Manure was a big part of his day. In colder months, when the cows lived inside, the manure flowed to a sort of pond; Brassard periodically pumped the pond’s contents into a special tank trailer that he towed behind the tractor across the fields, spraying the stuff onto the soil. The shed for the younger cows, those not yet lactating, was set up so the manure fell into straw on the floor, creating a more solid form that he moved around with the bucket on the front of his tractor. He piled it in a big U-shaped concrete berm he called the “stack,” and in spring he loaded it into another specialized trailer that flung the stuff out in lumps as he drove. Both activities trailed a plume of odor that filled the valley.
He bought hundreds of tons of feed grain, but he also raised a lot of his own cow food. Think of it as a recipe for a cake or loaf of bread: To a hundred and ten acres of soil, sift in manure and chemical fertilizers. Whisk with spades and harrows, mix in corn seed. Let stand until it rises. Baste as needed with insecticides or herbicides. Bake in sun.
This wasn’t sweet corn, so it was never harvested for human consumption. The cobs dried on the stalk, and in autumn the golden-brown fields were felled by a combine that chopped both cob and stalk and hurtled the mixed chaff into a high-sided trailer. The fields were left with uniform rows of stubble, and the stuff was blown into the silo to feed the cows during the winter.
Brassard also grew ninety acres of hay, which he cut several times a summer, left in windrows, and then raked to fluff and flip it so it dried uniformly. He baled some but rolled most of it into huge wheels that he wrapped in heavy white plastic, leaving the fields scattered with six-foot marshmallows.
Diz did grow vegetables, in a fenced plot right behind the house, but mostly they bought their green stuff at the Grand Union and kept it in the refrigerator or a freezer in the basement.
Diz was a stickler for “respectability,” keeping the house and immediate grounds well tended and pretty. She maintained a fringe of lilies and poppies and chrysanthemums, three mountainous lilacs, and some apple trees. Morning glories climbed a trellis near the door. She mowed the lawn and weed-whacked the taller grass along the road.
But the farmyard, just to the side of this island of order, wasn’t pretty. It was shapeless and often muddy and marked by the braided ruts made by tractor wheels. Tractors and tractor attachments sat haphazardly when not in use, along with various cars and Brassard’s truck—a massive red double-cab Dodge Ram that he washed often and took great pride in. Earnest’s regular pickup was often there, and sometimes his big old warhorse stake-side, the one he used for his tree business, decorated the place as well.
Beyond the farmyard and the near paddocks, though, lovely pasture opened up, green and inviting. Brassard’s cows grazed freely there during the warm months, contentedly lounging or strolling along meandering trails they’d worn in the grass to favorite grazing spots.
So cows, manure, machines, and corn are the most obvious elements of the small dairy farm. Diz didn’t even raise chickens—she used to but said she got sick of having to go out to the henhouse with the .22 to “pop” raiding weasels, raccoons, and fisher cats. She bought her eggs from a “hippie” couple who ran an organic vegetable farm about two miles down the road.
I wasn’t exactly disillusioned by the realities of Brassard’s operation, but for a while it did leave a hollow in me where the ideal farm used to glow. The six-year-old in me, you could say, mourned the dream’s passing.
And yet. And yet—another example of why we should be more patient with life—despite modern farming’s hard pragmatism and reliance on technology, I found that there is strength to be gained from having feet on the ground and hands (or at least tools) in the earth. Your psychic clock is set by the sun’s year and by its day, and I do believe our lives are better when we acknowledge and live by the power of those cycles. Otherwise, we get out of step with the world and with ourselves, our rhythms wrong, then wonder why we’re stumbling and off balance.
And I believe that we know ourselves to be real when we experience ourselves as creatures—as animals. Every woman I know who has had a baby, who has suffered through the burden of carrying and then the pain of birthing, says that this holding and cleaving wakened her to her life. I was there when my friend Terri gave birth, and I remember her screams and mounting fear when it seemed the baby’s head simply would not crown. I remember what the midwife said so fiercely to her, what pulled her out of her dive into despair: “You are a female animal! You know how to do this!”
And Terri was. And she did.
Similarly, waking to the red-tinted sky and getting your work-stiffened limbs moving, and going outside to the first tentative bird calls, and inhaling unapologetic animal and earth smells, and getting cold if it’s cold and wet if it’s raining, and looking a large fellow mammal in her long-lashed eye—these things are basic, natural, foundational. They make you strong, and at times they can still the jittery yammering of the urban monkey-mind. No meditation practice has ever granted me such long stretches of productive emptiness, such single-pointedness of mind.
Mucking out the parlor
