While Waiting for the School Bus

This is something I wrote in 2018.

After all these years of marriage, I can’t believe there’s a story from my childhood my wife says she hadn’t heard from me until recently.

When my parents and I lived on a hobby farm in the rolling dairylands of Northern California, every once in a great while cattle would break through a fence near where we waited for our school bus in the morning.

They would wander around in the road, a dangerous hazard to those driving way too fast along our winding country roads.

No big deal, we knew just what to do. Half of us would quietly, casually walk one by one past the cattle on the far side of the road and half of us would stay put. Then we would form a loose but gradually tightening circle to slowly herd them towards the hole in the fence they had escaped through.

No panic, no sudden moves, since that would make them bolt between us, but the cattle would shuffle away from us warily… and as we got closer and closer they’d take the hint and go through the opening back into the fields where they belonged, and one of us would twist the wire fence back together.