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By Ian Cumming Dad, farmer that he was, died just as he got up at milking time early on Tuesday morning Dec. 16. There wasnt his usual alarm clock beeping and feet instantly on the floor, but rather the ringing of a bell, summoning my sister managing his at-home care, during these last weeks of his 92-year-old life. My younger brother was coiling up the oxygen hose when I arrived, my older brother, misty eyed, standing behind the chair, holding dads shoulders, to keep him from drooping forward. My sister, having run the hospice in Cornwall for several years, was busy with the pre-authorized paper work and summoning the appropriate medical personnel. There was lots to think about for the next 45 minutes, sitting on the side of dads bed, my hand resting against the front of his shoulder, helping my brother keep him upright. Ironic that, because dad had always, on his own accord, stood tall. We were sitting with him this morning in the house my grandfather built and dad lived for 90 of his 92 years. The first two years were in the whitewashed log cabin, pictured on the wall, that used to stand here. The barn was across the road where the lights would come on every morning, and still do, for milking. The tributes flowed in later in the day from the dairy world, from those who knew and remembered. We grew up with his legacy, thinking all this was normal. Canadas first 200,000 pound Ayrshire, that was still calving at 20 years of age, also breeder of the worlds highest producing two-year-old at the time and subsequent dam of what was correctly called “the milkiest bull in the world.” The tombstone from the New York AI unit stated that, sitting in our machine shed south of the border. The show trophies jammed in the bookcase in his house, the countless curled black and white show cow pictures in the drawers. The non-mailed extra Christmas cards from 1963 showing his royal junior champion and first prize junior get of sire, which sold right after to a millionaire in New England, enabling dad to pay cash for a brand new truck and car and double the size of his dairy barn. There were the two full-time hired men who brushed the cows every day in the winter and washed tails every second day, delighting the Montreal milk inspectors when they dropped in. Things change, selective history becomes fact and due to the industry starving for those who didnt farm like dad or his cousins who sold milk door-to-door for 40 years and everyone, for better or worse, was decreed, by law, to be kept equal. Dad adjusted. The late cattle dealer FC MacLennan bought him quota. He drove every month to a smoke-filled French speaking hall in Ste. Martine to bid on quota. “Why is he doing that?” smart farm leaders at the time used to sneer to us kids. They were spreading the prevailing wisdom of making a good living through their protective system and “getting out of the barn sooner when you only have to milk 30 rather than 80.” Dad sat stunned in the last years of his life that this economic folly of no expansion had become dairy policy. Just prior to pro rating quota, dad was in his barn clothes in the bank and wanted to see the manager, who was tied up with a customer. Dad, impatient as he was, yelled outside through the slightly ajar door for all to hear, “We got the quota so we need $250,000.” The manager yelled back. “How long do you want me to term it?” Im 86,” dad replied. “So I dont give a damn.” We thought tile draining every acre was normal, because dad did it. We did not realize until we were older that dad being hospitalized with that ulcer was due to the stress he was put under by the wise scorning him for “burying good money in the ground.” We never realized how rare it was, that dads far-sighted decisions, common sense, individual thought, personal sacrifice and hard work, set three sons up, each on his own dairy farm. Each having his sons working into the businesses. Dad was a farmer.
Ian Cumming is a former Glengarry County dairy farmer and now farms with his son in northern New York state. |
