Warning: This Post Is About Poop. Holy Cow!

Welcome, one and all. Thank you for commenting. This meeting shall now come to order. Don't make me - John, don't make me use my gavel. There. There. Now I had to use it. Please, everyone, keep your pocket-sized Robert's Rules of Order at hand.

Now, today's subject is poop.

Yes, poop is raining from the ceiling. Poop. (quote from Angela, "The Office," when a bat is caught in the ceiling after finding droppings on the floor.)

First of all, our two new dogs have taken a while to house train. One gets the gist of why we go "outside" to "potty." The other understands that going outside to "potty" means peeing. But he has a phobia of pooping in front of us. He just won't do it. He'll wait until we get back inside, are in another room, and then will poop on the floor.

We were both feeling surrounded by lots and lots of poop. Until the cows came.

Let me explain. Our house and yard are surrounded by stone fences. On the other side of these stone fences are cow pastures. In the past, the cows have stayed in those pastures.

In the past.

Until the other day, when John called me at work. "The cows are out." "What??" "The cows. They're out. They're down by the stream, and the horse barn. We have to close the gates."

There is one gate up by our house, and another about a quarter mile down the drive by the mailbox.

When I got home, cows were everywhere. Okay not everywhere. But they were by the creek, they were by the horse barn, and they were even in the pasture where the stallion is usually kept. And they were all mooing so loudly it sounded like they were on strike. On strike from being cows. They mooed so loundly that it woke me up during the night. There's an unsettled feeling hearing disgruntled cows bellowing their discontent at 2 a.m. It's discordant, it's belligerant, and it makes one feel that if the cows decide to stampede one's house, there will be nothing to do to stop it.

So, the cows had been by the creek, by the horse barn, and in the stallion pasture. We finally got word why: the calves had been separated out from the herd, and the cows were Not Taking This Lying Down. They had been jumping the fences. JUMPING THE FENCES. Suddenly the phrase, "the cow jumped over the moon" floated through my mind, and It Made SENSE. Thus far, the hills had been echoing cow bellows through our windows, but no cows had actually been in our yard.

Until last night. I was suspicious yesterday morning, wondering how a large pile of cow poop had landed in our driveway. After John's Intramural Ultimate Frisbee game last night - which they won, 10-4 - we drove home, shut the first gate behind us, drove up the drive, and I hopped out to shut the second gate behind us. As I was wrestling with the wooden bar to fasten the two doors of the gate together, John warned in a high, tense voice, "LOOK behind you." I turned. I yelled. A large, black cow had come around the side of the small barn-future garage, and it was walking PURPOSEFULLY towards me. I turned and rapidly finished fastening the gate so it wouldn't escape. "BULL!" I yelled, plunging towards John and the house. Then I saw it's empty-looking udder hiding behind the stomach. I relaxed. "Oh, it's just a girl cow. She's okay." We stood, transfixed, watching the cow go around by the stone wall. "DON'T TRAMPLE THE DAFFODILS!" I yelled, feeling like I was in the scene out of "Anne of Avonlea." John and I stared at each other in amazement until the cow came around the other side of the barn, stood on the gravel, and lifted her tail. "OH, NOT THERE," I lamented. Then she sauntered over to my car. MY CAR. My car has never looked small until Suzie P. Cow went over and nosed it. "John, what if she sits on my car? Can you IMAGINE the insurance report? 'Cow Sat On Car?'" It's an old car, but still, I called out the car's name as the cow approached it: "JEZEBEL!" The cow decided not to render automotive damage and instead walked up to the house and past it into the back yard.

John and I suddenly realized that the world was quickly becoming a sea of poop. Dog poop seemed infinitesemal compared to large, size of Jupiter's moon cow patties.

So today, the weather report is warning citizens of flooding, and rivers of water seem the least worry: we feel, rather, the paranoia of becoming flooded in poop.

Today is supposed to be the last day we have to open, drive through, close the gate, open, drive through, close the gate. What amount of poop we have to wade through remains to be seen.