The first day of the storm as a kid on a dairy farm you didn’t have to do much, just watch the snow come down, play a board of Monopoly or the card game War, but the second day, well, the milk truck came every two days and you’d better be ready.

Today, across the county, you can count the number of dairy farms on one hand, but when I was a kid, our old winding, back-country road alone serviced six dairies. On the now “improved” road, only Menendez’s Sprucegate Farm survives with milkers and there, if you are into that sort of thing, you can still buy raw milk right from the source.

By our time, the typical milk can was a collector’s item and could be found in Mrs. Kidd’s Antique Shop. The milk can had been replaced by large stainless-steel tanks for bulk pickup and the milk was pumped from the tank to the bright cylindrical tootsie-roll truck of the milk company and they pumped it into the truck with all the other milk from the road’s farms. If the milk truck could not get to your milkhouse, you might have one more day of capacity, but the farmer would soon need to dump milk, or take in stray cats. Cats love milk.

Our driveway ran west-east from the town road down two hills to the farmstead halfway to the river and even with snow fences staked into the field on the north side of the lane the right kind of Nor’easter could plug that dirt road shut like a cupboard door swollen and with the knob pulled off.

The snow blew across skinny JoJo McCoy’s flats and across our irrigation pond and the alfalfa field and through and over the snow fence and when it hit the shallow fencerow and deep ditch along the north side of the lane, the aerodynamics of the situation were such that drifts as high as the horns on a cow were deposited overnight, or in an afternoon, and the snow was laid tight like a good dry-stacked stone wall, impenetrable.

So, by that second day we had our mittens on and our goloshes from Tick’s Department store buckled tight and snow suits and the rest of the thermodynamic protections of middle America of the late middle century years and off we went to dig.

These were the days before skid steers and the years before Pop bought the John Deere with the hydraulic bucket, and all he had was a makeshift plow he made out of a sawmill sawn oak plank somehow rigged to tow behind the red McCormick-International diesel. It was an inferior implement of even more imperfect design and while the big red tractor could go almost anywhere on its own, snow drifts over the back tires were problematic, hence the shovel corps. We emerged from our woodstove boardgames and began shoveling on the closest drift we could reach. As soon as the morning milking was done, all attention turned to the lane.

The days were short, and our attention span shorter, but we did the best we could, and the big aluminum grain feed shovels could move a lot of snow, cut, lift, throw; cut-lift-throw.

We never made it all the way up the lane and maybe late in the day a neighbor would begin work on the far end of the lane and work towards us like building the continental railway. Eventually our father would take a measurement of us and see if we were frozen to the bone, or still workable, and we continued until released, but he knew our limitations. He would break out the tractor again and mess up the drifts with the wheels and swear like hell but during his quieter moments recount doing the same chore with his brothers, Bill and Dave, when they were boys, and OK you better get inside now.

When we entered the farmhouse, it all felt hot and my ears were the type that got red, beet-red, so much so my mother took me to the doctor about it more than once, and my cheeks were the sort that had heavy blushes, patches of bright red, but all that was nothing to me and I felt nothing about them, but it was my fingers. We pealed our thermodynamic clothing off and shook off the snow (my mother never minded a little snow on a rug) and we put our mittens on the cover over the steam radiators and hung our snowsuits on the back of the wooden kitchen chairs. Before the hot chocolate, made with milk, of course, was put on the table, my fingers would begin to ache from the inside out like they had been crushed in the hay baler or beaten with a mallet and I hung my hands to my side, and put them under my armpits, and ran cold water on them, and nothing helped except the passage of time and by the time the scalded hot chocolate had cooled enough to take a sip, I would begin to forget my pain. I think these were the only times I shed a tear as a child, oh maybe a few others, but there was nothing like your hands swelling and stiff like science fiction, as if the finger bones had split open right down the middle, and I hurriedly dabbed the corner of my eyes so no one would see, for especially when you have an older brother, no one should see.

If a dairyman can’t sell his milk, he’s got nothing. The men shoveled until the evening milking and the next morning the lane would be shut in more from the blowing, but the tractor could break through that, and the milk truck would come down the lane and do the big loop in the yard and back down to the milkhouse and load the white liquid gold. Handshakes were made.