The House Cow My Father Gave Me

The walk down the road

We did not own a trailer. Matt said he could borrow one, but I said no. I wanted to walk her.

So on a Sunday morning in October, after the milking, I put a halter on Pearl and a lead rope in my hand. Matt drove the pickup in front of us at a walking pace with the flashers on, and Opal and June followed Pearl the way heifers follow their mother.

Two miles. It took us most of an hour.

Mrs. Haskins came out to her mailbox and waved. The Petersons slowed down in their Buick and the old man rolled the window down and said, “Moving day, Jess?” I said yes, sir, it was.

I looked back once at the home place. Dad was standing at the end of the free-stall barn with his hands in his jacket pockets. He did not wave, and he did not go inside either. He watched until we went over the hill.

I have thought about that a hundred times since.

Building it

People think you can just milk a cow and sell the milk. You can, in Missouri, but only one way. The state lets you sell raw milk straight off your farm to the person who drives out to get it. No stores. No delivering it to town. They come to you, or they do not get it.

So I had to make it worth the drive.

Matt and I cleaned that old hay barn down to the boards. We poured a concrete floor in the milking end and put in three stanchions, a stainless sink with hot water, and a bulk cooler we bought used from an Amish family over by Seymour that was going out of milk.

I milked Pearl and Opal by machine with a bucket milker, and I strained and chilled every drop inside the hour. I washed my glass jugs the way Mom taught me to wash the kitchen jars, hot water, then hotter, then air dry upside down.

The first Saturday, I had six gallons and a hand-lettered sign at the end of the drive. Two people stopped. One of them was Mrs. Haskins, and I think she came to be kind.

The next Saturday, four people. The Saturday after that, nine.

It was word of mouth, mostly. Somebody’s daughter-in-law in Springfield could not drink store milk without her stomach turning, and she could drink mine. A young mother from church wanted milk for her babies that came from a cow she could see.

An old man named Mr. Kessler told me it tasted like the milk he grew up on. He cried a little at the end of my drive, and he came back every week for years.