Gone Forever

The farmer who owned the calves came this morning to get them--finally--FINALLY! We love having animals in the pasture in the spring and summer when the grass is growing tall and lush and we need something to keep it eaten down. But by late fall, and especially by winter, we are more than ready for them to be gone. They make an absolute mess of the pasture when it rains, they nose around for grass and leaves wherever they can find them (dislodging the intricate system Jeff has devised for keeping the dogs in the pasture!), and they're old enough and big enough to be ornery.

As they rode away this morning, I thought with a bit of nostalgia, "Well, we'll never see them again." So goodbye, Bartimaeus--who had some sort of vision problem, if not total blindness (hence the name), and who surprised us by turning out to be a girl after we named her. Goodbye, bull calves, who once got pepper-sprayed by Jeff when he was in the pasture plugging a hole in the fence and the calves charged him (an incident which made both my neighbor Wilma and I laugh hilariously, but which Jeff didn't find so funny). And goodbye, my favorite one of all, the all-black, female, gentlest one--you were the beauty queen.

You'll be missed--not by me, but by our dogs, who liked to give you a hard time by snatching bites of your food and sometimes even charging you (the nerve!). It was fortuitous that Jeff snapped this picture of tender animal camaraderie yesterday when we arrived home from our church's morning service. We didn't know at the time that the calves would be taken today, but now they're gone forever, and the dogs are supreme masters of the pasture again.