“One hundred and ten head of Holsteins,” said Natalie. She followed this statistic up with a bombshell of a statement: “I’m pretty sure this is the man I’m going to marry.”
Three weeks had never passed so slowly. Natalie had fallenso hard.She’d never quite bought into the phrase “crazy in love” in the past, but now she did. Sex with Austin was better, different, somehow more profound, than it had been with anyone else, but it wasn’t just that. I want to have his babies, she thought the third time they slept together. You weren’t supposed to think that way, not when you came from a liberal family in Massachusetts and held a degree from Wesleyan. The Sisterhood might laugh her out of the group chat.
Soon enough, Natalie and Austin were on a speeding train they couldn’t get off—didn’t want to get off. They started planning the future on Natalie’s trip to Bozeman. Natalie couldn’t give up her job, not with the equity, the promise of mobility. Austin had lived in Montana his whole life. For Natalie, he was willing to make a change.
In Boston, Austin got a job in medical sales. He was so good! He had the personality for sales—he could talk to a dying houseplant and it would perk up like it had just been watered—but he didn’t have the true temperament. Without putting too fine a point on it, he hated it.
“It’ll get better!” said Natalie optimistically.
“Sure.”
“It’s just an adjustment.”
In the next two years: proposal, bridal shower, wedding, two lines on the pregnancy stick that meant Evangeline was coming. A bigger apartment, double the rent. A coveted spot in a Back Bay day care. Little Evangeline, with her tiny pursed lips and her little waving fists, her milky eyes, her demands. Natalie’s heart had never felt so big.
They loved their little family, but at work Austin was miserable. Tiny Evangeline was miserable too, constantly shuttled from here to there. Natalie wasn’t miserable, but she was exhausted. They were tied to the drudgery of day care drop-off; the stress of one or the other of them always having to say no to staying late at work, to drinks with investors for Natalie, clients for Austin. They were stretched so thin. The winter sidewalks were so icy.
“All of this time inside is making my elbows itch,” Austin told Natalie. “I’m allergic to the fluorescent lighting in conference rooms.”
“I don’t think that’s something you can be allergic to.”
“The sky is so small here. It’s all hidden by the trees.”
“Well, I can’t change the size of thesky,” Natalie said testily, scooping pureed carrots into six-month-old Evangeline’s mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, willing herself to some equilibrium. “Do you want to quit?” She felt for him—she really did. She’d taken him out of his natural habitat, away from the wide Montana sky, and plonked him in the middle of asphalt and bricks. Of course he didn’t fit here. Didsheeven fit here?
“And do what?” He was holding his big strong hands like a supplicant. His hands, so brown when she met him, had taken on an urban pallor. It was January, and outside the apartment window the trees were bare and stark, the winter sky a pale white-gray.
“Be my plaything? Station yourself in bed on satin sheets with a cocktail when I get home from work?” She was kidding, obviously.They preferred organic cotton sheets, for one thing. For another, she was still pumping four times a day. A nightly cocktail was not in the cards. And, finally and most important, Austin did not want to be a plaything. He’d been working with his hands nearly as long as he’d been able to count his own fingers. Austin did not want to sit idle. Austin wanted to work.
Then, through a connection from a friend of an uncle, he heard about a dairy farm for sale in Vermont. “Let’s just look at it,” he said to Natalie. “We’ll just look.”
“I have equity,” she said. “What if we go public? I can’t imagine walking away from that.”
“We’re not walking away from anything,” he said. “We’ll just look.” He fixed his baby browns on her, and she couldn’t say no. The next weekend they packed up Evangeline and drove the nearly three and a half hours to Shaftsbury. They walked the farm with Evangeline facing out in the BabyBjörn, pointing at the cows.
In the hotel room in Bennington they talked long into the night while Evangeline slept. Natalie came to realize that if they didn’t take this chance Austin would one day want to move back to Montana—and then what? She couldn’t imagine being so far from her family, from the East Coast, from the beach house, from the ocean.
By the time they went to sleep themselves, they had a new life plan. That Monday, they put together an offer, subsidized by Austin’s parents, who agreed to help them buy the farm with the understanding that Austin and Natalie would run it without additional help from them. On Tuesday, when Natalie was back in her office, the offer was accepted. Forty Holsteins, a farmhouse, a milking barn that would need renovation. Hillside Haven. Natalie set up a meeting with her manager and gave her notice.
Austin was so happy on the farm! He never complained about the early hours or the physical labor. He called the cows “the Ladies” and treated them with respect and reverence. He rarely needed an alarm; his body acclimated to the cows’ schedule, as it had once done in Montana. They hired two local farmhands. Austin mended fences; he repaired the homogenizer when it broke; he sanitized the teat cups. He befriended the cranky old-timers in town, the ones who thought Natalie and Austin were city kids playing at farming. He proved them wrong the night the neighbor’s heifer was in labor with a breech calf, the phone lines went down because of a storm, and he helped deliver the calf.
The Hansons had just moved to Hillside Haven when the pandemic hit. They felt removed from what they saw on the news. On the Sisterhood group chat, Leah talked about spending all day on Zoom calls for work. Kayla’s toddler was going crazy in their San Francisco apartment. Amber, still working in a lab, barely took her mask off. Rachel and Mark had left Manhattan to move in with Rachel’s parents in Connecticut; they worked for a Broadway producer, and of course the theaters were dark.
I’m spending all my time on Instagram watching sourdough bread videos, texted Rachel to the Sisterhood.
I made my own buttermilk, texted Natalie.
Leah weighed in withHa ha, but Natalie actuallyhadmade her own buttermilk.
By summer she was pregnant with Scarlett. With her main jobs being caring for Evangeline, helping on the farm, and being pregnant, she threw herself into domestic life. She started an Instagram account: @hillsidemaven.
I feel like with every cake you bake you’re betraying the Sisterhood, texted Amber.Ha ha.
Three other members gave it the exclamation points that meanwe agree!
The Hansons applied for and received their organic certification.They added ten more head of cattle. Natalie fell in love with it all: the meditative beauty of the early mornings, the intense clarity of the night sky, where every constellation she had heard of was visible. She fell in love with the cows’ quirks and personalities, learning which ones were placid and forgiving and which were feisty or standoffish. She loved the paths they wore in the grass as they moved to and from the milking barn. She loved the way each day followed a rhythm and each year did too, with a portion of the Ladies always pregnant or calving and another portion “drying off”—resting from milking before giving birth. She loved the lined Carhartt pants and the muck boots and even the farm smells, which were so pronounced they had a texture. She loved the way each time a new calf was born it felt like a miracle, the head and front legs emerging in a dive position, then the rear legs, the big brown eyes, already open, already soulful.
She loved cooking in the kitchen, spending time she’d never had before, perfecting a loaf of bread or learning a new method for braising meat. She loved Austin’s appetite for everything: food, sex, Heady Topper beer, the sky at 4 a.m. She, Natalie, who had struggled through honors biology in high school, did not flinch when she watched her first bovine birth, did not flinch when she assisted at her second. It was all so raw and beautiful. She watched the mother cow’s rough tongue go at the calf to clean it off, watched the calf stand and nurse within the first two hours of birth. She loved the girl power at Hillside, the way dairy farms are by nature ruled by the ladies.
