$12.95 / paperback
ISBN: 978-160844-061-0
228 pages
Also available at fine
bookstores everywhere

FOREWORD

“When I was a kid we had this one cow named Mabel...” I can hear my husband launching into one of his farm stories, and I cringe because I know the city women at this dinner party will soon be rolling their eyes. “She was a huge cow, more the size of an ox than a regular dairy cow, with horns that came around the sides of her head. And she had really big teats.” (Okay, there go the eyes.) “I mean they were really big. This big around.” (He’s gesturing here with thumb and forefinger.) “And about this long.” (Can that really be 12 inches?) “And one day Mabel got into some brush where one of her teats got cut, and it was infected. Of course we milked by hand then, but she wouldn’t let anyone get near her. My dad tried to milk her, and to keep her from kicking he put hobbles on her back feet. But she ended up kicking him with her front foot. So he left Mable for me to milk. I was the only one who could milk that cow without being kicked.”

My husband had a hardscrabble childhood, growing up in a family of eight kids. Their father rented farms in Illinois, and they moved to a different one almost every spring after their dad purchased his first herd – that one cow was kept in their garage. You’d think these memories would be tinged with resentment, but when my husband’s siblings get together they laugh so heartily while recalling their misadventures that I’m envious of the close bonds they shared growing up poor, working those rented farms.

Show me someone who doesn’t love cows and I’ll show you someone who turns up their nose at ice cream, won’t eat a cheese pizza, hates chocolate milk, and doesn’t appreciate the magnificent benefits of yogurt.

“Cows are the foster mother of the human race,” Wis­consin’s Governor William Dempster Hoard once said. He even had a notice posted in his barn: “Remember that this is the Home of Mothers. Treat each cow as a Mother should be treated.”

I’ll venture that no one included in this volume would argue with that point.

Beef cattle? I spent quality time during a sleet storm in Idaho with a gorgeous herd of Irish Dexters and their feisty little bull. Last July I shared a pasture with a herd of Scottish Highlanders as I admired their furry calves. Born and raised in Wisconsin, however, I am hard pressed to find anything more beautiful than a gathering of the girls — black and white Holsteins lying in shady green grass near a pasture creek on a sunny summer day.

I live in the country near Spring Green, Wisconsin – not far from famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Stu­dio. Wright was outspoken about cows, as he was on many subjects, but his personal philosophy is worth passing along. (Note: Wright was extremely fond of the color red.) “Wis­consin is a dairy state,” he said. “That means herds of pure Holsteins or Guernseys, or what have you, occupying the best ground anywhere around, making pictures that go with the one made by the red barn. Wisconsin, fond of passing laws, should pass another law compelling every farmer to paint his barn red. Another that will compel him to pasture his cows by the highway and his pigs back behind the barn.”

I have fallen in love with this collection of stories and poems that Christine Lindemer has gathered. In this volume you’ll find stories of love and sorrow, of gentle cattle who nuzzled for hugs, and of farmers who had to give up their farms. Funny or sad, every story, every poem, has a genuine thread of love running through from beginning to end.

Unfortunately, the fate of our lovable cows is changing these days with the advent of factory farms that cram thou­sands of them together and insert chemicals to encourage higher milk production or larger sides of beef. Dolly and Bessie and Bossy are often identified only by numbers on the tags in their ears (or the bar code), and it’s even likely that they’re milked each day without the touch of a human hand.

I think of poor Mabel with her incredibly large and very sore teat – she wouldn’t have enjoyed that at all.

Sara Rath