The mercury approaches 100 degrees every day.
Patches of the yard are turning brown. The violets of spring have withered. Plantain leaves curl like endive. Peonies wilt as if hit by frost. Shriveled leaves on our little dogwoods cling tenuously to brittle branches. Under my feet the grass crackles like the grandkids’ corn flakes spilled under the breakfast table.
It’s late July as I pen these notes, hot and dry throughout the day and well into the night – summer as I remember it as a boy. For some inexplicable reason I’m glad I don’t have to worry about keeping cans of milk cool overnight.
If ever we had a can go bad – and we did – it was during times such as these. We’ve all heard the adage, “Poor folks have poor ways.” I guess that was us when I was a boy on the farm.
Farmers who could afford them had refrigerated coolers to drop cans in after evening milking. Some farms had spring houses with streams cold water gushing from the earth and cooling their 10-gallon cans of milk in concrete troughs.
We had neither, but we did have cold well water, galvanized wash tubs and a milk stirrer – the most essential parts of our simple cooling system.
I’d allow most dairy farm kids today have never seen a milk stirrer. It was a simple, uncomplicated tool fueled entirely by elbow grease. It worked marvelously as long as the water was cold and the engine on the handle worked tirelessly.
Basically, a quarter-inch stainless steel rod with a saucer attached to the bottom, a loop for a handle formed at the top, this simple tool reached to the bottom of the can and was used to keep the milk constantly in motion as it was cooled by the water in the wash tub.
It was the ideal job for a boy with boundless energies, but one which also required more patience than resides within most 12-year-olds. Stirring faster didn’t speed up the process. It takes time for cold and heat to transfer through a steel milk can, and calling milk cooled when it was still warm almost always guaranteed a can of soured milk would be returned from the creamery.
Milk didn’t bring much in the late 1950s, but we needed every gallon to sell.
As a hedge against spoilage on hot summer nights, Dad had us fill the tub with fresh, cold water after the milk was cool (easier to do when the well pump was still working). Next, we soaked a burlap feed sack with water and pulled it down over the can — effectively creating an evaporative cooler. Most mornings the tub would be dry, but the milk would still be cool.
It was a simple system, but it worked.
I don’t recall exactly when Dad came up with an old refrigerated milk can cooler (I think I was in college at the time), but I know it sat in the backyard, outside the barn, right near where the cans had always been when we carried our buckets from the parlor and poured the rich, Jersey milk into a strainer atop each can. I also recall it was a pretty good chore to heft cans in and out of the cooler, so they were seldom completely full.
Sometime before getting the cooler, Dad also came up another milking machine. We had started with a machine in 1957, but it never worked right. Ultimately, Dad gave up on the machine and bought buckets for himself and his two oldest boys, Russell and me. For most of the next decade that was how we milked — sitting under the business ends of Jersey cows — just as Dad did when he was a boy.
As I noted, poor folks have poor ways — but that doesn’t make them bad ways. Grit, ingenuity and elbow grease got the family through our first, truly hard years on the farm.
I may have even learned an important lesson stirring all those cans of milk: some jobs can’t be done right and done fast at the same time.
Copyright 2024, James E. Hamilton; email [email protected]. Read more of his works in Ozarks RFD 2010-2015, available online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from the author.
