"I'm M.," she says.  "Just M.  I'd love it if you write about us."  Neither of us says anything like This is what makes the world go round. or Laughter heals or Community is sooooooo important.  I tell her where she can find me on the internet.  She says she'll be in touch.  I remember I'm now 25 minutes late for the job and say good-bye.  

As I open my car door, I look over my shoulder to check for traffic.  There is a little red car.  The license plate says MjustM.  "Thanks," I say and head off to work.

I'm battling the ancient p.c. at my job, cussing quietly when I suddenly remember the muddy cows.  I send myself an email:  Muddy cows!  The day slogs forward and I forget the email.

I find Muddy Cows! later that night at home.  I remember the gray Great Lakes afternoon I saw them. It was 1974.  I was driving home from a swim at the community center - a half hour swim I'd squeezed in between nine hours of work, a half hour of buying groceries, two hours of homework, one hour of prep for the women's psych class I taught, six hours of mothering my kids and 50-year old boyfriend and 5.5 hours of sleep - when it occurred to me that I was as close to wanting to kill myself as I had ever been. I knew I wouldn't.  My mom was brilliant, a gifted pianist and a suicidal depressive.  Every two years, she'd save up her pills and swallow them.  And live.  The psychiatrists of that time were the psychiatrists of that time.  The cycle became predictable, then terrifying.  I had vowed I would never put my kids through what I'd gone through.

Just the thought that there would be no escape from the weariness and bleakness I felt dropped me even further.  The Northeast Spring skies were gray - for the fourth week in a row.  It had been raining for days.  I drove numbly on. I felt absolutely alone.  Then I glanced to my left and saw a field of black and white Holstein cows.  They were up to their ankles in mud.  One of them lifted her foot.  Mud splashed up to her solid cow butt.  I laughed.  

I heard myself laugh.  "Thanks," I said.  I pulled off to the side of the road and began to cry.  Slowly. Steadily.  When I was done - and late for whatever incredibly important responsibility I'd been racing toward - I felt empty.  It didn't frighten me as it usually did.  I sat a few minutes and let myself be.  By the time I started up the car and drove on, I knew that I would stay alive - not only for my kids' sake - but because I didn't want to miss seeing more muddy cows.

My life didn't get any easier.  I had no choice in living always on the edge of an hour late and a dollar short - except perhaps in my choice of boyfriends - but slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to make myself look and listen, taste and feel.  That practice has brought me through to today, when my daughter - who is thirteen years older than I was at the time of the muddy cow epiphany - and I teased each other on Facebook; and I received a series of jpgs from my youngest son in Japan.  All my grown children have the gift of seeing the muddy cows - or in the case of my son's jpgs, a sleeping white dog; a Japanese kid wearing a huge frog hat;  and a sign promoting Freshness Burgers/Vegetable Burger Beans.  

Thanks.