You Know You’re in the Countryside…

I love to hang out my washing.

The sheets and pillow cases, the t-shirts and shorts, the pj’s and frocks, that dance and cavort on the line until dry.

Folded while crisp and smelling of the outdoors, then packed away into drawers, the linen cupboard or on hangers in the closet.

I grew up with grandmothers who hung their clothes on the line, with a prop, to keep it from dragging in the grass, or on a pulley contraption that allowed them to have a line between the houses.

My mother gave up line drying when we moved to the Middle East,

“Too much traffic, too much dust,” said this Londoner!  “Besides,” she continued, “I have a dryer now!”

In Beirut we lived in high rise flats so it wasn’t practical to line dry but after a few years we moved to a pent house flat in Iran where there was plenty of room to string the plastic coated line and plenty of fresh mountain air to make our clothes smell sweet once more.

Today as I rounded the corner of my house, laundry basket on my hip, I was met by the cow Hubs had been talking about earlier.

“You missed all the excitement,” he said when I got home from grooming, “there was this cow and I tried to herd her into the front pasture on my John Deere so you’d have a surprise when you got home!”

She evidently had other ideas and ran back the way she’d come.

“Did you take a photo?” I asked.

He hadn’t!

Never mind, there she was munching on the grass growing lush and green around our aerobic sprinkler system…

Thoroughly at home at Footlights, enjoying the woods, and wandering off to graze on the abundant patches of green leaving her calling cards along the way.

You certainly know you’re in the countryside when a cow comes a-calling.

She visited for two days and I named her M’amselle.

She was always on her own and grew bold enough to come close to the house unperturbed by me and my phone!

I found plenty of evidence near my flower beds which I promptly scooped up to put around my zinnias and lilac seedlings.

Luckily she didn’t try to walk through our screens.

Perfectly content to keep her discovery of Pasture Heaven to herself!

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