THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506040036
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
My daughters milked a cow last weekend.
They did, that is, if you call putting your hand on top of a farmer's hand while he milked a cow, milking a cow.
And I do.
While my husband and I oohed and aahed, and took pictures and patted our pockets for more 50-cent tickets to milk the patient Guernsey, I wondered what my father would think.
He grew up on a farm, back when milking cows was considered an everyday chore, a drudgery.
``You paid them to milk a cow?'' I can hear him saying. ``And you didn't even get to take the milk home?''
Not only that, but we had to stand in line to do it. I'm sure we would have whitewashed a fence had Tom Sawyer been around.
Every time we go to the country, whether it's to pick berries or milk cows, I always picture my father standing back behind the tree line holding his sides laughing.
Yes, these wily farmers have figured out a way to make us suburban folk do the work. Charging us to do things my father couldn't make me do for free when I was a kid.
That would have been on rolling land in mid-Missouri, where our family has lived since long before the Civil War. Generation after generation of farmers has coaxed up soybeans, wheat, hay from that land. Many are still there, buried under tombstones so weathered you can't read them anymore.
My father is the last generation of our family to know that land so well, to be so closely linked to the soil. He knows it like a friend. Knows where the land dips into ravines, knows where the creek cuts through pasture, where the walnut trees are hidden, where the fishing is best.
He marks time, not so much by calendar as by rainfall. ``That was the year we had that bad drought in the summer, remember?'' he'll say. Or, ``Musta been 1973, when we had that blizzard in April.''
I rarely notice whether it's a wet or dry year, and I sure can't keep decades of weather logs in my head like he can.
As a kid, I turned down many a request to go tromping through the woods and fields he knows so well. Growing up in a dusty farm town near there, I measured success by how far away I could get from that land - how high a building, how big a city, how far from the furrows of dirt.
But now that I've reached that air-conditioned office in the city, I keep looking back. Especially now that I have children. On weekends, I seek out places with gentle horizons and the quiet rustle of trees. Places like Bergey's Dairy, a Mennonite farm in Chesapeake where cattle graze, and stalks of corn flutter in the wind. Where snorting horses cavort through pastures dotted with yellow flowers.
Or Hickory Blueberry Farm, tucked away in south Chesapeake, a place where blueberries roll right off the branches in summer, gently poinging into plastic buckets. Or Henley's vegetable farm in Pungo where you can take a wagon ride in the fall to pick pumpkins under crisp blue skies.
I make these forays to water the rural roots of my family, roots that could easily dry up some day. Knowing full well I will never know the land like my father does.
I guess that's why I pay to milk the cows and ride the ponies and trundle through cornfields that I would have scorned as a kid.
And imagine my father standing back there beyond the tree line, laughing. by CNB