When pigs come running, a large group of pigs, and they are all trying to get close and rubbing against one another, their skin touching makes a sound like sandpaper. As with every other aspect of farming I've encountered, pigs are less trouble and smell than rumored. I won't say they don't smell. But they prefer to keep themselves clean. They do their best to confine their manure to one area of their pen and sleep as far from that area as possible. With no way to lick or paw themselves, they still manage to keep their bodies tidy. They are smart, their needs are simple, and they aren't aggressive so much as opportunistic. I used to be afraid of pigs---you hear such horrible things. But pigs are no problem, as long as they are setup well. The smell for which they are famed, as with chickens, is the result of feeding unnatural foods and poor housing. Pigs don't smell so much as human mismanagement smells. Pigs have a kind of dignity and unique beauty which is no longer recognized in our society, save for fairy tales and a few children's stories.

The perception of dignity and beauty on the farm is lost in our society in many ways. In the dark mornings when the cows follow each other in a silent line moving from pasture to parlor, I think of them as priestesses, keepers of important information about how to live that humans keep forgetting. Human cultural memory is astonishingly short. The most cursory reading of Little House on the Prairie shows us Pa's discontent with the crowded conditions of life in the United States in the mid 1800s. He felt the loss of wildlife and intrusion of society keenly. Pa's wild life with bears, cougars, Anasazi, and elemental rhythm is so long past its nearly mythical now. And it only took 30 years, one generation, for society to almost completely forget how to deliver babies, hand milk a cow, or handle any one of many lovely dignified useful life skills.

I had to hand milk a cow yesterday, for the first time since I took this farming job. My boss is so impressively strong and capable it would be absurd to compare the two of us. I am a pudgy housewife who bumbles along in her wake. Except for the skill of hand milking. I would guess there are probably less than 1000 people left in the United States who are skilled at getting milk out of a cow without machinery. I can do it in about 20 minutes, which is pretty fast. Hand milking was a nostalgic pleasure for me, yesterday. I think my boss was maybe a bit surprised? She offered to take turns, to help out with the task---something truly difficult and kind of onerous for folks who don't know how. It wasn't her considerable strength that mattered then, but my skill. It took me about 7 minutes to fully strip her dear old cow, a job she expected to require both of us and take "a while."

The life in and around that farm, flourishing more despite human intrusion than cultivation, is charming. I told the owner its a bit like Charlotte's Web around there. I hear not just owls and coyotes, but the subtle conversations of animals almost no one gets to hear anymore: cows singing for grain in their deep harmonic tones, pigs softly grunting to themselves, the voluminous and meaningful silences between all the animals that convey peace and rest. I've seen not just the profusion of spring frogs who show up to help with summer flies but the byways and creative paths of creatures in unexpected places like the mice who travel farm fences for safety and speed and the snakes who shelter in the farm clutter. Even our mechanical systems can offer unexpected beauty. The smell of the dairy parlor in the morning takes me back to banging through a well salted screen door at the beach just before the baking sun resumes its work, when the iodine tide has washed the sand, the oats in the dunes, and the warm soft air clean for another day. The parlor smells beautiful to me, surprisingly like the ocean, the two places society consistently harvests the most nutrient dense calories available for food in our culture.