Whether or not you’ve ever even been in a barn, you probably have an idea of what a barn looks like.  Maybe you read or saw Little House on the Prairie, or saw a television show or movie where there might have been a scene or two in a barn.

When I tell people I live in a barn, they think of a cow barn, or maybe a horse barn.  High ceilings, hay mows, silos all around, animals and manure.  I can see they are thinking of those vaulted ceilings and envisioning some light filled cavernous room echoing from all the wood.  That’s not our house, except for all the wood.  We have the entire south side in windows and it is filled with light.  But high ceilings?  Nope.  And that’s good.  I don’t want to heat all that air.

There are different kinds of barns.  We live in a fruit barn.  Apples and cherries were processed and stored here.  Chickens were raised in the basement until they were old enough to go outside.  Winters can be harsh on little chicks, so we start them inside sometimes.  I did that once when I was living in a house on a dairy farm in Baileys Harbor.  I think of doing that again, often.  I like chicks and raising chickens, and fresh eggs, too. But I won’t be starting them in the house.  Too dusty.  I did it once, and that’s a story for another day.

So when I was farming the first time with Dave I spent hours in the barn doing chores.  Milking cows.  Sweeping feed mangers twice a day.  Cleaning the barn, sweeping cow stalls, throwing fresh straw down from the hay mow and putting it in the stalls, throwing fresh lime down on the walk.  Washing the bulk tank every other day after our pickup.  Feeding calves and heifers twice a day.  Those were the easy days, when there was no field work to do.

When I went back into dairy farming with my Dad and Mom my days got longer and pretty soon I spent more time in the barn than in my home.  And it showed.  My barn was clean, and my house was always in disarray.  A farrier once told me that was the way it should be.  I just didn’t have the time, but I certainly didn’t like it that way.

Our barn’s ‘basement’ has 36″ thick field stone walls, and are well insulated, so dry and cool in the summer and dry and warm in the winter.  We heat with a wood boiler that is in the basement, so the kid’s rooms we built in 1994 are very cozy.

Our home, pottery gallery and studio are in this barn.  There are plenty of rodents and bugs.  That could be chalked up to living in the country in the middle of an aging orchard in addition to living in an older building.  Pileated woodpeckers like our cedar shingles because many insects live underneath.  Periodically I have to run outside yelling at the birds to stop eating our house, or I tap loudly on the window or pound on the walls.

I guess there many people, like myself, who thought living in a remodeled barn would be cool.  It is.  Upstairs, here in my office or in our bedroom, the view is beautiful.  Not many bugs fly this high, so the windows can be open without screens.

I can lie in bed in the morning and watch the light change as the sun moves up in the sky.  The window faces east, so morning comes fast up here.  The birds are high up in the trees near the open window and they chitter chatter to each other and themselves.  I can hear the bees and the birds across the orchard at the neighbors suet feeder.  I can hear the wind in the trees.  I can hear the sounds of trucks coming down the hill into town.  I can hear the bell ringing at the Clearing calling the students to breakfast and that sound pushes me out of bed.

I sit at my desk while I work on my many writing projects, my blog/memoir ‘Not on My Money You Won’t‘ or my blog/journal or our pottery blog and hear birds sing, watch as wasps lazily fly in and out of the south facing window, hear the wind in the trees, hear the hummingbirds zooming at each other, smell the flowers, cut grass, rain smells on the air.

I’d say that living in this barn is good, because it’s where I live.  It’s the home my husband John built, the pottery studio he created and the business he started and grew and where I learned pottery and raised my family.  I’d say I don’t want to go back to the first barn I fell in love with, because the animals are gone, that life I had is gone.  But I miss that barn;  and I miss that life;  and I miss that place;  and I miss that part of my life.

Yeah, living and working in barns.

I fell in love with the idea of raising chickens before I even moved to the farm.

Actually, I had plans; really serious plans about landscaping a pond for geese and ducks and pea hens and chickens.  I wanted pigs and horses (the dream of all 13 year old girls? and adult me), and goats.  Raising rabbits came later.  There were other animals I wanted, too.  Now I can say I am grateful to Dave for saying no.  Then, I was not grateful.

“Pigs get out of everything,” he repeated to me regularly, like each time I would bring it up, or show him a plan in one of those back-to-the-earth again hippie mags.  I thought he was just saying that.  I learned through a girl-friend’s experience a few years later chasing pigs all day that he was right.

I wanted geese.  “They shit everywhere.” And then we visited our friends in Brussels, south of Sturgeon Bay.  They had a flock of very nice geese that not only shit everywhere but hissed at us and chased us back into our truck.  Invite us to dinner but forget to warn us?  Not cool.

So, I went to the library and researched chickens and raising them.  I read Ag Extension booklets and magazines and finally mailed catalog requests to several farms in Iowa that sold day old chicks.  My favorite was Murray McMurray Hatchery.

I ordered 25 chicks and followed the recommendations for setting up a flock in all the books I read.  I had a heat lamp, a chick waterer, proper feed for the chicks, a clean and dry place for them (an old chicken coop), plenty of dry bedding, and a whole lot of enthusiasm.

They were cute.  They peeped.  They scratched and drank and pooped everywhere.  I would perch on a log stump (used to behead the little darlings when they were old enough for the oven) and watch them eat and climb over each other for food and water for fifteen or twenty minutes after each feeding twice a day.  As the spring crept into summer I let them out for longer periods during the day until at last they could move to the larger coop which had a door to the chicken yard.  I never stopped being fascinated by their behavior, never really interested in the why but more in the how of their lives.

And that’s how I got hooked.  Even after having to slaughter 15 of them on my birthday one year and the subsequent dressing of the birds, I still looked forward to January and studying the catalogs looking for the next breed to raise.

So confident was I that one year I decided to order one hundred straight run chicks of mixed breeds.  I was going big time.

~

I ordered 100 chicks to be delivered in early April one year.  I thought that it would be late enough to avoid any nasty weather.  I was wrong.

I hadn’t lived here long enough to just accept that even in May we couldn’t get a blizzard that could stop the world.  I had hopes of getting to spring sooner because of course it would be fine, I wanted it to be fine.  And warm.

Today with the sun shining and 16 degrees with a wind chill of COLD, I can feel the yearning for shorts and a tshirt.  No boots, no winter jacket.

And that is why gardening magazines and catalogs are almost cruel.  I can smell the tomatoes, I can taste the pea pods, I can feel the crunch of green beans.  More than tantalizing.  And chicken catalogs had the same unnerving effect on me.  I think I lost my mind that winter.  April is not spring in Northern Door County.  April is winter.

So one morning, close to 7 am, I got a phone call.  Getting a phone call that early set me up for a crises, for who calls that early except in an emergency.

It was from our postmaster.  I didn’t know he was in the post office that early in the morning.  I looked out the south facing window next to the phone in our kitchen, and I couldn’t see the out buildings.  Boy, it’s snowing, I remember thinking.  Bob was talking to me and I didn’t understand him.

“Come and get your chickens,”  he said again.

“What?”  I said.  I could hear something in the background, kind of a high pitched beeping sound.  Where was he?  In a garage?

“Come and get your chickens, NOW,” he said again, this time with more than a forceful tone.  This could be his yelling, I thought.  I could hear the beeping in the background better now.  It sounded more like peeping, and the excitement and fear of 100 day old chicks moving in with us stopped my breath, for a moment.

“I’ll be right down,”

“Now!”

“Well,”  I said, “I have to dress the kids.  It will take a few minutes.”  And then I threw dressed them in their snow clothes right over their footed pj’s.  I felt the faster I got there the better it would be for me in the long run.  I didn’t even stop in the barn to talk to Dave, who was finishing up chores.  He’d find out soon enough.

It was a good thing our truck had extra weight in the back because our driveway was drifting over and so was County EE on the way to Baileys Harbor.

I drove into the post office driveway, pulling all the way up to the garage and set the parking brake, leaving my kids in the truck with the engine running since it was just starting to warm up and defrost.  I hopped out and carefully trudged through the snow towards the back door, then knocked hard on that door.  To me the wind was deafening and the blowing snow was blinding so I probably pounded on that door harder than I needed to.  Bob pulled it open like he had been standing there with a stop watch, waiting for me.  There was no welcoming smile, either though that wasn’t a surprise.  He was not the happiest guy to begin with, and apparently he was having trouble with this minor blip in his morning.  “Hi,” I said in a hurry to let him know I was in his debt forever, “Thanks so much for this I am so sorry I didn’t know they were mailing them this week.” I stopped and looked at him, hoping I had said enough.

Bob said to me, “There.  There they are,” as though I was having trouble locating them, and pointed to two large heavy cardboard boxes with holes in a regular pattern the size of marbles on the top.  The brown corrugated heavy duty boxes were about 14″ x  28″ x 8 ” and had the Murray McMurray labels on them.  The peeping sound coming from them was louder and more urgent than I had expected.

I looked at those two boxes and saw immediately that it would be crowded in the cab of our pickup, since I had both kids with me.  And then I wondered just how heavy 50 day-old chicks in a big box was, and whether I had to ask Bob to help me carry them, something I didn’t want to do and afraid that if I did it would be a waste of air.   I walked over to the boxes with confidence while inside wondering where to put them in the truck, and asked him as I picked up the top box if he would just open the door for me.

I practically ran to the truck with my new babies in my arms.  The box wasn’t too heavy but the chicks all slid to one end and I almost dumped them in the pile of snow I had to run around.  Then I almost slipped under the truck because there was ice under the snow that I hadn’t noticed on my way in, of course, since I had been so careful.

I crashed into the driver’s side door, plunging the chicks into momentary silence, then pulled open the driver’s side door and tossed the box onto my seat and slammed it shut.  I turned to go back for the second box and Bob was standing there, holding the second box, so close I almost ran him over.  The kids slid over and Tim crawled up onto Vanya’s lap while Bob shoved the second box of chicks on top of the first and pushed them over so I could crawl in.   Bob slammed the truck door and scurried back into his post office, moving faster than I thought possible for our phlegmatic post master.

And there we sat for a moment, in that warm truck, windshield wipers going steadily, radio on the local Sturgeon Bay station WDOR, the announcer talking about the weather, the kids beginning to whine about breakfast, me all wet and hot.  “Buckle in,” I reminded them.  “How?” they wondered in their snowsuits and boots on top of each other.

I drove anyway, slowly finding my way back to our farm only 3 miles away.  There are times, I think, when our truck knew the way better than I.  The blizzard was totally complete and it was a miracle we didn’t end up in a ditch.

But my morning wasn’t over.  Those chicks needed a home, fresh warm water and food and the home waiting for them was a drafty old chicken coop with cracks wide open to the snow.  I was glad for the breakfast diversion for it gave me some time to solve this problem.

~

When the door to the chicken coop that had been selected as the new home for our fledgling flock of 100 straight run chickens was wrenched out of my hands and slammed up against the wall by the wind gust whipping around the chicken coop,  I could see instantly that my plans would have to change.  A few chinks between the logs had fallen out giving the snow entry into the thirty year old building which made unusual sculptural drifts and turned the perfect home for baby chicks into a deep freeze.  Soon the thought that an alternative had to be discovered fast and acted upon got me moving around the farm, looking into all sorts of out buildings.  The horse barn had electricity but no small room to convert.  The larger chicken coop had the same problem with the additional issue of a permanently open door directly to the north. That was definitely out.

I did go into the barn and look around but when Dave saw me doing that he ended my speculation without even a conversation.  No chickens in the dairy barn.  If the milk inspector showed up, and he would as soon as the chicks were installed, we would loose our Grade A certification.  Good point, I thought, but what I demonstrated at that moment was that I was not acting like a responsible dairy farmer but a desperate chicken farmer and grumbled over my breath, and a ‘discussion’ ensued.  I gave up quickly, though, since I didn’t have the time to plead my case.  The chicks were still in the boxes, hungry and thirsty and on my kitchen floor.

When I got back in the house, totally stumped, I stopped for a coffee and sat down with the birds.  They were loud and to my un-initiated ears frantic.  I hadn’t learned that that was just the way they sounded.  I wondered how soon they would die, and all at my incompetent hands.

And then, in my darkest hour, I thought of a plan.

A few hours later I had cleaned up and carried up all the chick paraphernalia from the original chicken coop and installed everything in our spare bedroom on the main floor.  I had a bale of straw sitting on the far edge of a tarp and had constructed a large chick ‘pen’ on the rest of the tarp.  I had figured out how to hang the superfluous heat lamp just because I had one, not that they needed the warmth in my centrally heated house.  I had covered the bed, a dresser, my sewing table and various other boxes and toys with old sheets in an effort to keep the place tidy, not even aware of the futility of that.

With my two small children watching, I opened the first box and tipped the chicks out, so pleased with myself for solving this crises so easily.  I took the second box and they slid out swiftly and we stood and watched them scramble and scratch about, finding the food, the water and each other.  There was a bit of pecking order stuff going on,  which gave me a new appreciation for that cliche and motivation to get several new waterers and feeders the next day, after we were plowed out.

I went to bed that night after spending a few quiet moments with my chicks as they scratched and pooped with abandon, and I bonded with my flock.  The lights were off in the room and the heat lamp was on, providing a warm glow over them.  I was at peace and felt very smart. When I crawled into bed and snuggled down under the covers with my book, ready to read myself to sleep, I could hear those birds peeping away.  And so could Dave, who could sleep through a mortar attack, he said, but he couldn’t sleep through that peeping, even with an extra feather pillow over his head.  I could tell he and I weren’t going to get along over this and that feeding them and keeping the ‘pen’ clean were the going to be the least of my problems.

~

So, our days we filled with meeting the needs and cleaning up after 100 chicks.  I never imagined the dust created by such cute, small and endearing creatures.  It’s hard to raise one farm animal in your house.  We’ve all heard or read stories about the runt of the hog litter being rescued by the hardy and resourceful farm wife, basket behind the wood stove and baby bottle to nourish the critter and then when it is grown it wins the blue ribbon at the fair..oh there might be a spider in this story, too.  But no such luck for me.

~

Chicks were everywhere.
I woke up and poked my head into the bedroom to discover that they had pushed over the cardboard barriers and had taken over the room. It was time to find larger quarters.
But where?
Not the living room, nor the original chicken coop. The weather had maintained it’s January interpretation of April, so that was out. They may be bigger, but they were still chicks.
So? What to do but move them to the basement. That sound easy, and our basement was perfect. It wasn’t heated, as such, and the floor was concrete, so clean up would be easy. But. I needed a room they could go into with a door i could close.
The root cellar. A walled off corner in the basement would be the answer. I spent a day walking back and forth in the drifts between the barn and the house, hauling bales of straw, hay, bags of chicken feed, buckets of water, the feeders and waterers. I carried the heat lamp down and jury-rigged a way to suspend it to provide some warmth. The basement was probably 50-60 degrees.
And then, well, it was time to carry those 100 chicks to their new home. And that’s when the brilliance of the spare bedroom answer was crushed, dimmed into a dusty tragic ending. We had to chase them, grab them, squawking and cheeping and flapping their baby wings, spreading dust e v e r y w h e r e.
Into everything. Into all the rooms on the main floor.
It’s not like we lived in a very modern or contemporary house. It was a ramshackle, katywopmas, tilting, leaning kind of a house. The boards on the kitchen floor had gaps so wide that I needed to use a knife to dig out the grime and grit from the barn and the crumbs the dog missed while holding the vacuum cleaner to suck the crap out. Sometimes cleaning it just revealed how bad it was. So, you might think that we wouldn’t mind the dust from the birds. But after a day dealing with dust and stuff in the barns and sheds, I wanted at least a house that wasn’t a barn.
But the dust from the chicks wasn’t a fine thin dust easily blown off. This would require serious cleaning.
Thank God spring cleaning was coming.
It took until dinner to get most of them and I had to wait until the next morning, when they were thirst and hungry, before I got the last of the recalcitrant fowls in their new quarters. The basement.

~

It was not the best solution, but it worked for a while.

Dave was not happy with the peeping noise.  The chicks were housed directly beneath our bedroom and they had grown in both size and sound.  I enjoyed them still, even with the extra work and the ribbing I got from him.  But the time finally came when they were big enough to withstand all kinds of weather, so Dave and I once again chased these birds around and once caught we would pop them into our burlap bag and carry them to the chicken coop.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds.  They were faster, smarter and could fly.  We had only our two feet and all the intelligence in the world couldn’t compete with their instincts to survive.  It took hours and finally we got a helping paw.

The barn cats had become interested in our goings on and came to the house to investigate, an unusual thing for a barn cat to do.  Several snuck down stairs, stirred up the chickens and several went running into our arms in an effort to escape certain immediate death.  When we finally had all the chicks (minus one, discovered the next day when I went down to do laundry and clean up their pen) we discovered that one barn cat wanted to stay, forever.  And that is another story.

Chapter Nine

I could look out the south window in my kitchen and see up the hill to the back forty pastures and watch the dairy cattle graze.  In the morning I would watch out that window for Dave to leave the red pole building that housed our young stock and head to the barn, swinging empty buckets and know just about when he’d be in for breakfast.

The garden soil is very thin and full of rocks and bedrock is exposed in my yard, but not the in garden.  That was a plus.  I could spend hours roto tilling after Dave had run the disc over it in the spring.  We’d spread old crusty manure over it and then I would work it into the dirt, using shovels and a rake.  A disc is a farmer’s field tool, like a plow, but doesn’t go as deep.  The plow brings up big rocks, sometimes as large as small boulders, and we wanted to avoid that.  We used the disc to break up sod in an old hay field, and Dave could spend a day driving the tractor back and forth, crisscrossing that field and still the grass would grow. So finally we did buy a plow and probably used it three times: the only three times we needed to convert a hay field into a cornfield. And sometimes we would use a grass and weed killer.

The soil here in our area is littered with rocks left by the glaciers.  The soil was scraped off the earth, leaving exposed bedrock and cracks in the bedrock sometimes deep enough to reach the ground water.  This is not friendly farmland.  It’s great for orchards and there are several left from the old days.  Plant a cherry tree or apple tree and you don’t have to work that land for thirty years, which is easier than crop or dairy farming.  But what really happened is that most farms raised many kinds of crops.  Cherry, apple, and hay combined with dairy and maybe pigs or chickens provided a many layered income stream.  If one crop failed, all was not lost.  The farm wife usually had a job off the farm, and sometimes the farmer himself drove truck or school bus.  It was almost impossible to survive on farming alone.  I too had side jobs throughout the years we farmed.

Each spring we would wait until the soil was dry enough and then Dave would disc the fields to ready them for planting.  And a few times he would get anxious and go out early and get the tractor stuck in the mud.  One of our fields was next to a swamp; they call them wetlands now.  But they are really swamps.  In fact many of our fields lay next to the swamp around Peil Creek, which fed Kangaroo Lake.  They were hay-fields for just that reason.  Too wet to work in the spring. We learned the hard way.

One spring day after lunch, Dave went out with the large tractor, the Ford 5000, to pull the disc just lightly through the field, get a jump on the fieldwork.  He was excited to get out there.  Later he walked home from the field, his face dark and a cloud of anger following him. Stuck!  He needed me to follow him in the truck while he drove the smaller tractor and we would hitch the thick chains to the tractor and walk that baby out.  That’s what he kept saying.  That baby will just walk out of the mud.

So I dressed the kids and packed some apples and crackers and drove to the gray log cabin field, the name we had given it cause it was next to a gray log cabin.  It was a summer cabin, so no one was around most of the time, and no witnesses to our drama.

When we got there, I couldn’t believe that it would walk out of the mud.  The tires, close to five feet high were two thirds buried in the mud and the hole was full of water.  But, I didn’t know anything, as I was reminded again, and since I really didn’t, my feelings weren’t bruised. I trusted him, of course.  He backed the tractor and attached the chain to the frames.  This chain was thick, industrial, or rather, agricultural.  Each chain-link was about 3 or 4 inches long and heavy.  I waited until he had it all set.

Then he turned on the bigger tractor, explained how I should drive it out, explained how he would creep forward until the chain was taut and then on his signal we would both go in low gear and increase the rpms and give’er.  These tractors had a low and a high gear, with four forward gears in each one, so that we had a total of 8 forward gears.  Then he mentioned that the front end of the tractor I was driving might rise in the air, like a horse rearing up, and not to be alarmed.  I, of course, told him I would be fine.
And so the plan unfolded and all went as he said it would.  The tractors were roaring, the kids were hanging out of the truck window, watching and cheering us on, the sun was out, the breeze was chilly but the spring air smelled great and birds were everywhere.  I felt so at ease, sure of myself.  This tractor would walk out of the mud and we would all go on, happy.

And then, suddenly, the front wheels of my tractor popped up in the air.  Not inches, but feet.  Almost 4 feet in the air.  It happened so fast that I couldn’t shut the engine down fast enough.  I was shaking, terrified, and not expecting to see Dave  launch himself off the smaller tractor, screaming at me, waving his arms.  For a minute I actually thought he had been as worried as I about the tractor flipping over and pining me underneath.  As he got closer, I saw the look on his face, heard his words, and realized my mistake.  I was an idiot, and a suburban lazy person who didn’t know the meaning of work and couldn’t ever understand farming like he did, he told me.  But then, he wasn’t on that tractor.

So we didn’t get the tractor out of the mud that afternoon.  The next day he asked a neighbor to come and help him.  And of course, that was what he didn’t want to do.  Ask for help.  Show the neighbors he didn’t know how to farm.  His pride hung in the balance.  I learned years later that we should never have tried that stunt.  Hs got stuck only one other time, and this time it was worse.  He had learned some tricks by then, so getting that tractor out was easier.

Getting the fields and garden ready for planting

After all that disc-ing was done, he and I and our small children would go out to a field with five gallon buckets loaded into an old manure spreader pulled by the small antique Ford 9N tractor.   Dave would park it in the middle of the field and we would spread out. The weather was usually cold and damp.  We’d wear our heavy cloth gloves, but not the leather ones.  Once leather gets wet and dries, they are never the same.  They were thick golden yellow gloves.  They reminded me of thick felt.  These could keep our hands warm whether they were dry or warm.  And protect our hands from the rough surfaces of the rocks.  There were so many rocks that we had to make a size distinction, anything smaller than two inches wide stayed in the field.

These were not smooth beach rocks, but rocks from the coral reef that Door County was, so many millenniums ago, and had sharp, rough surfaces and edges.  The frost would heave rocks up each spring and then the disc would find more.  We had to handpick these rocks before Dave could plant the oats or corn seed.  The planter wouldn’t plant well, or break, if we did a shoddy sloppy job. I think hate is too soft a word for how I felt about that job.

There was a story told about rock picking in our neighborhood.   A single farmer bought a mechanical rock picker, which worked pretty well.  Then he got married and sold it.  It wasn’t funny to me.

Our two children, Vanya and Tim, were grand rock pickers.  They could fill a five-gallon bucket faster than Dave or I could carry it to the spreader, unload it and carry it back.  One spring we hired someone to help us with spring fieldwork and all he did was complain about the demeaning physical labor we had expected him to do, all the while those two kids out picked him.  We let him go soon after.

So many rocks were picked by so many farmers’ years before us that those rock fences enclose the fields and pastures.  Some of these fences are built carefully and meant to last.  Others, like the ones around our neighborhood, were just created by farmers dumping bucket after bucket of rocks in a row until there was a rock fence.  Sometimes we would find a piece of granite, dropped by the glacier as it receded, a gift from a far off time and place.

The first spring we farmed, Dave picked rocks alone.  Vanya was too small and it was too cold for her to be out for long, so I stayed in the house.  I felt guilty but couldn’t figure out how to pick rocks with a toddler.  Later years I had the older children to watch the younger one and many times they stayed in the bed of our cream colored pickup, playing, and climbing in and around the truck.  I always brought along snacks. It was like a big metal portable playpen.  Then, when they were bigger we allowed them to work.

After Dave was done with disc-ing the fields, he would pull into the yard and bring the tractor near my garden.  The first time he thought of doing this, I agreed with him.  I thought it would ease the soil preparation and give me a break.  But the big tires spinning and turning on the soft wet soil compacted it and it would soon harden before I got could get into the garden to till it.  Then my job was harder.  The large garden seemed to shrink with the tractor in it.

There was a permanent rhubarb bed on the west side and the asparagus was in the northwest corner.  Each year he would forget about the rhubarb and drive right over that with the disc and cut and spread the roots around, so each year the rhubarb bed grew.  Not so with the asparagus.  Then, the tall grass choked it and the disc-ing killed much of the new growth.  So the bed was disappointing each spring.  After the first year I would race outside waving my hands, perhaps a dishtowel in one, yelling as loud as I could to get his attention.  The blue Ford 4600 tractor would be in a lower gear but the rpm’s revved up and I almost had to run and stand in front of him to stop him.

This was one of those times when he thought I was nuts.  Not because I stood in front of him, but because I disagreed with him.  It was good enough for his mother, all farmers do it this way, why don’t I just plant my sweet corn with the field corn and so on, he told me.  And along with that came the threat that he wouldn’t help me in the garden then, if I had to be stubborn.  Then he would pull the disc through anyway, cutting the rhubarb again.  Right after I reminded him of the patch.  Each year we did this.  To this day, though, the rhubarb patch flourishes and we harvest huge stalks, some up to two feet long.

The thin soil in the garden needed lots of manure and rock picking.  I used the rocks I picked each spring as markers, like little pyramids, at the end of each row.  These would then be scattered by the disc in the spring, so I would be picking up old and new rocks.  After a few years I learned to pick only the ones in the row I was sprinkling seeds, another lazy move by me, I found out, when I visited other farmer’s wives and saw their gardens.  I wondered when they had the time to make them so neat.  Dave did too. And pointed the neat yards out to me as we would drive someplace.

He also wondered why I couldn’t mow the lawn and keep the yard looking nice.  And keep the house clean and the kids clean and him fed and do chores twice a day and wash the bulk tank every other day.  I wondered too.  I thought I was already working hard enough, but apparently I needed to sit in on a scheduling meeting with the farm wives and find out their secrets.  That never happened, either.  No one shared any secrets with me and I’m not so sure there were any.

But I loved the garden and I loved the cattle and I loathed haying. I should say I loathed unloading the bales of hay onto the hay elevator.  The hay stems poked and scratched my arms, the dust got in my eyes and I itched like mad.  I liked raking and baling hay, just not unloading it.  The sight of birds swooping and swirling above us while I’d rake the hay into straight puffy windrows would distract me sometimes.  They were free and watching them, I felt freer then.  The terns from the lake shore would fly in because somehow they knew we were baling that day and there would be mice and bugs staying cool under those windrows that they could catch when exposed.   Snakes would be sleeping under them, too, something Dave was certain would one day give him a heart attack.  Sometimes the baler would scope up a snoozing snake and cut it in half and its tail would be writhing away and Dave would reach into the baler chute and there it would be, in his face almost, freaking him out.  He’d dropped more than one bale, hand to his chest, white faced, stock-still.  I had to watch him carefully so I could stop the tractor slowly but fast enough to rescue him

I sometimes drove the tractor with a baby in a backpack on my back and our dog in my lap, resting up between mice chasing and tire chasing, with the baling machine hooked up to the power take off and the baler was hitched to a hayrack.  When the kids were older they hung out with Dad on the rack and sat on a bale to get out of the way.  Soon, bales were stacked four deep, sometimes five and then Dave would toss them up there like they were pillows, and where they rode until he filled the rack.

The sun pounding down on me, the heat as hot as an oven from the tractor engine and the diesel exhaust filling my lungs and eyes could make me sick. I would sit at an angle so I could watch where I was going, keep an eye on the tractor and the baler and him and the kids and the dog. I can still hear the tractor roaring.  We’d have it on high rpms but a low gear to bale the hay.  Sometimes it was the sound that made me sick more than the heat and exhaust. At the end of a long day baling hay I sometimes had to sit in the shower and let the cold water bring me back from the brink of I don’t know what.  Then I would make dinner before doing chores.

I planted corn, beans, peas, carrots, spinach, Swiss chard, potatoes (once), zucchini, winter squashes, onions, garlic (once) herbs, eggplant (once) cucumbers for eating and cucumbers for pickling, beets (once), cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, lettuces, tomatoes.  One summer I planted okra, another I tried kohlrabi, another I harvested so much basil and made so much pesto I was mailing it to people.  I delivered zucchinis under the cover of darkness and then, began baking zucchini bread and sold it to restaurants, once.  I planted three kinds of beans and three kinds of peas and two kinds of tomatoes.

The summer was full of fresh produce all day and processing it all night.  I learned when to discover when the corn was ready before the raccoons did.  I got good at pickle and sauerkraut making.  I made chokecherry preserves and crab apple jelly, once. The kids and I picked apples from the apple trees in the lot the heifers were in.  We made applesauce and apple butter and apple jelly and apple pies.  They were the best apple pickers because they were young and light and could climb into those old trees, remnants of an old orchard on an old farm.

Chapter Eight

There was a winter once, when we were deep into the dairy farming years, when we had a big snowstorm each and every week, on Wednesdays.  For some reason I remember that.  It would snow lightly daily in between these weekly snowstorms, which usually dumped 6-8 inches of thick heavy snow, blown around so that each morning the landscape had changed slightly.  Each time Dave would spend several hours on the tractor plowing the driveway and piling the snow higher and higher, in newer places, so that finally the driveway was flanked on both sides with 8-10 feet piles.  Saying this now, I can hardly believe it.  But I have photos of that winter so I can reassure myself that in this, my memory is OK.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if we had gotten all the wood cut and stacked before the snow came.  The ten foot lengths were buried under feet of ice and snow in the middle of my garden 40 feet away from the house.  Dave would walk on the surface of the snow to the heap and kick at a section of log until the snow was knocked off, start up the chainsaw, and cut lengths for our wood stove.  I would stand in the kitchen, looking out of the kitchen window facing the garden and watch him, hand on my phone, ready to call for help if he slipped and cut more that the wood.  When he was done, I would wait for him to collect the logs and carry them to the house, opening our battered door to the basement and then the flimsy outside door for him to walk in with his load.  He would heave the four or 5 logs down the steps to the basement and turn back to go outside for another armful.  After several trips he would stop, go down stairs to throw a few logs on the fire and stand there, watching the logs catch and finally close the firebox door.  He’d climb those stairs without stacking the wood, so that when I would walk down there with my baskets of laundry I had to slide my feet along the cement floor and push the wood out of my way.

The power went out just after the morning milking and breakfast but before Dave cleaned the barn.  The cows had been fed and milked, so that was something.  Dave let them out to romp around in the fresh snow and romp they did.  The hot breath blowing out of their noses made them look like dragons.  They would plunge their huge heads into drifts of snow, tossing the snow up into the air and breathe out and I was transfixed by the games they engaged in.  Dave had seen all this when he was a boy and now was more interested in getting the chores done than standing in a blizzard watching them play.

I went up to the house and that’s when everything stopped.  No running water in the house meant no water in the barn, a minor problem unless it continued.  Cows need gallons of water all the time.  they are big animals and all they eat is dry, so water is essential for their continued health.  And for ours, because milk production depended on water consumption.  We weren’t worried, though.  This had happened before and the power always came on pretty soon.  The kids were excited about the new snow, so they had planned the day around that, and I wasn’t too unhappy about the lack of water since that meant I could postpone dishes for a while.

And so the day progressed, the snow stopped, the clouds passed and the sun streamed into our house and the barn adding little warmth but lots of cheer.  Still no power, though.

Dave brought the cows back into the barn, gave them fresh hay, fed the rest of the livestock and did what he could.  The gutters in the barn were full now and since we had graduated to an electric barn cleaner we couldn’t go back and shovel the manure by hand.  And the lack of water was no longer an issue, it was reaching major headache time.  Not quite a crises, but we were headed there.

When the power went out – Part 2

Dave said not to worry, so I didn’t worry.  Instead I dressed the kids and we went outside to scoop snow into pots and pans and carried them into the house.  We had a gas and wood combination kitchen stove and the snow melted fast enough to take care of the cooking and drinking needs.  I didn’t care that I couldn’t wash dishes, since I didn’t like washing dishes.  And the kids had fun on all the mountains of snow.

As the afternoon wore on, though, I could tell that Dave was worrying.  And the lack of water was rapidly losing it’s status as the number one problem. Milking the cows was on the top of that list, now.

Milking started at 5:00 pm.  It was getting close to the 4:00 feeding time and the cows hadn’t had water all day.  But worse.  Modern (at that time, early 1980′s) dairy barns had either milking parlors or pipelines, and we were pretty modern.  We milked using a transfer station.  That meant that we were automated, to a point.  A pipeline system would take the milk directly from the cow and through a series of stainless steel pipes transport the milk into the milk house and the bulk tank.  We used a milking pail and then after milking the cow, carry that pail over the gutter, take off the lid and then pour the milk into a larger container that was connected to the bulk tank by a plastic hose.  The milk was sucked into the bulk tank, saving me the chore of carrying a bucket full of milk into the milk house and lifting it and pouring it into a filter perched over the hole in the bulk tank.  I was short enough that Dave built me a little step so I could pour the milk without spilling it.

When we first moved to the farm and began milking, we had that simple system in place to put the milk into the bulk tank.  Dave shoveled the gutters by hand, I pitched the haylage and silage out of the silos by hand, we pitched the feed into the truck by hand.  As time went on we were slowly replacing our labor with machines.  All well and good for us, until there was no electricity.  Then it was back beyond my experience and venturing into Dave’s.  He knew how to milk a cow by hand, and was good at it.  I didn’t know the first thing about milking a cow by hand.  Our cows were used to the machines, which could milk her quickly, efficiently and safely in three to four minutes.  Dave was also fast and efficient.  I was a bumbling oaf, and they didn’t like that one bit.

But we didn’t milk them at 5:00 pm.  Dave wanted to wait until the power came on, so we waited.  Until about 8:00 pm, when he finally came into the house to get me.  Well, I asked, what about lights?  Flashlights and candles, he said.  In the barn?  Candles in the barn?  Fire was one of my biggest worries in the barn.  Well, Dave’s cleverness solved that easily.  Of course, he had been thinking about this, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

When the power went out – Part 3

We put tall white candles in half dozen five gallon white buckets and lined them up on the walk in the middle of the barn.  We each got a flashlight to take with us as we milked.  Dave picked out the cows that he wanted milked first, and then it was time for my first lesson in milking by hand.

I have to say I was bad at this.  Bad.  In fact, bad doesn’t even touch how bad I was.  Dismally bad.  Horribly horrible.  Useless.  Really.

Dave decided we would milk the freshest cows first.  A fresh cow is one who had given birth recently therefore making the most milk.  In other words her production was high, and the longer she would go with a full udder the worse it would be by actually cutting her production permanently.  The pressure of all that milk sent a signal to her body to slow down production and it would be hard to get back to her production level before the late milking.  There was an unpleasant sense of urgency that, added to the worry about the lack of water, had ratcheted up the tension in the barn.

It was mid-winter and there was no moonlight streaming in, causing cool shadows in the barn and helping us negotiate.  It was black; the kind of black when you thought your eyes were closed and had to touch them to prove to yourself that they were open.  The candles made yellow pools of isolated light evenly spaced on the walk and the light from our flashlights bounced off the rafters and stanchions.  Human and cattle shadows loomed and danced and I would lose all perspective, occasionally feeling dizzy.

The real problem became clear to me as soon as I washed my first cow.  Her name was Alyce, which is a Dutch, or Freisland name.  She was my mother’s cow, a Brown Swiss, and had beautiful browns, creams and whites in her hide.  Her brown soft eyes hid an animal with a more stubborn personality than I thought possible in a cow.  She embodied that word: stubborn.  No matter what, no matter who, no matter when.  If she didn’t want to, she just didn’t.

Tonight she didn’t want to be milked by hand by me.  My fumbling and bumbling uncertain hands had her turning repeatedly to look at me and my pathetic efforts to relieve her pain. I washed her as I always did, in the modern days of milking that had existed just hours before.  She was standing there, chewing, calmly waiting for the whole process to be completed.  She wasn’t a badly behaved cow, and she didn’t kick or hit you in the face with her tail, as many other cows will do, expressing themselves or flicking off a fly.  She just had clear ideas of what she would tolerate.

When the power went out – Part 4

I missed the window of opportunity when her milk let down, and soon, my tugging on her teats pushed her over the edge.  She kicked the bucket that had maybe 2 cups of milk in it and the milk spilled all over my lower legs, chilling me.

So, Dave stepped in to rescue that poor animal.  He was kind enough to not snicker at me.  He had managed to milk 4 cows while I tortured Alyce and I thought maybe it was my uncertainty that caused my failure, so I went to the next cow, a calm Holstein, named Phoebe.

I was wrong.  I started the same way, hand patting her gently on her rump, talking to her steadily, getting my equipment in place.  I dunked the brown paper towel into the icy cold sanitized water and then held it in my hand to warm it, something Dave insisted was unnecessary.  But I shivered thinking of that freezing towel rubbing her udder and being a nursing mother myself who had experienced icy fingers stunning me into silence, I couldn’t do it to her.  She didn’t care, of course.  And as soon as the milk let down I tried once again to take advantage that.  But   Dave had shown me wasn’t in me.  Not like him.  I tried and found that I had more success with Phoebe , but then, she was older and also had a more forgiving personality.  But I couldn’t get the milk out of her.  He finally accepted that I would never be an expert and accepted that I was at least relieving her, and that was enough.

As we moved down the line, taking care of one cow after another, I stopped worrying and began listening to the cows eating, belching, pissing, drinking, filling the milking bucket, lying down or standing up.  I could hear what the barn must sound like in the middle of the night, in the dark, something the cows and barn cats heard each night.  No radio.  No vacuum pump. No silo un-loader. No tractor. No barn cleaner.  Just the living creatures in their home and I felt at home, too.

The lights came on then.  I cheered.  Dave looked relieved.  Secretly, of course, I was disappointed.  My romantic imaginings of how life on the farm had been fed for a few minutes.  The natural ease with the cows that I was developing was furthered with my foray into hand milking.  Dave won hand milking contests as a boy in 4-H in DeKalb , IL and I was more in touch with what that meant, finally.  I could hear and feel how it must have been for farmers decades before, milking the cows with lanterns hanging from the rafters.  The peaceful rhythm and slower pace was something to experience and I somewhat mourned what had past.

But, the cows could be milked and they could drink and we were all saved.  And that was important, too.

Chapter Seven

I had a forty by forty foot garden all those years I farmed.  It started out smaller, of course.  It was south of my house, situated between the house and our white wooden machine shed. Beyond that building was our red pole building, a newer structure we had built.  We stored our tractors in that white shed, and the workbench was in that shed.  Barn swallows and pigeons shit on the tractors so much we had to cover the seats after getting up.  We used the same three burlap bags the whole time we farmed.  Finally we put up barriers to prevent the birds from nesting in there.

I could look out the south window in my kitchen and see up the hill to the back forty pastures and watch the dairy cattle graze.  In the morning I would watch out that window for Dave to leave the red pole building that housed our young stock and head to the barn, swinging empty buckets and know just about when he’d be in for breakfast.

The garden soil is very thin and full of rocks and bedrock is exposed in my yard, but not the in garden.  That was a plus.  I could spend hours roto tilling after Dave had run the disc over it in the spring.  We’d spread old crusty manure over it and then I would work it into the dirt, using shovels and a rake.  A disc is a farmer’s field tool, like a plow, but doesn’t go as deep.  The plow brings up big rocks, sometimes as large as small boulders, and we wanted to avoid that.  We used the disc to break up sod in an old hay field, and Dave could spend a day driving the tractor back and forth, crisscrossing that field and still the grass would grow. So finally we did buy a plow and probably used it three times: the only three times we needed to convert a hay field into a cornfield. And sometimes we would use a grass and weed killer.

The soil here in our area is littered with rocks left by the glaciers.  The soil was scraped off the earth, leaving exposed bedrock and cracks in the bedrock sometimes deep enough to reach the ground water.  This is not friendly farmland.  It’s great for orchards and there are several left from the old days.  Plant a cherry tree or apple tree and you don’t have to work that land for thirty years, which is easier than crop or dairy farming.  But what really happened is that most farms raised many kinds of crops.  Cherry, apple, and hay combined with dairy and maybe pigs or chickens provided a many layered income stream.  If one crop failed, all was not lost.  The farm wife usually had a job off the farm, and sometimes the farmer himself drove truck or school bus.  It was almost impossible to survive on farming alone.  I too had side jobs throughout the years we farmed.

Each spring we would wait until the soil was dry enough and then Dave would disc the fields to ready them for planting.  And a few times he would get anxious and go out early and get the tractor stuck in the mud.  One of our fields was next to a swamp; they call them wetlands now.  But they are really swamps.  In fact many of our fields lay next to the swamp around Peil Creek, which fed Kangaroo Lake.  They were hay-fields for just that reason.  Too wet to work in the spring. We learned the hard way.

One spring day after lunch, Dave went out with the large tractor, the Ford 5000, to pull the disc just lightly through the field, get a jump on the fieldwork.  He was excited to get out there.  Later he walked home from the field, his face dark and a cloud of anger following him. Stuck!  He needed me to follow him in the truck while he drove the smaller tractor and we would hitch the thick chains to the tractor and walk that baby out.  That’s what he kept saying.  That baby will just walk out of the mud.

So I dressed the kids and packed some apples and crackers and drove to the gray log cabin field, the name we had given it cause it was next to a gray log cabin.  It was a summer cabin, so no one was around most of the time, and no witnesses to our drama.

When we got there, I couldn’t believe that it would walk out of the mud.  The tires, close to five feet high were two thirds buried in the mud and the hole was full of water.  But, I didn’t know anything, as I was reminded again, and since I really didn’t, my feelings weren’t bruised. I trusted him, of course.  He backed the tractor and attached the chain to the frames.  This chain was thick, industrial, or rather, agricultural.  Each chain-link was about 3 or 4 inches long and heavy.  I waited until he had it all set.

Then he turned on the bigger tractor, explained how I should drive it out, explained how he would creep forward until the chain was taut and then on his signal we would both go in low gear and increase the rpms and give’er.  These tractors had a low and a high gear, with four forward gears in each one, so that we had a total of 8 forward gears.  Then he mentioned that the front end of the tractor I was driving might rise in the air, like a horse rearing up, and not to be alarmed.  I, of course, told him I would be fine.
And so the plan unfolded and all went as he said it would.  The tractors were roaring, the kids were hanging out of the truck window, watching and cheering us on, the sun was out, the breeze was chilly but the spring air smelled great and birds were everywhere.  I felt so at ease, sure of myself.  This tractor would walk out of the mud and we would all go on, happy.

And then, suddenly, the front wheels of my tractor popped up in the air.  Not inches, but feet.  Almost 4 feet in the air.  It happened so fast that I couldn’t shut the engine down fast enough.  I was shaking, terrified, and not expecting to see Dave  launch himself off the smaller tractor, screaming at me, waving his arms.  For a minute I actually thought he had been as worried as I about the tractor flipping over and pining me underneath.  As he got closer, I saw the look on his face, heard his words, and realized my mistake.  I was an idiot, and a suburban lazy person who didn’t know the meaning of work and couldn’t ever understand farming like he did, he told me.  But then, he wasn’t on that tractor.

So we didn’t get the tractor out of the mud that afternoon.  The next day he asked a neighbor to come and help him.  And of course, that was what he didn’t want to do.  Ask for help.  Show the neighbors he didn’t know how to farm.  His pride hung in the balance.  I learned years later that we should never have tried that stunt.  Hs got stuck only one other time, and this time it was worse.  He had learned some tricks by then, so getting that tractor out was easier.

Chapter Six

Cattle in our Barn Years Later

I saw over one hundred black and white cows standing hock deep in manure, exhaling clouds of steam and looking like dragons to me.  It was early 1978 and we were about to start our dairy business by purchasing our herd near Green Bay, WI.

Dave and the sale barn guys walked into one of the holding pens to inspect a few of the cows closer.  These animals were large and filthy.  Most of them had wet manure shmeared on their backsides and their swishing tails spread it even further.  Their udders and teats had what seemed like a months worth of dried manure caked on.  I wondered if they were as cold as I was, standing there with my mitten-ed hands clenched, hiding in my pockets.  The exhaust fans, running on high to vent the moisture to the  outside, also brought the ice-cold January air into the sale barn.  The venting minimized the powerful odors of manure and urine so I didn’t embarrass myself by gagging at the overpowering ammonia odor.

These men look at a cow’s udder, which seemed logical; but then they walked in front of her and looked at her chest, they made her walk away from them, looking for bad feet or legs, and they pushed and prodded each one of the quarters of her udder.  I knew what they were doing, but not why.

The barn we were in had several holding pens, with about twenty or twenty-five cows in each one.  The gates were heavy aluminum, which swung open easily.  I stayed in the middle walk, watching the proceedings. Although the barn was well lit the place felt like a cave and I expected to see mushrooms in the shadows.  The men had been polite to me, a newly minted dairy farmer’s wife, but I wasn’t part of the process, not necessary. Watching them inspect the girls and discuss their breeding records and milk production history was boring and I was ready to go to the truck, warm up and listen to the radio.  But I didn’t move.

I watched as Dave picked one cow and then another until he had selected the thirty cows that would be the beginning of our dairy herd.  How he made these choices wasn’t apparent to me.  It seemed almost magic.  Even today, after many years working with Holsteins, I couldn’t tell you what he liked about one over another; I always thought he was frustrated having to explain everything to me.

In the space of about forty-five minutes he had spent thirty thousand dollars.  That was the beginning of our adventure, some could say maelstrom, into dairying in the 1980′s.

Chapter Four

“Wash the white cow next,” Dave said loud enough for me to hear over the vacuum pump.  I had no idea that milking cows would be so noisy.

“Which one is the white one?” I said.

He waved one hand towards some cows which all had some white on them.

“Which one do you mean?” I asked again.  He shook his head.  I was feeling pretty stupid by then.

“Over there, between the two black ones.”

We should have been laughing, but we weren’t.  Dave was impatient with me because I couldn’t remember one cow from another.  They all looked the same to me: the heads were shaped the same, their ears were huge, eyes were deep brown, those nostrils were slightly disgusting, slobber and grain sticking to them, their tails were still beaded up with dried on manure from their days in the sale barn and the truck ride up from Crivitz, Wisconsin as few weeks ago.

He finished taking the milking claw off the cow’s udder, removed the hose from the vacuum line and swung the milk bucket across the gutter.  Grabbing two coarse brown paper towels, he then dipped one into a rubber bucket with the disinfectant in it and walked to the white cow.  One hand on her backside, he said quietly, “There girl,” rubbed her softly and stepped in between the two cows.  Repeating himself, he squatted down and slowly brought his hand to her udder.  By this time, the wet towel was cold, so the initial touch shocked her and her skin recoiled a bit.  Then, the rhythm of his washing felt familiar and she stood patiently while he dried her.  I was watching this whole procedure, trying to commit it to my not so good memory, which seemed unable to even tell the difference between white and black cows.

Done, he stood up, crossed the gutter and went back to the bucket full of milk from the previous cow.  He removed the top, and poured the milk into two smaller stainless steel buckets for me.  He put everything back together for the white cow.  We were milking 2 cows at a time, and while initially that seemed too slow to me, after a few milkings I realized it was actually a fast pace. I took both buckets and carried them to the milk house to pour into the bulk tank.  We couldn’t afford to buy a pipeline system, nor even a transfer station, so I carried the milk after each cow was milked.

The bowl with a filter sat in a hole on the lid of the bulk tank and it was so high that Dave had to build a step for me after I spilled milk too many times.  I was grateful for that bit of help from him.

And so that rhythm of washing, milking, pouring, walking and pouring was established pretty fast.  I got to understand how to step up to a large animal and the soon even the swinging wet and slimy tails were easy to anticipate and dodge.  I learned which cows were happy to see me and which ones were afraid.  These girls hadn’t all come from the same barn, so the different farmers before us had trained them to their own habits.

My First Day Milking Cows

Dave too, had his own way, from growing up in his Dad’s barn.  Always approach from the left, start at their spine and slide your hand down, slow movements, soft voices, and gentle touches.  We had to retrain them all.

But still, I couldn’t tell one white cow from another.  After a year of working in the barn I was beginning to recognize certain cows, Phoebe was easy for me, I had named her and she had a funny spoon face.  Bessie was our first cow.  We bought her when we first moved to the farm and she lived in the barn all alone, poor girl, until we could finish the repairs.  She was one of the best cows we had, and my children and cats could play underneath her and they would be safe.  Before lying down she would paw at the bedding with her hooves and kittens would scatter.  I have a photo of my son sleeping up against her big belly, her eyes slightly closed, breathing slowly, Tim in his snowsuit, holding his toy tractor.  Flushed cheeks, he was quit warm.

Chapter Five

I imagined, when I first moved to our farm in Baileys Harbor, that I would never do anything else with my life but farm;  that I would always be married to Dave; that we would grow old together, happy with our lives and our family.

So when I mentioned this romantic dream I had while we were in our cream colored, battered 3/4 ton truck driving through Ephraim one spring afternoon, he said, of course, what else would I do?

His remark seemed so resigned.  No, I said.  You could do so many other things, like remember you once thought you would like to teach high school and coach.  It’s not too late for that.  He smirked, I’m too old to start over.  I said if you want to, we will.  If that’s what you want. I’ll support you in whatever you want.  If you want to leave the farm, then we will.

He shook his head.  It was like I was this foolish little girl, unaware of the ‘real world’.  I mean it, Dave.  What ever you want to make you happy.  His face was impassive and the conversation died.  We drove on to the co-op to pick up some supplies and then home.

Chapter Three

How did I end up a dairy farmer’s wife?  Changes.  Dave, at twenty-nine, decided that even though he hated working at the wire factory, it was a good job and he wasn’t sure he wanted to finish college, so he changed his mind about quitting. I wanted a law degree, but I was twenty-six and thinking more and more about having children first, so that was the second change to our plans.

We were renting a house in DeKalb, IL and I was in that domestic bliss stage that follows intense morning sickness. Dave had vacation time due, so we went to Ephraim, Door County, Wisconsin to stay in the bed and breakfast my Mom ran in the summer.  My Dad asked him to knock down the weeds in the hayfields on a farm he owned in Baileys Harbor, 5 miles away, using the Ford 9N tractor and a brush-hog.  When Dave returned, all sunburned and smiling and very dusty, he began talking about the barn on that farm, how easy it would be to reclaim it and get some cows in there.  He told me how much he liked dairy farming, about his memories as a boy on his Dad’s farm, how this was like his heart’s desire.  The possibilities were there for a good life together.

We spent the rest of that summer in 1977 talking to my parents about renting that farm.  Dad and Mom had had dreams of retiring in ten to fifteen years to Baileys Harbor for some time now, which is why they bought the two old farms that abutted each other. And they put their dreams on hold to help us get ours going.

I had been vacationing in that area for over 20 years and felt at home there.  We discussed rent, the time frame for establishing the herd, and the plan for borrowing the money.  I dreaming of hitchhiking into town with my baby on my back, wild flowers filling the fields on either side of County Trunk A, sunshine on my shoulders, my peasant skirt brushing my legs, pink toenails peaking out of my espadrilles.  Dave was happier going to work at the wire factory because he knew he would be leaving soon, that he would finally live his dream of having his own herd on his own farm.  He had a clear picture of what life on a farm would be like, since he had grown up on one in northern Illinois. But, as it would turn out, his memories were of a boy on a farm and my ideas were more from books and back to the land magazines.

So, there was this one moment, when what we had talked about began to feel real, when Dave called his folks to tell them our plans and good news.  He talked to his dad first, as always, and they shared insults and jokes.  And then, with his Mom on the other line, he told them we were going into farming in Wisconsin.  He told me later that his mom said,  “Not on my money, you won’t.”

He flashed a big grin, but I couldn’t tell what she meant, or how he felt about that remark.

“What does that mean?” I said.  His family often insulted or made fun of each other and I hadn’t learned which was what.

“She’s just making sure we understand they won’t help us,” he said.

Chapter One

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