When we first built a house on a portion of the farm where my wife grew up, we frequently had cows in the yard because the old fence around the pasture had seen better days. Now, our neighbor has a new fence and we seldom see cows out on the road or our garden or the driveway.
The worst thing is when they get out at night. Black cows are hard to see in the dark, and they don’t mind running into people who are out in the roads and yards with flashlights trying to get them all moving back toward the break in the fence.
Cows are heavy. When the ground is wet, it doesn’t take them long to create a mud hole or put a lot of foot-sized holes in the yard for the riding mowers to get stuck in.
Since it’s 2020, I keep expecting to see cows in the yard again. Knock on wood. So far, nobody’s rung the doorbell and said those fateful words “Your cows are out” even though they’re not our cows.
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Fate’s Arrows,” in which a young woman fights the KKK in the Florida Panhandle of the 1950s.
Malcolm's Round Table 
Not entirely unlike a black cat on the next-to-top-step in the dark when one needs to make a bathroom visit – but larger and more dense…
We’ve run into our cats in the dark, too, even though none of the current cats are black.In the middle of the night, we’re too sleepy to see them clearly.