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and piss all around us. Look out the kitchen bay window and you would see, just across the road in the pasture, about two hundred cows, at least fifty of them shitting or pissing at any given instant. Go into the back huck, and there you'd find barn shoes and overalls caked in shit and dried piss, and two hundred yards out the back door, a barnyard two feet thick in squishy shit and piss, and in the barn, one hundred and fifty cows and four pens of fifty or so calves pissing and shitting night and morning, and all hours in between. I forgot to mention calfshit, the most disgusting slimy slippery smelly shit of all because the milk you had to feed
calves
was pure cholesterol. That was my first job
when I was eight. No one else would do it. My father
would wake me at five-thirty,
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wait for me downstairs, stuff me with
bacon, eggs, and toast, then send me
to the barn. I had to mix this supplement
designed to mimic a fresh cow's first milk with water in
a nipple pail and then
feed it to the younger calves.
For calves newly weaned,
I had to wait for old man Kuperus or Floyd to milk the mother and bring me
the pail of "yvisk," Frisian for first
milk, and then teach the calf to drink by having it
suck on my fingers and then holding its head down
in the pail. Quite often, the calf, unsatisfied
with this new mode of suckling, would revert
to its new born instinct, a fierce buck against the
mother's imagined udder, except this time the udder was
the pail, and the lunge would send me toppling, the pail
of mother's milk
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