So on the one hand, I feel very spoiled. Not only do I have a husband who loves me, but he actually tolerates my love of milk cows and my huge garden and the chickens and the projects overflowing the kitchen. I get to mosey down to the barn after having coffee with him, milk what I want from my cow, and then have breakfast with her and her babies.
I do feel spoiled. But then there are the days when I am reminded of how much hard work it is. Wonderful work. Oftentimes enjoyable work. Sometimes miserable work. Work I wouldn’t trade. Hard work. It isn’t all sweet, slow mornings and a pint of warm milk.
So when there are mornings that I can leisurely have breakfast in the barn with my cows and my cats, I will, and I will savor them, because not every day is like this.
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I’d say I’m back in the milk business, but that really isn’t quite accurate. Posey is, and I steal a little here and there. After a somewhat tumultuous couple of weeks shuffling bum calves around, during which time she has fed four different calves and for 36 hours fed all four (she wasn’t impressed), we have her little family established and Marigold now has competition that isn’t me.
I have to say, I love standing down there watching three happy little tails whip back and forth, and their fuzzy little heads get wet from nursing, and their little bellies turn round and tight like little drums. They come up for air, standing there with their tongues stuck out before going back for more, and finally waffle off to sleep. They sure aren’t malnourished.
And I do occasionally snag some of that wonderful, rich, creamy milk. The perks of having a nurse cow.
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Originally published in the March/April 2025 issue of Down Country Roads Magazine
What do we call this time between true winter and true spring? It needs its own name, because applying either label cheats these months out of their own unique charm. But if we are to be confined to those two descriptors, I’ll say this: It is winter, until it is not.
We may be covered with a foot of snow. Our teeth may be chattering against a biting north wind and sub-zero temperatures. We may be chopping ice and stomping around in heavy winter boots, in thick coats and hats and coveralls and heavy gloves. We may be shoveling snow and digging critters out of snow drifts, but winter is on its way out! The end is in sight. Cold days don’t last. Warmups are punctuated by frosts and snows, and cold snaps are punctuated with blue-sky balminess. The days deliciously lengthen. Everything – two-legged critter and four-legged critter alike – is simply bursting at the seams with pent-up energy, soaking in the sunlight, and new life springs up every time a person turns around. The barnyard, the garden, the hillsides, the sky, everything is stirring with an unmistakable effervescence, if you will, a scintillating energy. Spring is “bustin’ out all over,” as the old Rodgers and Hammerstein classic goes.
There is almost too much to look at. The living room has been overtaken with the beginnings of the new garden – Seedlings stretch their little leaves towards the westerly sunlight streaming in the window, the optimistic beginnings of what will hopefully be a fruitful summer. Cheeping and twittering come from the spare bedroom – Tiny fuzzballs of chicks bask in their brooder box, where they are gazed upon by multiple pairs of eager eyes (one pair of human eyes, and three pairs of canine eyes), before they are moved down to the nursery box in the barn.
The dogs, somewhat content in the wintertime to hunker down inside, throw aside their hibernation for rambunctious play at all hours of the day and night, stir-crazy and insistent. And the barnyard – What a chaos! “The barnyard is busy in a regular tizzy,” another song goes merrily through my mind, “and the obvious reason is because of the season.” (Once upon a time, musical lyrics were actually clever and cute.) “Each nest is twittering, they’re all babysittering – Spring, spring, spring!”
Little calves, brand-new and knock-kneed, stagger to their feet as their mamas welcome them to the world, wet and sneezing and floppy-eared – What a beautiful sight! Slightly older calves race around with baby bovine bursts of laughable, haphazard, chaotic energy, giving the distinct impression that their gangly legs and their brains aren’t quite communicating yet. In between cold snaps and little storms, they sack out in the sun, dazed and darling. The chickens, sullen and peevish for much of the winter (not that I blame them) suddenly rediscover joy in those first green shoots they find in the yard, and the egg basket runneth over. The milk cow is in milk again, lavishing us with her plenty. My morning coffee is au lait again, and the sweet rhythm of the milking routine is followed by the sweet busyness of skimming the cream and making butter and culturing yogurt and salting curds to make aged cheeses, and the cats learn to love life again, too, spoiled and round with excess.
Spring, spring, spring! It is winter, until it isn’t anymore.
Everywhere one turns, there is evidence of spring. Bare-limbed trees set buds subtly, and the first little hint of green lights up the pastures, grazed down and winter-worn. Shaded hillsides, that have held on to a winter’s worth of snow, little or much, suddenly run with life-giving water, and we can breathe deep of the long-missed smell of good clean dirt. Even the winter storms that blow in lack the bitterness of a December or February storm, and in the snow there is a taste of springtime.
Fingers yearn to sink into the dirt. Arms are ready to feel the sunshine. Feet are ready to tread on green grass and soft ground. Eyes are ready for color and greenness and softening of contours. Lungs are ready for the sweet, warm breath of a thawing earth, the perfume of the first flowers. Ears are ready for the meadowlark and the bluebird, the sandhill crane and the dove, the music of running water and the gentler murmuring of the spring breeze.
It is winter, for now, until suddenly it isn’t.
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Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on Feb. 26, 2025
This melt-off and warmup is as good as it gets in February or early March, days full of sun and the sound of water running off everything. There is mud everywhere! Relief and contentment radiate from everything, from the mellow gaze of a cow chewing her cud, to the half-closed eyes of her baby nursing, or tucked away safely on a little island of solid ground, comfortable and lazy in the warming air, perfectly happy with the ready supply of milk and hay to bed down on. The chickens have again taken to the yard, happy to leave their coop, and the cats snooze in the sun on the piles of sweet-smelling hay, greeting me with pink-mouthed yawns and arched-back stretches, rather than yowls.
What a difference a week can make!
It was one of those frigid mornings during that brutal cold snap, when just about everything gets cancelled except for ranching. Brad, covered in snow, burst into the mudroom with his arms full of a half-frozen calf. He had found it about a mile and a half from our house, and in sub-zero temperatures it doesn’t take long for a newborn calf to chill down and freeze. She wasn’t dead, but she sure wasn’t quite alive either. Her eyes were wide and staring, her little ribcage rose and fell hectically, and the occasional moo might have been a death moan.
The prognosis didn’t seem overly optimistic, but if you hand a ranch wife a sad little animal, she will try to fix it. The calf was a pretty little thing, dark brown with unique white markings on her face, white rimming her speckled pink nose, and white hairs on her ears so they looked frosted. The calf’s mama hadn’t even had a chance to clean her off before her hair froze, so she was a slippery little critter as soon as she started to thaw out. Her mouth was cold, which isn’t a good sign, but she still blinked and moved her eyes, which was hopeful. I turned that bathroom into a sauna and ran the water heater out of hot water, and little by little, her limbs loosened up. She began moving her ears, and trying to shake her head. Her mouth was still cold but her tongue had started to warm up, and a little corn syrup in her cheek helped, too.
And then, finally, after a couple of hours, she sucked my fingers. Now, that’s a great sign.
We gave her colostrum and graduated her to the calf warmer around lunchtime, where she stayed for the rest of the day and the night, and early the next morning when Brad did a heifer check he stuck her with her mom. When I was stomping around doing my chores, I poked my head into the shed. Mama cow stared at me rather defiantly, and behind her were four little knock-kneed legs. I waited, not sure it was the right calf, but the sweet brockle face peeked around mama’s hind legs. Her little ears, frosted with white hair, were perky. She took a couple hesitant steps, and then made a little baby frisk, all four legs coming off the ground in a clumsy expression of infant playfulness. It warmed the heart on a frigid day.
Another cow had lost her calf the day before, so I let my bottle calf get hungry (a powerful motivator), then tromped down to the calving shed with her. She walked with her head right next to my knees, the way a calf follows her mom. The poor little thing, now a month old, had been orphaned as soon as she was born, so she never got to nurse, but she always would suck my fingers, and she let me lead her nose over to the heifer’s udder. No coaxing was required. God’s design in these baby critters is so evident, in the beautiful instinct that He has instilled in them, and their incredible resilience in spite of their fragility. It was a treat to see her white-tipped tail whipping back and forth as she got that first real mama’s milk, and a week later it is a delight to see her content and satiated, wandering lazily over to nurse, her chapped nose healed up now that she is no longer licking it, and her recognition of me is quiet and friendly rather than desperate and heartbreaking. The brockle-faced calf is still doing well, and another dozen calves have joined them uneventfully. Life is good.
A cold snap brings a strange sort of survival mode to the ranch, alternating between having more to do than ever and having nothing to do because nothing can be done. Sometimes all that can or needs to be done is to put feed in front of animals and keep the water open, and wait for the weather to change or for something to go wrong. Because when things go wrong, they go wrong in catastrophic fashion. But, on the other side, those things that went right are sweeter than ever. I love going down to the nursery pens and just watching. Watching the springtime hubbub of mamas and babies, hearing the warm stillness punctuated with baby moos and cows talking back. The sloppy noises of hooves in mud. The sweet rustle of mouthfuls of hay. All the little suckling noises, or a bony calf head thumping an udder. Their mamas are so patient. I love watching as a nursing calf comes up for air and stands in a milk stupor with its tongue stuck out. It is sweet to watch brand new, first-time mamas learn to mother.
From the other side of a cold snap, it is amazing how much went so very right.
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Sometimes it is good and healthy to just step away for a little while, in a way that allows for some thinking and pondering, allows the creativity pool to fill up again. It wasn’t entirely intentional, but it more just happened, in the busyness of the holiday season, from the rush of Thanksgiving to the happy celebration of Christmas, to the fresh newness of the New Year and all that comes with it.
And then, a very unromantic contributing factor was our internet, which had gotten progressively worse and was no longer conducive to writing or photo work, except for the bare minimum. When it would take at least 10 minutes just to load my blog platform so I could begin to format an article (if it would end up loading, not to mention the time it took to upload a photo or three!), it just wasn’t sustainable and I had better things to be doing with my time! But that was happily remedied, the rush of the holidays are over, calving season is well underway, and springtime is a’coming!
I’m busy, but back in business. And I’m so happy to be here.
P.S. Stay tuned for a little backlog of a few articles. They’ll be backdated so they remain sequential, but I’m so excited to share them with you!
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