Moo!

I drove out to Chilliwack for a first birthday party; a noisy, turbulent affair, with a half-dozen excited kids under 4, plus three babies, and their parents and grand-parents all talking at once. Such fun!

So on the way home, I was too tired to brave the freeway in the rain without someone along to keep me awake, and I cut across the farmland, turning south and east, as the roads permitted. I passed fields green (new grass), brown (very wet mud, plowed for planting) and yellow (daffodil farms), crossed canals and irrigation ditches, full of swirling brown water. The rain eased off, and it was barely sprinkling when I passed a harrier criss-crossing a field, so I stopped to take a photo out the window.

Cow barn, half-green hillside, and harrier.

The weather held for a few minutes: I managed to shoot a couple more barns before the bottom dropped out of the clouds.

Red barns and fresh snow on the mountain.

Mossy old barn

Trapped cows

I hadn't noticed the window at the back of the barn until I was looking over my photos.

When Laurie first came to Canada from the UK, long, long ago, he worked his way west across the country as a hired man on dairy farms. He tells me, from time to time, about one farm where the cows were fed in the barn all year, and never released into the field. When the early spring grass sprouted outside, they would smell it and stand at the door, lowing and lowing, wanting so badly to get out there. But that was next winter's hay; they were doomed to eat the remains of last year's.

Sad.