25th of December

Early on Christmas morn, before the sun had begun to rise above the snowy hills, I decided to leave the warmth of the house and trek across the yard to the dairy barn, as I had countless times before.  Across the fields, the neighbour's farms are all silent. Their barns are dark and stables all sit empty.

The milkhouse door creaks open, the bulk tank sits empty, and the pulsators all hang in a row, covered with cobwebs and silent forever more.  The calendar on the wall sits frozen at April 1994, the month when the cows left.

The stanchions are layered with dust and it was cold and forlorn without the warm and friendly cattle.  The wind howls down the empty silo.  

I reflect upon the memories of countless Christmas mornings in the warm barn, protected from the blowing snow, and think that Christmas without all that, just isn't the same.

December Manure Spreading

 

Manure Spreading

It was a crisp early December morning.  The sun was only just begining to rise in the horizon.  The ground was frozen with only a faint dusting of snow.  It was a great day for spreading manure. The bare frozen ground gave for a rough ride, but at least the tires of the Minneapolis Moline gas tractor wouldn't get stuck in either the snow or the mud.  

Dad always insisted on spreading as late into winter as we possible could before he started piling the manure in the barnyard.  This meant that on most years we were still spreading manure daily in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  We didn't yet have a loader tractor, so the manure was dumped straight from the litter carrier into to wooden side New Idea spreader.  The Louden litter carrier was a big time saver when it came to cleaning the stable, but it still required the gutters to be forked out by hand, and some larger farms in the county had already installed new mechanical barn cleaners made by companies like Patz, Acorn, and Jamesway.  The litter carrier hung on a single rail track that ran around the whole stable behind the cows, before heading out the big double door into the cowyard.

Once I had a full load in the spreader, I headed straight to the field to empty it before it froze solid.  I was thankful for my thick coat and woolen mitts as I struggled to stay warm perched up on the seat of the Minneapolis Moline as the gas engine purred away.  Once I was finished I knew I would be able to enjoy my breakfast in the warm farmhouse. 

First Snow

The snow started to fall in the early hours of the morning.  The snowflakes glistened in the warm light coming out of the barn windows as I brought the cows in from the barnyard.  The twenty-eight Holsteins didn't seem to mind the snow very much.  The barnyard had a concrete base and was sheltered on two sides by the corn crib and old horse stable, and on the other side by the stout stone foundation of the bank barn.  I slid open the big wooden door and the cows cordially followed each other into the warm barn.

Dad and I locked the cows up in the stanchions and started to put the milkers together.  We didn't have a pipeline yet, instead we used four Surge bucket milkers that we carried over to the milkhouse and dumped into the flat top Sunset bulk tank after every cow.  My brother was running corn silage out of the silo.  Dad had built the poured concrete silo in 1965, and we felt like it was the pinnacle of luxury with its Patz unloader.  It sure beat the back breaking chore of forking down silage from the old wooden silo. 

By the time we had finished morning milking, the whole countryside was covered with a crisp blanket of fresh white snow, covering the scene of brown dead fields that we had seen the day before.

Corn Picking

The Anderson farm had been in the family for several generations.  During the autumn of 1959, Old Mr. Anderson still milked 15 guernsey cows in the old red barn with the date "1902" stencilled in white letters just below the peak of the roof.  Every November, after we'd finished filling the two corn cribs on the home farm, Mr. Anderson would hire us to fill the old wooden drive-through crib that was nestled beside his pig sty.  My older brother Henry was always the one running the New Idea picker behind the Oliver 66.  My job was to bring the galvanized gravity wagons back to the Kewanee elevator that   dumped the ears of corn into the crib.  Perched on the wagon watching the corn tumble onto the rattling elevator, I had a pretty decent view of the farmstead.  The old white farm house, the barns, the rusty windmill with the missing blades, the hogs rooting around in the barnyard, and old Mr. Anderson himself in front of the milkhouse, loading milk cans into the back of his Studebaker truck.  Further out I could see the golden guernsey cows out on pasture and the colorful leaves of the trees along the back fencerow.  I couldn't see Henry behind the tall corn, but knew we only had one or two wagons left to fill this morning before we'd be done for the season.

Now, decades later, I sometimes wish I could be that 14 year old boy picking  corn in rural Illinois again.