Sort of Important

On ice

Heh. I just noticed that yesterdays post is titled Most Importantly and today’s is called Sort of Important. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post: Possibly Just a Little Important

Both boys are sick, so last night I filled in for them at Melvin’s barn. It had been a while; most of last winter, I went down a night or two each week to help feed out and scrape shit into the gutter. But this fall I lost the gig to my sons, and it occurs to me that it’s only the first in a long line of duties that will be passed to my boys over the years.

I like going into the barn at night, particularly when it’s as cold as it was yesterday. It was zero and blowing something fierce by the time I pulled into the barnyard. Moonlight reflected hard off the iced-over pasture. In the barn, warm clouds of respiration hung above the cows’ heads. There’s something vaguely prehistoric about those big Holstein heads, the way they lumber and lurch at the end of those long, yearning necks. I starting rolling out the bale. A nice bale. Dry and light. Second cut, too. The hay felt good in my hands, so I left the hay hook hanging from its rusty nail.

The light was dim and the air thick with the sweet smells of fresh manure and fermented hay, and Melvin was wearing the insulated ear flap cap he wears when the thermometer’s headed for south of nothing. He was fiddling with the gutter cleaner when I got there. He is forever fiddling with the gutter cleaner, it seems. He’s gotten something like ten more years out of the cleaner chain than he was supposed to, and he seems intent on nursing it through another ten years, perhaps because the chances of it being someone else’s problem by then are at least 50-50, and he knows it. No one accepts their own mortality like farmers. Well, maybe morticians.

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. I remember how last winter, he showed me a link that had recently broken, how the roller pin had worn almost all the way through the link plate. He was grinning like he does when he’s pleased with himself, and it was clear to me that the pleasure he gleaned in having coaxed so much life out of that thin piece of steel was a greater thing than the inconvenience of its breaking.

I hope I don’t forget that. It seems sort of important.