Kickass and smelling like a cow

Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the current preoccupation with “social distancing” is nothing new to the keeper who knew it as a high-school farm boy trying to date the “city” girls while fearing that he might smell like a cow.

Barn smells may be respectable indicators of occupational worthiness under some circumstances, but for a high school farm boy back in the keeper’s day, the effort to separate barn clothes from school clothes—and hence eliminate animal odors, was a constant challenge; and the keeper could never be totally sure that bathing and lavish dousing with Old Spice had done a complete job.  This odor-intimidation called for social distancing of much more than six feet, and meant that the keeper might shout the length of a school hallway to someone like Pat Meyers in asking her for a date.

Maybe it is all different now, what with corporate farming and milking parlors and much less separation between farm and city kids, but the keeper likes to think that somewhere out there is still a rural youth practicing social distancing by standing 20 feet away from a cute city girl and shouting, “Hey, you wanna go to a movie?”