My sisters have become hay bale bucking, barel racing, 4h dominating, cow castrating, milk maids! Everytime I go home I am amazed by their agricultural acumen.

On Sunday I had the rare and unforgettable treat of helping them milk Tess* and Zellie, their minature dairy cows. Wearing a pair of borrowed muck-out boots I followed Mary and Katherine out to the battered army green Kawasaki Mule. The girls, our black teacup pug Turk, and I jostled and bumped our way through the pasture to the milking pens.

From the time I was young my mother and hollywood have tenderly cultivated a romantic vision of farm life. I have often envisioned myself walking out the back door of my rural cottage-style home. Birds converse in the fruit trees and my feet brush through the cool dew laden grass as I stroll through my early morning sunkissed garden. After gathering the fresh earth colored eggs from under my sleepy snowy white hens I head out to the barn where gentle old bessy placidly waits for her morning milking.

Something anti-magical happens when events make the journey from the glimmering shrine of my imagination into the raw realm of reality. The Sabbath communion with my sister's travel sized dairy cows was a far cry from the pristine, soundtrack worthy scene from my mind. (I've often thought that life should be accompanied by a soundtrack. Something to make a mental note of for later...much later.)

Tempting Tess into the milking shoot with a bit of grain and a few flakes of hay, my sisters effortlessly squeezed streams of florecent white milk from the boarderline microscopic udder into a glistening child's sized milking pail. I felt like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, surrounded by munchkins and mini livestock . Turk watched us with a condecending look from the driver's seat of the mule.

Standing in our cow pasture on that cool September evening a wave of awe and respect for the dairymen and women of the world swept over me. Trying to make the frothy white milk flow from a cow's udder is nothing less than an act of magic. It requires a slight of hand and wrist that rivals anything Houdini every did. Mary and Katherine were only too eager to let me attempt this feat.

Words fail to describe the unpleasant sensation that shot through my hand the instant I grabed one of Tess' teats. Nothing from my imagined milking sessions with old bessy prepared me for anatomical reality. Luckily Tess wasn't offended by my reaction to her anatomy and the girls got quite a kick out of it. I was able to coax a couple drops of milk from that black softball-sized udder. Its a good thing I decided to stear clear of dairy farming as an occupation from an early age!

*This cow's name has been changed. I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to spell her name in our modge podge language without success.

The pictures in this post were generously created and donated by Shayna Nelson.