car, which would have been messy, and probably dangerous for the driver. So I had to retrieve her. I wasnât all that sure how to do this by myself, as cow herding wasnât a subject theyâd covered in liberal arts school, but I thought Iâd improvise.
âStay here,â I told Miranda. â
And donât get out of the car
.â
âOkay, Mama,â she said, nodding. âI promise. You go get Lucky?â
âYeah,â I told her. âSomething like that.â
Silas, who was listening to his Dart, said nothing.
So I grabbed a stickâbecause even if I had a lasso, I wouldnât know what to do with it if it slapped me in the assâand went off to find the cow.
Lucky was easy to locate once I got to the road, standing as she was in a patch of kikuyu grass and lowing at passing cars. I endeavored to catch her attention.
â
Baaa!
â I screamed. â
Baaa
!
â
Despite my efforts, the cow did not interpret this clamor as a request to return to her paddock. Instead, she correctly assessed me as an amateur without a clue. Ignoring me utterly, she ducked into our neighbor Hamishâs garden.
This worked out fine, because Hamish is a dairy farmer. So while he probably would have preferred not to have our cow gobbling his roses, at least he knew what to do with a four-legged beast when he saw one. Besides pick up a stick and yell, âBaaa!â
Then the real problems started. âMama!â I heard. âIâm coooooming!â
That sounds a lot like Miranda
, I thought, with impressive naïveté.
But it canât be Miranda, because she promised she wouldnât get out of the car.
Thatâs when I noticed my three-year-old trotting down the center of the highway. Her height was just right for this, because she was short enough to be completely invisible to any speeding motorist.
â
Miranda!
â I hollered in a terrifying roar I did not know I possessed. â
Get. Out. Of. The. Road. Now!
â
Predictably, she burst into tears. But she got out of the road.
âIâm sorry, Mama. Iâm sorry,â she sobbed. â
Please!
I want to be your
friend
!â
So I slapped her.
No, just kidding. I snuggled her up and held her close and carried her back to our property, where Silas was still in the car. Like a little angel child, he had done what he was told.
I opened the car door.
My son was squatting in the passenger seat clutching two patties of warm poo. Having already spread a good deal of it over the carâs upholstery, my purse, and my cell phone, he seemed unsure what to decorate next. He looked to me as if for inspiration.
I took a deep breath and counted to ten, just as the anger management people suggest. Then I plucked the patties from Silasâs hands and flung them in the bushes.
With two delinquent poo incidents so close together, I donât want to give you the impression that Silas is one of those tricky poo-obsessed children who smear it on the walls or flick it around. Now, at five years old, he was basically toilet trained. The problems arose when he wasnât near a familiar toilet and didnât have the words to ask for one. Had he been able to speak, I feel confident he would have asked to be let into the house so he could use the bathroom likea normal child. But he didnât know how to ask. So he had had an accident. Then, faced with a number of rogue turds in the back of his motherâs car, he had done the only other thing he could think to do: he spread them on things.
I made sure Hamishâs front gate was closed. I knew Lucky would be safe across the road for a few days, but as far as I was concerned, that solo cow-wrangling escapade was the final straw. Country life was complicated enough without dodging traffic to chase after livestock. We asked around the neighborhood and eventually found a farmer who was willing to let Lucky eat his grass until Katya and Derek came back.