A Calf Born in Winter
Reflecting on death, growing up, and my grandfather’s farm
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The Cows
The calf was born in winter. My grandfather’s neighbour, Alan, had interrupted our dinner and ushered us into this drafty corner of his barn, following the irritated mooing of a mother cow in the throes of labour. We shivered under ill-fitting winter jackets, watching through clouds of our frozen breath as one cow emerged from another.
The calf was a tangled mess of limbs, coated in a thick mucous, squeezed out the backside of its mother like an oversized bowel movement. The mother cow mooed and stomped her feet, but most of the time she remained still, as if she didn’t know what was going on behind her. She seemed at most mildly annoyed, as if she’d grown impatient of standing in a long queue at the DMV.
I don’t know what compelled Alan to call on us. We certainly couldn’t help him or his cow, my three siblings and I, nor my father — all we could do was watch. But that, I think, is what he thought we wanted. We were curious children. We asked many questions of him; “Do you name your cows?” “Why is maple syrup so sweet?” “What are hay-bales for?” “What happens to the cows when they get old?” Perhaps showing us where cows come from was a preventative measure.
Alan was a quiet man with a sly smile, always squinting through his bushy white eyebrows as if he were struggling to see something on the horizon—a friendly, blue-collar Clint Eastwood. His life was his farm, next to my grandfather’s, constituting a modest homestead surrounded by acres and acres of golden hay fields, and across the street from a weather-worn brown barn that housed his cows. I remember the smell of hay and the dry dusty air, the beasts’ massive heads protruding from their holding pens; their bulbous, glassy wet eyes the size of tennis balls, and their long, rough, snakey tongues grabbing small bundles of hay from my tiny hands.
The Highway
The spectacle of bovine birth is one of my earliest memories, and like most early memories, I can’t quite place it in time. I don’t know how old I was when it happened, except that it was during one of our annual winter trips to rural Quebec to visit my grandfather, and to ski the frosted, powdery slopes of the…
