Another Sunday has rolled around and a fine one it is. There was a heavy ground fog when I got up but it is gone now and the sun is putting a serious shine on everything. The old horse pasture just glows with goldenrod and the geraniums are like multi-colored torches.
I think the gardens and fields give us a nice show every year so when the snow flies we know just what we are missing. Fall must be on its way. The weather is turning much cooler, at least at night, and the kids are coming down with colds. The health issue with back-to-school is a big one here at Northview. All three kids have asthma to some degree and the cold and flu season is just a misery for all of us. One more reason to love the seasons when they are not in school.

Back-to-school also means less help and not much company during the daytime. We get a real good picture of just how much the kids do for us (and with us) when they are not here to do it. This year none of them will be able to miss school to go to the fall farm show with us, which takes some of the fun out of it. On the other hand, it is amazing just how much work I can get done with no interruptions.
I miss them though.

This morning the milking crew, (not including yours truly because of my day off), had another typical Sunday-fine-as-frog-hair time. A former show heifer named Drive had a great big half-shorthorn bull calf up in the cow pasture yesterday evening. (We have been moving the close-up heifers in with the milk cows because the coyotes have been stealing calves from the inexperienced young mothers. Cows don’t put up with such shenanigans.) This morning poor Drive came down minus her newborn, looking all forlorn. They put her in the barn and went looking for baby…and for a milk cow from my string, named Zinnia, who was also absent without leave. They found the pair together, Zinnia smug as a cat with a bowl full of cream, with “her” new baby. They had to put the calf in the barn to get Zinny in and then they couldn’t get her out.
She wanted to stay with the young ‘un.
Thinking back I remembered another calf stealing cow, old number 20, whom we eventually sold because she stole all the calves she could find. She would literally try to kill anyone who tried to take them to the barn. She once jumped into a 20-foot sheer sided ravine just to get around us and run back out to pasture to a stolen calf. I ticked back over the generations to Maroy Bianca. That was 20’s pedigree name. Sure enough, Bianca was the mother of Milestone Blackie, dam of Blackbird, dam of Black Berry, through several other cows to Blueberry, (you guessed it), dam of Zinnia. The whole crew traces back to an old show cow, Ronscott Sovereign Lucky, a 4-H calf Ralph bought from Mike Scott. Who would believe that such a tendency would come down through so many generations?
A cow like Zinnia is a mixed blessing. On one hand there is no way a coyote is going to kill a newborn calf with a cow like her in the picture. On the other hand, sometimes it is a little hard for people to bring calves in as well.

This is the forth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Since that day, we never hear a plane go over without looking up.
Every single time.
One of the ones that flew into the World Trade Center turned south for New York City over the City of Amsterdam, just eight short miles from here. It made me think then and it makes me think now.