed that lifts the spirit even before 7 AM.
