“The hush of deep winter brings a certain intimacy. When flakes fill the air, the apparent world shrinks. The senses are quieted in this stillness, in the reverent silence. It’s a swaddling of the soul, akin to what I imagine the devout experience in an empty church. Milking Daisy that winter was unexpectedly tender. Daisy was more patient with me than she’d ever been in the past. I wondered if, after her miscarriage and before we got Mara, Daisy had accepted me as a sort of surrogate calf. She was as gentle with me as she had always been toward her calves, to a degree she had never before reached with me. Our bond deepened. Our trust in each other deepened. That winter, she never showed impatience with me, never tap-danced if my milking took longer than she wanted it to. She stood like a statue for me. Sometimes she ate while I milked, but often, she meditated as she did when nursing a calf, her eyes half closed, her posture relaxed. Sometimes she fell asleep. As I sat beneath her with my head and shoulders resting against her warm belly, rocked gently by her breath, there were times I almost fell asleep, too.
“Sometimes I paused during milking and leaned against her side and sipped a mugful of her warm, rich milk, frothy from the velocity of milking. When I worked an espresso stand as a teenager and had maxed out on triple shots, I’d make myself steamed milk with a spoonful of almond syrup stirred in. That’s what Daisy’s milk tasted like, sipped in the snow, milked into a mug and enjoyed immediately. When I finished milking, before I brushed her in gratitude, Daisy groomed me. With a gentle toss of her head, she covered my body in long, deliberate swipes of her tongue. I only ever let her groom my clothes, for cow tongues are rough enough to take off a layer of skin with one lick. Sometimes, I misjudged the length of her tongue and she nicked my cheek with her spiny taste buds and I flinched in pain, but it was worth it, to be so loved by Daisy.”
