Day 14 - No Sense Cryin'

35 GALLONS OF MILK

It's just milk, right? It's not like it's gold or love.  It's milk.  But that milk represents more than just bovine mammory excretions!  It's the sum of its parts that is making me a bit depressed.

Dolly was supposed to be pregnant!  We had geared up to stop milking her this week.  All of our milk customers had been informed, Jo would be re-united with his mamma, I had begun planning what I would do with the 2 hours of time each day I would gain while we waited for her calf and I began to think we might travel away from our home as a family again.

But, our vet informed us Friday that Dolly isn't pregnant.  And he also informed us she had started developing an infection in her udder for some unknown reason and to save her any future complications, we had to administer an antibiotic.  I feel defeated as an organic farmer.  Even worse, she may still lose a whole quarter, despite the medicine.  I thought I had been so careful! Clean bed, wholesome organic feed, supplements, thorough washings twice a day... How could my cow end up with an infection?  Isn't that what factory farming produces?  And there's no way I'm drinking milk that's tainted with antibiotics, so we'll be dumping her daily milkings for two weeks to be sure we and our customers are drinking clean milk.

Well, I guess this just goes hand-in-hand with all the other hypothetical living we can dream of.... of how life is suppose to be.  Life happens and usually with its own agenda and plan.  My careful orchestration is just a side-dressing to what is really going on.  I'm not in charge. What's the phrase?  "Stuff" happens.

So, knock it off, pick yerself up by the bootstraps, and get on with it.  So what if we have to dump her milk for 14 days.  It's only $200 worth of milk.  So what that I lost 240 hours of free time over the next  4 months.... I'm still alive and blessed and have the same life I did before.  And what's the defeat in Dolly getting an infection? Don't most creatures get ill from time to time?   Thankfully brilliant minds have created ways to combat infection and she will heal.  And, I've learned yet again that there's no sense in crying over spilled milk.