Stupid Towels

Earl's conference thing ran late yesterday and he had forgotten to ask Erik to start milking and so when it got to be four o'clock, Oliver and I went up to milk. Some milkings go better than others and this was one of the others. It was just little things. When I was putting the cows in, Neatha wanted to keep eating and kept taking two steps toward the barn and then turning back into the feed bunk, so I gave her a slap on the flank (It's the noise, not any pain that is motivating. I'm like a three-year old to her even before you factor in her full suit of leather.) Well, Neatha is a brownish-black color and she was clean as a whistle, except for the exact spot my hand touched and I had a few things to do before I found my way near a sink and some soap and paper towels. Then I couldn't find the bucket to fill with hot water and iodine soap to wash the cows. And Kila Monster had thought it over and decided she might want to be milked eventually, but not right now and not by me and couldn't I just please leave her alone while she ate her grain, which incidentally, there wasn't quite enough of. And Oliver fell asleep and I had to lean a little forward to keep him snuggled against my back. And then the feed sheet was missing and I had nothing except the size of each cows' udder to tell me how much grain to feed her.

Really, though, it was the paper towels. About every third Monday Wayne Kerr comes by with his big truck full of Useful Things a Dairy Farmer Might Need. The truck's box has a door on the side with steps like a motor home. There are fifteen-gallon drums of soaps and sanitizers for washing the milkhouse equipment, shovels and shovel handles, calf bottles, nitrile gloves and leather work gloves, buckets of all sizes and materials, and paint sticks (which are big oil pastel crayons) for dairy farmers who might want to make it easier for their wives to identify and feed the cows by writing the first letter of each cow's name in a color that corresponds to the amount of grain she gets. And paper towels for washing and drying the cows' teats.

There are two kinds of paper towels, white towels and brown towels. The white towels are thinner and more flexible and are great for the summertime, when the cows are out on pasture and we just dip and dry them and hook them up. In the winter, we wash them with paper towels dipped into a bucket of hot water and iodine-based Udder Wash. Then we dip them, then we dry them. The white towels are not up to this task, so every winter for the last ten years Earl has bought the thicker brown towels. The white towels cost 21 dollars a box. The brown towels cost 34 towels a box. Last winter, for some reason unknown to us, when Earl asked for, "The Brown Towels," Wayne left two boxes of thin, barely-enough-to-blow-your-nose-on brown towels that he had just started carrying and which cost 13 dollars a box. As if it was the color that was important.

We call these The Stupid Towels, as in, "Cliffy, go get a Stupid Towel and blow your nose," or, "If you can't get the woodstove started with just kindling, you can use some of the Stupid Towels." When I got to the barn yesterday, the towel holder was filled with Stupid Towels. (The towel holder is a little cordura pouch that buckles around your waist to hold towels while you're milking. It looks a little dorky, but it's a great invention.) Now, I should have just marched right into the utility room and swapped out for the good towels, but I didn't want to take the time and I thought it would be good to use them up and I thought I might even save us some money, despite using about four times as many towels per cow. I doubled up the Stupid Towels, then I tripled them. And I kept thinking that I would go get the better towels as soon as I got one set of cows hooked up and I had a minute before the next set was ready to come off. But the gods of milking were laughing at me and the next cows were done, done, done by the time I had finished with the pair before them.

Eventually I used up The Stupid Towels and I left Sweet Pea dripping teat dip while I got the unstupid towels. It took about fifteen seconds. And then everyone seemed to milk out nicely and then Earl came back and took over and I went back to the house with my small victory--I had milked fifteen cows and eliminated one more bundle of Stupid Towels from the barn.