You know those “sister moments”? The ones where you giggle and shush each other, sneak around in the dark with a flashlight, make too much noise and make memories? Well, my sister and I didn’t have those growing up. She was 7 years older. I thought she was bossy, she thought I was spoiled. We were both right – hahahaha!
Tonight, we made up for lost time.
I don’t know if you can fully picture this in your mind, but I’ll do my best to explain it. It was 11pm when I left my sister’s place tonight. Bernie had brought some goldfish for both farms to go into our big water troughs to keep the mosquito population down. I am a big ole chicken, scared of the dark. Jim, my farmer man, was in bed so he can get up early and go to his day job. The gold fish were dropping like flies. It had been several hours and they weren’t going to make it til morning in their little baggie. A “midnight” trip to the water trough and pond were in order and there was NO WAY I was doing that alone.
So, we pack up the goldfish, leftovers, ancestry supplies, computer etc and head to my farm. My sister loves me now much more than when we were little – or she loves goldfish. Either way, she decided to come with me to walk me to the trough and pond. It’s a good thing because those fish would have all died before I would have hiked to the pond alone at midnight!
We parked the van so that the lights shone on more than half the pathway and we headed into the pasture with goldfish in a bag and a flashlight. Now we can enjoy giggling, shushing, and making too much noise! Re-living our missed part of childhood. You see those cows in the picture? Yeah, they are really cute – in the daylight. They are a bit unnerving when they follow you in the dark. Apparently, gold fish in a bag look enough like something to eat that sleeping cows will wake up, get up, and follow along – at an increasing pace. The only thing that slowed them down really was turning and shining the flashlight back at them and spreading my arms out wide and saying “Not feeding you tonight boys” loud enough to probably bother my neighbor. Which, incidentally, was loud enough for the goats to hear. They were afraid we WERE feeding the cows, but not them – so they decided to being their chorus of “what about us”.
We somehow managed to get to the top of the little hill without stepping in any of the plethora of cow piles that were strewn along our path – which could only intermittently be lit by the flashlight – because we were using that backwards every ten feet to ward off the oncoming cows! We dropped off the first few fish in the water tank and headed to the pond.
My, braver than me, sister was able to get right to the edge of the pond to pour the rest of the fish in. We were both startled by a frog dropping into the pond to get away from us or the flashlight. No one fell in. Miracle. But we did gasp a bit, and giggle some more. Then, we turned around and headed down the hill with all the obstacles from before plus a swarm of little bugs that just loved our flashlight. Take three steps, wave our hands around to clear the bugs, turn the flashlight backward and fuss at the cows (who incidentally move faster downhill and sound quite menacing coming up behind us), cue the goats, shine the light forward to check for cow poop. Take five steps . . . You get the picture.
We giggled and thought of how funny the whole scenario was, how much fun we have together now that we don’t live in the same house, what we would go through to save the lives of a few goldfish, and how I was going to share this story in a blog as soon as I got home.
Sometimes, even at night, the farm is a whole different kind of entertainment.
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