Farm Boy Memories

     Who else would blog about a cow?  Life on the farm of my childhood, in the 1940s, was relatively primitive, at least by today's standards.  Our farm was electrified when I was three so I don't remember a time without it, though outages were fairly common, especially in the winter.  A trip to town was huge deal, and that was to Sinai population ca. 140. School was one room with 8 grades a mile away. Farm chores included watering the calves, feeding the chickens, milking cows and other sundry duties.  The sleeping rooms in the farmhouse were on the second level heated only by heat rising through floor registers. For a significant period of time we didn't even have a working radio. (A small excurses here: my older brothers, as teenagers, bought a cheap, used radio and put it in the barn. Dad thought that was very foolish. Before long the radio died and Dad went to town and bought a replacement; he'd discovered he could hear the news in the barn.😊)  A sleep over was big deal with my classmate Lloyd Hope, at either of our farms.
      Now I live on the 15th floor in downtown Minneapolis with radio, TV, internet, microwave, air conditioning, central heat, running water........In childhood all of this was unimaginable.  When I read the poem (below), in The Writer's Almanac, it evoked childhood memories. The poem's description of the cattle, water tank, cold well water, moss on the water,

was almost exactly as it was on our farm.  The decades have flown but the memories remain. 


After Reading John Clare on Thoughts of A Cow
by Tom Hennen

There are deep hoofprints in the soft ground around the
wooden water tank. A steel windmill with its fan blades spin-
ning free in the summer wind. No water pumping because the
connecting lever is not in gear and the tank is full. Thick green
moss floats here and there on the water's surface. Blue sky and
white clouds reflect in the pool, pulled out of heaven in a piece
just the right size to fit the old round wooden tank. The cow
yard is empty, the cows in the far pasture, strolling its hills for
grass, slowly, with quiet pleasure as if on a boulevard in Paris,
France. Nothing about a cow yard enters their thoughts until
late afternoon when I come with the dog to fetch them home.
Then they amble, dust stirred from its summer stupor by their
hard hooves that kick up the smell of dirt and powdered dung.
After the long walk from the pasture they remember they are
thirsty. Now in a hurry, they crowd around the water tank.
They drink and drink. When one raises her head, water and
setting sunlight drip from nose and muzzle. With a tin cup I
drink icy water from the pump and pour some into a pan for
the dog. The cows are dry of milk until fall. Now all they need
do is sleep. From the east dusk is sliding across the fields. Frogs
and crickets are tuning up, fireflies cannot wait and are air-
borne before the sun is completely down. The summer night
settles weightless as a feather on the grass. The windmill turn-
ing, cold water running out of the iron pipe into the tank, far-
off bells, and the murmur of starlight falling on water.


Tom Hennen, “After Reading John Clare on Thoughts of a Cow” from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems. Copyright © 2013 by Tom Hennen.

Takk for alt,

Al 

8 years in this school house.