It’s that time of year again, here in the valleys of the eastern High Sierras; calving season. For me, it’s a love/hate affair.

Calves are born smelling like sweet molasses, at least to me, and I love it. I can’t imagine what they smell like to their mammas, but whatever odor they emit, mom jumps right in and starts lickin’ that baby dry! Usually.

It’s when she decides the smell isn’t to her liking, or perhaps she has no sense of smell, (or, sometimes, she just has no sense!), that I will have “house guests!” Forty or fifty pounds, more or less, of slime on the hoof….in my laundry room, on the porch, or in a couple of cases, the “guest” bathroom. Maybe that’s why I don’t have very many two- legged visitors. And that “good housekeeping fairy?” Useless. Keeps her distance. Her job description obviously doesn’t include washing calf pee and poop from walls, floors and cupboards, nor scraping mud and….”gunk”… out of the bathtub after a particularly cold calf has been soaked overnight in warm water!

There is a little bull in my laundry room as I write. His momma is a “first calf” heifer; she’s a bit like a ditsy teenage girl. Her priorities are a little “skewed.” The other “girls” that she hangs with saw something on the far side of the field last night, and well, she just had to go with them to investigate, and, “OMG(!), you mean I was supposed to wash that thing off…with my tongue?!?! No! No way! Uh-Uh! Not happenin’ tonight, sister! I got to find me some HAY!”

So, Junior has become my first guest of the season, which wouldn’t be so bad, except that everytime he bellows, my dogs become raving lunatics, and my cats “poof” up like furry blow fish, finding ingenious places to hide out…under sofa cushions, behind the refrigerator, in the small space between the DVD player and the tv ………..my yarn basket.

Junior is now finding out he has legs. The banging, thumping and crashes coming from the laundry room are likely the bucket of detergent, trash can, laundry hamper and the cat litter box being rearranged. The towels we used to dry him off last night will be part of the trash that goes out today. I’m afraid to put them in my washing machine for fear it would have a seizure. I hate it.

Thumps and bumps means he has managed to get up on those wobbly little calf legs, at least for a few seconds, until the linoleum proves too slick, and down he goes, right in the kitty litter, with its contents,  that are now covering the floor. It would seem that he has discovered the door into the kitchen, inching his way forward through the cat food dishes and their water bowl. Maybe that super-clump  litter won’t clump TOO badly on his damp hide. It’s gonna have to be chipped off like “quick harden” cement.

I have a feeling that getting his nit-wit mother to EVER accept him will be next to impossible. Calves are supposed to smell like molasses, not cat pee, poop and last night’s salmon dinner. They certainly aren’t supposed to be “crunchy.”

If you happen to see that housekeeping fairy, lasso the bitch. I need her. Meanwhile, I have to go shut the laundry room door. Destructo, Jr. is staggering through the kitchen like a wet, kibble and litter encrusted zombie. My guess is he no longer smells like molasses.  My cats may show up later today. Meanwhile, I have to check under all the sofa and chair cushions before sitting.  Just gotta love it.