American Gothic - Grant Wood’s Midwestern Mystery—a short, fascinating article about how this painting came to be.
My head has been nestled into the side of a black and white Holstein cow for the last few days. This memory was sparked in a roundabout way when a friend sent me a write up from The Writer’s Almanac; it included a short piece on Iowan artist Grant Wood, who was born and raised in northeast Iowa. Despite his travels and European training, he said “(I) realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.”
When I was in high school, my mom broke her wrist, so I milked our one cow. By the time I was in high school, my parents had stopped milking cows, but we had kept Beauty for house milk. Beauty was gentle and kind. She wasn’t high strung like Long John, named for her long legs. She perhaps didn’t give as much milk as Whitey, named for her more white than black dominant coloring. But Beauty was the perfect milk cow; I wasn’t afraid of her kicking me. I pulled up a stool and placed it near her back legs and put a bucket underneath her udders. As I squeezed milk into the bucket, I leaned my head into her warm side. Those hoofed feet on a thousand pound bovine that close to my skull is a jarring thought—except, this was Beauty.
Holstein cows by Minnesota artist Bonnie Mohr This cow is Babe, and she reminds me of Beauty.
As I write this, my thoughts harken back to “Sensory Trickery: The Bath,” an essay I wrote in October 2021. That piece followed the string of sensory exploration and how simply sitting in a bathtub doesn’t relax me. I need at least a two-fold sensory distraction to lure me away from the external world so I can stay in a two or three second moment. From a forty year distance, I know that’s why the memory of milking Beauty is so visceral: my butt connected to a wooden stool, my fingers rhythmically squeezing milk into a bucket, my right side next to Beauty’s—and a trust that let my head rest into her warm black coat, in the soft valley between the girth of her midsection and her back hind quarter.
I look for deeper meaning as to how Grant Wood’s cow reference put me back in the milk barn. I try to think what was happening with my family then, but I have no recollection of precise memories about my life at that time. Really, the only facts I have about this peeling back and peering in moment are that Mom’s wrist was broken and that I was milking the cow. I have no memory of my reaction to this chore being mine for a while, nor how long I actually milked; I hope I did it without a sullen overlay of teenage angst.
I’ve turned away from that path of trying to eke out concrete details of this memory; there is nothing there. Rather than clamoring for those bone dry details now, the moment unfurls as I look at it through my 55-year-old lens. The strength of the memory lies in its anchoring of me, a teenage girl, to a present moment. Perhaps one of the first times I was so completely connected to “now.” The senses blaze in this scenic memory where there are no spoken words to bring it to life. What I see is sensory trickery that held me in a mindful moment, long before I knew such a thing existed.