The Downside to Buying Homes Near Dairy Farms in Elk Grove

Dairy farms in Elk Grove are scattered in the countryside.

Dairy farms have convinced me. Much as I appreciate the countryside, I am an urban girl at heart. It’s not often that I get out to the country. Living in Sacramento, the country is actually very close at hand. There are lots of places you can drive to from downtown Sacramento and be in the country in 20 to 30 minutes. Which is where we went yesterday afternoon to bring our adopted cat Horatio back to the Sisters Animal Sanctuary on Fogg Road. We drove past a bunch of dairy farms. I’ve never seen so many cows that close up. I asked my husband to stop the car so I could shoot a photo, which you see above.

Holy cow, pardon the pun, but it was a bad thing to do. To lower the car windows. I almost said “rolled down” before I realized nobody rolls down their windows anymore, which certainly shows my age. Lowering the windows instantly filled the interior of our car with the odor of a dairy farm and cow manure. I could still smell it when we raised the windows. We had to turn on the air conditioning and lower all the windows to get that smell out of the car. That’s how I know I am an urban girl. Like Eva Gabor in Green Acres.

Well, I should have known when I was in first grade, now that I stop to think about this. Yes, my first-grade class went on a field trip to a dairy farm. All of us kids got off the bus. As soon as my feet hit the ground and I got whiff of the farm, I vomited all over my beautiful new saddle shoes. I’m not really a vomiting kind of person. It takes a lot for me to vomit. Like after drinking tainted water in the middle of a jungle in Ecuador. Been there and done that.

The bus driver put me back on the bus. I didn’t get to visit the dairy farm. I had to sit in my bus seat and wait for everybody else to come back. Seemed like eons. I sang to myself, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, which a few years later I thought was the same guy who opened a McDonald’s in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. It made sense. Cows. Hamburger. One of the teachers brought me a small plastic cow as a souvenir, but dairy farms remain a mystery to me to this day.

Horatio sits in the window at night.

Sometimes, buyers who purchase homes near the countryside, especially in Elk Grove or Anatolia, complain about the smell. Or, they don’t like listening to pigs squealing or donkeys braying. I say before you buy a home in Elk Grove, it makes sense to drive around the neighborhood and look at the location of your new home in Google maps. Zoom out to see the landscaping around it.

Horatio is at the no-kill shelter again looking for a new family, hopefully a person or persons who don’t have another cat. I bet he can smell the dairy farms from his outdoor enclosure. It will take a few months, I imagine, for our original two cats to de-stress from this 6-month situation. There wasn’t any other choice, and I feel guilty that it took me so long to determine we had a problem. I wanted this to work so bad. Wanting it doesn’t make it so. Sometimes doing what is best is painful. This is best for our Ragdoll Jackson and Ocicat Tessa. I have to keep reassuring myself of this so I don’t cry.

Happy solar eclipse day. Don’t stare at the sun.