It Was the Cow's Fault
Over the years some of my friends have told me what a proud and fiercely independent person I am. I was pondering that today and it made me think of an incident that happened when I was about 10 years old.
I grew up on a farm in rural Nova Scotia. The closest neighbour was about a half a mile away, and my nearest friend was about a half hour's drive away. In those days, parents didn't offer the kind of taxi service they do today...at least my parents didn't...so needless to say, summer holidays were for the most part a very solitary time for me.
For a lot of the summer I didn't mind the solitude. I was pretty much left to my own devices (my mother being too shell shocked from a long year of teaching school to do much more than curl up on the living room couch with her vast collection of Harlequin romances, and my dad being too busy working 14-16 hour days to take more than a passing notice of us kids). I was a voracious reader, I loved to go exploring on bike or foot, I regularly visited and chatted up the farm animals, and when I was very little I had an imaginary sister named Cathy who accompanied me just about everywhere. Cathy, by the way, was a dream child - very sweet and caring, and everyone loved her. But she had many life threatening illnesses, which meant she had to regularly ingest pills (candy). Janet was the mean one - jealous that Cathy got so much attention. She was always stealing Cathy's pills. A psychiatrist could have a ball with this I'm sure!
Anyway, by the time I was 10 Cathy had long since disappeared, and I was getting to the stage where friends were becoming very important to me.
One summer day I found myself at loose ends, feeling terribly lonely. My dad wasn't around to take me anywhere (not that he made a habit of doing that anyway), my mom didn't drive, and so I sat in the car and had a good long cry.
Then the problem was how to explain my red and puffy eyes to my mom and brother. My pride was such that I would do just about anything to avoid admitting that I was lonely, or sad or emotionally hurting. So I came up with what in my 10-year old mind was a plausible story. I went in the house, and when my mom, taking one look at me, asked what was wrong, I said: "One of the cows kicked me." She of course wanted to see the inflicted wound, and of course could see no sign of anything when I showed her my leg. She looked at me with a puzzled expression but didn't pursue it further.
Where such pride came from I cannot say...a probable source is my Scottish ancestors, for whom such qualities as pride and independence provided necessary survival skills. Past and more recent events have reminded me that keeping all one's hurts inside is not healthy. However it's proving to be a hard habit to break. My God I can be a silly git sometimes! I need a cow to give me a good swift kick in the backside.
4:47:39 PM 
|
