Jenna Nienhuis

Dave leaned against the weathered, wooden gate, his mannerisms gruff like his beard and earth-stained clothing. He appeared as much a part of the landscape as the sycamore trees and worn paths of the Cotswold countryside. His DNA made of the dirt under his fingernails.

As we stumbled upon his stall from the adjacent road, Dave invited us into conversation. 

“We had to give er’ a real thump to get her breathing,” Dave recounted, in his heavy Gloucestershire cadence, not meaning to be crass.

I stepped closer.

Immediately, I felt like a child entering the room where her parents had just been arguing – the intensity still drifting back to earth. I peered around the fence to find a broad, mahogany Hereford generously cleansing her infant calf.  Our conversation with Dave fell into the backdrop of my awareness.

My empathetic eyes met the mother’s: fear-soaked, tired, and with flies feeding about. The calf lay on her side, exhausted, her fresh coat congealed together with amniotic fluid.  Every so often her neck gave a nod in hopeful response.

I snapped into focus as Dave colored in the story’s details with both frustration and relief: “That woman with her dog off the lead nearly cost us our calf”.

The conversation meandered from calving into family history and cost of living, all the while I stole glances over the stall. As we continued by foot to the village of Painswick, I couldn’t shake the reality: all of that living, and would both cows be slaughtered anyway? 

We carried on through the woodlands and down the narrow, canopied path; an anthology of writers. The soles of our shoes munched on discarded leaves dotted with tar fungus. Cotswold stone cottages with poppy-framed windowsills lined the red-carpet roadway up to the center of Painswick. A porcelain duck and a rocking chair sat idly behind the pane.  False idealism was sealed with custom house signs like “The Little Cottage”.  Sold! 

Once we landed in the village center, I bought a souvenir map at the corner coffee shop, supernatural in feel and offerings. Unfurled it revealed points of interest, circled and dotted. Lines suggesting where to walk, where to eat and what to do. I went elsewhere. 

Signs of disobedience enriched the landscape, encapsulated by the single branch I found protruding like a nose out of the perfectly manicured yew tree. Do Not Enter! I ached for the tree’s freedom, to be wild and unruly as nature intended. A theme reflected in the coffee shop owner, who moved here because of the mysticism and lore of this village. 

Stories of brothels and a missing statue of Pan, the Greek “party god” were rumored through conversations. 

And yet none of these salacious tales touched the complexity of the moment we had all shared on the way to Painswick. The real underbelly of a walk in the countryside told through the voice of an old farmhand: birth, enlivened by the prospect of death.