conversations with cows

a vignette

“She's brim full of poetry - actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She lives what paper-poets only write...” — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbevilles

The Little Cowherd, Johannes Hubertus Leonardus de Haas

The sun has just gone down, but I can’t bear to go inside yet. I’m going to pay a visit. You may come with me. We won’t be gone past nine, I promise.

Down the road and around the bend is a farmhouse. White, clean, and old, the chipped paint revealing its character beneath. Maybe it was here one hundred years ago — maybe two. A garden of wildflowers bursts like colorful fireworks in the landscape of unremarkable cornfields, a homogenous ocean of green spiky leaves.

Two big barns look to have stood here even longer. Grass grows through the cracks in the concrete run where I used to wave at a goat, who apparently no longer lives here. Instead, in the wavy pasture beyond, there is a new face — the doe-eyed, long-lashed, bashfully elegant face of a Jersey cow. She’s the one we’ve come to visit, you see.

She looks at us as though we are no surprise to her, as though she gets visitors on bicycles every night of the week. I look at her udder, trying to tell if she’s calved or not. She looks young to me, young and maidenly, not yet a mother, but the reason she lives in this barn and grazes this pasture is because she soon will be. A milk cow, of course. The single most valuable possession for families of old. The one animal from whose goodness a family and a farm besides can sustain itself, who can take a broken piece of ground and bring it back to life with the mere effort of living.

If I were to come back in the dark of night — scandalous thought — but would she let down her milk for me, like the cow in the story? You remember, the story of the two men who steal out in the night to milk the rich man’s cow, the first cow in the Oregon territory. A Jersey is a Jersey, but some are more beautiful than the others. She reminds me of that cow in the movie, alone here in a land forsaken of animals. She has the same lovely eyes and quiet dignity. “It was your milk that did it,” the Cookie says, telling her of his culinary success as he courteously carries out his crime.¹

Even while the late July humidity blankets me, I can remember cold mornings before dawn in a shadowy barn. The smell of hay, the frozen creak of the door, and the sounds of many calves urging me to hurry up, feed us, please. I remember pulling a squeaky wagon loaded with buckets, filling bottles, sounds of sucking and expressions of clumsy gratitude from Holstein calves. The day-old babies pierced my heart, crying for their mamas. The utter imbecility of the yearlings drove me to cursing. I began to love them all, even as I saw them as my trial. Even with freezing fingers and drooping, 5 o’clock eyes.

“They’re so lovely,” I said to you, one day last week while we looked over the herd I used to milk every day. “They do what’s required of them, they never complain, they don’t bother anybody, and they give us milk and butter and cheese and meat. They’re so graceful and calm and obedient and simple.” Somehow, I know this to be true, even after chasing these same cows through the neighbor’s soybeans, getting kicked, stepped on, and frustrated to tears.

Our fawn-colored companion stands there, chewing. I stand with foot poised on the pedal, suspended over the road and silent. See how she’s looking at me? Unafraid. Does she know how I love her? What is it about a cow’s stare that feels like a conversation, wordless but profound? The same conversation I began with the calves in the cold Great White North is being carried on with this nameless maiden cow on the far-away prairie.

I have ridden these roads many times since getting married. I have tried to love this wild prairie. You have helped me. This beautiful beast, alone save for the chickens, the only breathing thing on hooves for too many miles, is a gift and reminder. I am glad to have her as a neighbor.

You know I was joking about the dark and the milking and the biscuits. Now let’s leave her be, and go home.

First Cow (2019)

1. I’m making references to First Cow (2019). Strange and beautiful movie, highly recommend but can’t guarantee you’ll enjoy it :)