Milking Stools

I was tempted to make the title of this post, "Stool Samples," but I thought better of it.

Each morning and evening when Tricia and I go out to milk our cows, we sit down. It is one of those jobs where "sitting down on the job" is a positive thing and not a disparaging comment.  When we first started milking, we simply turned a 5 gallon hydraulic oil bucket over and sat on that.  It did the trick.  After we had milked for a while, I figured that we better get a little more professional.  You can't just plop down on a bucket and be taken seriously in the milking community.  Sitting on an overturned milk crate was out of the question since it caused an affliction I call "waffle butt syndrome."

I shopped around on line and couldn't find anything cheaper than $24 including shipping for the old-fashioned style 3-legged milking stool.  There had to be something else to sit on that we had around the place that would fit the bill.  The photo below is the seat that Tricia has been sitting on for about 7 years.  Not that she has been sitting down for 7 years consecutively. let me rephrase that.  This is the seat that the milkmaid sits on when she milks Daisy.

The Easy Chair

The top of the chair has been worn smooth over the years.  Although you would never confuse me for a carpenter, I built this seat and it has lasted over the years. Years ago lightning struck a tall pine tree in my parents' yard.  It was a pine tree that grew straight toward the heavens and had few limbs.  My Dad had the tree taken down and a gentleman with a portable sawmill came to his house and cut up the old pine into lumber.  Dad dried it and stacked it in the shop at the farm.

The pine smelled rich and aromatic, like opening a bottle of Pine Sol.  We used some of the lumber to build my kids a nifty tree house that had a zip line coming off the second floor and an observation deck with a pulley and a rope where you could pull up a bucket full of whatever you wanted.  I used some of the leftover pieces of wood to build the chair that Laura Lee, Russ, and Benjamin would sit on up in the tree house.  Unfortunately, the wood wasn't treated and we didn't paint it and after 6 or 8 years, the tree house rotted and was dismantled and burned.  It lives on in our memories, though. Surprisingly, the chair didn't rot and I rescued it and repurposed where it now lives on as the milkmaid's chair.  And a fine chair it is.

A second life for the tree house seat

My chair has an equally storied past.  Here she sits in all her glory.  Behold my milking seat.  This, in its former life was a rocking chair.  The rocking chair that Tricia sat in with each of our three kids when they were babies, nursing them, singing them to sleep, and nurturing them. One day, as things always do, it broke. One of the curved bottoms of the rocking chair broke.  What good is a rocking chair that won't rock?  It was too hard to throw away the chair that rocked our babies.

Well, I pulled the arms, the back and the curved bottoms off of the rocking chair and it was transformed into a serviceable milking seat that is leaps and bounds better than an overturned five gallon bucket.  Pretty?  Nah, but it is a chair that does the job and also evokes fond memories of an earlier time in our little family's history. 

Off my rocker?  Nope.

My milking chair, unlike Tricia's has an ever so slight indentation where your bottom comfortably finds a home for twenty minutes each morning and night.  It's surface is spacious and expansive, allowing for future growth - although hopefully that won't be the case.  

Flying Milking by the seat of my Pants

It is sort of poetic, in a way that a chair previously used to give milk is now used to get it.  Funny how things change.  I think there's a lesson in there somewhere.  In a disposable world, if we look hard enough, we can always find uses for things that would otherwise be thrown away.  When you think you're at the end of your useful life, don't give up.  Reinvent yourself.  Keep on keeping on!