More Cowbell

View from our front yard, 1971. The row of trees follows the brook, 

from which we were often summoned by the cowbell.

My mother is aging and not in the best of health. We have sadly come to the place where she can no longer live by herself in the house we grew up in. She needs to downsize to move into a different situation where she can get the assistance she needs to continue to live as independently as possible.

Over the course of the last few years -- at her suggestion - we have been preemptively laying claim to the antiques that have been passed down through the family for generations -- in some instances since the 18th century.

It's been very civilized -- oldest to youngest and then youngest to oldest. Rockers, marble top tables, paintings, etc. have been divvied up without any conflict. We decided that since there are four of us and four early 19th century samplers, each one of us gets one. 

The piano was always promised to whoever learned to play it the best. The music teacher won that contest, so it's hers -- without a word of complaint from the rest of us. 

And then someone found the cowbell.

It's a cowbell. A real cowbell. It once hung off the neck of a cow. Three of my four grandparents grew up on farms, and this cowbell came from my father's mother.

My parents figured out it was a great way to call us home for dinner or whatever occasion we needed to be gathered back into the homestead from -- scattered around the neighborhood as we were.

You could hear that cowbell at least three blocks away. Maybe even four.

I was always mortified. To be summoned home by a cowbell. I wanted to sink into the ground at the sound of it. I pretty much hated that cowbell. Not because I was being called home, but because it was so…country bumpkin. Oh, the indignity. 

Until. 

I now have a child who goes across the street to play and once he's in the backyards, he can be in the backyard of any one of three backyards -- they run back and forth between them -- and also in and out of houses. Finding him for dinner can take as much time as making dinner. 

"I wish I had that cowbell," I have found myself thinking.

This past weekend, someone found it while going through boxes. But then my brother, who had informed me that it had been found, couldn't find it when he went to get it to show me.

For a moment, we thought it had been tossed. Or that Older Sister had taken it. 

And in that brief moment of thinking it was gone, we discovered that every single one of us wants that cowbell. 

We did not fight over the scrimshaw walrus tusk cribbage board. We did not fight over the Victorian era rockers. We did not fight over the personally hand signed Norman Rockwell print. 

We found ourselves all wanting to lay claim to a cowbell. 

Somehow it has become a cherished memory from our childhoods. The running free and far so long as we were within limits of hearing the cowbell. The Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed susan and strawberry and raspberry-graced fields, the brook with its ever elusive minnows, the hills, the jack-in-the pulpit and mistletoe-lined trails through the woods, the climbing rocks, the trout-stocked skating pond. Neighborhood post-sunset freeze tag and hide and seek and kickball games. The cowbell called us home from those places, but now it is a portal back to those times.  

A lottery was suggested, but then someone remembered that it was actually given to my brother by our grandmother. Apparently my parents just usurped it for, oh, 45 years or so. And once that was spoken out loud, others remembered it too. 

So to my brother it goes.

The lucky dog.