Tessa

Earl will have to write about what really happened with Tessa, medically and all--but here's how it played out for me:

It's four thirty in the afternoon and the phone rings. I'm supervising homework, washing eggs, and thawing steaks for supper. It's Earl and the vet is coming and there's something up with Tessa. Can I come up to milk when Dr. Pinello gets here? Sure. Give me twenty minutes. I feed snacks, wrangle boys into outerwear, put Oliver on my back and head up to the barn. Dr. Pinello isn't there yet and the boys run around, checking on all their secret barn projects, while I feed grain and hang out with Earl. I go check on Tessa and she actually looks okay to me. She's up and eating and I can see the calf moving against her side. I say this to Earl and he says he knows, but something doesn't seem right to him. Christine (aka Dr. Pinello, the vet) arrives with her buckets, paper towels, halter and rope. She is saying something to Earl about how, when he calls her like this, it either turns out to be nothing at all or else it's really something. I am thinking this will be in the first category, but I am wrong.

Tessa, or maybe the calf, has somehow managed to twist her uterus around so her birth canal is twisted shut. The solution to this is to lay her down and roll her over with a board pressing against her belly. Earl calls Erik, our ace farm hand, who has gone home about an hour before, and our neighbor, Kris Brown and his daughter, Amanda, who have the dairy farm across from our road. Cliffy and Jackson are dispatched to throw down straw from the hayloft. Earl and Harley go to get a board. Oliver and I milk the rest of the cows. I hear Dr. Pinello saying she thinks the twist goes this way. I wonder what will happen if she's wrong. I finish milking and take the units down to the milkhouse and clean everything up. When I check in with Earl about the milk for the calves, Tessa is on her feet, untwisted, and Christine is checking her cervix. Apparently Amanda, who is a high school senior and as smart and tough as she is beautiful, managed some gymnastics to hold the board in place and the job came off without a hitch.

The next step is to get the calf out. Apparently this is complicated by the labor being so long and going nowhere and all the hormones have quit and gone home. Christine gets baling twine on the calf's feet and, with Earl and Erik pulling, the calf comes out, but he doesn't make it. Tessa, however, is up and eating and looking pretty good.

I don't know about this final outcome until later, because there's a meeting at the preschool to review a policy that I care deeply about. The original reason I went to the barn was so that Christine's visit wouldn't make Earl late and he'd still be able to watch the kids while I went to the meeting. But things are different now, so I take Oliver with me and go to the preschool, which I am hoping will only take twenty minutes, but which takes over an hour. I peel out as soon as I can, and come home to find the kids watching a movie and Earl still at the barn. I make a quick supper of sliced apples, canned soup and thick slabs of wheat bread I made earlier in the day. The boys tell me about the calf, which is sad, but that Tessa is okay, which is so good, and that Cliffy fell into the ice in the ditch beside the barn and had to run back to change his clothes. Earl comes in a few minutes later and we fry up some steaks. Earl is exhausted and that mixture of glad that he called the vet and that Tessa is okay and wondering if there was something he could have done sooner or better to save the calf. He almost falls asleep at the dinner table, which is not surprising, because it's almost nine o'clock. The boys are beyond hungry and gobble up everything I put in front of them and then get really sleepy when the food kicks in. They manage to get into pajamas and up the stairs with just enough energy for about two minutes worth of crankiness before Earl settles them and they stretch out and fall asleep. Meanwhile, I have gone out to the car to get Oliver, who fell asleep on the way home from the preschool and who I bundled up and put a baby monitor next to so I could concentrate on getting the other boys fed and in bed. Oliver wakes up and I change his diaper and put him in his jammies and nurse him until he falls back to sleep in his bed.

And then I wash the boys coats so they'll be clean for school in the morning and write all this, waiting for the washer to click so I can hang the coats by the heater to dry overnight. Which I just did.

We have days like this. Maybe not every month, but maybe three, maybe fifteen times each year, when we divide and conquer, call in friends, let the kids watch movies and drink root beer, eat canned soup or cereal for supper, and then collapse on our pillows, happy to put the day and its challenges to bed. Which is what I aim to do right now.

Goodnight.