IS THAT A COW IN THE FRONT YARD?

Just returned from a spectacular weekend at our country house and I am so glad I live someplace that has four definite seasons. Winter where we actually have frigid temps and Snow---we are lucky to have snow, some people have never even seen it. There is nothing like the morning after a nighttime snowfall. Everything is so crisp and clean and blinding and quiet.

Spring when it's cool and we're about to die to have some warm days. Then all of a sudden it's warm and everything is sprouting and blooming and just gorgeous. Then Summer comes where it becomes maddenly hot some days but we do seem to look forward to shorts and sandals all year long and keep reminding ourselves of the winter that will eventually arrive on those 100 degree days.

Then we have Fall, my favorite season. It's crisp in the morning and evenings and usually warm during the day, the colors are magnificent and the smells of leaves burning (in the country) and even the pine smell seems to be more prevalent. I LOVE FALL.

Anyway, had a wonderful Fall weekend in the country with Papa. I went down early Friday afternoon and got Snoopy settled in and then went to the neighboring town (it's a little bigger than our little town--more stores and a Starbucks!) to run some errands. Back to the house to have dinner with Papa and then he settled in to watch sports shows on tv. I got bored with this after a while and decided to go do the grocery shopping for both houses (city and country houses). I prefer shopping at the country store for both houses because it does seem to be cheaper.

Anyway I headed to town and I usually refrain from driving around at night when we are in the country. We live 8 miles from town on three windy country roads and our country town newspaper is filled with car accidents in every issue. I've made comments to Papa that it seems like all the teenagers are crashing into the elderly folk or vice versa and we're going to run out of teenagers and elderly folk one of these days due to all the traffic accidents.

I headed to town anyway, in the dark, and got almost three miles from the house on the absolute worse blind curve on my journey. Through the trees I saw a truck coming down the hill. But first I have to let you know that I have this real bad habit at night of slowing down, sometimes coming to a stop (when nothing is behind me) when I'm meeting a car in the dark because I don't see well at night and the oncoming lights tend to temporarily blind me. So I was slowing my car down to a standstill and realized the oncoming truck was making a wide turn (aka HE WAS IN MY LANE) coming around the corner and he saw me FINALLY and locked his brakes up. I had come to a complete stop by this time and was just watching and listening to him try to stop. He finally did about a foot (THAT'S ONLY 12 INCHES!) from my front bumper. He composed himself, backed up and pulled up beside me where I asked him if he was OK! What else do you say to some stranger that has almost killed you? He said he "was fine and was glad the road wasn't that wet in that spot (it had rained off and on all day) because he didn't have much tread on his tires and he would have hit me pretty hard". NOT TO MENTION THAT HE WAS IN MY LANE AND PROBABLY GOING WAY TOO FAST DOWN THE HILL. I told him I was glad we were both ok and then we both drove away.

For some reason I wasn't that shaken up until after I finished my shopping and was on the way home and came to this same curve and noticed the tire tracks on the pavement and saw where they had ended. That shook me up a bit. I told Papa when I got home that instead of unloading groceries from the car, we both might have been having a totally different evening. I guessed that since we (me and the other driver) were neither elderly nor teenaged, that we were saved for some reason other than as a newspaper article of another traffic accident.

So after that incident, the rest of my weekend was kind of low-key. I love Saturday mornings in the country. We usually sleep in, have a big breakfast, and what we call "cowboy Saturday". On one of the satellite channels, they show (usually the same ones over and over) old western movies, usually with John Wayne in them. Papa and I have watched these movies hundreds of times but Saturdays just aren't the same without them. I have even bought some of the same movies on DVD for the city house for Saturdays so when I stay up in the city for some reason on a weekend, I won't miss out on cowboy Saturday. But, alas, it's a week before Halloween and we didn't get a cowboy Saturday, just a bunch of horror movies which caused us to get outside alot earlier than we usually would on a Saturday. Papa started on some outside construction projects and me and Snoopy walked the gravel roads and the fields for a while.

Our second favorite thing to do on Saturdays IN THE FALL, is watch college football games. We are both so addicted to this that as soon as it's high noon, we are both in front of the tv with our popcorn bowls and our plan for the day. We started with OU and Kansas, worked into the Texas/OSU game, and ended with Mizzou and Colorado (roughly nine hours of football back to back). Then we collapse into bed.

Sundays, we usually spend wrapping up any inside/outside stuff we need to take care of (I usually clean the house, run the dishwasher, do the laundry from the weekend), Papa finished his outside construction project with help from Joe, our renter from the property we own across the road.

But on this Sunday, right about noon, Papa came running to the front door yelling at me to come outside and don't bring Snoopy. Well, of course, me and Snoopy are both running to the door and I'm trying not to trip over her while trying to get in the front of her which I succeeded in and flew out the door closing it to keep her in the house. There stands this huge cow (steer, I was told), in my front yard looking at me. Me and Papa looked at it and at each other, completely without a clue of what to do. H started walking towards the cow, who trotted back to the road with Papa in pursuit going in the direction of home. There is one guy who has cows on our road, so it was pretty easy to figure out where this one came from and he seemed to know the way home. Papa followed him, making sure he was headed back home. Thankfully the neighbor was home to get the cow back in the pasture where he belonged. Sigh...life in the country, there isn't anything else like it!

Until next time...Grammy