Breakfast on the house

One of them sings loudly. One doesn’t like to talk at all. One wants only water. One deliberately initiates a scuffle even though there’s plenty for everyone.

It’s a typical winter weekday morning: one on which between the hours of 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., I’ll feed four different meals to three different species in three different locations. In all, it’s 15 mouths to feed; or, put another way, 56 legs all making their way over to see what I’ve got to offer them for their morning repast.

Not all at once, of course. My 13-year-old eats first, fresh out of the shower and cheerful even though first light has yet to dawn. He takes one look at the thermometer, which hovers around the 10-degree mark, and begins to sing loudly: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a song he learned from watching the movie “Elf” twenty or thirty times last summer, when it was most definitely not cold outside. Today it is, though, and as I listen to him do his best cabaret act while buttering an English muffin, I wonder where the stereotype of sullen teenagers slow to waken on a winter morning comes from. I may be wishing he’d go back to bed, but he’s clearly ready to face the day.

As he assembles his backpack for school, I make a quick stop in the laundry room to toss a scoop of kibble into the dog’s empty dish. I notice her water bowl is empty too and would prefer not to think how long that has been the case for; it continues to be a mystery of domestic life that in four years, I have never once known anyone in my family except for me to fill the dog’s water bowl, and yet at least twice a year I go out of town for two days or more, leaving the rest of the family behind, and when I return the dog is always still alive. Somehow it gets done by someone else if I’m not around, but most definitely not when I am. Another truism of motherhood.

After feeding the dog, I head upstairs to wake my very drowsy 9-year-old, who does not like to be roused one bit. The only thing that cheers her up in the morning is a somewhat maddening game of her own invention in which she answers my question about what she’d like for breakfast by forming letters with her fingers and expecting me to guess what breakfast food the initials represent. On a good day she flashes me an easy one: “O” for oatmeal; “B” for bagel. Other days it’s not so easy, and I waste six or seven minutes trying to figure out that “L” stands for “lightly buttered toast” or “M” represents “medium-sized bowl of Special K.” She always seems disappointed when she has to provide verbal clues for me; I’m just glad to be one step closer to getting everyone fed and out the door.

A cacophony of mooing greets me an hour later as I drive down the lane to the barnyard, where 12 cows divided into three groups based on weaning, breeding, and general compatibility are waiting to be fed. The adult cows point their faces skyward and let loose with their loudest moos; the calves stand in front of the gate and then skittishly leap to the side as I reach out to pat them.

The cows eat in their usual inexplicable pattern: although I throw five hay bales down from the hay loft for one sub-herd of seven animals, all seven of them cluster around the same single bale, shouldering each other out of the way while four other bales sit nearby, unnoticed. Two more bales go over one fence to a group of three cows; and the last group of two gets just one bale to share.

And then I’m done: everyone whose breakfast I’m responsible for has eaten. I still need to go running and then write some articles, but it all seems easy and relaxed after everyone has been fed. The kids are off at school; the dog is waiting to go running with me; the cows are chewing away, as they’ll do for the next several hours before they make their way through all the bales.

I’ve often said the reason I like feeding the cows is that it’s so easy and yet so satisfying. It requires so little judgment or analysis, just strength. And yet the results are so tangible: I’m faced with a herd of content, well-fed animals whose noisy clamor has ended. I suppose that's true of the other creatures as well. The rest of my day might be more challenging: writing compelling text, offering intelligent conversation, solving various problems. True, it sometimes seems like feeding hungry beings is my primary role in life, but at the same time, feeding is easy. And for now, feeding is done.

Feeding season again

It’s a mid-fall seasonal ritual: the resumption of livestock feeding.

From May through October, the cows graze. That makes life easier for the rest of us. I see them as I drive by or run alongside their pastures, but I don’t interact with them much. They graze and mingle in the fields; I focus on human pursuits.

But for the other six months of the year, I spend time with them daily. I head out to the barn in the morning and they follow me right up to the gate. I climb the ladder to the hayloft and they stand below, watching me. I shoulder my way among them to move a bale or cut the twine around the hay and they subtly shove back, reminding me that my shoving is no match for their shoving. Or even their gentlest nudging, for that matter.

I’ve been doing the cows’ daily feeding on my parents’ farm for the past three years, not out of obligation but because I was outdoors on the earlier side of the morning anyway, letting the dog run around and then going running myself, and it just made sense to take on this responsibility since I was right there already.

But for the past several months, I thought my job with the animals was over. The logistics of farm life have changed over the course of the year; now there is a significantly greater number of animals in the herd, and also more farmhands involved, so I was told there was no need for me to continue.

But rituals, like habits and water, have a way of carving their own paths. I had thought the herd had become too large in number for me to navigate my way around comfortably, but then for husbandry purposes they were separated into small groups in three different pastures. And it turned out I was still the first one out in the barnyard in the morning, letting the dog play and getting ready for my daily run. So once again, it just made sense for me to climb up to the hayloft and throw down some bales while I was out there anyway.

And even though it seemed like giving up this duty might not be such a bad change when I contemplated it a few months ago – surely that extra ten or fifteen minutes every morning that I’d save from not entering the barnyard would come in handy – now that I’m back into the feeding routine, I’m so glad I didn’t have to give it up after all.

I love the way the animals watch me walking toward the barn, the way they low in anticipation of their morning meal, the way they mill and shuffle and edge each other around as they wait for me to make my slow way to the hay supply. I like the way they lower their big faces into the bales once I finally deliver on my promise, and the way they ignore me as I make my way between them once they’re eating.

It’s not an affectionate personal relationship like the one I have with my dog…or my kids. I just like being around them. It’s been part of my day during the cold-weather seasons for the past three years. I know they don’t particularly care who shows up in the barnyard at eight o’clock each morning. My company doesn’t mean anything different to them than any other human’s. But their company means something to me. It’s a tradition, and I’m happy that once again this November, the bovines and I are spending time together.

End of the barnyard "semester"

It was a little like the feeling on the last day of the school year when you’re not graduating. I knew I’d be back, and I suspected nothing would be radically different when I returned. At the same time, like finishing a grade, it was the end of a phase, so I couldn’t help feeling a little bit reflective.

Specifically, yesterday was the last day of cow-feeding for the season. From now until mid-October, the animals will rely on grazing. I’ve pulled out the very last bale of hay; the barn is empty, and as I did my usual triple-check of the barn gates after feeding to be sure I’d secured everything, I had to laugh to myself: it wouldn’t really matter if the animals did get into the barn, at this point; there’s nothing in it for them to eat anyway.

Just as I used to do on the last day of school, I tried to think back to what had happened this past feeding season that was particularly memorable. There was the growing calf Rain’s uncanny ability to slip in and out of the sheep’s gate, a space that by all appearances he was too big for, and so we left it open when it was time to separate him from his mother for weaning. But every time we separated them, we found him back with her by the next morning. He’s the Houdini of the barnyard, able to will his way through an opening that appears to us to be much too small for his fast-growing frame. Finally we learned to leave the sheep gate closed so that he’d stay where he was supposed to be.

I thought back to the morning in late November when I went out to the barnyard and couldn’t find Hank, the 2,000-pound bull. That’s a lot of animal to be hiding, but when the other animals showed up to be fed, he did not. I drove to the house to share the problem with my parents; we all looked for him and speculated on what could have happened. A bull-napping incident? A fence break? Had he blundered into the pond? All sounded so improbable to us. It wasn’t until after we’d alerted the local police to the problem that we found him stuck (but not too badly stuck) in a chute behind the barn. Emergency averted; we coaxed him back out of the chute, and all was well in the barnyard again.

From that time on, I never again had the experience of animals not showing up at feeding time until last month, when I arrived at the barn one morning and none of them was in sight. The sound of mooing drew me eventually out toward the brook; then three of the four animals emerged from the woods and headed toward the hay bales I’d just put out. The fourth was tending to a newborn calf who then had to be coaxed up from the brook and onto higher, drier land. The calf is three weeks old now, strong and healthy.

This winter was memorable in the barnyard for the same reason it was memorable everywhere else: feet upon feet of snow. I remembered the days I slogged off the plowed driveway and through the untouched drifts to get to the barn in snow that was much higher than my knees. The worst thing to happen in terms of animal care this winter wasn’t the snow, though; it was the day the pump stopped working. My parents were out of town on vacation, and I was at a loss for what the problem was and what to do about it. The cows had already drunk most of the water in the trough by the time I discovered that no water would flow out of the pump, so I took the snow shovel and dumped as much snow as I could into the trough. It didn’t work as well as I expected, though; after a good fifteen minutes of shoveling snow into the trough, the water level had only risen a few inches. At that point I remembered that grade-school rule of meteorology: one foot of snow equals one inch of water. Filling the trough with snow as a means to keeping the cows watered was going to be almost impossible. Instead, I focused on what the problem with the pump might be and noticed that a bit of ice had built up around it. I chipped it away, cleared the accumulated snow out from around the pipes, and waited a few hours; the next time I tried, water flowed easily from the pump.

Also I’d learned at least one very valuable lesson. One day a month or two ago, my father and I tried to separate the cows and bulls. We put hay bales where we wanted the two cows; they followed us amicably into the enclosure, and we closed the gate while they munched away at their breakfast. But when I went briefly back into the cows’ pen I was taken by surprise when Gracie shoved her way right past me to get back to the bulls. Once she had food, I assumed she’d lose interest in being with the bulls. Without giving too much contemplation to what that says about me, I’ll simply admit here that I learned an important lesson about working with large animals that day.

Over the next few months, the cows will eat all the grass they want; we’ll hope the summer doesn’t become as dry as last year did. We’ll mow and cut hay, and then bale it and refill the barn for next winter. Come October, I’ll be back in the barnyard feeding the animals every morning again.

So it’s like the end of a school year. Lots happened – relatively speaking, of course; I acknowledge that these are cows, and nothing much happens even at the most adventurous of times – some of it good and some of it not so good, all of it enlightening. Spending time with this amiable herd every morning at feeding time has been a pleasure. I’ll come back in the fall a little more experienced in animal care, ready, I hope, for a new season of bovine adventures.

The everyday-ness of feeding cows

Heading back from feeding the cows yesterday morning, I found myself musing. Why do I enjoy this so much? Why is it so satisfying, day after day? Why do I find no particular relief in having a couple days off from the duty, as I did last weekend when I went up to Maine leaving my husband and son with the barnyard chores? Why do I never accept my father’s offer to take a turn with cow-feeding, a job he did on his own here for more than two decades before I offered to take it on a couple of years ago?

It’s hard for me to explain why this job is so satisfying. Unlike dogs waiting to be fed, the cows don’t greet me with ecstatic displays of welcome; they just swing their big heads around to watch me enter the barnyard. Our dog jumps irrepressibly with excitement when we offer her the simplest gesture of affection; the cows and bulls, on the other hand, seem almost patronizing as they submit to a scratch between the ears when I walk amongst them, but they certainly don’t seek out my attention. They just wait stolidly for their bales of hay to be tossed down from the loft or pulled out from the back of the barn, and then they wander eventually over to the water trough to see that I’ve topped it off for them.

But leaving the barnyard always gives me a sense of accomplishment different from anything else I do during the day. Not a bigger sense of accomplishment, necessarily, but in some ways a more unequivocal one. And I suppose that’s because the job is physically demanding but also easy. I haul a few bales, turn some valves on the pump, take off my gloves to manipulate the chain closure to the gate, reach and stretch my arms and legs to climb up and down the hayloft ladder; but really it’s all easy. Very little can go wrong; it’s unlikely that on any given day I’ll find any of these simple processes impossible to execute.

So perhaps the satisfaction comes from that combination: knowing I’ve worked hard physically, but also knowing it’s more or less a sure thing that I’ll complete my task in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes. And when I’m done, I’ve filled that most primal of needs: provided food and water to fill an animal’s stomach. What could be easier, and yet what could feel more critical at the time it’s being executed?

Curious about how something so routine could continue to be pleasing, day after day, I resorted to the question I often pose to myself these days: WWHDTS, or What Would Henry David Thoreau Say? In his journal from 1841, I found this quote: “Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.”

Is feeding the cows every morning the routine against which I brace myself as I draw on my boots to advance through the rest of the day? I like that image, the idea that the sturdy everyday-ness of this task fortifies me for whatever follows. Perhaps that’s the answer: I’m fortifying myself as I fortify the cows: them with hay and water; me with the routine of caring for them. Maybe they don’t show the overt enthusiasm of dogs at my arrival, but I know they wait for me every morning, and I know their day becomes better when I appear. And it might be that that’s enough.