Nearly Artemis and the Milkapaloosa Product Line

When Cliffy was born, our friends, John and Janine, gave us a green lava lamp to use as a nightlight. I put it at the foot of our bed, which was the only place our recalcitrant newborn would sleep, and spent many all-but-comatose hours staring at it and nursing. When I wrote to thank them, I found myself not just praising it as a diversion, but describing the different formations it would make and my names for them. My favorites were when the wax stuff first gets hot and shoots a geyser of green that immediately cools in the not-yet-warmed-up liquid at the top, looking sort of like funnel cakes, Pennsylvania's answer to fried dough, and when a small bubble gets going fast and blasts right into the middle of a bigger bubble that's cooling and on its way down. If it was an especially eventful night, the little bubble might break the big bubble in two instead of being swallowed into it. Always I was routing for the little bubbles to hold their own.

At the time, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I'm horrible at getting thank-you cards written, but when I do, I've got the formula down. First you praise the item. Then you describe its cool features and how much it's enriching your life. Then you thank the person for being so thoughtful. Usually you do this on a tiny little card that gives you room for one, maybe two sentences for each part. In the early days of motherhood, however, the idea of a trip to the post office was profoundly daunting. And so I had written an email. With no spatial limitations. And apparently I got a little carried away, three maybe four paragraphs, in my description of the cool features and the enrichment of my bleary new-mommy existence.

John and Janine thought it was hilarious, which confused me.

Earl said that sometimes (he was patting me on the back gently here) the things that are in my head don't make the same kind of sense to other people as they do to me. I had suspected that I was a little out of my mind, so I took his word for it and in the months and years that followed, if I couldn't stop myself from sharing the contents of my brain, I could at least stop being surprised at the blank stares that followed.

So all of this is a precursor to something I've been thinking about in another sleep-deprived state--morning milking. I haven't done much morning milking in the past nine years, seeing as I was pretty much nursing or pregnant the whole time and we had some employee help so Earl had a few mornings each week when he could sleep in (until six, anyway). Now the employees have moved on and Earl is a wonderful guy, but he's somewhat less wonderful if he's doing every morning milking and haying on top of that. My milking in the mornings is an investment in my marriage and familial happiness. Plus, I really like milking cows. And I like being up for a few hours when the phone doesn't ring and my brain is my own. What have I been doing with my brain?

Well, the thing I've been thinking about is making names for rock bands out of combinations of the cow names. I was thinking this the other day when I was writing out the milking sheet for the third rack in the parlor. The parlor has six milking stalls and the cows come in two at a time. Each set of six is a rack and when you get them all filled up, you write down who is in what stall to help track their general behavior (if Kila comes in last she's not feeling well, if Lilac comes in first, she's in heat) and to make sure that at the end you've milked them all. We bring them in two at a time, and when the cows in five and six are hooked up, the cows in one and two are usually ready to take off. So we think of them in pairs. And the other day, it was Nearly Artemis, Scarlet Coffee, and Dixie Peanut. Band names, yes? Two new age, one of them all female with a male keyboardist maybe, and a bad country band that plays the Holiday Inn circuit. This is funny and interesting to me. Some of the names are too weird to work with--Nefertiti, Buerre, Tesla, Urny, Natty, Pompy, Ullie, Snakey Kila and Tracta--but some are great and full of potential--Artemis, Cinder, Ambrosia, Honey, Spring, Peanut, Dixie, Lilac, Nearly, Sweet Pea, Charlie, Fern, and Jasmine.

I find there's really no topping Nearly Artemis for a rock band, but Lilac Spring would make a great air freshener, and Nearly Dixie could be a reduced-fat fried chicken dish. Charlie Honey would be a great title for a book about a boy raised in Virginia by a team of eccentric, doting aunts who make their money running 'shine and sewing prophetic crazy quilts.

This has been a challenging summer, agriculturally speaking. There was just enough corn that survived the crows and rotting under the rain to come up and look dismal. Most of the hay got rained on. Something ate every last strawberry in the kids' garden and Killdeer Farm, our regular supplier of strawberries for our ice cream, didn't have a single quart for us after the late frosts and June rain. But at four in the morning, the phone doesn't ring, there are no orders to take and no hay to bale. It's just me and the cows and the routines and rhythms of milking and a little mental time to play Scrabble with cow names.