new calf born in the January snow
by Scout Torres of Singing Horse Ranch
To The Editor,
I was pleased to see my first thoughts about the nature of being so-close-yet-so-far from home (farming) were well received. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about (as opposed to doing) farming recently: between long days at my desk and the holidays fast approaching, I have spent extra hours on the road of the prodigal farmchild retracing my steps instead of taking new ones. It had led me back here, to thinking and writing about the life I lead within both the margins of agriculture and the margins of these pages.
I am one of the editor’s daughters, as I presume most of the readership knows. He put my photo on the back cover of a series called Farm Romance in the late 90’s, and the same photo has shown up in his books and magazines over and over again, like pins threaded with red string across a map. I admit, I look much different now than the giggling, nearly bald toddler running down the red cinder road between the pines, although I’d like to think I have maintained the way my eyes disappear when I grin and the toothiness of that smile.I am one of the editor’s daughters, as I presume most of the readership knows. He put my photo on the back cover of a series called Farm Romance in the late 90’s, and the same photo has shown up in his books and magazines over and over again, like pins threaded with red string across a map. I admit, I look much different now than the giggling, nearly bald toddler running down the red cinder road between the pines, although I’d like to think I have maintained the way my eyes disappear when I grin and the toothiness of that smile. She was a roundfaced, round-bellied little girl running towards her mother’s camera, dusty Osh-Kosh blue jeans pooled around pudgy ankles and her father’s neckerchief tied around the little wisps of thin blonde hair. You can feel the outsideness of that photo Mama took, in that smile, in the way the trees seem to move behind me.
Walk with me into a mid-winter several years ago. It’s cold, really very cold. Colder still because I am sweating in a blizzard, running down the road in my heavy snow boots. Still round-faced and round-bellied but no longer quite so young, I sprint now away from my mother and towards home. I can certainly feel the outdoors in this moment, stinging my skin, fogging my glasses, making my nose run. I am acutely aware of the way the trees move and groan beneath the weight of the snow.
It’s January, it’s snowing, and a calf has just been birthed directly into the sharp branches of a long-dead fallen Juniper tree. His limbs and the tree limbs have become difficult to tell apart, and his wet fur has begun freezing to his railthin body. Two mothers hover, upset and unsure how to remove him from the predicament: his mother, and mine.
Farm. I make it back to the house, pat my elderly corgi Wendell absently as I put on a pot of coffee and a bottle of milk. Colostrum, I think, tearing through the bandages and medicines and empty, needless syringes in the dusty box above the fridge. The nutrients of a first milk from teats that the calf cannot reach, will not receive in time. I make a triumphant noise as I pull a pouch from the box – my corgi gives a disgruntled sigh as my boots trail melting snow across his favorite napping spot on the dip in the chipped linoleum floor. I scoop the powdered colostrum replacement into the milk on the stove, carefully set aside the spoon, and choose a fresh one to stir milk into my coffee.
Romance. I pour the remaining coffee into an insulated mug for my mother, test the milk from the nipple of the bottle on my inner wrist, and repeat my dog’s disgruntled sigh as I make the decision that I don’t have the hands for both coffee cups and the bottle. I set my coffee cup on the side rack of the wood-stove in the living room and feel the warmth from the living, laughing fire. The crackling feels like cackling, as if it’s mocking me for having to go back out into the cold. I place the bottle inside my jacket to keep it warm and jog back into the snow, frowning as I realize perhaps I could have carried both mugs.
The hard work has been done when I arrive. The young police officer who patrols our corner of the wilderness had first noticed the calf on his route has finally managed to untangle it from the branches and is cradling it in his arms. He is red-faced from the cold and exertion, and he is smiling. I am reminded in this moment that there is nothing more human than empathy. The baby is too feeble to do much but appreciate the small amount of warmth that is radiating from the man’s body as he carries it to the bed of the truck. I curse myself and wish I had made coffee for him, too. When the snow melts and the spring thaws, the young man will bring his wife and children to meet the calf we named in his honor, and to tell the story with wonder in his voice.
It is a few years later and it is hot, really too hot for five am in June, and I roll over in bed as my husband rises. He says something soft and quiet about cows outside our window and I am not awake enough to listen, but as he drags his feet into his shoes, his second set of words is louder and more insistent. Baby, there’s cows in the yard. I’m gonna call your dad. Followed closely by words that will always wake me from a dead sleep. Shit! They’re in the barn!
Less than five minutes later I am running pell-mell down my dusty driveway toward the barn in a fluffy bathrobe and rubber boots. I have finally accepted that the roundness of my face and belly will never go away, and neither will the running to or from herds of cows, although I have come to see all these things in a more favorable light. I am learning to be softer with myself, I think, more empathetic. My parents are rushing out to meet us but for now it is just my husband and I chasing cows out of the precious little first-cutting hay in the barn.
Farm. I catch hold of an off-cut bit of wood from our sawmill that is resting against the chicken run and hold it like a wizard’s staff as I square off with several obstinate yearlings at the barn door. I feel the cheatgrass burrs which have collected in my robe scrape the back of my legs and I bemoan the fact that I will spend hours picking them out later. I speak harshly to the steers with the argument that they do not belong in the barn – they believe otherwise, but eventually turn to leave. I hear my father shouting equally stern things to the other cattle as he moves down to meet us, pushing the heard away from the fresh sprouting grass in the yard and passing Wendell’s memorial garden as he does so. Dad is remarkably awake for five am, and then I remember that he hasn’t had a full night of sleep in decades and was likely already up and drinking his coffee when we called him.
Romance. My husband wraps his arm around my waist and I lean in for a few moments while the cows move through the open gate. He was (still is?) a city boy, but those days grow further and further away and he looks more and more at home on our little patch of ranchland and wilderness. There is a lopsided grin beneath his sleepy eyes that I recognize – the adrenaline is wearing off and the sense of belonging, of participating, is setting in. He’ll tell his friends about it this evening, I know, breaking up chatter before their Dungeons and Dragons game begins with the story of this morning. I rest my head against his shoulder and think about the way he will look when he tells them about it all. He isn’t a farmer, but sometimes I catch a glimpse in his face of something I often feel squarely in the center of my chest; a sense of awe and wonder that comes from putting down roots in this kind of life.
My mother walks down the driveway quietly a few minutes later, follows my gesture to the few stray cattle in the tall grass behind the barn, and moves out to meet them. She has and always will be softer than dad and I – it takes her a few moments of gentle insistence and a flutter of her hands and the three stragglers have been pushed to the gate. Her softness radiates, settles into the landscape, and I pull myself away from my thoughts to watch the sun rise on the family farm. Later the heat will be relentless and the desert summer will have me wishing I could scoop the whole place out of the ground with a spoon and deposit it somewhere cooler, but right now everything is perfect. Even the cows. I look over to see my father having a heated argument with a behemoth and am reminded of the snowy morning I ran to the house to get that animal’s very first meal. I doubt very much that even his massive head would fit in the arms of that police officer now. I watch as my mother passes behind them both, leading her strays to the gate with the kind of firm and loving presence that only a mother can employ, and I recall once again that there is nothing more human than empathy.
The series of volumes titled Farm Romance with my photo on the back are no longer in print, and you cannot find them on the Small Farmer’s Journal website. If you google that title, you will find instead over-dramatized artwork from the covers of romance novels that look like posters for what I like to call feel-good films: men in pristine white t-shirts with carefully manicured beards and clean, un-calloused hands carrying women in similarly un-remarkable and un-marred clothes through fields of corn at sunset. That is to say; the opposite of “farming, romanticized.” More’s the pity.
To me, the romance is in the clean, defined lines of a policeman’s uniform mussed by the wet and freezing body of a newborn calf. The romance is in the cheatgrass burrs in a cozy, fluffy robe. The softness is, in a poetic twist, found in the harshness of the farmer’s world, the starkness of the life we love and choose in contrast to the sterility of perfection. The real weight of those memories is in the margins, the details that elevate recalling them to reliving them.
You see, reality never feels quite as real as it does in those memories of the cold of a January snowstorm or the warmth of five am in June or the aliveness of a giggling child running down a red cinder road. Perhaps I glamorize the lifestyle I feel guilty of only living adjacent-to these days, or perhaps I am just melancholy about the days when I felt the most solid, the most present, the most real.
Or perhaps there is something more to the concept of Farm Romance. Allowing oneself to be swept away in the the awe and wonder of this often difficult livelihood is an act of enthusiastic participation in the deeply beautiful within the deeply practical. These and other memories of my life on the family farm behave as altar candles for the dark nights of my soul, when I feel the most far away from home. I have taken these mundane moments and believed that they are something worth remembering as act of empathy for my own humanity. They are a kindness to myself about the shape of my body and the shape of my days and the type of aliveness I feel rushing out, for better or worse, toward cows.
Farm. Life on the farm is something I chase, something I aspire to, something I hope for, and the stories of it’s struggles and joys are something I return to over and over again when I need them most. It’s that feeling of realness that keeps me company and gives me hope on the road of the prodigal farmchild. When I feel overwhelmed by the bills and the work and the uncertainty, when I am trapped at a desk or in a meeting or in my own head, I run to these memories and turn them over in my mind like a worry-stone.
Romance. As I write this, it is July and over 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I look out at the fields I walked and cursed and sweated in this morning from the comfort of my “cool” house – it is, at least, a few degrees cooler than it is in the shade. I was out there, this morning, carving some new memories, shaping some new stories, generating new farm romance to keep the fire burning in my heart. Or, perhaps, I was just changing wheel lines with my folks, who really could use more help than I can provide these days. I imagine by the time this arrives on the editor’s desk and is or isn’t read and is or isn’t chosen and is or isn’t published, the days will be cooler and the fall will be settling in around me. The writing and re-reading of this will be another candle on the altar of my soul that will carry me through winter, when I dream of days this warm and dry and wonder, as the storms begin to roll in, if there will be a new calf born in the January snow.
