When You Don't Hear from a Farmer...

She’s trying to get her cow mad so she’ll get up and have a will to live.

She’s carrying a wet (2 weeks overdue) calf up to the barn where she won’t shiver.

She’s rejoicing to see a resurrected mama following up the hill, with the just-aggravating-enough jersey steer on her tail.

She’s deciding whether to tell you about the new calf (Ellis, after the town in Kansas where her grandma grew up) now or after she learns to suck.

She’s watching overwhelmed while the vet shows her how to intubate a weak calf and milk a lying cow.

She’s bottle feeding a calf between her own knees every 4 hours – all through Mother’s Day – until she can literally get her feet under her.

She’s making 5 separate trips to Tractor Supply and out-of-the way Farm and Fleets for bottles and calcium supplements.

She’s hearing the first bird break the night before the dawn does. She’s milking under the night sky and spotting a shooting star.

She’s calling a vet a second time for milk fever.

She’s learning what it means to pray single-mindedly.

She’s whooping for joy when she and a helpful neighbor administer a loaf-sized calcium pill two feet into the back of her cow’s mouth.

She’s easily remembering to sleep and hardly remembering to eat. (Bente nurses her with a meal and an inspirational speech three times a day.)

She’s chuckling when she milks the mastitic teat and the calf is vigorously chortling on the other side, and feeling like her bottle baby is all grown up.

She’s driving home for the first time in four days.

She’s scared of giving verdicts.

She’s treating an infection. She’s developing a sudden appreciation for James Herriot while learning to give intramuscular injections, aspirins in porridge, and take temperature.

She’s so grateful to have landed in a tradition where she can go to Church and know that the full story is bigger than hers.

She’s returning her injured vet’s favor by helping him move furniture in his house.

She’s caring for the tomatoes she neglected while tending to the cow, and caring for the texts she neglected while tending to the tomatoes.

She’s tearing up and wondering if she has the muster to milk every two hours and hot pack her cow’s udder for second full week, this time with less hope.

She’s milking again in the pasture, attention moving from the flies to the songbirds, the pus to the locust blossom fragrance, the heat to how nice sweat feels in the breeze, the cow and her terrible infection to the calf-turned racecar speeding from one end of the pasture to the other.

She’s wondering if you, visitor in the sunshine, want to hear how thin the thread is between life and death.

She’s realizing, in the end, that Life wants to Live. A sick cow can quickly become an improving cow. A dead cow is coupled with a romping calf beside her. Death and vigor are both gifts offered to that undefeatable Life.

A poem I’ve loved for many years became poignant for me in this time of late spring and this effort to receive what is given. Here it is:

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s

almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving

their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate

sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees

that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Ada Limón

I wish you all the blessing of continuous living.