The Weather Balloon in the Feed Alley
A white balloon with a little foam box dropped out of the sky into my feed alley, and the whole herd studied it like a jury.
It was a Tuesday morning in late spring, clear and still, and I was pushing feed down the alley when something large and pale drifted over the roof and settled on the concrete. A deflated balloon, white as a bedsheet, with a little foam box on a string. I stopped the feed cart.
Within a minute every cow in the pen had come to look. They stood in a ring around it, noses forward, ears up, like a jury. Gladys, who is not afraid of anything, reached out with her tongue and tasted the string. A calf named Pickle lifted a hoof and put it down again. Nobody knew what to make of a visitor from the sky.
I read the label on the foam box. It said the object was a weather instrument and asked the finder to call a number. So I did. A very pleasant woman on the other end explained that these balloons rise high into the atmosphere to measure temperature, wind and moisture, and that mine had come back down after about two hours. She said the folks at the National Weather Service would be glad to have it returned, and she asked, with real concern, whether anyone had been bothered.
I told her the herd had formed a committee. She laughed. She asked whether I could mail it back, and I said I would drive it to town personally, which is what I did the next day, with the balloon folded neatly on the passenger seat and a calf, I will admit, sticking her head through the back window to see where we were going.
A week later I got a card in the mail with a stamp on it. It was a thank-you note from the weather service, signed by four different people, and one of them had drawn a tiny cow in the corner. I have the card on the refrigerator. I send visitors to the pages at farm.FM when they want to hear what else drops out of the sky in Texas.
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