Morning Chores in Snow

This is the first time in my memory that we’ve had significant snow in November. And it is significant. We woke up to several inches and it was still snowing.

I went to milk after fortifying myself with coffee and donning multiple layers for warmth. Visibility was maybe 100 feet, up to 200 sometimes. Then the wind would blow and the snow on the trees, and especially on the pines, would say “Geronimo!” and the air would look like a fog.

I always milk first and feed the horse second, but both things happen in the same little shed and most usually the horse is waiting in the shed even before I milk and I bark “Back!” to him and used to he backed out (he is trained to voice commands) but now he turns around to get out and the shed is just barely big enough for him to manage to turn himself around in. But he comes out and he and donkey wait just outside the shed while I milk and the cow eats.

Milking is a meditation, really. My consciousness becomes a speck while my body continues to sit on the stool and my hands continue to squeeze the milk into the bucket and I am not my body and I am not separate from the cow or from the bucket. This morning I was in such a state when the speck of consciousness became aware that something was eating my hat! The horse was a bit impatient maybe, or maybe he just thought the giant pompom on my hat was funny. My consciousness was immediately aware of my body being on a stool stuck between a 700# cow and an 1800# horse who pretend they don’t particularly like each other. “Back!” I said, and he took a step or two back and I laughed at him and at the beauty of the morning.

Then I took the milk to the house when a wind came and blinded me under the trees and I just stood there while white came down all around me and into the collar of my coat. The children were already sledding, laughing. I took the feed back down to the horse, gave the donkey his obligatory handful, and waited while the horse eats. Donkey took his usual aromatherapy from the empty bucket while I scratched his withers and admired his snowy, spiky mane and the curls on his thick coat. I turned to check the horse over and found a place that needed my attention, just an itchy spot on the side of his hock, and while I was bent over attending to this I felt something quite heavy come up against my behind. It was donkey’s behind. After his withers get scratched, he has a spot on his rump that is his real favorite spot and he can be quite insistent that I attend to it. While I did this, the goats came up waiting to clean up any grain the horse may drop. They were fluffed out to twice their real size.

When the horse was finished I went to get a bale of hay and throw it to them in piles in the field, and then I found my way back to the house and to a breakfast of eggs and toast by the fire.