Page 14 of Past Due

The first attempt didn’t do anything, but when I tried again, squeezing the teat and rolling my fingers down the length of it, I managed to make a stream of milk shoot out. “Hey! I did it!”

Laughing, Agnesa stood up. “Now, give both teats a squeeze. Let the milk hit the platform. You’re clearing the nipple of any dirt or hair.”

“Okay.” I bit my lower lip and milked a few streams from the goat’s heavy udders. The goat seemed relieved by the milking, and I relaxed with the reassurance I wasn’t hurting her.

Behind me, Agnesa produced a sealed metal bucket and placed it under the goat. She removed the lid. “Milk her into this pail. It’s been sterilized. When you’re done, I’ll show you how to filter and transfer the milk to be cooled.”

Squeeze. Roll. Squeeze. Roll.I repeated the directions over and over as my hands moved up and down the goat’s teats. After a few minutes, my wrists started to burn. I glanced up at Agnesa who smiled knowingly. “The pain will ease up once you’re warmed up a little more.”

“Do your wrists hurt like this every time you milk?” I kept working the goat, shooting streams of frothy milk into the gleaming pail.

“Yes, but that’s part of the job.”

“What about those automatic machines? Like breast pumps but for animals?”

“Too expensive for my little herd,” she scoffed. “Sometimes, the old ways are better.”

“I guess,” I replied skeptically. My wrists were on fire, and I could tell there was still a lot of milk left to be expressed. As the pail filled up, I thought I had reached the end of it, but Agnesa stunned me by stepping forward and whacking the goat’s udders. “Whoa!”

“It’s fine,” she assured me. “You should see how the baby goats headbutt their mothers to get more milk. This is just a tap compared to that.”

“If you say so,” I said uncertainly. The goat didn’t seem to mind at all. If anything, the goat seemed mellowed out now that the pressure of all that milk was gone.

When I finished milking the goat, I secured the lid on the pail and set it aside on a higher shelf with the other pails of milk. Agnesa untied the goat and walked her down the other side of the platform and into the pen with the other goats. She came back and said, “Grab two pails. Follow me.”

We carried the pails of milk to her barn. There was a room off of the entrance that was incredibly clean and tidy, but she shook her head when I got close. “Boots off. Jacket too.” She gestured for me to put my pails of milk on a stainless steel table and then stripped out of her jacket. “Hang yours up there on the hook.”

After tugging off the boots, I placed my jacket on the hook and joined her at the sink in the white tiled room to wash my hands. When we were clean, she motioned for me to join her at the table where she had placed all of the sealed milk pails. “So, we are going to filter the milk and transfer it to some sterilized jars. Then, we put the milk in the refrigerator so it can chill quickly.”

Fascinated by the process, I worked quietly next to her, taking in the proficient way she handled everything. A metal contraption fit inside the opening of a glass jar and the milk was poured into it. As the milk dripped through a filter, all of the errant bits of hair and dirt were trapped. What ended up in the jar was pristine, smooth milk.

“Does it separate like cow’s milk?” I crouched down to see the milk swirling into the jar. “The fat and the watery milk, I mean.”

“No.” She gave the filter a little shake to get the last of the milk through it. “If you check the refrigerator, the cow’s milk I processed this morning is on the top shelf. You can see the difference.”

Curious, I opened the refrigerator and inspected the cool jars of cow’s milk. The milk was a slightly whiter color and looked thinner than the goat’s milk. Already, the milk had started to separate with the cream floating to the top. “Why is different?”

“Goat’s milk is naturally homogenized,” she explained while screwing a lid onto a jar. She handed me the processed jar. “If you want to separate the cream from the milk, you have to mechanically separate it.”

“Like with blood samples in a centrifuge?” I put the jar of milk on an empty shelf and closed the refrigerator door.

She laughed. “Yes. Exactly like that.”

As I joined her at the table to help with the rest of the milk, I asked, “Do you know what cottagecore is?”

She shot me a funny look. “The girls in the flowery dresses gathering flowers and vegetables and petting cows on Instagram?”

“Um, well, yeah that.” I laughed at her apt description.

“What about it?”

“Maybe you could advertise your farm as a guest house that offers a legit cottagecore experience.”

“No.”

“I’m just saying,” I continued insistently, “that I would have missed out on this incredible experience if I hadn’t stumbled across your puppy. This has been hands-down the best part of my entire Europe trip.”

She eyed me as if I had lost my mind. “Sloshing through mud puddles to clean chicken shit and getting bit by a goose is the best part of your trip?”

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