Cow Love

Love doesn't like being stood over with a plan. Even cow love. Mykyta didn't know this. He wanted a calf so badly that he decided not to wait for spring, for the mood, or for nature's mercy, but to take the matter into his own farmerly hands. And so his cow Kvitka got a date. With apples, a rushnyk, a fiddle, and a man more nervous than anyone.

From the neighbor he brought over a young bull named Hromobiy. A fearsome name, as if he ought to be smashing fences, but the bull himself was afraid of his own shadow and mostly stared at the bucket. Kvitka stood calm and proud. She looked at Hromobiy the way a scribe looks at a badly written complaint. Mykyta broke into a sweat. He'd made the arrangements, he'd dragged the bull across half the village, and now such indifference.

"I didn't spend half a year planning for you two to just stand there," he muttered. Mykyta decided the animals needed atmosphere. He scrubbed the cowshed clean enough to receive a lord's delegation. He spread fresh, fragrant hay. For Kvitka he stole the reddest apples from the neighbor's orchard, and for Hromobiy he brought a choice beet. And so that everything would be properly "human," he hung an embroidered rushnyk on a peg and tied a bouquet of clover and mint.

"Let everyone see there's culture in this house," he told himself, wiping his brow with his sleeve. But the romance went sideways. Kvitka silently ate the wedding bouquet, ribbon and all. Hromobiy crunched the beet, turned to face the wall, and froze with the look of a groom who's been led to the altar while still thinking he'd been invited to dinner. Mykyta went up to the bull, stroked his warm neck and whispered in his ear: "You be polite, but confident.

Women love decisiveness." Hromobiy only sighed deeply in reply and started sniffing the old wooden bucket. Then Mykyta called in Sydir, the village's only fiddler. "So it'll be soul to soul, not horn to horn," Mykyta explained. Sydir stepped into the cowshed, scraped his bow, and Hromobiy took such a fright he nearly knocked over the barrel. Kvitka, though, slowly turned her head and looked at Mykyta.

In her big dark eyes there was so much quiet reproach that Mykyta felt guilty himself, though a minute earlier he'd considered himself practically the wedding elder. I've seen people ruin love with advice. But a man bringing a fiddler into the cowshed and expecting the bull to turn into a romantic suitor after the first note - that we'd never had before. Even Hromobiy, it seemed, now thought he'd been invited not to Kvitka but to the grand opening of the fair.

Just then the neighbor, Baba Bohdana, appeared in the doorway of the cowshed - she'd come to inquire about the stolen apples. She looked at the rushnyk, at the apples, at the fiddler, and at Mykyta, who was trembling with responsibility. Bohdana spat and said: "Go on, call the wedding elder too, bake a korovai and strike up a wedding song - maybe then Kvitka and Hromobiy will finally understand that what you've got here isn't a cowshed, it's a family affair already."

Mykyta took offense. "I'm doing it for the farm, Baba! With me everything has to be done properly!" Bohdana only shook her head, looking at his hands trembling with strain. Mykyta decided to leave them alone. He went out, but within a minute he was already peeking through a crack in the boards. It was quiet in the cowshed. Kvitka stood looking straight at that crack. Her gaze was so calm and all-seeing that Mykyta felt a burning shame.

Bohdana, who had come up soundlessly behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder: "There, you see, son. Even a cow understands that love doesn't grow with an audience. It needs room, not your worry." He was about to light a candle for coziness, but Bohdana blew it out in an instant: "Next you'll burn the cowshed down, you romantic." Then Mykyta understood that his plan had broken against something simpler and wiser than himself.

He took down the rushnyk, gathered up the apples, thanked the fiddler and opened the cowshed door. Without a single word he led Kvitka and Hromobiy out to the meadow, where the wind smelled of wormwood and free grass. They walked across the meadow, without music, without a plan, without Mykyta's head hovering over every step. For the first time all day Kvitka wasn't looking at everyone like a stern committee, but simply nibbled at the clover.

Hromobiy walked calmly beside her. Mykyta stood by the wattle fence, watching, and for the first time in a long while he felt the loosening of that tight knot in his chest, the one he'd tied for himself. The calf came in spring. Sturdy, with curious eyes. Bohdana said then: "You see, Mykyta, sometimes the best matchmaker is the one who cleared off in time." Not every business can be hurried along with worry.

Sometimes you needn't pull harder on the rope - you should step back and let life do its work. Even cow love doesn't like it when a man stands over it with an apple, a rushnyk and a plan for the future.