The Cow Who Ate February
The year a heifer ate February off my kitchen calendar and the whole Hereford area showed up a month late for the potluck.
Every dairyman in the Texas Panhandle owns a wall calendar from the feed store, and mine hangs by the milk-room door where I can see it with a bucket in each hand. One January a heifer named Biscuit slipped her halter, wandered into the milk room, and ate February clean off the wall. She did it politely, one page, like a woman finishing a napkin. I found only a corner of the grid and a smear of what I think was the 14th.
I figured nobody would notice. That was my first mistake. My second was telling the church secretary I had lost track of the date, because she wrote the whole thing down and put it in the bulletin as a schedule. By the first week of what I will call February, the pastor announced the spring potluck for the 19th. Everybody circled it on the wrong page of the wrong calendar, and Hereford ran about a month behind itself.
The potluck happened in what the rest of the world called March. Forty-one casseroles arrived to a hall that had been booked for a quilting club, and the quilters stayed to eat, which they said was the best decision of their year. I posted a notice about the missing page on farm.FM later, mostly to apologize to anyone who had paid a bill early. A man two counties over wrote back that he had enjoyed an extra month of not paying his feed bill and wished Biscuit could do his March, too.
Biscuit never ate another page, but she did start standing under the calendar whenever I opened the milk room door, looking up at it like a customer reading a menu. I bought a second calendar and hung it higher. She found a way to stand on a bucket. Today I keep three calendars, a phone alarm, and a chalkboard, and the heifer is fat, happy, and technically responsible for the best-attended potluck in Deaf Smith County history. For more tales like this, the farm humor pages keep a shelf for me.