Yesterday afternoon the sky was angry black with twisting, swirling clouds boiling above the cow barn when I went to work. A gaggle of gulls spun over the roof looking like something out of a Hitchcock movie. It was downright eerie. I remember when The Birds came out and the family watched it at Grandma Lachmayer’s house. I hid under the dining room table for the whole thing and couldn’t wait to go home. I like birds now, but this is certainly a disturbing season. This evening when I went over the sky looked like a faded bruise, all muddy yellows and harsh purples. It was the ugly precursor of some nasty, squally weather. The wind just howled around the barn. As we were milking the last cow the lights went out and the milking motor and fans all died. We were soon running around by flashlight turning things off and trying to get enough milk out of the line for the calf bottles. Poor Becky got switched in the face by a cow’s tail in the dark. Then the lights came back on and we hurried to finish milking Cisco and feeding babies with her milk. By the time I came back over to the house, by the light of a cold gibbous moon, it was so windy that we hustled whenever we had to walk under one of the old trees in the yard. They sway so far when it really gets blowing that I am afraid they will fall right over.

Lately there has been a broken five-gallon pail in the gutter behind E-Train every time we go in the barn. It’s been a puzzle how it got there. Every day, twice a day, I have moved it back behind a divider by the wall out of the way, and every milking it was back in the drop. However, tonight when I went in the back of the barn the pail was full of kittens, two of Stormy’s babies, having a whale of a cat-battle. Ears pinned and little paws pummeling, they skirmished over possession of the bucket. Now we know how it gets rolled all over the floor.
The five kittens right now are as cute as a batch of speckled pups, but they are always under foot. My favorite one already was stepped on by Balsam when she was walking out of the barn. They just have no respect for the cows and treat them like massive, inanimate objects. We pick them up constantly and move them to safety, but they are soon back in the cow beds or climbing stall dividers.
The mother cats, Stormy and Wildthing, trade babies all the time. Sometimes one will nurse all five, sometimes they feed each others and sometimes the litters split two and three and they care for their own. Since all five are some pattern of grey or grey and white I wonder how they keep them straight. The kids can tell them apart too. Alan carts them around in his shirt all the time, fleas and all. Ewww, I don’t want them that close to me.