At the end of the summer, we will celebrate our seventh year in Middlefield. My 30 years of being a New Yorker are quickly becoming a distant memory. The combination of my Italian/Irish genes and New York origins has never really allowed me to slow down and feel relaxed. In this sleepy town, I still rush about. I expect things done quickly and done right. I’ll even confess to jaywalking if there is such thing around here. The memories of New York stay with you, even if they become more distant. Coming through the windows during my Bronx years, I often smelled the wonderful aroma coming from Arthur Avenue. While New York has some truly nasty smells emitting from it, nothing beats the aromatic pleasure of freshly baked semolina bread when the wind blew from the south. Since we have come to Middlefield, on warm summer nights an entirely different smell comes through my window. In our first few days as residents here, we discovered that we were neighbors to a cattle auction house…something you definitely didn’t see in the Bronx. We hadn’t realized this until our third night in the Old Miller House. We were adjusting to life on the prairie. Our 300 year old home came chock full of modern amenities like bee hive ovens and a 18th century loom up in the attic. Not very useful tools for making smoothies, but we would learn to rough it. Kate, my 1st grader had given “Pa” a kiss goodnight and walked through the living room to go upstairs. It was then that she saw a scary shadow through the old window. It wasn’t unheard of for a child to imagine frightful apparitions in a new place to live. When Kate screamed I told her to get a hold of herself and get to bed. She called again, “Mom there is something looking at me right outside the window”. I still didn’t believe her. Finally she grabbed me by the hand and we were both squinting through the dark window trying to see this ghost. Less than 2 feet away we saw the massive horns. Staring strait at us in the pitch black, was a massive bull looking though the window, wishing we would get out of the way so he could watch Sponge Bob on the TV behind us. Now I was the one calling to my husband in disbelief. Needless to say, we opted not to walk the dog that night. For three weeks the bull found his way into our yard, but only after dark. Apparently he was an escapee from the auction house and managed to stay elusive for weeks in the 90 acres across the way. My guess was that he liked watching Sponge Bob through the window. You would expect this in Oklahoma, but Middlefield? When he was finally spotted during daylight directly across the street, we watched the state policemen armed with cheap plastic rope trying to lasso him. This was obviously something they hadn’t been trained in at the police academy, so it was like watching Larry, Moe and Curley. The laugh was on them, but to this day I smile when I think about our first visitor to our home. Whether the view outside your window happens to be of an apartment building with a man that likes to dance in the buff, or of a TV watching bull, the miracle is in the unexpected. This just proves, life is a great show.
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