‘We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.’ Anais Nin

I was getting bigger and the summer was getting hotter.  Northern Illinois is corn country and the heat and humidity was an ingredient of that.  I was spending more time in front of the fan, sitting at my sewing machine, sewing baby clothes, watching baseball games with Dave before he went to work on the second shift.

“The county fair is next week,” I remember him saying one afternoon before leaving.  “Let’s go and take a look at the dairy cattle.”

We went that next Saturday and of course it was hot.  My feet were swollen, my back was beginning to complain when I stood too long and I needed a bathroom often.  We drove in our pathetic faded brown four-door car to the fairgrounds with the windows wide open causing the wind to tangle my hair.  I was looking forward to the hot-dogs.  By now I was hungry all the time.

Dave wanted to go straight to the dairy cattle barn and I was looking for a bathroom when we turned the corner of a building and I saw Katie, an old friend from college.  I stopped to talk, but Dave kept walking, even though I called out to him several times.  It was like he forgot I was there.  I said a hasty goodbye and ran after him.

I caught up to him inside the barn.  I was dazzled by all the colors: dark browns, rusty reds, sharp black and brilliant whites, and creamy tans.  The cows were all sizes, too.  This was the closest I had ever come to dairy cattle.  They were all clean, tails fluffy, swishing back and forth from habit.  There were no flies in this barn.  There were piles of bright oat straw beneath each cow.  The light was diffused and the barn felt dark and cool.  Huge fans, on six-foot poles, were blowing on high.

Loud music from a rock and roll station in Chicago filled the barn and teenagers were sleeping on bales of straw and hay; one was even curled up against his cow, who was lying on the straw, eyes half closed.  Even her chewing was in slow motion.

A few kids were moving about.  One had a seven-tine pitchfork and was shaking out some slices of straw in a stall.  Another one walked over to her cow, whose tail was lifted.  The cow shit and the girl slid the fork under the straw, lifted up the mess and was out the door so fast I almost missed it.

“Where is she going with that?” I asked.

“There is a manure pile outside,” he said to me, over his shoulder, since he had moved on.

We walked up and down the aisles, Dave pointing out one cow after another and her good and bad points.  Sometimes he walked up to them, patting her on the rump, rubbing her udder.  I worried that this was bad or dangerous.  No one seemed to notice and the cows didn’t turn to look.  Finally, we stopped behind some fawn brown cows, and Dave asked me if I knew which breed they were.  Of course I didn’t.  There were Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, Milking Shorthorns and Brown Swiss in the barn.  They were beautiful and I imagined a barn full of these clean smelling peaceful cows.

“Which ones should we buy?” he asked.

I looked around and pointed to the fawn brown ones, which I later learned were Brown Swiss, and said, “Those, cause then we can sell chocolate milk!”

“They don’t make chocolate milk,” he said, looking at me like I was more stupid than he thought.

“Joke, honey.  I was making a joke,” I said. I wasn’t used to Dave being so intense.  One of the qualities I loved about him was his sense of humor. He once owned a watch he called ‘Wonder Watch’, cause we would wonder what time it was. I put off his inability to catch my joke as him being so serious about this dairy business stuff that I decided to be more serious myself.

Dave grew up with Holsteins, the ubiquitous black and white cows, and of course that was the breed we bought a year after we moved to the farm.  The bigger the cow, the better was Dave’s breeding philosophy.  Our barn was built for smaller Holsteins, or Jerseys, which weighed less than one thousand pounds.  Eventually our largest cow, Jill, would weigh close to a ton.  Those large cows were never happy in our small barn and several cows ended up with life ending udder injuries because of Dave’s love of large cows.

Chapter Two