Our AI guy got back into town late yesterday and came racing over to check Phoebe out for us.

Nope. Phoebe isn’t pregnant.

Our whole family was out in the barn with him and Phoebe. All the children gazed at him quietly while he did his business and then made his announcement. He felt bad. Said usually “backyard cows” take easily and that he has never had this happen before where he inseminated three times only to end up with no results.

We discussed bulls a little bit. “One thing they have over AI is accurate heat detection,” he said. (This very nice man does AI - artificial insemination - for a living and travels up and down from here to Florida for his company doing it.) We suspect that there may be more to it than that but obviously even just accurate heat detection is an important factor. So is availability. So, perhaps, are other more subtle factors as is always the case with the natural process from our point of view.

He mentioned how this was bad news for a Valentine’s Day a few times.

I said as how at least we never dried her off completely. I was always unwilling to dry her off since I didn’t know for sure more milk would be forthcoming later so we just cut back to milking her once a day. We are getting about a gallon a day now which seems like a lot to folks who don’t milk cows or make butter or cheese or sell kefir grains or feed six children. But it isn’t a lot. It isn’t nearly enough. We will try to build her milk supply back up in the spring.

And lick our wounds. And come up with a new plan.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Perhaps we are just unwilling to let go of a cherished idea, or perhaps we have a cow who does things in a slow, drawn out way, but we are still hoping for a calf. The primary reason for this is probably that having Phoebe turn out to not be pregnant at all would be such a blow to us in so many ways that we choose to continue hoping that she is. We have no way to resolve this “reaching for hope” into “finding the fact” so we remain strongly in the “reaching for hope” camp.

Our AI guy said he would come over a couple of weeks ago and check her out for us but he never did and he is out of town a lot. My husband meanwhile found a number of useful web sites about internally checking cows because I am more than willing to put my hand in - well, arm in - to check her out. I did an internal check on her a couple of years ago (when she was overdue and was being given a shot to induce her) but that was with help. I tried once with her a few weeks ago already but couldn’t understand what I was feeling. After reading through various web pages, I learned that the baby drops out of reach in a cow anyway, and the other signs you would look for internally to confirm pregnancy were things I didn’t really understand and that were not recommended for students to do (these were vet school pages). So we are left with outward signs which are not necessarily easy to read on a cow. As our nine year old commented, “If only she could talk to us.”

My poor husband is going nuts with this. Even back when I was pregnant, we of course knew there was a baby coming at least but didn’t know when exactly. That not knowing when exactly was very stressful for him. I could at least busy myself with trying to cope with the end of pregnancy whereas all the husband really has to do is fret about when the birth will happen. Waiting is hard. Paul is at least getting quite an education about cows and pregnancy and heat and so on because he keeps researching hoping to find hints. I know that the information he is gleaning now will help us in the future as there is much to know about these matters. Especially for us - we had one cow calve unexpectedly when no one knew she was pregnant and none of the experts involved recognized her condition at all even when their attention was drawn to it and our other cow (Phoebe) whom we purchased just before her last calving went late and the dairy folks came over and gave her a shot to induce her. So we have unusual experiences with bovine birth - 2 - and normal experiences with bovine birth - 0.

One day, Paul came in and made a list. I thought his list was interesting and useful. Here it is:

CONS (i.e. signs that she isn’t pregnant)
1. No clear indication of heat;
2. Not getting big enough;
3. We could not feel fetus by internal check(he wrote this before we learned that we couldn’t feel it anyway);
4. Fiona’s erratic mounting behaviors (that is our heifer);
5. Phoebe is well over due;
6. Phoebe mounted Fiona once which she never does pregnant or otherwise

PROS (i.e. signs that she may be pregnant)
1. Months ago she kicked at her belly frequently;
2. No visible signs of heat all these months;
3. A few weeks ago made maternal sounds and had maternal behaviors we have only seen in her back when she first had Fiona;
4. Her belly is much bigger than it used to be;
5. She has put on well over 100 pounds since we last weighed her using a weight tape;
6. Her posture is different than we have ever seen it - her spine isn’t as straight and she holds her tail differently much of the time;
7. She seems to be lying down more than usual;
8. When standing and chewing her cud, she shifts her weight a little here and there rather than standing stock still as she usually does;
9. We tried doing a “baby bump” which is sort of punching at the flank and feeling for a push back. I wasn’t strong enough to do it. Paul did it and knew he felt a push back but couldn’t quite make out if it were a fetus or just incredibly strong cow muscles. It apparently takes practice to perfect doing a baby bump.

Even though the PROS list is longer, the exercise is still totally inconclusive for us. Paul tried another on-line due date calculator and got a different date than the one I used earlier! Sigh. Apparently she is not as overdue as we thought. Not quite two weeks over yet which is well within normal limits.

So what does all of this add up to? Who knows. It is honing our observational skills which is a plus. It is adding considerable stress to our situation which is a minus. It is leaving us humble in the face of Nature which is as it should be. It leaves us pondering the complexities of trying to accomplish these things more simply in the future. None of this feels particularly natural or self-reliant. There has to be a better way but dairy bulls are supposed to be the meanest creatures on earth. The difficulty of this fact is apparently why artificial insemination (AI) was invented in the first place. Well, back to being humble and waiting, waiting, waiting.

I guess Phoebe will keep us all posted.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I recently came across the following very interesting comment. I can say for a fact that he didn’t have homesteading in mind when he said it, but homesteading is certainly teaching me some of the truth of his sentiment.

[He] always felt that the secrets of Nature are always shrouded in mystery. Birth is not for science according to him. Birth is a mystery. And the moment that mystery is opened and made a subject of science, in a very certain sense, when a mystery is exploded, it is made profane, it is without dignity, it becomes something as [He] used to say, ‘a market topic’ for conversation – a topic reduced to the roads, to the streets for discussion, for conversation, and for condemnation.
He, the Hookah and I p. 260

With us humans, you generally know when the ladies are pregnant and it has definitely become something profane these days. Some feel the sacredness at the moment of birth itself but, other than that, pregnancy and birth are definitely ‘a market topic’ for conversation and there is all sorts of intrusion all along the way.

Now you take goats - you cannot tell when goats are pregnant no matter how expert you are. You basically have to know when they have been bred and then go from there with your planning and expectations. Goats keep their pregnancies to themselves.

It turns out, to my surprise, that cows can do this too. Our first cow, the inestimable red and white Dutch Belted Pezra, was a perfect example. We bought her from friends (husband was a rancher from way back) with whom she had had a calf and who were milking her for some time. They got tired of having to be home for milking time twice a day and sold her to us, whereupon we milked her for quite a long time. Suddenly in the middle of that summer, she basically went dry. No one knew why. Crazy red headed behavior maybe? A couple of months later, her udder suddenly ballooned up in size. Yikes. The rancher-from-way-back previous owner came and looked at her. The dairy managers from whom the rancher had bought her came over and looked at her. They all shook their heads and scratched their chins but had no idea what was going on. We then attempted to treat her for mastitis in a dry cow which is bad news. Meanwhile, being desperate for more milk and having fallen in love with cows. we went and bought Pezra’s older sister who was bred and due to calve three weeks hence.

We made the preparations for two cows. We brought Phoebe, the older sister, over and the two cows got reacquainted and settled in. We settled in too to wait for Phoebe to calve and get milk for the family once again. On a memorable Saturday morning about two weeks before Phoebe was due, my husband went out to the ladies their morning hay. He came tearing back into the house shouting that a calf’s leg was sticking out of the back of Pezra. Yup. She was calving. Yup. She had been pregnant all that time and none of the experts involved had any idea even though they had been examining her abdomen and udder closely. (I, on the other hand, had often gazed at her going into the shed to be milked in previous months and had thought, “Wouldn’t it be a kicker if she turned out to be pregnant?” I guess ‘market conversations’ and intuition are two very different things!)

So we helped Pezra birth her breech calf and then two weeks later Phoebe calved pretty much on her own at which point we drowned in about 8 gallons a day of unplanned for milk. Let’s just say that I made a LOT of cheese and fast forward to the present.

Phoebe is a practically perfect cow in all ways except that she has “silent heats.” You can’t tell when she is in heat so it is tough to get her bred. Our AI (artificial insemination) guy bred her three times and thought that finally with the third attempt that it took. We thought so too.

We waited patiently through gestation. We recently found a due date calculator for cows and ascertained that her due date was January 23. About a week before that, her heifer went into heat (now this gal has nothing silent about her heats - she turns this place upside down sometimes) and Phoebe seemed to respond. I mean she responded more than we have ever seen her do. And we panicked. What? Is Phoebe not pregnant after all? Is she in HEAT? Now that we are so close to the due date will there be no calf and no milk? You see, it just isn’t perfectly obvious whether or not she is pregnant. It seems incredible really because pregnancy is such a huge thing for us but there you have it. For cows (as well as goats and perhaps all other mammals for all I know), pregnancy is still sacred in some mysterious, natural, inscrutable way. If you are just a friendly kind of human companion to the cow (as opposed to a super duper professional/industrial human to the cow), you can easily have no idea about something as essential and basic as pregnancy in them.

The next day, Phoebe suddenly acted very maternal with her now 2 year old heifer. It would paint a more accurate picture to say that she was suddenly psychotically maternal. Chased our dog all over the pasture. Made that sound that cows only make to their young. Flipped out when she didn’t know exactly where her heifer was at all times. Milking time was … well, wow. Wild. We have only seen her that way once (as she is otherwise the most serene and placid cow you could ever meet) and that was when she had her heifer two years ago. She was also overdue for that heifer so … maybe there was hope. Maybe she really was pregnant after all? What a roller coaster. What crazy, crazy cow times. And then a couple of days later that behavior vanished and Phoebe was back to her old serene self and has remained so ever since.

So here we are on February 3rd. She is 11 days past her due date - if in fact she is pregnant at all. You see, we aren’t just waiting for her to calve. We are waiting to find out if she is pregnant! That is a lot of waiting to be doing all at once, I can tell you.

I think this is why people can be so quick to move what is naturally sacred and mysterious over to the profane, measure it, talk about it, control it category of things. Waiting is not easy. Accepting natural consequences and phenomena isn’t easy. Wondering how you are going to feed your children if the cow isn’t going to calve isn’t easy. In fact uncertainty in a faithless, ritual-less, community-starved, unnatural world is not only not easy, it is really, really hard.

And that is where we are. We are waiting. We are waiting on the mystery whichever way it goes. And how we will move forward after that particular mystery resolves itself is also a mystery in more ways than I can even count or would want to mention.

There are mysteries everywhere in our lives together here when I stop to think about it and such has been the case for a long, long time. I have tended to experience them as excruciating uncertainties but I think now as I am writing this that I should redefine these uncertainties for what they objectively, naturally, spiritually are -mysteries.

Furthermore, instead of thinking of the mystery of our lives as nothing but conundrums both exhausting and bewildering, I think I must now choose to think of them devotedly as sacred. What will emerge? Only He knows.

Meanwhile, I am keeping my eye on Phoebe.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

The beautiful red and white, highly intelligent Pezra was our first cow. It was she who broke us into cows, who gave us the sweetest milk we had ever tasted, and who taught us that you have to work with cows not by attempting to overpower them but by always being one step ahead of them. As this also applies to parenting, this is a useful lesson to be constantly learning in the field.

For me who never had so much as a goldfish growing up, it was Pezra who encouraged me to stand my ground as the caretaking human and not be intimidated by something as measly as a 1200 pound body and a sometimes crafty, opinionated mind! For my husband, it was Pezra who gave him the look when she first arrived that anointed him as “farmer.” It was Pezra and my knee injury that gave Carolyn the opportunity to move more deeply into farm life by learning how to milk the cow only I otherwise milked. This has created a depth, a skill, and a perspective unusual in a girl whose default focus is on reading classics, writing poetry and singing opera. That Pezra also loved classical music and particularly Mozart was a boon for Carolyn. It was Pezra who taught the younger children to form a relationship with a very large animal that is based upon respect, skill building, intuition and an appropriate degree of caution.

While we will always be grateful for Pezra, the time suddenly came when she had to take her ministry elsewhere. The amount of land we have simply cannot support as many animals as we have running on it. I asked a local acquaintance how we might go about listing her and he suggested craigslist. He knew others who had searched for and found rare breeds through craigslist. We listed her last Friday and had emails waiting for us the next morning from a young woman who commented that she gasped when she read the listing. That she knew enough to know that this was a special opportunity and was open enough to share her immediate reaction to discovering this opportunity of having a Dutch Belted family milk cow endeared her to me at once!

Psychology talks about a “goodness of fit” between parent and child. I have observed that a goodness of fit is also crucial between humans and their animal companions/livestock. Life is just better when all the parts of your living system fit together in some kind of nameless, energetic way. My conversation on the phone with this woman indicated to me that there definitely would be a goodness of fit between her and her family and Pezra. I also find that people who work hard to obtain unprocessed milk, appreciate rare breeds, avail themselves of rotational grazing and know about issues related to grass feeding and minerals and so on are just neat. They have to be different because it takes so much effort to break industrial molds and head towards what is natural. This was the case here too so we had an interesting conversation.

Later that day, this woman arrived with her two young boys and her two parents who are cow people. Oh, and with a stock trailer. Her dad checked Pezra out. We all chatted. They conferenced and within a short period of time Pezra was loaded onto their trailer and was off to her new home. There are times when everything aligns and what could be a complex or time consuming transition becomes stunningly simple and swift. This was one of those times.

It was really hard to lure Pezra up into their trailer and hard to hear its back gate clang shut. It was hard to see her disappear down our mountain road. It is hard now for me to write about it. However, it is wonderful to know that she will be cared for thoughtfully and effectively. It is wonderful to know that Pezra will be nourishing another family. It is wonderful to know that Pezra will be in a place where many children will see her during the summer at their summer camp. Hopefully the word about Dutch Belted’s will now spread just a little bit faster.

Pezra’s new owner was kind enough to email us the next morning with the cheery news that Pezra fit right in. She even sent us a photo of Pezra with her older Jersey, Buttercup.

What a photo! Pezra looks like she has been there for ages. We certainly wish all success to everyone and everything there.

It has been tough looking out at the pasture this past week and not seeing Pezra’s red glow. However, I can almost hear the land breathing a sigh of relief and I find that milking one cow instead of two somehow cuts the work by more than 50%. Very odd. That will all be made up for when our goats kid in the next few days to week, though! Always some kind of transition happening here on the homestead. It is good. It keeps you supple inside. It reminds you of the fact that each living thing is a unique individual with its own destiny, functioning and developing within a subtle web of relationships of which we humans only form a part. May the Higher Intelligence guide us all.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

This is the video of Leslie’s post that is below this one. The video shows the hen in the Pezra’s feed bucket and the resulting egg.

A couple of weeks ago, we bought a few more older hens from a beautiful Mennonite farm here in Floyd County. A few of these hens have their own ideas about where to lay eggs. I guess the like larger spaces because they don’t lay in their cozy hen house but in the much bigger milking barn. Not only do several of these hens prefer the milking barn, they apparently claim it as theirs and only tolerate the presence of cows being milked under protest.

We are in the habit of letting the hens out first and then working our way over the milking barn to start milking. However, these new hens are so insistent on laying in the feed trough (which in our case is always full of hay), that they get in and around the cow being milked. Sometimes the cow has to knock the hen out of the way which can have repercussions down at the milking bucket end of things. So we have been trying to milk first and then let the hens out. This morning we forgot and the hens were right in with Pezra while I milked her.

The first hen to arrive actually hopped into the feed trough despite the enormous animal that was also using it. Amazingly Pezra tolerated the hen sitting on her hay.

Meanwhile other hens are lurking in the wings, so to speak, for their crack (so to speak) at the feed trough. They are all under Pezra’s legs and milling around the barn creating a bit of racket.

Once I put Pezra back in the pasture, I returned to discover that the hen had actually laid an egg while Pezra was eating right next to her and the hen on deck was already hopping into the feed trough.

Just one cozy homestead here in the mountains, I guess. As with other aspects of family life, it is kind of more fun that way with everyone and everything involved in everything together.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Natural, healthy environments radiate wellbeing in every possible way. When we leave the stress of our artificially loud, unnatural worlds and go out into the woods, or to a semi-secluded beach, or to a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon, we always breathe a huge sign relief. Modern societies and cities give off so many unpleasant, and in some cases, assaultive vibrations that wreak havoc on our human systems that escaping them even briefly shifts us toward health. Even just electricity gives off a powerful and often destabilizing vibration that negatively affects us all, never mind the rest of what we are confronted with. To cope with these daily challenges of modern life, we tend to become hard and desensitized.

I experienced a profound overall shift in health in myself and family since returning to the country a few years ago. There are many great sights, sounds and smells out here that have a positive effect on the human system. After some time of living with them, you find yourself softening and getting stronger all at the same time. Your energy level picks up. Your thought patterns clear.

The idea came to me a few weeks ago to share some of the sounds of winter on our homestead. You can hear them on the videos below.

I have always been an animal person. In my youth I wanted to be a naturalist or a veterinarian. For years, I used our set of encyclopedias and the library to study one animal after another. One animal I had little interest in at that time was the cow. I guess I thought cows were boring and unimportant because it looked to me like all they did was stand around in pastures. However, my ideas about cows changed dramatically two years ago when our first family cow came to live with us. Now I understand that cows are one of the key animals supporting human civilization.

The cow’s generosity is one of Nature’s special gifts to humanity. She embodies the Divine Mother’s gracious qualities of generosity, patience nurturance, tolerance and grounding. Cows have a very earthy quality that gives you a sense of security when you are around them. All of us here experience a great sense of wellbeing during milking times, no matter what state we are in when we start out. Through spending so much time with them, the cow has become for me the Earth Mother’s representative. I feel blessed to some living with me on my property. Here is an interesting essay about the attributes and the value of cows from a Hindu perspective. While we are not Hindu, we have discovered the truth of some of what is written here through personal experience.

I notice that how a culture treats its cows reflects in some way how it treats its women and how it relates with the feminine principle in general. In our society we generally disrespect and exploit our cows in spite of how many of them we have. In the corporate mentality that now dominates the world and reigns supreme here in America, cows are treated as a commodity. Agri-business has focused exclusively on a select few breeds as the corporate the ideal for serving the modern marketplace. Many of the remaining heritage breeds carefully developed over hundreds of years are disappearing so rapidly that they are now categorized as rare breeds. (Please see the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy for more information.)

The industry ideal these days for the beef cow appears to be the Black Angus while the ideal for the dairy industry is the Holstein. The Holstein is a tall cow with a slim frame and long legs and an over-developed mammary system. She gives an enormous amount of lower quality milk -as much as eight gallons a day when they first calve. Due to their being over-bred and cared for in unnatural ways, the Holstein is prone to disease and doesn’t carry a parasite load well. As is generally the case in the cattle industry, Holsteins and other corporate favored breeds are routinely injected with health-stealing antibiotics and hormones. Just as within human bodies, the harmful bacteria and viruses are becoming resistant to the antibiotics. The majority of corporate cows are not given access to the pasture which provides their natural food but are kept in small feedlots where they are fed grains, usually corn, which they are not equipped to digest. Their inefficient digestion of the grain leads to increased disease as well as excess burping up of the methane gas which contributes to global warming. Their enforced grain diet and cramped quarters also increases the incidence of harmful e coli bacteria. Both beef and dairy cows are a cog in the corporate assembly line for slaughter and milk extraction respectively. The cow which has been respected and celebrated worldwide for thousands of years is now treated as an exploitable commodity. Just like nature, the earth and woman herself, the cow is considered an object, something that you mold the way you want, from which you take what you want when you want it and then thrown away when the one exploited/desired quality diminishes with maltreatment and age. This attitude of ingratitude will be the downfall of our civilization.

For us as a family, our cows came to us through the various efforts of both the progressive and conservative communities where we were living. My wife, Leslie, had researched for years about the benefits of raw milk so a family cows was a definite part of our general plan for building a homestead. Leslie joined a food co-op and picked our orders up at a very nice, conservative Mennonite woman’s house. The woman told Leslie about a family that was practically giving away raw milk because they had far more than they could use. Leslie contacted them right away and began to get delicious milk from them by the gallon. Months later they decided they wanted to sell their milk cow and figured we were likely candidates for taking her on. They gave us a few options for trying out milking her ourselves and seeing if we wanted to buy her.

At the time we had just seen the excellent PBS Nature episode entitled Holy Cow which tells the story of how the cow has domesticated human beings. I had also recently gone on a trip to India. At an ashram there, I noticed a cow that was living with no available pasture and was lying on a cement slab when I saw her. I walked up to her. We looked at each other and had some sort of a moment; there was a subtle exchange. At that moment I knew we were going to purchase the cow.

Needing a second cow a year later, we went to the Twin Oaks intentional community nearby our home. This progressive community was where our cow, Pezra, originally came from and where we ended up purchasing her older sister, Phoebe. Ironically the Mennonite woman and Twin Oaks were both are on the same road, only several miles apart. Both of the parties we purchased the cows from were helpful in setting up our homestead and getting us adjusted to our new duties. So for us the cows were “uniters” as they created a convergence of two otherwise polarized communities.

We are still milking our two cows, Phoebe and Pezra, twice a day. Since their arrival we have learned how to make butter, mozzarella, panir, ghee, kefir, kefir cheese, kefir mascarpone, feta and a few other things with their wholesome milk. We switched our cows over to being grass-fed only with the sole addition of an excellent mineral mix. Our cows are the rare Dutch Belted or Lakenvelder breed that has only 200 registered in the United States. Ours are not pure bred and are not registered but they are wonderful nevertheless and give delicious, easily digested milk.

There is a part of this experience that is difficult to translate into words but I think it has to do with the fact that people and cows have been together for centuries. In many ways, for us having cows has been like coming home. There is something familiar and nourishing about being with them. This goes beyond food or anything else that the cows physically provide. It has more to do with the fact that they have a presence, a condition, a vibrational quality that is very beneficial to the human experience. I have nothing but gratitude for these cows and their heifers coming into our lives.

Attached is the first in a series of 12 videos of “A Day in the Life of Our Cows” and a link to our channel for the last nine.

All the best,

Paul

In the course of reading a lovely old book to the children last night, we came across an unexpected reference to Dutch Belted cows. This book has now become even more special to us and gives us a living link to the land and times whence our noble cows came.

One of the great joys of homeschooling and using a Charlotte Mason approach in general and Ambleside Online in particular is that the children and I share the very best literature together constantly. It is pleasantly instructive for all of us and deepens the bond between us as we step together into one world after another and use our minds and hearts to explore it. Ah bliss …

Yesterday’s Classics is a business that serves Ambleside Online among others as it publishes books long out of print from “the golden age of children’s literature” which they cite as being from about 1880 to 1920. When I last placed an order for necessities, I splurged and bought a copy of The Dutch Twins as well (scroll down the page and you will find it about halfway down on the right). I just couldn’t resist it, for some reason, and now I am so glad. It is written simply enough that they can almost read it for themselves but we are having such fun sharing it by my reading it to them. How I love hearing their delighted laughter when the twins do something especially cute and familiar.

Last night we read about the morning these soft cheeked 5 year old twins spent with their mother:

“I shall be glad of help,” said Vrouw Vedder, “because Grandma is coming, and I want everything to be very clean and tidy when she comes. I’m going first to the pasture to milk the cow. You can go with me and keep the flies away. That will be a great help.”

Vrouw Vedder put a yoke across her shoulders, with hooks hanging from each end of it. Then she hung a large pail on one of the hooks, and a brass milk can on the other. She gave Kat a little pail to carry, and Kit took some switches from the willow tree in the yard, with which to drive away the flies. Then they all three started down the road to the pasture. …

When they reached the pasture, there was Mevrouw Holstein waiting for them. Mevrouw Holstein was the cow’s name. Kit and Kat named her.

Vrouw Vedder tucked up her skirts - and that was quite a task, for she wore a great many of them - and sat down on a little stool. Kit and Kat stood beside her and waved their willow wands and said, “Shoo!” to the flies ; and Vrouw Vedder began to milk.

Mevrouw Holstein had eaten so much of the green meadow grass that Vrouw Vedder filled both the big pail and the brass can, and the little pail too, with rich milk.

“I shall have enough milk to make butter and cheese,” said Vrouw Vedder. “There are no cows like our Dutch cows in all the world, I believe.”

“O Mother, are you going to churn today?” asked Kat.

“Yes,” said the Vrouw, “I have cream enough at home to make a good roll of butter, and you may help me if you will be very careful and work steadily.”

“I will be very steady,” said Kat. “I’m big enough now to learn.” (pages 47-51)

When we read the words “Dutch cows”, we all wondered… Could it be? Why yes, look at this charming picture with the Dutch Belted cows in the background chewing their cud! Dutch Belted cows are so rare these days that this unassuming little drawing holds great meaning for us. As a matter of fact, the entire passage quoted above holds great meaning for us because embedded in it are many facts and attitudes about child rearing, real food, the biology of milk production, farming practices and so on that are nearly lost nowadays. While I was reading it to them last night, the children caught these meanings naturally and their way of life was reinforced in their minds and hearts.

This is a perfect example, by the way, of why I am constantly searching the past for some clues about how to conduct family life in the present in order to build a healthy future. (One of my greatest sources for this kind of information is Down Memory Lane, Vol. 1, by the way, for those of you who know this wonderful book but I find bits and pieces from many sources.)

I was curious as to why Kit and Kat would have named a Dutch Belted cow “Mevrouw Holstein” as we know Holsteins as a different sort of cow altogether. I discovered that “Mevrouw” means “Madame” and the name Holstein originally meant “the land of those who dwell in the woods.” In other words, it is a place name from that general area of the world where this story takes place.

Lucy Fitch Perkins was the author of The Dutch Twins. She wrote and illustrated a series of 14 Twins books that take place in 14 different settings around the world (none took place in India unfortunately). She wrote them in order to keep a “spirit of friendliness and good will” alive for children from faraway places. She provides a very engaging way to teach world geography along the way too, I must say. The Dutch Twins was the first in her series and was originally published in 1911. Yesterday’s Classics has printed the next two in this series so far. I hope they print all of them in due course.

I look forward to reading The Dutch Twins to my grandchildren. (After all, you can’t stop homeschooling with just one generation!) How charming it will be to look again at the drawing of the Dutch Belted cows, only in their company this time, and talk with them about having first seen this drawing with their parents when they were little children learning about shooing away flies, milking cows and making butter. No matter what our lives will be like then, the values and work we will share will be the same and I am sure the conversation will be just as sweet.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Dutch Belted cows were bred by the nobility for the nobility hundreds of years ago. Being what is now a critically rare breed, they have been able to retain their original characteristics. I somehow find their air of nobility especially noticeable when they are quietly grazing in the early morning mist and fog that so often embraces our farm here. The sight of them this way always inspires me to calmly reach higher as I proceed through my day.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie