Milking the Wrong Cow

Without going into a lot of details, by the age of 11 Mom had found herself put out on a farm as a sort of foster child. I say sort of because it was not by her mother's choice that it be done, but leaving the mechanism for another story, she was fostered out to a farm family in Forks Township, just north of Easton, Pa. Having spent her first 7 years in the small slate quarry town of Pen Argyl, and the intervening 4 years with her family as they bounced around from institution to institution, she had her first taste of what it was like to live on a farm in mid 1920s America. It was a harsh life, to be sure, but she was treated no differently than the farmer's own children, and as she described her experiences to me as a child, I got a sense that she regarded them as brothers and sisters in the same way she regarded her natural brother and sisters.
Anyway, as I had said, it was her first experience on a farm and with farm animals. Her first real job on the farm, certainly within the ability of an 11 year old to learn, was to help in the milking of the cows, something that had to be done twice a day, and was the only job a farmer would do on a Sunday. As few farms in those days had automatic milking machines, the farm lady showed her how to do it and then gave her a bucket and stool and told her to go to Grayey, the cow on the end. She was an easy milkier and would let anyone milk her anywhere.
Unfortunately for Mom, she went to the stall on the end, not the cow on the end. The on the end was occupied by the farmer's bull. Without the bull's services once a year, the cows would have no calves and would therefore have no milk to give. Unfortunately for Mom, not only are bulls of a decidedly nasty temperament, the bull's scrotum is situated just about where the cows udder is, between the hind legs. Mom managed to get into the stall and have her stool set up and was about to give the bull the surprise of his life when the lady yanked her out from the stall. Right then and there I would suppose was my mother's first lesson in the difference between cows and bulls.