Photo by cottonbro from Pexels
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes the keeper’s observation that Wisconsin numbers work out to mean that for every dairy cow in the state there are five people; and none of those five will have anything to do with milking the cow.
As it now stands, while there is some movement to corporations doing the milking with automatic cow-operated-no-people-involved machines that cost thousands of dollars, most of the current Wisconsin milking is now done by immigrant farm hands who came to the state for a better life.
Family farms that once made a warm social quilt out of the state disappear by the hundreds every year, and unlike the case in the Netherlands, there is no government help to curb the corporate takeover trend.
As one with a history that goes back to sitting on a stool with his head resting against a cow’s side, while pulling at her udder to squirt milk into a milk pail, the keeper bemoans the trend, even when he recalls the instance of a cow named Longlegs using one of her long legs to kick him into a manure-filled gutter after a fishhook in the keeper’s cap pricked her flank. The keeper’s cap was still hanging by the fishhook when the keeper’s father came to the rescue, much to the relief of the keeper, and to Longlegs.
The keeper’s father ruined his parental heroics by laughing, which remains as one of the youthful psychological traumas that the keeper blames for the mental moguls that threaten his balance as he schusses down life’s great hill.
If the other four Wisconsin residents assigned to his cow would step forward, the keeper would take his turn at doing the milking, sans cap, of course.
