Sweet Pea

Earl and I milked together last night, just the two of us, for the first time in months. My teenage cousin, Zoe, was taking care of the boys at the house. I had hoped to get the cows in and set up the milkhouse while Earl was still shredding a round bale in the freestall feedbunk. (The cows can eat the round bales unshredded, either rolled out or just plunked there to pull the hay off, but they waste a huge amount and, with last summer's low-yield hay season, the bale shredder has made a big difference.) I'm famous for underestimating how long things will take me, though, and between Oliver getting hungry, making pizza for the kids and Zoe, and trying to figure out how to get the television working after our ten-hour power outage so the boys could watch a movie, it was twenty past four by the time I headed up the hill.



Earl put the cows in and I set up the milkhouse, which is a good distribution of labor--the cows sometimes treat me like the babysitter, saying, in their bovine way, "Earl always lets us drink as much as we want before we go in the barn. He never makes us wait to drink inside." I also like to set up the milkhouse because then I can bring all the units upstairs and have them connected before I turn the vacuum pump on. This makes all the pulsators, which make the rubber sleeves that go around each teat squeeze and release, squeeze and release, make their clicky noises in synchronicity. I don't like it when the clicky noises are all random.



The cows are used to a few minutes of standing around, waiting for the person who put them in to shut the gate behind them and come around to milk, and they weren't quite sure what to do when the door opened right away. Antonia was in the front, but she just calved last week and she's not a raise-her-hand-in-the-front-row kind of cow, so she turned tail and headed back into the stream of cows and I backpeddaled and decided to shut the door and refill the dip cups for a few minutes. Only Kila had made it in. Kila, aka Kila Monster, was born on New Years' Day 2000 and she's a rascally old cow and she's seen it all. She wasn't surprised to see me and I wasn't surprised when she tried out three different stalls for leftover grain, tried in vain to get into the new grain bin, and generally ignored my attempts to influence her behavior. When Earl came into the parlor, she stepped up into stall three and, if it wasn't an anatomical impossibility, I would swear she was whistling.



Before we had kids, I used to milk all the time, either with Earl or to give him a chance to sleep in or to work longer at something else, like sugaring or haying or fixing something. I milked the day before Cliffy was born because it was Thursday and that was Earl's morning to sleep late. And then we had all these kids who were having nothing of bottles or pacifiers and I haven't had a regular presence in the barn since. I pinch hit--milking 11 in a row when Earl hurt his back in '04 and when things go wrong somewhere else and Earl needs to fix them, during haying, or when we're running late and I'll get started while Earl feeds. And milking is a like riding a bike and I find myself in autopilot--one hand on the cow's flank, leaning in, reaching for the dip cup with the other. I use all my tests to determine when she's done milking (this is the most important part to keeping the cows healthy and milking well), looking to see if there is milk in the hose and if all four quarters are slack, feeling the udder, and what I know about each cow and her stage of lactation and how long she takes to milk out.

The problem is that I don't know the cows like I used to. I mean, I still know the cows I knew when I milked all the time, but that was almost eight years ago and a lot of those cows aren't with us anymore and some of their daughters look or act like them, but some of them don't. Scarlet looks like Bizkit and Coffee and Cream and Cocoa and Butter are all lumped together in the Dumb Food Name group in my head and I can't seem to remember who is who. Maisy looks like Tatiana, except that that the white spots on Tatiana's head look like the number 7 and Maisy's just look like spots. Lily looks like a lot of other cows but she is high strung and mean and I find myself thinking, "This must be Lily I've just milked," when I breathe a sigh of relief and let Honey or Dixie or Ambrosia out of the parlor. Taffy is mean, too, and Selma can be unpredictable. And all these cows get a scoop, or a half scoop, or a no grain at all when they come into the parlor and to look them up on the feed list, I have to know who they are. Sometimes, after I've milked, Earl will say to me, "I saw on the chart that you milked Popcorn three times," and I will shoot him a look and make some smart-ass comment about maybe getting some more distinctive cows if he cares so much about his milk chart, but the truth is, in my mind, that was Popcorn, all three times.

So last night when Sweet Pea came into the parlor, I was all smiles and relief, greeting an old friend. Sweet Pea was a wedding present from some dairy-farm neighbors. She's a Holstein-Guernsey cross and she's all black, except for a white heart on her forehead. She has a beautiful well-balanced udder and and is patient and sweet. She's very tall and her udder is usually very clean, minimizing the work I need to do with hot water, iodine teat dip, and paper towels. She takes a bit to milk out and usually needs her front quarters taken off for her rear ones to get fully empty. She makes a lot of milk and gets a full scoop of grain unless she's just about ready to dry off, and that's obvious from one look at her udder. Sweet Pea was my easy street. She came in with Urny, another old friend, and I sat down between them and knew just how to take care of them.