Counting Cows

“My nose itches. I smell peaches. Yonder comes a man with a hole in his breeches.”

Grandmother loved reciting that rhyme. She always said that last word so that it rhymed with “itches.” And we would laugh as she furiously scratched her nose. Then we laughed even harder when Grandaddy came around the corner of their house with a HUGE, obvious hole in his blue denim overalls.

When we asked what caused the hole, Grandaddy said, “I don’t know. Snagged ‘em on the fence I guess.”

His overalls and his knuckles were always getting snagged on that fence. And he never knew exactly what he had been doing that caused a scraped knuckle or torn clothing. He just knew where he had been.

Grandaddy spent a good portion of his day in the pasture counting his cows. If he counted them once, he counted them twenty times a day, especially when it was calving season. I loved hearing Grandaddy say, “Do you want to help me count the cows?”

Counting the cows meant walking hand in hand through the entire pasture and talking. Grandaddy’s voice was deep and gravelly, and it told the best stories. As we walked, he would tell me about growing up as a sharecropper in rural Alabama in the 1930s and 40s. He would talk about meeting Grandmother and about my Grandaddy Robert—Grandmother’s father—when he was a younger man. He would tell stories about his Uncle Lige and Aunt Ethel and about his mother. He even told me stories about my mom and her brother when they were children.

When it was my turn to talk, Grandaddy would listen like I was the most important person on the planet. In those moments I felt like I just might be, at least to him. We talked about school and my siblings and my dreams. He knew what kind of car I wanted and what kind of house I wanted and even what I wanted to be when I grew to be an adult. And he would start a conversation by asking me questions about those things.

I said goodbye to Grandaddy in January of 1995. The last time I heard his voice he had helped a neighbor by cutting wood so she could be warm for the rest of the winter. Before he went to bed that night, he called to check on me. My dad called me the next morning to tell me Grandaddy had passed away in his sleep. I still imagine him in his torn overalls walking pastures and counting cows.