When writing a blog, I always fear that my mother will read it and later tell me that what I wrote was not the way it happened at all. Well, my mother won't be reading it anymore but my children do and they have now taken Grandma's place. On that note I feel I need to put a disclaimer in here. "What I have written, I have written, if I go back and change anything, it will mess up a really good story!" :)
Life continued as we struggled to make ends meet while Rob struggled to farm half the county. I enjoyed helping out in the barn. It was probably the nicest thing about the farm, till we got our new house. The barn was cool in the summer with the doors open at either end and warm in the winter, with the doors shut and the cows tied in. It was a perfect place for children to learn to rollerskate, and ride bike. The gutter behind the cows held a certain fascination for toddlers and little boys. It was deeper than most gutters so it was generally pretty messy when the little people fell in.
We had glass pipeline, with four milkers. Watching the milk flow through the pipeline, into the receiver jar, then empty into the milk tank, kept the children entertained while we were milking.
We had several years when the crops did poorly from lack of rain. We were running out of feed for the cows, and money to keep everything going. We decided to sell the cows and machinery. So in the fall of 1988, a tractor trailer backed up to the barn and took the cows to a new home.
Rob worked for a local dairy for several months till he found a job about an hour north of us, in the little town of Loysville, in Perry County. He again worked for a dairy farmer. He liked the work but he missed being his own boss. After a year, he found another small farm to rent, several miles away outside the little burg of Alinda. It was situated back a long lane, between two very high hills. We moved onto the farm in the Spring of 1990. My Dad again supplied Rob with his second herd of donut fed cows. The children loved it when Pap would bring a load of cows. He would also stop at the donut shop and pick up a barrel of stale donuts on his way! They would get first dibs!
This time around I didn't have to help as much at the barn, mostly because there was no pipeline. The barn was equipped with a dumping station and bucket milkers. When the cow was finished, you would dump the bucket into a portable tank, it would then be pumped into the bulk tank sitting in the milk house. Even in the 90's this was very unique. It was probably the last of its kind! Rob told me this was how they milked at his home before I came on the scene. I had never seen anything like it, so I was as fascinated with it as much as the children.
There was only 60 acres to this farm so Rob found a few more acres to farm from neighboring farmers. I worried about him farming on the hills, it scared me to watch him. One fall they rolled a silage wagon while they were chopping corn. During the winter I wouldn't let the children sled down the hill on the north side of the house, I was afraid they would come crashing through the window and end up on the kitchen table! As is the case when your children grow up, I found out recently they did sled down that hill. They made a barrier in the snow so they would stop before they got to the kitchen window. One trip they crossed over the barrier and had to bail off at the last minute.
Our water came from a springhouse. The winter of 1993-94 was the coldest winter we could ever remember. The temperatures dipped to -23, and froze up the springhouse. Rob and I both got pneumonia, and we ended up with about 30 inches of snow that made the blizzard of '93 famous! On the throes of the blizzard came the ice. I was eight months pregnant and became housebound! I was like a caged lion so my children tell me!
After a very difficult pregnancy and delivery, Amanda was born on Feb 18th. This time Rob didn't go out to milk his cows, they had to wait for quite a long time that night. After Rob's brother was finished milking his own cows he came over the mountain and milked ours.
Our herd of cows was growing, so we started looking for a bigger farm to rent. When Amanda was six weeks old we moved lock, stock, and barrel about an hour southwest, to our present dwelling place. We added the landlords cows to our herd which pushed the number up to about 60 cows. Leah was 13, Jesse 11, Debbie 8, and Amanda 6 weeks.
And this is where we all learned to milk cows! This farm was quite modernized compared to what we had worked with before. We now had automatic take-offs. When the cow was done the milker came off. I truly enjoyed milking cows. The children were not quite as taken with it but they did it because they had to! (I have to add that or I will hear about it later!! :))) )
Life became a challenge with a baby and a farm. Leah decided she would rather stay in the house and keep the baby, than milk. As the baby grew that became an even bigger challenge. She had an uncanny way of disappearing. One day we walked out of the barn and found her perched on the peak of the milkhouse roof. Her favorite hideout was behind the pile of cow feed, eating it. By the time she was three we didn't need a babysitter in the house anymore, she was usually perched on the stalls above the cows while we were milking.
As the children grew older their responsibilities became more challenging. I never gained anymore experience beside milkmaid. Leah was more adventurous. When Rob bought an old dump truck to haul silage from the field to the trench, the truck became Jesse's baby and Leah learned to pack trench with the tractor. Jesse hated milking cows, and everybody hated milking with him so he got the job of feeding the cows while we milked.
~ to be continued
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