The house was built during the Dust Bowl era and was little more than very thin boards in the shape of a house on an unsealed sandstone foundation.

All winter long, the wind would whistle through the walls and freeze us, many a morning my sister and I woke to find our pajamas or blankets had frozen to the ice on the window glass overnight.

We had a variety of animals, which included everything from chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, about 30 cats, pigs, horses, goats, sheep, a milking cow or two, and so forth on our tiny five-acre Oklahoma farm.

At the time of this story, we had only one dairy cow. She was a very large Jersey with the biggest, most soulful eyes you can imagine. My mother named her “Joy”.

We were all able to milk our small herd of Nubian dairy goats, but my mother was the only one with the hand strength to milk Joy.

On a farm, everyone has to pull their fair share of the load. Chores must be done, it just is not possible to tell the chickens to wait to be fed until the next day or explain to the horses that they will just have to wait until you feel like filling their water trough. The problem with this was that my mother was not exactly cut out for hard work. She loved to sleep.

One Saturday morning, as usual, we were all struggling to get her up. She was absolutely refusing. Aunt Sue was getting more and more aggravated with her as Joy was in the field bellowing her dismay over being two hours overdue for milking. Poor Joy’s udder was stretched way past the point of maximum capacity. The bedlam building in the farmyard was getting unbearable as Joy’s bellowing got the other animals to join in the mayhem.

We made every attempt we could think of to get my mother out of bed. We even tried lifting her head to look out her window, where she could see Joy looking absolutely miserable out in the field.

Everyone for miles around knew that poor cow was in pain.

Finally, my mother, in rebellion over wanting to sleep and in disgust at us insisting she get up, said the famous words that not one of us ever forgot: “Well, Sue, if you want me to milk Joy, then bring her to me.”

Sue looked at my mother still sprawled in bed, said, “Okay”, and quickly walked away.

My sister and I looked at each other and ran back into my mother’s room. “What is Sue going to do?” we asked. My mother, who was still sprawled in bed, said, “Oh, did she leave? She’s probably going to bring Joy to the window to be funny.”

There was an odd silence across the farmyard. Then we heard the commanding voice of my aunt, “C’mon Joy, c’mon, it’s okay. Don’t be scared, c’mon. Huuup!” And my sister and I shrieked…as Sue walked into the house with a rope…and at the other end of that rope was a COW!!!!!! Coming right into the house, scrapping her large sides on the doorframe as she entered calmly chewing her cud and enjoying being part of a spectacle!

Well, my mother heard the screaming and the very odd sounds that sounded remarkably like a large animal coming into the house and I heard her say, “NO! She didn’t!!!!” She came bounding out of her room just in time to see a grinning Sue and a HUGE cow standing in our tiny rectangular-shaped kitchen. Sue calmly (although chuckling) said, “Well, you said to bring her to you!”

Chaos erupted. My mother is yelling to get the cow out of the house, my sister and I are still shrieking, and the cow is starting to get that look on her face…you know the I’m-about-to-make-a-large-deposit look? And Sue just can’t stop laughing as she tells my mother she’d better hurry up and milk the cow before something bad happens!

Well, Mother finally gets Sue to agree to get the cow out of the house. But, there was a problem. We learned that day that cows don’t back up! And Sue, so tickled over her joke, had not thought about how to get the cow OUT OF THE HOUSE!!

We had a backdoor, but it was so narrow and there was an extremely sharp turn to navigate before getting to it. No one thought Joy could possibly do it, including Joy who shook her head “no” when they made their first try to get her around the bend and through the door.

So there we were with a cow stuck in the house! They didn’t want to call friends for help because we were already known for getting into weird jams (wonder why!) and they didn’t want the entire town of 1,500 (counting chickens, too) to enjoy our predicament. They certainly had no intention of calling Betty, our dairy farmer friend, and explaining why we had a cow in the house. Poor Betty was known for laughing so hard at our antics that she’d start crying helplessly with laughter and be unable to talk anyway!

The cow won’t go backward. The cow won’t go forward. But the cow is DEFINITELY looking like it’s going to “go”!

They decided that we all had to be quiet to calm the cow (which confused me because the cow was the ONLY one who did look calm!) and get her out. With Sue pulling the lead, my mother pushing poor Joy’s butt, and her and Sue both trying to push in the cow’s sides to get her through the door, it was quite a sight! They finally succeeded in getting Joy through the first doorway, managed to BEND the poor cow around the corner (remember, this is a FULL size Jersey cow and she is a BIG girl), and finally out the back door…to where there was a tiny cement porch that measured approximately 2 feet by 1 foot. Cows are much bigger than 2 feet by 1 foot.

Poor Joy, she got to that point, tried to navigate the tiny steps, gave up and jumped/scrambled/fell to the ground, where she returned to calmly chewing her cud. Sue looked at my mother and said with ever so slight a smile, “Well, are you going to milk her here or do I need to bring her back in?”

Through gritted teeth, my mother responded, “I’ll milk her here.” So she sat on a back step, in her pajamas, and milked the cow while Sue held the lead. The whole time my mother milked Joy, Sue told Joy what a wonderful cow she was and that she was sorry Joy had to go through so much.

It was about a week before my mother’s jaw unclenched and a year before she forgave everyone. But she never insisted on staying in bed again! From then on, to get her up, we would just say, “moooooooo!”

(For a mental picture of the cow in our kitchen: The kitchen was rectangular with our eating table on one side and cupboards on the other, leaving an open area that was only one cow wide and about three cows long. Yeah, after that, we kind of started measuring everything in cows, not feet and inches!)

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