At dawn and dusk the Whirlwind Hill cows passed through the barnyard. All the food they ate during the day went into making the milk and the other products that they left behind before they went out to pasture again. My grandfather and uncles gathered up those “other products,” put them into the manure spreader, and carted them to the fields to feed the crops. “Waste not, want not” was what farm life was all about.

The door into the cow barn faced east. I like to think of my ancestors greeted by the rising sun as they left the barn in the morning to go back to the farmhouse for their coffee and breakfast and by the westward sunset in the evening as they crossed Whirlwind Hill Road to join the family in the warmth of the kitchen for supper.

“The Barnyard,” Carol Crump Bryner, gouache, 2015

On Monday:  Games and Grandparents