One bright Easter morning several years ago, a new baby calf was born into this world on my father in law's farm. This happened all of the time, so none of us expected the chain of events that would take place over the next few months and even years because of this life changing baby girl we named Easter.
You see, Easter's mother had a difficult delivery and despite days of working with her and veterinary visits, unfortunately she could not be saved. This left Easter, only a few days old, orphaned and at a high risk of death herself from complications of her own. It didn't take long for me to fall in love with this new baby girl and my husband and I decided we had to try and do something to see if she could be saved. We started trying to bottle feed her, but to our dismay she would not suck the bottle. Her health was deteriorating quickly and her chances of survival were slim. We took her to the Mississippi State University Veterinary School where we were not given much hope, but they kept her and tried everything they could to save her. Thankfully, after a week or two of hospitalization, being fed through a tube and treated for lung infection/pneumonia, they called and said we could bring her home. They still did not give us much hope that she would ever see her first birthday because her lungs were so damaged. We took her home anyway and resumed bottle feeding until she was old enough to be weaned. Everyone in the family helped with this daily chore. My father in law later decided to gift her to us and that's when it all began. She was our very first cow and our first inkling of an idea that some day this is what we wanted to do with our lives.
Easter grew to become a great big mama's girl. She was a pet more than anything else and would "moo" at us when she saw us coming and stand by the gate for a pat on the head and a treat. Even when she was old enough and strong enough to be put into the pasture with the other cows, we could call her name and she would come running to us. Later, Easter even blessed us with her own calf that we named Maybell. She was such a good mother too! We weren't sure she would survive giving birth because of her weakend lung condition, but she did great! Now we had two cows for our future farm! I couldn't have been more proud of my big girl!
However, that following year, my father-in-law found Easter lying in the pasture unresponsive. She had unfortunately passed away during the night. It was devastating news and one of the saddest days we had to face. We are so thankful for the time we had with her and for the baby girl she gave us. I will never forget that sweet cow and how she changed my life. See, what I didn't mention in the beginning, was that my mother had passed away that November and caring for this baby calf was like therapy for me. Watching her heal and grow stronger everyday helped my heart to heal and grow stronger right along with her. This is why I said what would happen after her birth was unexpected. The fight she had in her and the courage and hope she gave me was something I never expected to happen. Especially since I had never had anything to do with any of the cattle or calves on the farm before except for look at them and comment how cute they were. Since then, we have accumulated several more cattle and Maybell even gave birth to her first calf this past year. At this time, we take care of our cows and continue to take care of my father-in-law's cows since he passed away from lung cancer two years ago.
We have so many plans for our future farm over the next few years. At the moment, the cattle are all still on my father-in-law's land until we get land cleared and fences set up on our own land. Hopefully, that will start taking place this year. We are also planning to add some goats, chickens and possibly even a hog to our farm family in the future. One thing I'm most excited about is building our dream log cabin retirement home. We will be starting on clearing our land and getting our site ready for that in 2020! From the very unexpected and unusual circumstances of that orphaned calf, Collins Cove Farm became a dream of ours. Since retirement a few years ago we made the name of our farm official, and now we are slowly making that dream a reality one day at a time. If God is willing, it will be done!
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