photo taken in Austin, Texas
18 March 2012

When I was a girl in the early 1960s, we lived on some farm land in Louisiana, and across the two-lane road was a dairy farm. The couple who lived there was Cajun - the husband spoke only French. They had no more than 25 cows I'd guess. He knew each one by name, and at 5 AM and at 3 PM, they'd line up outside of the barn, in the same order each day, and wait to be milked. He'd put this rich moist grain for them as they were milked. I remember the pungent mix of smells, of the grain and the milk and the cows.

Every couple of days, a truck with a gleaming steel tank would come to their farm and transfer the milk from the big steel vat in the farmer's barn.

The couple never had a day off, not Sundays nor Christmas nor hurricanes, because the cows, and their few chickens, required attention.

My sister and I visited them maybe three or four times. The farmer's English was so limited, and we as yet knew no French. I don't remember ever talking with him, and yet somehow we learned how everything worked in their dairy. He just let us follow him around, and we learned.

I have some vivid memories of the cakes his wife baked - yellow with chocolate frosting, decorated with cherries and pecans. She had a night light in the guest room - prayer hands that glowed in the dark. I remember she had ways of using eggs or mayonnaise to condition her hair, leaving it on with her hair wrapped in a white towel.

Once, we were running around with the chickens while she hung clothes on the line to dry. There was a very large azalea shrub nearby, dense with deep pink blooms. Hummingbirds, dozens of hummingbirds shimmering bright green and red in the daylight, flitted around the flowers. The smell of the grass and the faint poignant sweetness of the azaleas with the flickering of the little birds in flight felt like something key, something of love at the core of life.