Saturday, December 16, 2006

Wright's Dairy Farm

I just went to Wright's Dairy Farm and while I was waiting for them to open for the day, I wandered over to visit the calves. I love the smell of the hay and swampy mud. I love watching the gigantic heads of the full-grown mature cows, the cows chewing in unison. Some are pregnant, some are lying down. I looked at the face of one cow and thought, that's a man's face! I checked, and sure enough he was a bull. I could see the women through the bakery windows, working like mad. One woman was spackling cakes, each in thirty seconds flat. She would plop the angel-food cake out of the pans onto a rotating surface, like what potters use, and she would squeeze a bloop of whipped cream from a gigantic pastry bag onto the spinning cake, and spackle the whipped cream, scoring it with her other hand as the cake spun around, and voila, another cake decorated and added to the pile! The scent of icing and cake filled the air. In the barn I could see the farmers with their suspenders bending down to clean the cow teats and plugging milking machines onto them. What an operation!

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