Welcome to our Netroots for the Troops, Inc. Holiday Fundraiser: Twelve Days of Christmas Blog! Today is the eighth day of Christmas, and entitled Eight Maids Milking.
I couldn’t come up with any actual milk maids, and as an Iowa farm boy I assure you I’ve hunted high and low these last thirty years, but I do have a lot of cows ...
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will help us create and ship packages full of useful and fun things to our
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A thousand years ago, a million miles from where I sit now, my father would stay in the front office, making entries in his ledger, while my brother and I would wield brushes and squabble over the hose. Most of the milking in Iowa in those years was done by machines and the milk was picked up by the creamery’s bulk truck. A handful of smaller farmers still did it the old fashioned way, hand milking, storing the milk in cans like this one, and waiting for the can truck to transport it to town. It was our job to get the recently dumped cans clean for use the next day.
My father is many years gone now, laying beneath the grass on an Iowa hillside. The head of his grave is marked with a stone and there is a small bronze plaque that says “Korean War Veteran”. His service was the occupation of Germany, so the only scars he returned with are the ones a teenager would normally acquire when left in charge of an ammo dump. Just a few years ago and a few miles up the road from his grave I caught this yearling imposing on his mom for one last taste ...
The old ways were in decline even when I was a tween and the creamery is long since closed, a victim of increasingly industrialized farming. Even so, cows remain, and their fundamental nature has not changed; the grass is greener, and they’ll go to great lengths to get at it.
Where once there were milk maids, now there are machines.
Relax, you silly urban liberals - those are happy Massachusetts cows, part of a herd of about two hundred. Once they’re done with milking they get a little grain … then it’s right back out to the pasture.
When the weather turns cold the grain still comes out morning and night, but alfalfa preserved in the summer months is brought out for daytime snacking. These are beef animals, which you can tell by their blocky shape, and now that I think about it this hay bunk is less than a mile from my father’s grave.
My dad came home from a two year service stint and his prior experience as a gandy dancer got him right into the Elgin Joilet & Eastern line, a class II railroad that serves the metro Chicago area. He worked for three different railroads in his twenty six year career and the union cared for our family every single day after he was disabled in a work related accident at fifty. The Railroad Retirement Board made sure our family was safe even after he couldn’t work any more.
I’ll make a donation to NFTT, of course, and you should too. But we need to do much, much more than that. Our troops are coming home to an economic winter, and we ought to make sure the hay bunk is full for them and every other American. The minute we’ve secured that our next chore is making sure that green pastures will be sprouting soon so that our men and women currently in uniform have a path like the one my father enjoyed.
Doing what is needed to provide jobs, health care, and a safety net for those who stumble is the very best Christmas present we could provide our men and women in uniform.
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