Honoring Peggy, The Cow Who Made This All Possible

When I was four, my Mother and I lived with my Grandfather and Aunt Mary, while my Father was in the Korea. Shipman, Illinois is a very small farming community, maybe 550 people. There was only one other child living nearby. Her name was Mary Jane Christopher and she lived across the state highway that I was forbidden to cross alone. So, the animals on my side of the highway became my best friends.

One large dairy cow - one of many who grazed in fields adjacent to my grandfather's much smaller "retirement" farm - would come and visit me at the fence. She seemed to know I was a child and was very gentle. She wore a rope collar with her name on it. Peggie. She seemed to really enjoy facial rubs and ear scratches a lot, and had the softest nose. I never got a lick - a cow kiss. I really wanted a cow kiss. I always thought it would be like a giant dog kiss, and I love a dog kiss. Fairly often, she would come to a particular spot at the fence and wait for me. One day, as I approached the fence, she started mooing with urgency, charging the fence and stamping around violently from side to side, finally breaking the lower wooden rail of the fence and stamping even more violently. For a moment, I thought she was coming after me. I didn't understand why she suddenly acted so. As suddenly as she had started, she stopped. She lowered her head to sniff something on the ground; then began bobbing her head up and down and mooing until I looked. Just then, my Aunt arrived on the scene. She had seen the cow's actions from the kitchen window and thought me in danger. Instead, she arrived to see the cow indicating the dead snake at her feet, a sizable dead snake just on my side of the fence, the side where I would have climbed up to sit. She gasped and called my Grandfather. He immediately identified it as a three foot adult Copperhead, indigenous to Illinois and very poisonous, probably deadly to a small child many miles from serious medical attention. My Aunt was in awe; and when she related what she had witnessed to my Grandfather, he was in awe. My aunt took some pictures, two of which supposedly appeared in the Collinsville newspaper the next week, along with the story of the heroic dairy cow, Peggy. Shipman was too small to have a paper of its own....even a weekly. "Peggy" the Cow was honored at church the following Sunday, no doubt inspired by Heavenly intervention. Eight and a half years later, our family went back to Illinois to visit my Grandfather, Aunts and Uncles and such. My Father had been re-assigned to Wiesbaden, Germany for 3 years, so we wouldn't be seeing them for a while. Peggy was still alive, but retired. Mr. Christopher, owner of the big farm and dairy that surrounded my Grandfather's farm, said people still told the story now and then; and some still like to go out and give her some rubs and scratches. So, that's what I did.

Now, I know you're waiting for me to get a lick - a cow kiss, solidifying the happy ending; but I never got a cow kiss. Instead, she saved my life.

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