160 animal, vegetable, miracletrous course for June, a peak growing time for crops and pastures. A few
storms had gathered lately but then dissipated. The afternoon was still:
no car passed on the road, no tractor churned a field within earshot. It’s
surprising how selectively the human ear attends to human- made sounds:
speech, music, engines. An absence of those is what we call silence.
Maybe in the middle of a city, or a chemically sterilized cornfield, it really
is quiet when all the people and engines cease. But in that particular dot
on the map I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren
sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bick-
erings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized
by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent
bell as we tossed in our peas.
We heard mooing as thirty caramel brown Jersey cows came up the
lane. Elsie introduced her daughter Emily and son- in-law Hersh, who
waved but kept the cows on course toward the milking barn. Lily and I
shook pea leaves off our laps and followed. Emily and Hersh, who live
next door, do the milking every day at 5:00 a.m. and p.m. Emily coaxed the
cows like children into the milking parlor (“Come on, Lisette, careful with
your feet”) and warned me to step back from Esau, the bull. “He’s very
bossy and he doesn’t like women,” she said. “I don’t think the cows care
much for him either, for the same reason. But he sires good milkers.”
While Emily moved the cows through, Hersh attached and moved the
pipelines of the milking machine. During lulls the couple sat down to-
gether on a bench while their toddler Noah bumped through the milking
parlor and adjacent rooms, bouncing off doorjambs and stall sides in his
happy orbit. Lily helped him into a toddler swing that hung in the door-
way. The milking machine made a small hum but otherwise the barn was
quiet, save for the jostling cows munching hay. The wood of the barn
looked a hundred years old, dusty and hospitable. I couldn’t imagine, my-
self, having an unbreakable milking date with every fi ve o’clock of this
world, but Emily seemed not to mind it. “We’re so busy the rest of the day,
going different directions,” she said. “The milking gives us a time for
Hersh and me to sit a minute.”
A busy little pride of barn cats gathered near the bench, tails waving,
to lap up milk- pipe overflows collected in a pie plate. I watched a few