So Edith went on, of course, cooking and cleaning and mending and washing clothes and ironing. Also, she still had the garden to manage: to plant, hoe, water, can, and pickle. Also, she had the wood to cut and carry in, the stove to stoke, the chickens to feed, the eggs to gather and clean. Also now, every morning and every night, on top of all those other duties she had to do the milking.
Have you ever milked cows? No, I suppose not. Well, milking cows is all right if there isn’t any way you can get out of it, but it’s not quite the fun times old pictures make it out to be, with some bare-armed milkmaid sitting down beside some nice brown and white Guernsey cow under an oak tree and over there not far away is a blue stream bubbling and everything looks lazy and fine and somehow it’s always summer. No, you get up—Edith got up—every morning in the dark, never mind if it was blizzarding out, never mind if she was still exhausted. She got up, threw on a dress and a coat and went outside to find the five or six Shorthorns in the cow pasture. She walked them through the gate and into the barn, set the head catch to hold them there, hitched up her skirt and coat to climb up the ladder to the loft, threw down some hay into the manger, climbed down again, set the T-shaped milk stool in place, sat down with her head close to the cow’s flank to keep from getting hit in the face too much by the stinging shit-filled, eye-blinding tail, washed the tits off with a wet rag, pulled some first squirts of milk from each tit to further clean them and to check for mastitis, squeezed the bucket between her knees, and then, finally, milked the cow out enough to still leave some for a calf to suck and survive on. And then she did the same with the next cow, and the next, and the next. And all the time she was talking quietly to them to keep them calm enough that they would let the milk down and not kick the bucket away from her.
When she was finished milking, she turned the cows out to pasture again, and then carried the buckets of milk into the house to the back porch, where she ran the milk through the separator, turning the crank by hand. Afterwards, sometime during the day, she had to find time to make butter and to get the sour cream ready to take to town to sell. I believe they did that once a week, took the cream and eggs they didn’t need into town to Bishop’s Creamery opposite the railroad tracks.