I hate to admit this, but I’m having a hard time telling my kids and our cattle apart. I mean, there have always been similarities between Colemans and cows, but I think we have moved past resembling each other and into total herd confusion. Somewhere along the line, we’ve combined bovine and human habitats. Half of our household possessions are lost in the barn – dishes, sweatshirts, socks, water bottles, the American flag and probably the nice leather gloves I will never see again. And to the reverse, every time the kids come in from feeding, they track half the barn back into the house. We might as well all move in together because we’re already basically sharing each other’s toothbrushes.

Coleman michele
Michele and her husband, Dave, live in southern Idaho where they boast an extensive collection of...

Cattle and kids aren’t so different, really. They’re both always breaking into things they have no business being in – the corn field, the pantry, the refrigerator. I can’t keep enough feed around this place, no matter what I do. And everybody prefers to eat whatever is exactly the worst thing for them. Grain and ice cream, all the time. Both sets of kids certainly live by the law of the “walk and drop.” I can always tell where a kid or a cow has been, worse than Hansel and Gretel, because wherever they walk, they drop something. Manure, socks, car keys. They leave a trail wherever they go: biological fertilizer down the lane, wrappers all over the floor and hay just everywhere. Barn to house, it’s bedlam.

I think the real similarities mammal-to-mammal come out at fair time, though – when humans and bovines are living together round the clock for a solid week, the distinctions between species grow pretty thin. My kids sleep on the steers. The steers eat the kids’ fair food. Everybody needs a bath every 20 minutes. And when it comes time to step into the show ring, I swear kids and calves react exactly the same.

Take, for example, my daughter and Josephine. Both heifers. Both social. Both a real pain to get into a show ring come show time. Whenever it was half-past time for my daughter to be ringside, ready to meet the judge, I could just bet she wasn’t going to be in the barn. She wasn’t going to be by the ring. She wasn’t going to be anywhere near where she needed to be. She was going to be 5 acres across the fairgrounds trying to find out who all could go on rides that night, who needed to sit by who during the rodeo and who was going to wear what.

Josephine the heifer was just the same. Josephine was legendary. She couldn’t care less that we had spent the summer readying her up for her own appointment with the judge. No matter how much care and commitment we’d given to teaching her how to stand and walk like a runway model, she didn’t give a darn where her feet were on show day. She didn’t care if she even had feet. All that mattered to Josephine was where her best friend Lady was. When she came rushing into the ring all wild-eyed and quivering, if Lady was not there, we might as well have been at the rodeo. She just lost her head. Lost. Her. Head. She is the only animal we ever gave vodka to, and I really can’t say whether it helped or not. If it did help, it didn’t help enough, I will tell you that.

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If the Josephine category of personality disorder can be called the social category, the second Coleman category should be named the “What am I doing here?” category. My son invented this category. If I didn’t watch him like a hawk, he’d show up in the ring in high-water pants I hadn’t seen for two years, his hair looking like his mama didn’t love him, wearing moth-eaten tennis shoes or holey boots. He’d think he was looking at the judge, but to the rest of us it looked like he was trying to decide whether to have corn dogs or mini donuts for lunch. Whenever the judge came around to look at his steer, ring etiquette demanded that he take a scotch comb out of his back pocket and brush the steer’s hair back into place after the judge had felt him for readiness. Practice all we wanted, my son couldn’t remember that little step nine times out of 10. But it hardly mattered because 10 times out of 10, he didn’t have a comb in his back pocket anyway.

In the Coleman steer hall of fame, we’ve had a few steers that showed exactly, to a T, like my son. Wilbur, Obadiah, Schlaefig. The kids would work and work and work to teach them to stand with their heads up, tops leveled, feet squared, ’til they look like statues of prime rib promise. It didn’t matter. As soon as those steers stepped in the ring, it all flew out of their heads like so much dandelion fluff; they invariably stood for everyone’s edification like bowlegged cowboys, watching the butterflies dance by and wondering if the number on my kid’s shirt was edible.

I could go on and on. We’ve had boys that acted like bulls and bulls that acted like boys. We’ve had high-strung kids and high-strung cattle. As the fates would have it, those that were wired like bottle rockets generally showed in the ring together. After all these years, I bet I have as many pictures of the cattle as I do of the kids – or is it that I have as many pictures of the kids as I have of the cattle? It’s all the same around here. Just don’t ask me who is who because I’ll probably just embarrass myself.  

Michele and her husband, Dave, live in southern Idaho where they boast an extensive collection of irrigation boots by the back door. If you can navigate the boots, the door is always open (mostly because her children don’t know how to close it, and the screen was sprung several windstorms back). But never mind that – come on in because she’d love to chat.