Every season on this small world of house and garden, barn and chicken coop, fields and wooded slopes, has its beauty and its challenges.  Our rather brief summer means that the seemingly endless list of items “to be done,” jostle each other for time and priority.  But in the pattern of days, moments of connection with the wider world experienced by those who have gone before us give even routine chores a sense of wonder.

Bringing in the Cows
    Because of the way this place is laid out our three cows spend at least part of their time on the opposite side of the house from the barn, over in the field with the old apple orchard.
    Years ago, we used to turn the animals into the pasture behind the house--what had, before our time, been called the “night pasture.”  There had been a dozen or so head of cattle as well as a team of horses to look after then and they had apparently spent the summer nights in that field, presumably because there they would have access to water in the stream which runs in the valley at the back, and it would not be hard to find them come morning milking.
    For several summers now we have put the night pasture off limits to the cows, hoping that a bit of a rest might effect a change for the better in the quantity and quality of herbage there.  All that the cows see of it is a rather narrow laneway that gets them from the paddock beside the barn, past the granary, back behind the old chicken house and drive shed, up past the big maple tree, and into the orchard pasture.  As I suspected, they spend very little time in the laneway, being much more interested in the long grass in the orchard.
    The resulting configuration of pasture and paddock looks something like one of those mazes the men in the white suits are always dropping mice into to see whether they can figure out where the cheese is.  In order for the cows to get back to the paddock at milking time they must initially turn away from the barn in the direction of the night pasture and then negotiate the twists and turns in the laneway before they can see the barn ahead of them.  It does no good to stand outside the barn and call them, even though we and they all know it is milking time.  If they hear us calling, they simply come to the point in the orchard closest to the barn and stand peering over the fence looking glum.
    By virtue of this state of affairs we arrive at one of the pleasant tasks of the day, called "bringing in the cows."  It is a meditative activity, giving one the opportunity, when the cows are gathered and convinced that one means them to go to the barn, to observe earth and sky, to listen to the songs of the birds, and to ponder whatever it is that seems worth pondering at the time.  
    Cows are not much given to haste, so the trip is at a contemplative pace, and if the herdsman is inclined to pause to investigate an unfamiliar plant or flower or to listen for the song of a bird back in the woods or just to admire summer clouds in the blue sky, why, the cows are quite content to stop and think their slow ruminative thoughts as well, taking up their progress again when the time comes.
    Just now, the eye of the observer is well advised to be cast upon the ground, as the wild strawberries, startling flecks of crimson in the pattern of greens and browns in the short grass along the laneway, are ripening, and, as one of the children, along on the excursion, observed one morning, one tiny wild berry has all the flavour of the cultivated berry twenty times its size.
    Now, a part of the night pasture that has remained free of alder bushes seems also the poorest in terms of the plants that it will grow--even goldenrod there is sparse and small.  Instead, on the dry, sunny bank sloping to the south-west beside the drive shed, we have drifts of mouse-ear hawkweed, with its pretty dandelion-like lemon-coloured blooms raised above the surrounding thin grass on long, fuzzy stems, just as, earlier, a little further down the slope, lots of the little white stars of the wild strawberries gave promise of delights to come.  
    The hawkweed is what its name implies, a weed.  It loves dry ground and degraded pastures.  Bent on taking over whatever land it can by forming mats of creeping runners and spreading its flat rosette of leaves tight against the ground, it discourages other plants more acceptable to the cows and the farmer.  
    It is an ancient plant, though: man’s companion over thousands of years.  The Greek Dioscorides, living in distant Asia Minor, knew it and included it in his Materia Medica sometime in the first Christian century.  Pliny the Elder, who perished in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, mentions in his Historia naturalis that hawks feed upon the plant to sharpen their eyesight.  The Middle Ages knew it as Auricula muris, ‘Mouse ear.’  Among the great herbalists of nearer times, both John Gerard, in The Herball or General Historie of Plantes (1597), and Nicolas Culpeper, in The English Physician Enlarged (1653) valued the hawkweed.
    Those humble members of the rose family, the strawberries, who use the same method of propagation as the hawkweeds and are found everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere above the tropics, remind the farmer that the ground needs lime. But this little plant too has the dignity of long association with man, and seems to have been especially dear to the English.  A thousand years ago the ‘streawberige’ appeared in an English herbal now preserved in a manuscript in the British Museum. ‘Strabery ripe!’ was the cry in the streets of London in the fifteenth century, as the poet Lydgate reminds us.  Ben Jonson mentions them in a play written at the beginning of the seventeenth century.  Even Mother Goose tells of a suitor who promises Curly-locks that she shall “...sit on a cushion / And sew a fine seam, / And feed upon strawberries, / Sugar and cream.”
    So I take my time to admire the hawkweeds and the strawberries in their own part of the pasture.  With only a few cows we are not under the heavy economic pressures of commercial farming and feel free to invoke legend and beauty as goods above the good of strict utility.
    It is a time in and out of time, bringing in the cows.  The time of day, the weather, the whole knot of life from the herbs and tiny creatures underfoot, to the swallows dipping and swooping in the air overhead, to the moving pattern of cloud and blue sky--it is all one moment and only one moment, unique, never having happened before and never to be just this way again.  But as the cows and I pause to greet the green wanderers through time and space at our feet, friends and associates of man down thousands of years, chores and the day's demands are in abeyance, suspended in a momentarily distant future.

    If you have a milking cow and you want to have milk, then every year or so you want to see to it that there is a calf for mother to cherish.  That seems simple enough, but even little Jersey cows have been bred to provide far more milk than the infant can handle. After the birth, the cow’s milk, called colostrum, is rich with all kinds of specialised elements which the calf needs to get it off to a good start, so calf and cow are kept together for three days or so.  After that comes a period when the calf is “put on the cow” to nurse before the milker sits down to take the rest of the production. Then, some days later, at last the calf is ready to wean.  

The world divides, even in the barn

    Talking about weaning calves reminds me again that the world divides and redivides itself on any issue that may come down the pike, however indivisible the issue might seem at first glance.
    I originally discovered this penchant for hauling up on two sides of any question when I was younger, and, incautiously as it turned out, assumed that everyone loved the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan as much as I did.   It came as a great surprise to me to discover that the whole world did not share my enthusiasm. And, I must say, I still find it hard to believe.  
    Ever since that discovery was forced upon me I have been keeping mental note of inexplicable divisions we humans insist on.  Take the dogmatic disputes over weaning calves.
    We have not had all that many calves to deal with, since this is what the British would call a "smallholding."  Not having been brought up on any farm, where the weaning of calves was simply one of the things about which God - or father - pronounced in the beginning and thus it was done ever after, when we first were confronted with a calf that needed to break the mummy habit we turned to a slim volume from Maine, The Cow Economy, by Merril and Joann Grohman.  How we came across this book I don't remember now but it was the best help a small operation like ours could ever want, providing just the amount of information needed without sinking the reader in tables, charts, and cross-sections of "the stomach," etc.
    Not only did The Cow Economy discuss the pros and cons of keeping the calf with the cow for more than a few days (better not, unless you are so blessed with land that you can afford to keep cow and calf in separate fields more-or-less for ever), but it also discussed the pros and cons of weaning strategies: buckets with nipples vs. plain buckets, etc.
    Without realizing that we were standing at a fork in the road of life, we followed our authors' lead and set out for the barn with an ordinary bucket, prepared for what might come.  As I recall, what came was some awkwardness about getting the recommended grip on the nose of the calf so that one's fingers in his mouth made him think of mother while one pushed his nose down into the bucket that held his milk ration.  During this struggle the bucket was being guarded against spillage by another member of the family.  I really can't remember how many of us it took to wean that first calf, but we would probably have filled Madison Square Garden.
    I do vividly remember the moment, not too long after, when the calf, drawing analogies, wacked the bucket the way he was accustomed to wack mother when the milk supply seemed to be getting down.  I at the time was leaning over the calf, holding his nose down to the milk with one hand, while holding on to the bucket with the other.  What the physics of the calf’s action might be I don't know but I do know that the milk remaining in the pail instantly gathered itself together and shot upward with great force, catching me just under the chin.  From thence it too divided, a portion proceeding upwards to make a good try at drowning me whilst the majority took a sharp right and disappeared down the neck of my coveralls, headed, no doubt, for my boots, but contenting itself with producing a miasmal swamp that reached from neck to knees.  
    That pretty effectively ended Lesson One, and whether we or the calf learned more it would be hard to say.  Subsequently, we learned to back the calf of the hour into a corner so that his tendency to leave unexpectedly was thwarted, and we learned to keep a firmer hold on the bucket. The geyser effect has not been vanquished but we are better at ducking than we were.  That calf, and his successors, have all grown up to be happy, healthy and productive members of society, as far as we can tell, but we just learned last week that Dire Results ensue from this method of weaning.  Apparently the Only Way to wean is with a nipple pail which enables the calf to keep his head up and thus the milk goes into the right stomach, etc., etc.
    You pays your money and you takes your chance in this as in other things, it seems.
    25 February 1987

    No matter how often I came to the barn to tend to a new calf, I found something unexpected that made the process memorable.  Nine years after the experience above, faced with two calves, Frank and Jerusha, and weaning time, the battle of the sexes ran high.

    Down in the barn as the weather warms a bit and spring may possibly be on the way, emotions are running high among the barn cats, rather to the mystification of our splendid but purely decorative Thomas Not-a-tom who continues to focus closely on food and making sure he gets more than his fair share.  
    Thomas has acquired a new title, thanks to an off-the-wall novel my wife was reading a while back.  Part of the action was set in a vegetarian restaurant with Buddhist overtones in San Francisco in the sixties.  Need I say more?  You can probably make up the plot to please yourself.  Anyway, this restaurant had a cat named “The Ever-Present Fullness.”  Well, names like that don’t turn up every day in the week and when one does present itself it would be the worst sort of consumerism not to recycle it.  Thomas positively basks in the implications.
    The two calves who have been getting their milk from the source had gotten so big that I finally decided that it was time to wean.  In other years, when there was only one calf to deal with at a time, the logistics of weaning were simpler.  This pair, though, have had the freedom of the big box stall and it was obvious that calf B was not going to stand idly by while calf A was being introduced to a new food source.
    Eventually I tied them in opposite corners of the stall and advanced with buckets.  Jerusha, the heifer, was all for leaving to go see mommy, and although I had her backed into the corner we managed to spread milk about with (to coin a phrase) reckless abandon.  It reminded me of that Bill Cosby skit in which, rather than admit he doesn’t know where the gas cap is in his new car, he tells the gas station attendant to “just pour the gas over the top; maybe it will run in someplace.”
    Frank was a good deal easier to deal with.  Like Thomas, Frank was not one to question the source of supply, as long as the supply lasted.  I dipped a couple of fingers in the milk, applied them to Frank’s mouth, lowered his nose into the bucket and we were off and running.  Now and then we emerged from the deeps, snorting and blowing milk far and wide, but generally we were in business.  I left the pen with a good deal of the milk I had brought in (but it was distributed differently), and quietly congratulated Frank for demonstrating the innate superiority of the male.
    In the evening, however, it turned out that Jerusha’s objection was not to milk in a pail but to me putting my fingers in her mouth.  I left her with her bucket and tried the same experiment with Frank.  He stuck his nose in the pail and then came up wild-eyed, looking for fingers.
    A week later, Frank is still devoted to me.  Jerusha finishes her bucket by herself and without spilling a drop.
    “It just shows the natural superiority of women,” my wife explained when I told her.
    26 March 1996

    To an outsider, one who has never had the opportunity to get into the rhythm of simple tasks like barn chores, the whole process would probably seem uneventful and uninteresting - chores in the modern sense of that word.  To one attuned to the fine shadings, so much of interest goes on that it scarcely seems possible to attend to all of it at once.
    There were times, I will admit, when I could think of other things I would rather do than my 'barn chores,' but by the time I got to the barn to milk I slipped easily into the always-the-same-yet-ever-new routine and 'chore' took on a sense of satisfaction and contact with the real world.  Sometimes, indeed, that little world, that microcosm, like a mirror seemed to reflect the world of human affairs...  

Barn Chores

     Keeping a milking cow usually means keeping several cows because a calf is the enticement which starts the milk flowing.  Maggie, our bossy cow, is not alone.  She gives us milk, Mirella,
her last-year's heifer, is growing up to be a milk cow herself, and John, the two-year-old steer, is about ready to retire from the herd.
    As the late autumn days grow colder and the cows are in more and more, the barn chores move into their winter rhythm.  For a few moments when I come into the barn all is bustle.  Cats skitter here and there and the cows shift their feet expectantly, looking forward to hay and grain.
    We put our hay in loose, so I climb up in the mow and pitchfork down enough for a couple of milkings and then climb down to fill the mangers with the dried grasses fragrant with memories of summer now past and gone.  By this time the cows have finished the water I had put down for them and are ready for food.
    While the cows tuck into their hay I clean out the manure gutter and put fresh bedding down under each of them, checking as I do to see which cats are in evidence and noting that both the toms are present, the dingy grey-and white Lopsie, the current boss cat and the larger tidy tabby, named Fraidy, a stranger who seems inclined to move in.
    Quickly I measure out the grain for each cow into a series of rubber buckets and put the right one in front of Maggie, our current milking cow.  She gets more grain than the heifer and the steer because she is milking and a milking cow cannot get enough energy from hay alone.  She shoves her nose into her bucket and tosses it expertly so that she can get the most grain in the shortest time.  I move around to her side to set down the milking stool, sit down, lean my head into her flank, and pick up the cat's basin to give them a dollop of fresh milk.
    A rubbery plunk tells me that the heifer has finished her grain and given her bucket the old heave-ho.  The crashing of the steer's stanchion indicates his attempt to corral the tossed bucket in the hope that there might be some grain left.  As I lean my head against Maggie she shifts her position slightly so that I can get on with milking while she pursues her grain bucket.
    There is milk in the cats' basin now and I check over the attending multitude.  As usual the younger cats zoom about in excitement, while the older ones are sitting just on the other side of the manure gutter, watching the basin and swatting the occasional youngster who presumes to push in.  As I set down the basin I notice that both the tom cats are elaborately ignoring each other, and I speculate with the interest of a dedicated foreign affairs correspondent what the balance of power between these two might be.  
    Without rising I reach back to pick up the milk pail, set it down beneath the udder and begin to milk in earnest, listening contentedly as the metallic sound of the milk hitting the bottom of the bucket changes to a soft swishing sound as the bucket begins to fill.  As I milk I muse.  A shift in the balance of power in the great world seems to be the story of the late twentieth century and I wonder whether there is a similar shift going on in the little world of our barn cats.
    Unlike Spots, his predecessor, Lopsie hangs on to power with difficulty.  His white fur has gone dingy grey and developed yellow, nicotine-like stains, his ears are more and more ragged.  Unlike his predecessor, who liked to survey his domain from a perch on a beam over the cows' heads, the high places are not for Lopsie; he gets no higher than the barn sill, six inches off the floor.
    Now the two toms circle each other with elaborate deference and take up their positions on opposite sides of the alley behind the cows.  Fraidy is still careful in his movements but he must out-weigh Lopsie by a good bit.  The hand-writing, as it was for many another petty despot, is on the wall.
    This is, of course, all my speculation, and I have to admit rooting for Fraidy.  I speak him fair when I meet him and have even succeeded in scratching an ear or two once or twice, but my role in the power struggle going on, I know, is somewhat like that of the deists' God: I have set things in motion by raising barn cats, but now I must allow them to work out their own destinies.
    Tonight Lopsie was sitting on the sill when, to my amazement, Fraidy walked across the alley and deliberately sat down on the sill himself, ignoring Lopsie. A milking stool separated them.  Lopsie gave him an "if looks could kill" stare around the milking stool, but Fraidy, made of tougher stuff, ignored the stare.  
    Meanwhile, I finished milking the front teats and reached under the udder for the back two, all the while watching the confrontation  of the century.  When the steely glance failed Lopsie drew himself up and turned his head to the side, as if to look at something across the alley way.  Keeping his head turned away from Fraidy, he slowly put out a paw and placed it on the milking stool.  
    There was nothing hurried in the manoeuvre. It had the inevitability of an amoeba putting out a pseudopod.  With the same deliberate gesture he put the other front paw on the stool and then a back paw followed, ever so slowly.  Still his head was turned aside.  Fraidy seemed hardly aware of the action.  
    Milking forgotten for the moment, I watched, scarcely daring to breathe.  Lopsie was now immobile, three feet on the stool but the last foot still on the sill.  It seemed to me that Lopsie knew that the moment of truth had come.  The slightest awkwardness in the next manoeuvre would break the spell and fur would fly.
    Seconds passed as if they were minutes.  Then, amazingly, the last foot slowly and smoothly drew up to join its mates.  Lopsie sat on the stool, directly in front of and above Fraidy.  Only then did he turn his head until he was now looking down on the larger cat.  At that moment he looked as though there was good reason why he was the dominant tom.
    For a moment it appeared that Fraidy would take offense. He stared at Lopsie and began to draw himself up, but after rising about half way he stopped, turned away, and got down from the sill.  Moving carefully and without looking back he resumed his usual position across the alley way, facing Lopsie but with head averted.  I suddenly remembered that I was in the middle of milking and turned my attention again to udder and bucket.
    As I turned back to my cow and finished the milking I speculated, not for the first time, on the connotation of drudgery which the term 'chores' carries with it, and how, on the contrary, my chores are always interesting, always full of things to wonder at, and often like a window on the world beyond the boundaries of this farm.  This evening's confrontation of the tom cats leaves me thinking, rather ruefully, that barn politics is not that different from the posturing that goes on between nations.  Have we, I wonder, really come as far as we give ourselves credit for in our fascination with things human?
    I strip out the last few drops of milk from the udder into the pail and get up.  The drama of chores is over for this night but is, as always, to be continued....
9 November 1993

NOTE: If you want to read By Heart from the beginning, go to Archives, click on May 2011, scroll down to Prelude 1.  Begin there and read up from there.

I’m happy and privileged to introduce an artist and poet to the blog today - my wife.  Her pastel, “Milk,” appears at the top of the column.  As well as Maggie, Brownie’s successor, one of her daughters appears beside her, as well as two of the barn cats, regular attendants at milking time. The chap on the milking stool is myself - at a younger age.  The poem (with her pencil drawing), one of a series of poems intended for children (including grandchildren), memorialises one of Brownie’s more endearing tricks.  Never think that cows have no sense of humour!

    Beginnings are often more difficult to see than endings.  And what we might think of as a beginning may in fact be the end of a long development and also at the same time another step toward a yet unforeseen beginning.  Although the legal documents that made this place our own have dates that can be verified and so make a beginning of sorts, how those documents came to be, how this place came to be ours, how we came to buy a cow that had to be milked twice a day when we had never so much as been on a dairy farm, large or small - can all that, in any real sense, be explained?  There are threads that run through our lives, threads that take us beyond complexity and into mystery, a mystery that will take us, if we are honest, all the way back to St Thomas Aquinas’s First Cause, God.
    It was September of the first year we were here, having arrived in July fresh from the city. Between that beginning in July and that September I had, with the help of neighbours who had become our first friends, found a cow for sale not too far away. With the trees along the edges of the fields beginning to colour up and the nighttime temperatures beginning to drop into the 40's old style, we passed across the border marked by Labour Day and into our first fall here.  Wednesday of that week our older children got on a school bus for the first time, to begin their school life down here.  We parents were on pins and needles all day.  How had their day gone?  Would the contrast with the city schools be too great?  Anxiously we awaited the return of the school bus!  It seemed we had worried for no reason.  All was well. 
    Three days later I paid the asking price and we became the owners of a milk cow.  That evening, our cow, an elderly Jersey named Brownie, and I, began another educational process. The class, “How to milk a cow by hand,” met morning and evening.  Brownie knew the ropes.  I did not.  I knew mastitis threatened if the udder was not milked out and, after considerable struggle, I had only succeeded in finding two quarts of the rich Jersey milk, and I didn’t think I had gotten all that was there.  Sunday morning I got a little more, but still, I was sure, not enough. 
    A quick call to an elderly neighbour down the road brought an offer of help which I accepted with gratitude.  That evening Harold got me to start milking and quietly offered suggestions: everything from how to sit against the cow so that if she happened to kick you were more out of harm’s way, to how to clean the udder before starting to milk, to how to reach under the udder to grasp the teats on the other side. Then, after I had struggled away with his encouragement, he sat down and finished the job.  Four quarts.  By the end of that week Brownie and I had come to understand each other and on the Friday our oldest daughter, Hannah, made our first butter from Brownie’s milk.  It was a beginning.

In the Beginning . . .
    We have had a number of cows over the years, of greater or lesser personality.  Brownie, our first cow, was already well-advanced in years when she came to live here.  She taught us a lot about cows in general and Jerseys in particular.  She had to.  When she arrived we had never milked a cow.  Indeed, we had never had more than a passing acquaintance with a cow.
    Experienced farmers, men who had farmed the small farms of this part of the world all their lives, had told us that Jerseys were “nervous.”  The implication seemed to be that they were rather difficult and might give us trouble.  What we discovered, in the course of 20 years of keeping them, was not nerves but intelligence.  And Jerseys are “thrifty.”  They could adapt to different conditions without trouble.  They could adapt to a situation in which different members of the family might show up at milking time, and adapt even to milking times that could vary depending on the other obligations of the family.  What they did have that fascinated us was their curiosity.  Forget to close a gate into the pasture and a Jersey would go out to see what was on the other side.  (Of course this did not mean that having seen the other side the Jersey would return to the pasture by the same route, if at all.  We learned to be careful about shutting gates!
    Our good neighbour, Harold Parlee, introduced us to the mysteries of milking as seen from the farmer's perspective.  Brownie, a philosophical Jersey, endured the lengthy process without complaint although it was some time before she knew us well enough to be gracious about letting down the milk.
    Brownie put up with a lot in those early days.  It seemed that milking took hours, there were so many things to think about--how to sit, how to hold the bucket, how to reach under the udder to get the teats on the far side, how to squeeze.  Every squirt of milk in the bucket was a hard-won victory.  And this all had to be done twice a day!  How did anyone ever get anything done, who had to milk several cows?  Through it all, Brownie would munch away at her hay and occasionally swing her head around and stare at the perspiring milker as if to say, "Why are you making such a fuss about such a simple process?  Why don't you just get on with it?"
    Brownie had a sense of humour.  She was not given to slapstick comedy but every now and then, when the mood was on her, she would do the odd little thing.  One of her favourite gags involved her grain pan.  We had decided that we had enough to do to learn to milk without having to pursue a cow who was moving around to pursue every last bit of grain we had put down for her.     Finally we bought a dishpan and used that for her grain ration and it did help to keep her more-or-less in one place.  Gradually we began to get the hang of milking and the process seemed to grow more manageable in extent and we learned how to adjust for the cow's movements.  Then, one morning, as I was milking I was impressed by how nicely Brownie was standing, how quietly.  I glanced up to discover her placidly chewing her cud, with her grain pan nicely upside down on her head like an Easter bonnet.  How she did this trick we never knew.  By the time we noticed it was already done.  However it was done it seemed to be her way of letting the world know that she could see the humour in things too.
    It was Brownie who, after we had all gotten to know each other and she had been here for a couple of years at least, suddenly one day gave us some anxious hours that we won't soon forget.
    It happened when we decided that she was getting too old and it was time to get another cow.  We finally found one we could afford, another Jersey, up near Fredericton, and we had borrowed a neighbour's truck and gone up to bring her home.  Nothing of course had been said to Brownie who was out in the pasture when we left.  As far as we knew we had not mentioned the purchase in Brownie’s hearing, but when we got back with the new cow Brownie had vanished.
    There are cows who simply do not respond well to confinement, but Brownie was not one of them.  For the whole of her first summer with us she had been on a tether and even that had not been a problem.  But now, incredibly, she was nowhere to be found.  It wasn't that she had found herself on the wrong side of the fence.  She was just gone.  Period.  We called and called.  Neighbours came over and helped us search.  No Brownie.
    We were all standing out between the barn and the granary, looking at the woods beyond and feeling anguished.  Night was coming.  There didn't seem to be anything to do.  And then for some reason I turned around.  Not five feet from me stood Brownie, looking straight at me.  None of us had heard a thing.  We never knew where she had come from.
    Somehow, though, we felt she had expressed her opinion about bringing another cow into her barn.  She clearly wanted us to know that, whatever we took it into our heads to do, she was still in charge of the barn.  And so she remained, as long as she was with us, our first cow and the first of a series of Jerseys, the perfect cows, we found, for a small farm like ours.                             14 June 1994

   










Jersey Millinery

Our elegant little Jersey cow
With perfect horns has been endowed.
One graceful curve opposing t’other
Embellishes this gentle mother.

She, in her stall at milking hour,
Fresh from meadow grass and flower,
Stands quiet, proper, meek, and mild,
Not the least bit strange or wild.

But she’s not one to let stagnation
Stifle her imagination.
The orange pan her grain comes in
Is soon licked clean, then she begins.

A little maneuvering of her head
Back and forth and up ahead.
Soon, the milker, glancing right,
Sees a most peculiar sight -

Our Jersey, head up, methodically chewing,
Or doing a little gentle mooing,
While that orange pan adorns
Those very perfect Jersey horns

_ At long last I have a moment free to make an addition to this account of a life and a place.  I hope you will enjoy what you read here!  If you would like to begin at the beginning, scroll down in the Archives (in the column to the right of this) to May 2011, click on that and scroll down to Prelude I.  That's where this all begins.  And to all of you, readers, I send heartfelt Christmas greetings and best wishes for the new year. 

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
    Genesis 1:25

O all ye Beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever.
    Benedicite: The Song of the Three Children

 . . .in general foreign animals fall seldom in my way: my intelligence is confined to the narrow sphere of my own observations at home.
    Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selbourne, Letter XXVII, Feb. 22, 1770



    The fields and woods around us are still. Below the house our pond shows no sparkles even though there is a breeze which stirs the few remaining leaves on the lilac bush outside my window.  Like the fields and woods around it, it is held in the grip of the first really hard frost we have had this fall even though November yet has many days to run. 
    Across the valley  this morning a dull red band between Sharps Hill and the bank of clouds above it gave warning of poor weather, but all the day offered was a grey sky accompanied by fitful wind with brief moments of sunshine.  The temperature gradually rose out of the depths to cross the border from frost, and the blanket of early snow that has covered the open fields for several days faded away - grudgingly - toward the shady edges.  Still, it was not a day to neglect the fires and a good supply of two-year dry wood in front of this summer’s still-damp bounty makes light work of tending the stoves. 
    It isn’t long before the kettle on the kitchen stove begins to mutter to itself again after summer’s quiet, stirred into commentary by the fire which has been a regular feature of our days since somewhere back in late October.  In the living room a replacement for the old Lakewood stove that burned two-foot firewood and heated the room and the upstairs, much of it, as well, the more ornamental stove, that will take an eighteen-inch stick but prefers sixteen-inch wood to work with, utters its own metallic comments as the wood I fed it two hours or so ago burns down to embers.  Occasional fires in that stove in earlier fall usually were features of the evening but for some weeks now a chill in the air in the early morning and a desire to run the oil furnace in the basement as little as possible have combined to keep it going throughout the day, echo of our early years here when two wood stoves were all that kept winter at bay. 
    A late-night walkabout with the dog brought me along the old way I used to walk, going from the kitchen door on my way to the barn for the evening milking.  Tonight there is no snow to make the footing treacherous and no cow in the barn to look after any more.  As the dog follows his own agendas I glance upward and lo! the clouds have cleared away and the sky is thick with stars.  How often over the 20-odd years we kept a milking cow had I made this trip, morning and evening, and how often, in the evening in the dark part of the year, had I lifted my eyes to see the sights above me.  Against the tremendous arc of the heavens the stars burn through the cold air with a glory hard to resist.  High up the constellations change and return year by year while the wandering planets dance below them.  Tonight I look up through the bare arms of the big white poplar to see Orion tangled in its boughs, while Taurus, his attacker, bears down on him in  the clear air between the tree and the barn.  With the stars come memories of all the creatures that shared this “70 acres more or less” over the years.  Most especially I remember one frigid winter night years ago and the story I wrote about it. The story was the first of several I sold to the “Home Forum” page of the Christian Science Monitor, then edited by Elizabeth Lund, a fine editor and mentor for a writer just beginning to look for an audience outside his neighbourhood.

BEYOND THE BITE OF WINTER

    Winter with a vengeance.  More than long-underwear-weather: the temperature has been dropping steadily since the mid-after-noon and now registers minus twelve Fahrenheit and the wind has picked up.  I get out the overalls, the lumberjack and my down vest, the knitted cap of an indestructible unknown fibre and leather mitts with knitted wool liners, and then struggle into shoe-paks with thick felt liners and recall the slightly claustrophobic sense, in childhood, of being encased in a heavy snowsuit with all the trimmings.  Standing up, I open the inside kitchen door, pick up two water buckets, push open the aptly-named storm door, and edge out onto the porch for the evening trip to the barn, closing the doors behind me.
    The cold air bites at me as it streams around the corner of the house, and I think for the first time this year of finding a really big muffler to wrap neck and face in.  The decking on the side porch complains loudly as I walk across it, carrying water to the cows.  Creak, groan, creak, groan.
    Going down the path to the barn I look out across the valley at lights maybe three miles away glowing white and yellow, green and blue, at the corner out at the highway and at farms down the valley.  They are always there, except when it is snowing hard. Usually in the summer they have a friendly softness to them, but tonight they are only points of sharp light with diamond edges, slicing through the snapping air.      
    Only a hundred yards or so separates house and barn.  From the porch down to the big poplar trees the path twists and turns so as to avoid the worst of the drifts piled up in the last storm, snaking down beside the house as if reluctant to go too far from warmth and light.  Come a storm or high wind and the path disappears like a camel track in the desert only to be re-invented in more-or-less the same place when the storm is over or the wind has dropped.  The present path has lasted for several weeks, and beneath my feet the snow, its rough edges worn down from many trips across it until it is no more than a jumble sale of cast-offs, sounds rubbery as I walk and shifts unpredictably on the ice beneath it, treacherous to the unwary step.
    Overhead the sky is completely clear.  The earth lies open to the black emptiness above it, its heat a raging furnace, in comparison to the chill of outer space, even when to my poor ears and nose the air bites with bitter cold.  Moving away from the warm yellow light shining on the snow from the kitchen windows and trudging deeper into the dark, I am suddenly struck with a sense of tremendous loneliness.
    On a night like this the earth's heat flows unhindered upward, up through this cozy soup of atmosphere we live in, up past thin air like that at the top of Mount Everest, still up past where the highest cirrus clouds can survive, into that strange region of the aurora borealis, where it is blown away at last by the great wind of particles streaming past us off the sun into the blackness and emptiness of space.  It seems cold comfort that that space, for all its emptiness, still holds a shred of hominess, lying as it does within the circle of the inner planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars - around a cozy star, and moving with it as part of one of the spiral arms of the galaxy we call the Milky Way. 
    But all that heat this earth respires into the void has no more effect on the almost absolute zero even of nearby space than the heat escaping from our kitchen had on the cold of our dooryard as I opened the door to go out and closed it quickly behind me.
    I shiver as I walk along and the shiver is only partly the instinctive response of warm blood to cold air.  The strangeness of all this tangle of things we call life and earth and home strikes more deeply on a dark winter night, I think.
    A few months from now, when the grass and the flowers of our Canadian spring almost explode from the ground, and the air, filled with birds singing their strange sweet songs, seems to enfold us and all things living in a blanket woven from many threads into a seamless tissue, then, I think, it will be easy to be alive.  Then, there will be no sense of boundary.  Life then flows on, and our life flows with all life, and life is all in all.
    But on this evening in the deep of winter when the wind blows coldly through the bare branches of the poplars above me and the sky is so clear it seems space has swallowed up the sky, life seems a queer thing, a chance occurrence, the exception rather than the rule, and the shiver is partly a shiver of loneliness, of the tiny spark in an ocean of cold.
    I turn, just above the trees, to cross the driveway above the chicken house, and as I come out from under the trees into the clear air I look up into the chilly blackness above the valley.  Who can imagine such emptiness?  Am I looking out or am I looking in?  And then, suddenly, it happens.
    There above me a familiar figure, a pattern in the void, draws my eye.  Looking out or looking in, I wonder as emptiness organizes itself, ceases to be emptiness, links me to a home whose dooryard is all time and the starry heavens too. 
    Some star map I saw as a child dressed Orion in Roman garb, with short skirt, his left arm holding a lion skin as a kind of shield, a sword hanging from the stars of his belt, a mighty club upraised against the bull who bears down on him from above.  Now I just see the pattern of stars and above him to the southwest the V of the head of Taurus, the Bull.  And then, below him, to the southeast, I recognize Sirius, the dog-star, the shining eye of Canis Major, Orion's faithful companion. 
    Between the chicken-house and the barn I pause.  There in the sky is all the glory of the starry heavens, shining as only they can when the air is cold and clear.  Such a collection of wonders!  A sense of oneness with others like myself who down the ages have looked into the night sky warms me as I see and recognize, besides Orion, other now-familiar presences twinkling against the black.  There is Procyon, the other dog-star, there Castor and Pollux, the heavenly twins, there bright Capella, there the Pleiades, the seven sisters, daughters of the Greek god Atlas and Pleione his wife, and below them this winter, moving past them now, the unwinking stare of reddish Mars, god of war. 
    It is still bitterly cold and the wind stings tears from my eyes.  Even in gloves my fingers are smarting with cold from grasping the handles of the water-buckets.  As I turn to finish my path I wonder at the curious joy this chilly night has brought me.
    I reach the door to the barn and go in to that smaller dark.  With a flip of a switch the dark flees away and blank emptiness becomes a familiar place. Thomas Not-a-Tom meets me as usual, purring.  The other cats begin to appear: Cally, Spitz, Lopsie, Queenie.  Anka, the little heifer, sticks her nose over the top of her stall in greeting.  From the other end of the floor comes the sound of clashing stanchions as Maggie and John the steer rise in expectation. 
    "Hello, Maggie," I say to my cow as I put a bucket of water in front of her and go to do the same for John.  Going back to the walkway, I open the big door behind John, take the shovel and begin to muck out.
(Christian Science Monitor, 22 January 1993)

As we settled into our country life we began to take a different attitude toward the creatures around us.  Like the spiders  I had first regarded as a nuisance and then came to see not merely as useful but as helpful in spite of our occasional conflict of interest, so the wild world around us became more and more filled with meaning, even if we could not always say what that meaning was.  Old stories of wonders hidden in apparently meaningless events came back to mind as if to remind us of the wonders hidden in the everyday.  We were beginning to “touch the earth,” not now as owners and  superiors but as attentive students listening to a wise teacher.

    The Language of Birds
    After too many years of saying "What bird is that?" to each other as warbling filled the air, we finally purchased a set of tapes guaranteed to make us better listeners to the language of birds.
    The ability to understand the language of the birds is one of the motifs that shows up in fairy tales and myth fairly regularly, and when it does show up it usually helps to get the hero out of some tight spots.  I can understand why.  A lot of what I hear from birds sounds distinctly like information.  Why shouldn't the rest be information too, perhaps information that might tell us behind which of the three doors is the passage leading to the great treasure, or whom to avoid to escape enchantment? 
    The world looks plain enough to us as we look about us, but who knows what enchanted lands might be in front of our uncomprehending eyes?  If only we knew which tree was that Eildon tree under whose shade Thomas the Rymer rested one summer's day some seven hundred years ago, for it was under the Eildon tree that Thomas met the queen of elfland:
    "And see not ye that bonny road,
      Which winds about the fernie brae?
    That is the road to fair Elfland,
      Where you and I this night maun gae."
                  . . .
    He has gotten a coat of the elven cloth,
      And a pair of shoes of velvet green,
    And till seven years were past and gone
      True Thomas on earth was never seen.

    Many years ago, not too long after we moved down here, a friend and avid bird-watcher and listener came down for a visit.  I don't remember exactly when it was he was here other than that it was sometime in the early summer, when most of our local birds are busy spreading news of damsels in distress and dragons hoarding great treasure.
    In the course of a short walk one afternoon Jim wrote down the names of all the birds he heard.  I still have it.  On a day when, if pressed, I would have been willing to swear to a few crows, the occasional robin, and maybe a song sparrow, Jim had heard 51 birds and wondered about seven more.
    His list included the finer details of what I had lumped together under the heading "crows."  The crows, ravens, starlings, grackles and cowbirds.  It also included the red-winged blackbird, which I had forgotten to hear, and the blue jays which I never seem to hear until the leaves begin to fly in autumn. 
    He had also heard robins and song sparrows.  But he had heard the rose-breasted grosbeaks as well, those colourful birds whose long rich song sounds very much like the robin's, but a robin that has taken singing lessons.  And he called my attention to the bobolinks!  How was it that I had never really focussed on bobolinks until Jim came by?  One memorable first day of spring, many years ago, I heard my first English meadow lark while my wife and I were walking along a public footpath in the country not far from Oxford.  Now, when the bobolinks come back to the farm and begin to sing their warbling "bobolink-bobolink, spink-spank-spink," it reminds me not only of the sweet countryside around me but of a walk to a holy well one spring day in England.
    We have since come to know many of the birds on Jim's list one way or another, though usually by sight rather than sound.  Evening grosbeaks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, purple finches, chickadees, goldfinches and white-throated sparrows are all familiar visitors at the feeders during the winter.  Flickers flicker in and out of the woods this time of year, and the dusk of evening is made magical by the calling of the wood thrush from within the darkening woods around us.
        Far in the pillared dark
        Thrush music went--
        Almost like a call to come in
        To the dark and lament.  
    We see hawks floating across the sky, too.  In no danger of being a hawk's dinner, we still stand still to watch their soaring grace.  Closer to home but no less distant, this time because of his burning intensity, the hummingbird is even now feeding at the bergamot.  Much less intense, those avian stunt-pilots the barn swallows, their numbers greatly reduced these past several years, do Immelmann turns and loop-the-loops in the door yard and then suddenly stop to gossip on the telephone wires before frisking off again.
    There are more wonders to discover, though.  I have only seen one warbler in my life (several weeks ago in Fundy Park), and have never heard one sing.  Yet Jim heard eight different warblers and queried several more.  What other songs reach our ear drums but never register?  What birds, do you suppose, were singing in the Eildon tree that summer day so long ago?  Can we train our ears to catch the song?    6 August 1991