I Had No Idea Lady Cows Had Horns
Yesterday Mr. Redoux and I got in the car to run to the Post Office and I had this nagging feeling that I was forgetting something…
Then I realized that I didn’t have my phone with me. But Mr. Redoux had his. Whew! So we were okay!
We laughed and then we started playing ‘remember when…’
‘Remember when we would actually go somewhere and we didn’t have phones with us??’
‘Remember when the only phones we had were attached by a wire to the wall of our house???’
‘Remember when we moved to the middle of nowhere in NorCal and we didn’t even have a phone in our house??’
‘And it took us nine months to get one!’
Okay, now before I go on, a little background for you here —
We got married and moved to Northern California 45 years ago this month. We rented a tiny little house on a ranch that was owned by a very prominent senior citizen of the area named Marion. (She actually owned a gold mine and part of a bank)
Our little house was pretty cute but it didn’t have many modern conveniences.
The water came from a hand-dug well, there was no cable TV so we only got one channel from an old antenna on the roof, the house had never been wired for phone service and sometimes there were cattle in our yard because, well, we lived on a ranch…
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Not long after we moved in, I drove to the phone booth outside of Joe’s Country Store and called the phone company to order a phone for our house. They told me they could set us up on the existing line in our area. In December. This was March… Welcome to country life!
Now I was born and raised in a coastal town in Southern California so I guess you could say I was kind of a city girl and I didn’t know anything about rural country life.
So when December finally came, and our phone lines were all installed, I was so excited. The phone guy plugged in our shiny new phone and proceeded to tell me how to use the 8 party line that we were on.
‘Excuse me? What do you mean by party-line?’
‘Well there are 7 other families who share this line with you.’
‘Share the line??’
‘Yes. If someone else is using the phone at their house, you have to wait to use your phone because only one house can use the phone line at a time. All you do is pick up the phone to see if someone is already on the line and if not, you’ll get a dial tone and then you can use the line. But if you hear someone talking, they’re using the line and you’ll have to wait. And by the way, it’s against the law to listen in on someone else’s conversation.’
Seriously??…
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It’s amazing what you don’t know that you don’t know…
So what else did this young city girl not know about country life?
Well, there was the day that I went out to get in my car to go to work and it was surrounded by a bunch of cattle.
So I called Marion (after waiting 10 minutes for the phone line to be free) and told her I didn’t know what to do because there were a bunch of bulls around my car and I couldn’t get in it. She said she would be right there.
A few minutes later she showed up in her ratty old sweatshirt, bra-less, with about 3 inches of mud and cow manure caked on her black rubber boots and started laughing hysterically,
‘These aren’t bulls! These are lady cows!’
‘But they have horns!’
‘Honey, that’s not where you look!!’
Huh, who knew??? Lady cows have horns… (And that’s not where you look!!!)
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Then there was the time I ordered a dozen fresh eggs from a co-worker who had chickens. She brought them to me the next day and proudly opened the carton for me to see. There they were — 12 beautiful white eggs.
I said to her ‘Oh, these are nice! So did you bleach them yourself?’
She looked at me with such a dumbfounded stare that I knew she didn’t understand what I was talking about.
So I explained myself, ‘don’t chickens always lay brown eggs and then they’re bleached white to sell in the market?’
Well, apparently there are chickens that actually lay white eggs!
What???
It’s amazing what I didn’t know that I didn’t know…