It is April 1973, and it is dark outside as I slide my feet out of bed at four o’clock in the morning and dress hurriedly in the brightly lit bathroom. Daddy is already out at the barn and expecting his children to show up to help with milking, feeding the growing cattle, and giving milk replacer to the younger calves.
I awaken Joseph, my brother who is fourteen and just a year younger than I, by banging on the bathroom wall that adjoins his bedroom. I hear a stirring, so I make my way downstairs and prepare for my mad dash through the dark to the barn to avoid the monsters that might be waiting for me. Paul, at seventeen and two years older than I, is allowed to continue sleeping and will appear later.
Our farm of one hundred twenty-five acres is located in the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania. A narrow blacktop road twists through the farmstead, its path wandering within twenty feet of the buildings. The white clapboard house sits several hundred feet down the road from the typical red-bank barn. The upper part of the barn houses tons of hay and straw placed there through hours of toiling together during the hot summer months.
The lower part is the milking area, which contains twenty-eight stanchions for holding the cows securely in place while they are milked. We are modern farmers in that the milk goes directly from the milking machine into a glass pipeline above the stanchions. The milk shoots through the glass tube to the holding jar in the milk house, is pumped through a filter, and then is dumped directly into the bulk milk tank. We milk around one hundred twenty-five cows twice each day. When the cows are not being milked, they are housed in a large free-stall barn. They are fed silage twice a day using a squirming auger that crawls down the middle of the feed bunk. The silage cascades down a chute from the two towering concrete silos that grace the landscape.
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