August 14, 2008 | Chickens in the Road

Archive for August 14th, 2008

Aug
14

My parents are visiting. I showed my dad the results of my three days of milking Clover. You know, my three tablespoons of milk. All carefully preserved like museum artifacts, each tablespoon from each day, in its own little carefully sterilized jam jar. My 83-year-old father told me he’d show me how it’s done. He grew up here in Stringtown on my great-grandfather’s farm directly across the river from our farm. He started milking a cow when he was eight years old. After serving as a tail-gunner in World War II, he came back to West Virginia and graduated from West Virginia University. He bunked at the WVU dairy farm where he milked fifteen cows before breakfast. After they got done milking, the university bussed them over to their classes then back to the farm where they went to bed early to get up at four a.m. and start milking again.

That was sixty years ago. He left West Virginia and hasn’t milked anything since unless you count the stock market.

I was skeptical, to say the least, but not too proud to haul the 83-year-old man down to the milkstand and tell him to show me his stuff.

First, I got rid of these two.

I crated them up around four p.m. so that Clover would be feeling slightly more needy than she’d been feeling the past three days. There was quite a bit of plaintive bleating going on during this time. Clover and her babies don’t like to be separated. I’m not quite up to the notion of separating them for the entire night yet, but three hours was doable.

The 83-year-old man pulled up a turned-over bucket for a stool. I took Clover’s hind legs. Princess manned the camera.