The day daffodil departed
It is typical for us in Vermont to have a few extremely cold days every winter when an Arctic blast blows in from Canada and our thermometer drops below zero, but usually we don’t endure these days until sometime in January or early February. Despite the glorious fall with sunny warm days stretching well into November, the days leading up to and following Christmas 2017 were bitter cold, sub-zero temps at night and barely a single digit during the middle of the day. One brutally freezing cold day after another. Fortunately, our house sits on the side of the valley where the sun shines early. The first rays of the day would burst into our bedroom window, tricking me into rousting from my cozy covers. A glance at the thermometer outside the kitchen window was an agonizing reminder that despite the glorious sunshine, the temps outside hadn’t budged.
Before heading down to my father’s barn for milking chores with Pip, I suited up: long johns, jeans, snow pants, undershirt, long sleeve shirt, sweater, neck gator, fleece hat, gloves with liners, a fresh pack of handwarmers, wooly socks under my lined Muck boots, and my purple early 1990’s Nordica ski jacket - the warmest coat I’ve ever owned. Our ever-trusty 2000 Chevy pick-up groaned as I turned the ignition. Eager to get going and not interested in waiting for the truck to get warm, I scraped a small circle from the icy windshield, just enough to navigate my way down the driveway.
Accustomed to her milking routine (including a bucket of grain) and not fazed by the cold, Pip was waiting for me as usual with her head sticking out over the stall gate in the lower section of the barn. Each individual whisker, usually barely recognizable, was sparkling with white frost, and every breath was followed by a billowing cloud of steamy exhale.
While Pip scarfed up the grain in the rubber tub, I set about my pre-milking routine. The freezing cold from the handle of the pitchfork permeated through both my gloves and liners causing my hands to throb. I had to take breaks to dunk them into the bucket of warm water that I had brought along for pre-milking teat prep. This only resulted in a painful recharge as the blood crept back into my fingertips.
Even though the cold made my equipment slow to get going, I was relieved that everything ultimately worked as it should have, and the actual milking task only took a few more minutes. Before heading home to warm up, I made sure Pip and her stall mate, a young Jersey heifer named Cream Cheese, had fresh, unfrozen water, loads of hay, and an extra layer of clean bedding to insulate from the frozen ground below.
This routine lasted right up to the New Year, morning after morning, a tormenting reminder that I’d taken up a doozie of a hobby!
As is the case on many farms, a run of super cold days doesn’t always come to an end without a casualty. A day or so into the New Year, the morning sun finally pushed the outdoor temperature to a double digit above zero. I had finished my milking chores and we were wrapping up our breakfast when Ashley, the young farmer from Kiss the Cow Farm who lived in our rental house down the road (see Post #2), appeared frantically knocking at the door. She had just found her beloved Jersey cow Daffodil dead in the bull pen.
While attempting to comfort Ashley, I could sense Matt and our two sons beginning to buzz with both dread and anticipation knowing they were about to be called to duty for managing this situation. We all suited up in our winter gear and with Ashley headed to the big barn down the road to inspect.
There was no doubt, Daffodil was dead! Lying on her side with all four legs protruding stiffly up in the air, the cow’s body was bloated and rigid with all four teats jutting straight out from her balloon-like udder. A push to her belly released a retched puff of stinking gas, and we quickly surmised that it was not going to be an easy task to get the carcass extracted from its frozen spot inside the barn.
Daffodil and Cream Cheese in the springtime.
Autumn grazing - Daffodil & her calf Daisy with Cream Cheese
Back in the old days when dairy farms dotted the landscape of Vermont, including our own dairy farm which we sold bulk milk from the mid 1940’s to the mid 1980’s, there were people (men) who took care of dead farm animals. They were called knackers, and our knacker was named Sy Osmer. If we had a dead cow in the barn, he came and took it away. My memory of Sy was that he was a very friendly man, not at all phased by the assortment of extremities peeking out from over the sides of his dump truck. If he had to come to our farm, someone would hoist the carcass with the tractor bucket and toss it onto the pile. I’m not sure what exactly Sy did with all those carcasses, but he took them away and that was that.
Unfortunately, Sy is long dead and no one that I know of was ever eager to take over his business. So, back at the house, I made a quick call to our neighbor for some advice since he ran an excavation business and owned lots of heavy machinery. It became immediately apparent that he wanted nothing to do with participating in Daffodil’s removal since there was no way we could bury her properly with the ground rock solid from days of deep freeze. He further warned me about potential neighbors frowning with disapproval if we were to drag our dead cow down the road to a tucked away place on the Farm that we refer to as the “stump dump”. Well, that’s what we did, and nobody said a thing about it!
First order of business was extracting Daffodil from where she dropped - inside the bull pen located at the far end of the barn. Her body was lying crosswise blocking the pen gate. We would have to spin her around to get her into a position so we could actually pull her out, then spin again to get her out the doorway of the barn. At close to 1000 lbs. of (literally) dead weight frozen to the concrete floor, there was no way this could be done with the human power we had on hand, nor was the tractor getting anywhere near the doorway. Our son Alistair came up with an ingenious idea to use the winch on our John Deere Gator to pull her out. Since we couldn’t connect the hook of the winch to the cow and then get her around the corner of the pen (in one piece, anyway), Alistair popped open a window that was directly across the bull pen and ran the cable through it so there would be a straight run to initially remove her from the pen. Fortunately, this worked brilliantly, and didn’t involve a front leg being ripped out of its socket in the process. Once Daffodil was dragged out of the pen, Alistair then relocated the Gator to the barn entry. We reconnected the hook, and the winch and cable pulled her out of the doorway to a spot where ultimately, she could be hooked up to the tractor for the journey to her final resting place.
After days of bitter cold, with a few inches of snow dropping along the way, Broad Brook Road and every driveway on its path was snow covered and slick. Before we could drive the tractor an inch, we needed to affix chains to the massive rear tires. I mentioned earlier that temps had finally departed from the single digits. However, the upward trajectory wasn’t appreciably significant. It was still cold! In the barn driveway, Matt, our sons Miles and Alistair, and I spent over an hour wrestling with the pair of chains as the sun began to drop below the hillside behind us. We simply could not figure out how to get the needed extra mere inches to make the two ends lock in place around the tire. Matt was the driver of both the tractor and the orders. He would rock the tractor back and forth and we would hoist each end up, always to no avail. Chain is definitely not like bungy… absolutely impossible to stretch just a tiny bit further! The conclusion to this part of the story is that I have no idea how we finally got those damn chains on, but we did.
With the sun now rapidly dipping to the crest of the hillside behind the barn, we finally hooked Daffodil, rigid from hours of rigor mortis to the bucket of our old Case tractor. Of course, the bucket is attached to the front of the tractor which meant Matt had to drag the cow driving backwards down Broad Brook Road with Alistair, Miles, Ashley and me on foot following somberly like we were headed to a funeral mass. Fortunately, our procession made it all the way to the logging road entrance that leads to the stump dump without coming upon a single car. Matt then backed the tractor up to the area where Ashley picked a nice flat spot under a canopy of pine trees to be the appropriate place where we would unhook Daffodil and leave her to the wilds of winter.
After parking the tractor back in its spot in the barn driveway, we returned home to the wood stove fire and a house still adorned with holiday decorations. We were finally warming up and resuming the tasks we had abandoned abruptly several hours earlier, breakfast dishes still in the sink and now dinner needing to be prepared. As I resumed my post in the kitchen, I quietly exulted listening to my two boys, at that time one a junior in college and one a senior in high school, exuberantly rehashing details of our curious afternoon. They had such a story to tell their friends when they returned to school after the holidays. This crazy day gave them great purpose, and I never could have managed without them. There would certainly be many days ahead of total resistance. Presenting them with a shovel and a to-do list was a sure-thing dead end. Nonetheless, this experience gave them a true connection to this place, the cycle of life on it and their value to it all. Box checked for Mom.
No caption needed
