That ONE photo.

Ever have one of those moments when you see something epic, grab the camera, and it works?

That entire seemingly impossible moment comes crashing together in one millisecond and shows up in real live color, proving that the life you are living each day is worth it.

The life proven by mud and muck and $hi! on your boots, by the cracks in your fingers and dried out, un-ladylike, fingernails. The life that puts others needs before your own comforts and persists regardless of colds, flu, sprained ankles or other supposedly more admirable obligations.

That one. The one that makes those moments of finding death and struggling to put a 900-pound round bale of hay out and schlepping 50-pound sacks of feed into barrels weekly worth every step.

This is it.

Hope Farms
December 2014

About a Cow - A Story

I read this story today, as written by Nancy Petersen, and thought you might like it.

Photo by Nancy Petersen
All Rights Reserved

"About a cow:

Milking Angus

I can hear it now, “what the devil?” Angus? They are not milk cows! Well it all got started when the neighbor purchased 4 what he was led to believe were Black Angus calves from someone in a valley some distance from us. Once he got them home and observing them over the next couple weeks, it became apparent they were in fact a cross of some variety. In disgust, he offered them to us for what he paid for them, $20.00 a piece.

Anxious to get our “herd” started, being new to the country life; we bought two and some hay and put up a loafing shed. We suspected dairy cross so we named them Buttermilk and Brownie. As they grew, we hand fed them to make handling easier as we had no squeeze chutes in which to confine them. Over the next 14 months they became big pets, begging for carrots or apples as we moved through the field changing irrigation pipes and pulling noxious weeds; and coming on a dead run if you were working in the garden where carrots or pea vines lived or if we were headed toward the grain barrels.
At about 2 years of age, we had them bred to the neighbors Hereford bull. The pregnancies progressed without incident and soon they delivered two frisky little calves. But the udders on these two cows were huge. They clearly had more milk than the calves could handle. Once the calves devoured the first milk, (colostrum) I decided to see if the cow named Brownie could be trained to allow milking. She was pretty skittish at first but soon tolerated it without incident especially when her stanchion was filled with molasses flavored oats. Thus The Milking Angus was born. Her milk was so rich it formed about 6 inches of cream on the top of a gallon jug. Made us suspect Jersey in her blood lines.

Of course once the neighbors knew what we were doing, they fell down in gales of riotous laughter. That is until they saw and tasted the milk. Then they became steady customers. Buttermilk had white on her underbelly so we were thinking Holstein with her as her milk was larger in volume but less cream. An old time rancher told us that he always left the calf with the cow until he wanted a milking then separated them for 12 hrs and took his milking. It worked too, though it did get a little noisy as the calves objected mightily.

We took to birthing the calves in the early fall, as we felt the savings on one winters hay was evident before they were butchered at two years of age. After a couple years we decided we had too many mouths to feed on our small acreage so sold Buttermilk to some friends. We told them we did not have a loading chute so who ever picked up the calves would need a ramp to load her.

A couple cowboys arrived to pick up Buttermilk, only to find we had no chute and they had no ramp. They were going to leave and try to come back with another truck. Wait, we said, this can be done with a carrot. They, too, fell down in gales of laughter. I am not sure what was so funny, but they quit laughing as Buttermilk followed me and a bag of carrots up a hastily made ramp of two 2’ x 6’ boards with a few 2’x 4’ cross pieces nailed to keep her from slipping, into the back of their two ton 4’ high truck bed. She did love carrots, and the cowboys thought the local stockyard should know about us.

Over time Brownie became a neighborhood icon, folks watching as she approached calving or when she was in another field having a fit because a calf was being butchered. The man who did our field killing told us he had never seen a cow like her. She could see or hear his truck about 3/4th of a mile away, and she would meet him at the corner of our property that was ringed by the road, and run along side the truck bellowing at him constantly until he disappeared around the bend on the way to someone else’s place. We always removed her when we were butchering, but she would run right to the spot after the truck was gone and stamp on the ground and snort. It was almost enough to get you to quit eating meat.

One year, we were gone at calving time, and a neighbor on the way to work spotted the new calf. He returned home to grab some Bocee and a banding gun. After he had doctored and banded our little new born boy he trotted off to work. About 30 minutes later, another neighbor and his wife stopped by having noticed the newborn calf. A shot of Bocee was administered and when he turned the calf over to band it, he uttered, “well I’ll be, this puppy was born banded”!! Actually his language was a little more colorful than that but you get the idea.

One time Brownie developed a deep split in her hoof and it badly needed trimming and someone skilled to look at it. I called a horse shoer who would have all the tools and some knowledge of this kind of injury. When he learned we did not have a chute, he would have nothing to do with it.

We called a new young vet, asking him if he would at least examine her. He reluctantly agreed and after the exam agreed it needed trimming and cleaning. But without a chute he was not sure. Carrots, I said, this will work. Dubious, but willing to give it a go, he retrieved his equipment and I retrieved a bucket full of carrots and molasses flavored oats. Then I tied her to a fence post, and offered her the goodies while picking up her foot. He proceeded to trim, file, and clean up this nasty little hoof injury without so much as a twitch. He became the family vet and pretty enamored with Brownie, our Milking Angus.

A few years later I found her newly calved and down on the ground, awake but in deep shock and covered with frost. I grabbed some sleeping bags and covered her up while we put in an emergency call for the vet, assuming calcium or magnesium issues since she had just delivered. He arrived with the magic IVsolution, but by the time he got there so had all the neighbors, so this crowd of onlookers were pretty concerned. She did not get up after the first bottle was administered, and it took a second. By now he had broken into a big time sweat. After she got on her feet, we asked if he was ok, “yes,” he said, “There was just a lot of pressure treating the neighborhood Milking Angus”.

In 17 years Brownie produced 15 calves, and only one was lost due to severe birth defects. She was a sweet little mama, and never lost her pet like qualities with us, or the kids and grandkids. In her 17th year, she broke an ankle, and was in a great deal of pain so it was clear the era of Brownie The Milking Angus was over. But pictures still grace our albums including the pictures of her first calving. We were so excited, we sat on a near by rock pile to record the event. She in typical behavior was more interested in the possibility that we might have brought a carrot to the event."

~Nancy Petersen

Day 11: Below

Below

Happy Cows Come From...Hope Farms

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What's Stopping You?

There are few guarantees in life. Stability, certainty, and financial soundness aren't any of them. What is a rock solid theory, though, is that life is a high percentage what you make it. I don't think I fully comprehended the "attitude is everything" cliche until I was well into my thirties. And some lessons are still hard to fully learn. Some, still, are not learned yet.

Some days it isn't all pretty chickens, egg counts and Jersey cows with hats on, here. But what I can be sure of is that the consequences of taking risks must be worth the effort. How does the old quote go? "Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field." Eisenhower. Rest assured, dear reader, that one day may look entirely different from the next, here, and then...some days simply repeat themselves.

Lately it seems that the less I try to control things (money, weather, laundry, dishes, child, etc.) the more they work themselves out. This is not to say that I don't constantly, on some level, touch base with the consciousness that wants to scream, "You don't have a JOB," but I keep it at arms length. I do know there are many out there that worry enough for all of us combined. And it isn't really any of their business.

Fear can be a motivator. It keeps us from stepping out into a busy avenue without looking right, left, then right again, first. It can also cause paralysis: That mountain is too high to climb, I'd rather just sit down. Fear can be an instigator, "you tried that once already, and failed, what makes you think you can do it right this time?" Fear can squash our dreams. If we let it. Fear can distract you, for instance: I'm supposed to be writing an essay in my Social Problems course about euthanasia, but I'd rather be here, pontificating with you.

Life = experience. How do we gain experience if we don't "do" and "be" what we want? This isn't to say we should just give in to the whims of the hedonistic human nature and only do what the ego would benefit from. This is to say, what makes you come alive? What do you do that makes time stand still? What happens to you when your work feels like your play? Chase that. Believe that you are deserving of your dream. Don't take anyone else's negativity to heart. It isn't yours - it's theirs. Let them carry it around for it is heavy.

By contrast to doing what you love, how does it feel when there is too much on your plate and you've said "yes" when you really meant to say "no?" Tipping, sliding, grasping, and dropping things is absolutely counter-productive to living the life you want. We can't have it all. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I present the truth. It's impossible. We must pick one. We can't be IN the world and OF the world. We can't serve two masters. This does have some spiritual connotation to it, but really, it is meant more as a way to capture the full meaning of living the life we dare to dream or never daring to live the dream life for fear of not being accepted. Or the fear of failure.

How do we get there from here? Right now, there's an old outdoor water stove outside that's on his last leg, so to speak, and we're fairly sure that the ugly beast is well over 20 years, perhaps into the early thirties. He has served us well for over 3 solid years - nonstop, winter, spring, summer, and fall - and even though it is an inanimate object, the squeaking door, the smoke-belching pipe has been an integral part of our homesteading and daily survival here on the farm. From hot water for dishes and showers to heating the 123 year old wooden-girl that is our home. The answer is one day at a time.

We don't "happen" all at once. Life is the accumulation of those "bit by bit" pieces that may be a mix of sweet, bitter, salty, and downright rotten. We compost. We turn. We burn. We dissipate. And sometimes we steam. In the journey, though, is the realization that we must listen close to that still, small, voice. What do we want? And then, when we have figured that out, we need to ask ourselves one. more. question. What is stopping us?

Then, we tackle the answer to that question one. day. at. a. time.

Doing something you know to be true to yourself is terrifying. Shocking. Wave-making. Gossip-starting. Are you afraid not of what is stopping you but of what others might think? We all are. Even if we say we aren't.

Tonight I'm a farmhousewife. A un-knowing and un-sure entrepreneur. A farmer. A mother. A lover of the simple (but hard!) life. Tomorrow I might be a housecleaner. The day after that a student. The day after that I might be wondering how I'm going to turn vegetables, eggs, and crocheted rag-rugs into income for my family to use as a tool to continue this simple (but hard!) life. One day at a time. Do what you love. Figure out what is stopping you and use the fear as a motivator. In the next two years, I will be second-guessing my commitment of continuing my education in order to chase my lifelong dream of working with individuals and horses with the goal of helping people. It isn't an option, though, for me. It is what I must do.

What's stopping you?

Don't answer me. Answer you. Aspire to make a difference, not just a living. Join me.

Snapshots & Memories

A beautiful brisk day in the southern Piedmont of North Carolina yesterday - I got out of the house in the early afternoon and enjoyed some barn chores. Sometimes spending time with the animals is the most therapeutic form there is for a grieving heart.

Just over a week ago, just two days after Christmas, we laid to rest my childhood pony mare April. She was 38 years old. She had been in the family for 31 years.

April

Egg Count: 13

Hattie supervises feeding time

Roll in the mud much?

Gaston, the Rhode Island Red Rooster

Mr. Bunny

Sam Speaks

A lady to the end.