Photo by Henrik Hjortshøj on Unsplash
The Stillness of the Cows
While summer’s delaying, they doze and graze, ruminate over landscapes all day, lie side by side and gaze across fields, content (or a milk cow’s equivalent) with sunshine, warm rain, the shade of a hedge and acres of regrowing grass, and then with silage and condensation when bales and corrugated shed walls pen them in through the centrally heated months that the farmhouse squares up to across the yard. They quadruple-stomach everything (though cowhands may beg to differ), seem to know what it is to be cows in a field in a universe, and wait for the lad who bikes down at four to call them over to milking.