would be females, heifers, who would get “bred” when they were about two years old, then they would become cows after they “freshened”—a strangely quaint dairy way of saying “gave birth.” Then, in the perfect dairy world, every 12 months thereafter, each cow would have another baby, and “freshen” again. But that didn’t happen in our barn. In our barn, rarely did cows have calves every year—the first or second breeding didn’t take, or we missed them going into heat in the first place, usually evidenced by the cows “humping” each other, but sometimes you didn’t catch the barnyard action, being busy running back to the house after you let the cows out to make sure your child was still safely in his crib—and when the cows DID have calves, it was 2 boys to every girl, at best. However, there was one breakthrough, a beautiful, mostly white heifer resulting from the union of our best cow and an expensive catalog bull, via the breeder, of course. I raised that baby so lovingly; I watched her grow, such a wonder, she was, and, in time, we had her bred to another pricy bull. She was big, strong and bright-eyed and I spent a lot of time getting her ready for her upcoming milking experience. This young Holstein was one beloved creature. She was going to freshen early fall, maybe mid-September. It happened that my tenth high-school reunion was that August, so my husband and I decided to finally take two days off, find someone to do the chores and drive to Minnetonka to attend this momentous gathering. That night there was a big storm that ran through the area, lots of thunder and lightning, one of those major mid-western crash-and-boom events. I worried, of course, because cows and worry go together, and because our pasture was hilly and when it rained our small herd, sensible animals that they were, would
go to the highest hill to find a nice big tree to lay under so they wouldn’t get wet. But when we got back to the farm it seemed like everything was okay until I noticed that our nearly eightmonths pregnant beauty wasn’t around. I walked around the pasture until I found her, lying at the bottom of a gully where she had slid after being hit by lightning, and of course she was long dead, along with her unborn calf. So the next day, there I was, walking out to meet the truck which somehow managed to get up the rocky, bumpy roadless hill slippery with long grass, fix a tow-rope around her and pull her up from the other side all floppy and limp and leaking, oh god, what a grim and sad, tragic mess. I began to feel kind of, I don’t know, haunted by animal deaths. It just wasn’t working out. Farming and me, well, something was happening that was bigger than the both of us. Or something wasn’t happening. Eventually I ended up as an artist in Brooklyn— what else? I remember the cows with fondness, and I think about them sometimes, like when I see boys-cows with udders and get all annoyed and disgusted with we Americans and our ignorance about the way things work. Or don’t work. I’ll always be grateful to Violet and Clarabelle and Mary and Curly and all the rest—I thank them in my heart for what they gave me, for their sacrifices, their big-heartedness, patience and humor, and I hope they had good rest-of-their-lives and okay deaths. Which is what I feel about anyone I’ve broken up with, human or otherwise, at least, ultimately, I wish that for them, since most of the guys I went with are probably still around somewhere. Anyway, for the record, I really meant all those sweet nothings I whispered in their ears. But like people sometimes say about breakups: in spite of our best efforts, I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. P 37