{"id":156,"date":"2024-10-21T09:48:08","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T09:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/?p=156"},"modified":"2024-10-21T09:48:08","modified_gmt":"2024-10-21T09:48:08","slug":"cows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/cows\/","title":{"rendered":"Cows"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

T<\/span>he farm\u2019s distinctive business was the sale of milk. They <\/span>had about fourteen animals, she doesn\u2019t remember <\/span>which breed. What colour, I ask, black and white?<\/span>
She shakes her head categorically: no! Beige, I venture and <\/span>understand, that\u2019s more like it.<\/span>
During night and morning the cows were kept in the stable <\/span>under the same roof as the farmhouse, the stable now <\/span>converted into a living-room, the \u2018salon des vaches\u2019, where <\/span>we sometimes sit. Mme El points to a corner of the ceiling and <\/span>explains that at one time there was a hole up there through <\/span>which her husband, in his night-wear, was able to administer <\/span>hay to the waiting animals down below, thus keeping them <\/span>happy while he himself was able to return to bed for another <\/span>half hour, she laughs.<\/span>
The cows as such were the job of the men, her grandfather <\/span>who guarded them when out in the \u2018champ\u2019, her father and <\/span>her husband who milked them, by hand at first and later with <\/span>an electric apparatus to which the animals got so used that <\/span>they refused to be milked in any other way when there was a <\/span>power cut. What was it like when the calves were born?<\/span>
I inquire. She says they were mostly there in the morning <\/span>when her father came into the stable. Sometimes it was <\/span>necessary to help. No, half in, half out didn\u2019t occur. It did <\/span>happen that they were completely stuck inside. Nothing to do <\/span>with her, she says, visibly not liking the whole business, she <\/span>remembers her son\u2019s difficult birth, bad enough to put them <\/span>off \u2018ordering\u2019 another one, good thing, too, they couldn\u2019t have <\/span>paid for the education of two of them, she said. So entirely <\/span>her father\u2019s job, the cows were, he was a \u2018semi-vet\u2019 anyway, <\/span>putting his arm in and pulling things out, but sometimes they <\/span>had to send for the real vet, and on rare occasions they lost <\/span>a calf. The calves were sold very young, some two weeks <\/span>old, because of the farm\u2019s milk-business and because of the<\/span>
expense of fattening them, they were not into that side of <\/span>farming.<\/span>
The sale of milk, now, was Mme El\u2019s job. At one time she <\/span>went round the village with a little cart, from one door to the <\/span>next. It was dicey to leave the milk-can open, for things got <\/span>emptied out through windows. It once happened that some <\/span>water or other from above actually got into the can. But she <\/span>couldn\u2019t throw out the milk for that, could she?! A whole day\u2019s <\/span>milk! No, she says calmly and with a twinkle, she just went on <\/span>selling it and never had any complaints. People also came to <\/span>the farm to buy milk there. She used to dispense it outside <\/span>the kitchen, for there were the men inside having a meal or <\/span>something. Payment by the regulars was on a weekly basis, <\/span>she doesn\u2019t remember the price.<\/span>
When her grandfather was gone, she, too, had to take part in <\/span>guarding the cows, in the afternoon only, for she had to provide <\/span>lunch for the men, helped by her grandma. Mme El speaks <\/span>highly of her grandmother, a decent, hard-working, strong-<\/span>willed woman: didn\u2019t she oblige her granddaughter to marry <\/span>the man she did?! For if not, she would have been \u2018thrown out\u2019, <\/span>she said, and since she was attached to this house and its walls, <\/span>she chose to marry the man, a successful match as it turned <\/span>out. A church-minded woman, her grandmother, who liked the <\/span>cur\u00e9, she says, and went to mass on a Sunday. Now, going to <\/span>church did<\/span> not<\/span> enter the mind of Mme El who, preferring a bit <\/span>of a distance, is happy to watch mass on T.V. on a Sunday and <\/span>she never cared to see the local \u2018cur\u00e9\u2019, in her house.
\n<\/span>As for the cows, they were taken out into the \u2018champ\u2019, the <\/span>meadow in the afternoon. They were patient, easy-going <\/span>beasts who knew the way. Mme El accompanied them and <\/span>stayed there, she and the dog \u2018Parise\u2019, all their successive dogs <\/span>had the same name, who understood her \u2018patois\u2019 commands <\/span>and reined in the cows if necessary at all. Mme El had a stool <\/span>in the meadow on which she sat reading or knitting. Reading, <\/span>she stresses, raising her eyebrows, reading as much as she <\/span>liked, the news-paper for the most part, there was nothing <\/span>else, and regret in her voice. When her son was born she took <\/span>him to the meadow with her, in the pram. Imagine the cows <\/span>trotting to or from the meadow, lingering with the roadside <\/span>greenery, and the young woman with them, pushing her<\/span>
pram. They were patient animals, she stresses, there was no <\/span>danger. This went on for a number of years, until her father <\/span>also left and her husband got rid of the cows, having been <\/span>brought up, himself, working in the wood, with trees, he knew <\/span>all the trees, she proudly says.<\/span>
Her grandfather lived into his early eighties. One day, <\/span>guarding the cows, he fell asleep in damp grass, thus catching <\/span>a deadly cold which finished him off within two days. Her <\/span>grandmother, five years older than her husband, lived up to <\/span>ninety, cared for in her later years by Mme El. Her father, a <\/span>hearty eater, I understand, passed away unnoticed one night <\/span>after an excellent meal, he was eighty-six. Mme El found him <\/span>early in the morning, but couldn\u2019t attend to this new situation <\/span>until all the customers for milk had been served.\u00a0<\/span>
As for her husband, to whom she was tenderly devoted, he <\/span>left in his eighties after a fall in the \u2018chai\u2019, the wine storage <\/span>hangar, two months after my father on whose death he had <\/span>expressed his sympathy to me. Mme El became very ill as a <\/span>result and who knows might have wanted to leave in turn, <\/span>but then she pulled through, with a diminished memory, <\/span>but perfectly capable of thinking, writing and reading, even <\/span>if this takes energy of which she doesn\u2019t have much left.
\n<\/span>She lives mainly in the present, in the company of her son <\/span>and daughter-in-law who exchanged a small flat in town for <\/span>a spacious village farmhouse which they have done up very <\/span>nicely with the help of parcels of land gathered by Mme El\u2019s <\/span>father and sold by them in order to finance the modernization.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The farm\u2019s distinctive business was the sale of milk. They had about fourteen animals, she doesn\u2019t remember which breed. What colour, I ask, black and white?She shakes her head categorically: no! Beige, I venture and understand, that\u2019s more like it.During night and morning the cows were kept in the stable under the same roof as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions\/157"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/mme-el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}