creatures

Leah and I were in the apartment, not quite ready to move on with our respective school duties, so we decided to get a little exercise and go for a walk up and around the street to where the Stock Show is in town. We didn't pay to go in, but just walked along the fence down the new Trail Drive. A lot of the cows were out there, laying in their hay, soaking up the unseasonably warm weather. So, we came upon these two kids who were laying down in the hay with their cows (on the return walk, doubling back past these two again, the kid in the back there was face down this in the hay with his arm around his cow's neck, hugging it, the kid standing had returned to the hay as well). We talked to them for a bit and learned these were Brahmin cows; they were incredibly soft with these huge rabbit-like floppy ears (and upon a lick, learned of their sandpapery tongues as well). But you could tell these two boys, not yet teens, or just having become teens, they may not yet have been exposed to life's larger concerns, or then again maybe they knew all about life and death; but, what was for sure was that you could tell how they really loved their cows; you could see it in the way they touched them, in the way they looked at them, both proudly and affectionately. They raised them and took care of them and now here they were, at the stock show, maybe getting ready to part with them, to sell them off to some other bovine breeder for show or for their offspring to be used for beef (I don't know, I don't want to know in many ways where these animals will go). And it wasn't just these two boys either, as Leah and I walked further down the sidewalk, parallel to the fence, all sorts of kids were sprawled out in the dirty hay, sharing the bedding with their animals, their animals' waste, stroking and petting and napping with the huge beasts. Children and their cows. I don't know at all how rural Texan ranch life works and I don't understand so much of it--the enormous, loud, diesel guzzling trucks; the clothes; the small towns I've never heard of, nor the larger towns they exist near; the country music--again, not that all of these folks fit into these things, but so much of the culture was out and apparent today, so much of it does fit, and it's not negative, it's just me not figuring it out, not seeing how others work, how others live; again, I don't comprehend it, so much of it, but the love that these two kids had for their animals transcended any culture barrier, and misunderstanding. It was really something special to see, to hear, to bear witness to.