Best Laid Plans and All That...
by Vivien
Come set a spell and enjoy a few quiet minutes in the Meadow...
Hi, my name is Vivien. When I calved this year, Snack Lady said I was gonna be joining the milkers in the Snack House. I was supposed to be a milker last year, but I got a little sick after my first calf and had to have some medicine and well... that settled that.
No twice daily visits to the Snack House for me.
I like the idea of being a milk cow. I’d been in the Snack House before, so I already knew it meant warm lights, yummy snacks, and Snack Lady humming while she milks.
The milk cows who visit the Snack House are special. Their milk is collected by the Snack Lady and divided between the calves who get bottles and the humans. That meant my baby boy, Phil, would be taking bottles. Before long we’d both settled in to the new arrangement.
Only, for whatever reason, my milk didn’t seem inclined to cooperate.
The front quarters flowed steady enough, but the back two...
Well, they were feeling a wee bit shy.
Snack Lady tried everything she could think of. She sang to me. She massaged my udder. She stood there scratching her head and studying the situation like staring at it long enough might somehow make those back quarters change their mind.
They didn’t get the memo.
After a while, Snack Lady let out one of those long human sighs. You know the kind. Then she said, “Vivien, you're staying with the calves full-time.”
And that suited me right down to the ground.
By then I already knew Ember. She’s Sapphire’s little red girl. Sapphire and I had been pasture neighbors while our babies were in the calf pen. We spent a fair amount of time standing along that fence line keeping watch over the young’uns, making sure Snack Lady kept their bellies full of warm fresh milk and keeping watch to be sure no harm came to them.
So when Snack Lady opened the gate and let Ember in with me and Phil, that little girl came trotting right over like she’d been waiting on me her whole life.
I reckon she had.
She was hungry, I had milk, and hungry babies should always be fed. Ember bellied up to the milk bar, and just like that, I had two babies to tend to instead of one. As it turned out, my stubborn back quarters needed Ember just as much as she needed me.
These days I don’t go to the Snack House to be milked. There’s no stanchion, no vacuum pump, no clickity-clack of the pulsator, and no splish-splash of milk hitting the bucket. There’s just Phil, Ember, and the ordinary business of keeping two growing calves fed.
That wasn’t Snack Lady’s plan when all this started, of course. Humans do seem awfully fond of their plans. We cows, however, don’t always find it necessary to comply.
Snack Lady says the Creator has a way of providing what’s needed, even when it doesn’t look much like what we had in mind.
“But the Lord said to me, ‘My grace is enough for you.
When you are weak, then my power is made perfect in you.’”
— 2 Corinthians 12:9 (ICB)
I reckon Snack Lady was right. Sometimes those plans that didn’t work out were just making room for something better all along.
