Milk: A Eulogy

I finger the knots at the end of my scarf and stare into a vacant field.  Closing my eyes, I conjure a bucolic scene—a Holstein, patched in black and white, wet pink nose, tail swatting at gnats and teeth tearing at clover while her calf presses into her udder with intention.  I breathe in their leftover stench and hear my grandfather’s oft spoken words, “Smells like money.”  

January 2 turns out to be one of those warming winter days after a cold spell.  The clouds hang low, somber, while ground and air brew up a layer of fog and scatter mist across the cornstalk-stubbled fields.  On this land, my mom’s family made a living for four generations.  

***

In 1930’s western Kentucky, my great-grandfather, a sharecropper, knew farming was a gamble with few winners.  Farming was a constant pouring out of resources and strength, everything you had. A life forged in acquiescence to the whims of the weather, earth and pests. There was little money to be made, and with the depression, farms folded and consolidated.  As his five children grew, he insisted they have a better life than him — no farming.  

As the youngest, my grandfather, Cliff, received that message loud and clear.  He and my grandma married in the early 1950s, young and full of hope. They paved their own way, the way of many young men of his generation — the military.  The army promised that he wouldn’t have to farm and promptly ordered him to Massachusetts.  

That adventure wore on my grandfather after a few years, and he yearned for familiarity.  He missed home and got tired of people telling him what to do, so he returned to Kentucky and started farming.  

In his twenties, Cliff was lean, strong and marked with a crew cut.  He moved down the road from his parents and farmed land a few miles from the banks of the Mississippi.  At first his work was with others on their farms and then, slowly, starting out with one of his brothers, he got his own land and grew corn and beans, tobacco and cows.   

The dairy started in the lower level of a barn to the spray of milk in a metal tin.  In 1965, they built a milking barn on the side of a hill. Over the years, the barn transformed into a mash of renovations and additions — tiles in various pastels and other expansions in white vinyl and wood siding.  From the road, I always thought it looked more like a house with a lean-to rather than a barn.  

The two-legged entrance to the building is a side-door opening to a milk tank, a deep metal washing sink, hoses and a heavy metal door.  Behind that door is the milking room where cows lined up seven deep for the twice-a-day routine.  

The years turned over, and the farm sprawled out, the dairy folded into a larger pattern of planting and harvesting, and, until this day, January 2, 2017, it was the last operating dairy in Hickman County.  Almost sixty years after my grandfather began farming, I stood before that old milk barn, recently emptied for the last time and imagined the cows.

***

My mother was the only one of her siblings to leave Hickman County for good.  One brother left for a few years after college but eventually came back to raise his family.  For many years both brothers have worked on the farm, pulling the early morning shifts in the milk barn.  Her sister married her high school sweetheart, who also farms in the county. Their investments are in pigs and chickens, rather than cows.  Mom married after college and moved to Southern Illinois, a hundred miles from her home.  

Mom never expected to leave home, but she always expected it of me.  As my mother, she could see I didn’t fit that place even before I could, that my life would be lived apart from hers in a way that she simultaneously encouraged and grieved.  What she didn’t expect was for all four of her kids to leave and never come back.  

My siblings and I pushed out further than she wanted, the closest one of us living four hours away, and a few of us beyond driving distance.  I left first, going to college fourteen hours away, and I kept going.  

Moving to other states and countries broke me open, exposing a belief I have carried around my whole life:  I am an outsider. I never belonged on the farm. I never belonged to that small town in Illinois.  

Part of me wishes that home had been as perfunctory as staying on a farm, tucked into the fabric of a community without questions of origin, but dozens of moves later, home is far from a one-word answer.  

*** 

As we grew into adults, with our own families and our own lives, gathering together became a sacrament for my mother.  My siblings, their partners and I all travel back to Illinois for Christmas, and she breathes relief. We are together, and the world is right.  As a part of the ritual this year, we pile in the car and head to Kentucky.

When I was a child, we made this pilgrimage once a month, but even with a good sense of direction, I found it almost impossible to follow how we arrived.  We piled in the car after school on Fridays and travelled two hours south from Illinois, over the Ohio, following the flood plains of the Mississippi. Everything felt familiar, yet as I flipped through the map we kept tucked into the back pocket of the passenger seat, our turns and destination never matched what I saw out the window.  It wasn’t until years later that I could actually pinpoint the farmland on a map.

From my earliest memories, my grandparents’ brick ranch-style home has always been the epicenter of family gatherings.  They built the house in the 1970’s, and it still maintains some of the quintessential domestic features of the time: brown-mottled shag carpets, a faded yellow awning and interior wood paneling stretching up the length of the wall.  

As children, we tumbled out of the mini-van and asked for popsicles or soda, bought especially for the grandkids.  “You eat your dinner, and you can have one,” Grandmother chided, her face slipping for a moment into an easy smile.

Meals circled along the goldenrod laminate countertop:  smoked chicken and hamburgers, layered salads, Jello molds and cheesy casseroles.  The family snaked around the kitchen with divided Styrofoam plates. The dining room, den and front living room filled with tables, chairs, TV trays and the occasional knee balancing mounds of food.  

The conversations brimmed with “Good to see y'all” and “How’s school?”, and then filled with the easy conversation of local news and gossip.   This pattern flows into adulthood, with questions about school being replaced by work. Eventually, I get lost in unfamiliar names and places, slip on shoes and ramble around a field.

A few quiet acres of the farm sit behind the house, to the south across a creek now deeply worn into the earth.  The back porch, the one with the yellow awning, looks out on the yard and towards the creek, a wide-plank bridge and a red barn that used to be piled with hay bales and fishing gear.

In the past, calf hutches stretched along the creek on the barn-side.  When we were young we used to put on too-big-boots and coats and stumble out into the early morning light to shake the formula and hold the bottles through the fence for the calves. After they sucked the liquid dry, we’d muscle the bottles out and stick our hands in their mouths to feel the rough ridges of their mouth suction our hands into their emery board tongues.

***

On the way down to the farm my mom reports, “This morning my brothers shipped off the last of their cows.”  I focus on the noise of tires shushing along the rain-drenched road.  

These days, living so far away, I only come to Kentucky once a year, but I still want to know that this place is continuing on, safe from change.  I’ve changed, so doesn’t the farm get permission to change too?   

“Are they sad about it? Do they still want to farm? Why would they let it go?”  I protest.

“No and yes,” Mom says. “They wanted this. They are tired. This is their choice.”

We arrive to the usual collection of relatives — cousins, aunts and uncles — waiting at my grandfather’s.  

“I’m free!”  My Uncle Kenny declares as he gave me a bristly hug.  He wears a muted flannel, plaid button-up, worn jeans and his characteristic faded ball cap.  His voice sounds tired and relieved.  

“Loaded up the cows for Nashville, Illinois, this morning and we’ve got the last pitcher of milk up at the house,” he explains.  “We’ll keep a few calves up at our house for awhile, but I’m done with milking.” 

Pulling up dining room chairs, we congratulate them on freedom and dream what their lives will be without early morning chores at the barn.  “You should go to Hawaii with us next year!” My mom offers. We munch on leftover Christmas candy and watch my cousin’s daughter dance around the room.   

By late afternoon, my aunt and uncle get ready to head home, and I fight back tears.  I never got up before dawn to milk, and maybe I wouldn’t be so nostalgic if I had. Yet, I watch time rip away at this place, consuming the choicest parts.  

“Would you show us around the barn one last time?”  I ask.

That’s how we end up outside, me in flats, tip-toeing around the mud at the milk barn.  I feel like I am paying homage, visiting a family holy site. As I fix it in my memory, I see a collage of days, years before when we’d drive by the barn to say goodbyes as they did their last milking of the day.

My mom’s freckle-strewn face is outlined with laughter, and her hair has faded from earthy red into light auburn.  Unlike myself, she seems to hold little nostalgia for the recent exodus of cows. She lived out the work of this farm her whole childhood and sees a release from obligation.  

This farm is mine, not through work, but through blood and story; for years its steadiness rested like a millstone on my grandparents, aunts and uncles.  I feel disoriented and compelled to reach for a piece of the dairy, still fresh with cow stench.

The wood door creaks open, and the milk barn smells the same as I remember, the smell of cheesy, damp straw and cold concrete.  The air in the barn is cool and humid, and my senses stoke memories of whirring milking tubes, mist from the hoses and Holsteins murmuring in line.  

Outside, we step into a staging area with long troughs where cows fed and waited their turn at milking.  We push around gravel with our feet and stared long into empty fields, talking about now by-gone schedules and herd patterns.  We talk about silos and how we played in mountains of cottonseed getting them stuck like burrs in our hair and clothes. It doesn’t take long to exhaust words.  My Aunt Sadie and Uncle Kenny’s house is down the road from the dairy barn, and we head over before leaving.  

The left-behind calves are in hutches along the house. They bawl for dinner.  We oblige and bottles in hand, act as surrogate moms. These calves will be weaned and sold in a few months.  After the doll-eyed babes drain their dinner, everyone walks towards the house, and I sit back on my heels and watch the calf nose the fence.  

I reach out my hand, letting her suck until my fingers are foamed with milky saliva.  Tears return, and I finally let them fall. I try to recreate the place as it was to me as a child, but I feel distant and disconnected in grief and experience. 

The cold mist gathers into larger drops, and I trek toward the house.  After washing up, my aunt offers us drinks. She pulls out a few tall red plastic cups and the last pitcher of milk.

A few of us steady ourselves against the kitchen counter and watch as she portions it out, and then we claim our drink.  The servings are small, the jug split between six or seven of us. I swirl mine and let bubbles collect on the wall of the cup.  I mumble towards Kenny, “Should we give a toast?”  

Lifting his glass, he searches our faces for a tribute.  After a few moments of silence, memories fill his eyes, and he nods towards me, “You say something.”

I draw in a deep breath and tip my glass, “To the cows.”

More from The Bitter Southerner