For a wonderful few years we lived in the country in an old farmhouse on an old apple orchard and next to a cow farm. Even though we only lived there for a relatively short time, our family collected a lifetime of memories, of mushroom foraging, chasing wild turkeys, sleepovers in the tree-house, creek fishing, watching fireflies on warm summer nights and just about everything there was to know about apples. One of the many highlights to our lives were the neighbor's cows. Whenever one of the cows was about to give birth, Winston (our neighbor) would drive by the house, the kids would hop into the back of his beat up pickup, and they would head off to whatever part of the farm to help. We would often watch the cows and their antics from our porch with our morning coffee and it wasn’t long before the kids started naming them based on something unique about them. There was Blackie and Brownie and Spot and Speckles, and Puddle Jumper… she was fun to watch. By far the favorite Cow was this pretty brown cow with a big white splotch on her face as if she had just been hit in the face with a big cream pie. She got the name Pie-Face Cow. Pie-Face Cow was Queen of the Herd, bossy, playful and a bit of a brat. She would play chase along with the new calves or hip-check her sisters to get the best spot at the salt lick. Pie-Face Cow was the athlete of the farm, always first out of the gate, never going slower than a trot across a field, performing yoga moves to get the longer grass on the other side of the fence (because the grass is greener LOL) and even climbing trees. That was a day to remember. One morning the kids came running into the house yelling that Pie-Face Cow was in one of our trees. I’m thinking she got stuck in some low branches. I went to look and sure enough to my surprise, there she was, happily munching apples from one of our trees, precariously balanced on another tree that had been knocked over in a storm at just the right angle for her to walk on up and reach the apples on our side of the now ruined fence. We didn’t see her get up there and we didn’t see her get down but we definitely saw a cow who had climbed up a tree!
So now when I hear the Strawberry Cow song, I think of Pie-Face Cow, that beautiful, funny and acrobatic cow that made us all go WOW! It’s Pie-Face Cow that I was thinking about when I designed the Strawberry Cow Fingerless Gloves and I’m certain if there were any strawberries in that field Pie-Face Cow would have found them.
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