WORDSWORTH’S opening lines in the poem Daffodils are, “I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills. When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils”.
March heralds the start of spring, the beginning of longer days and colour. Like Wordsworth, I beheld a wonderful sight — a crowd, a host of dairy cows, in monochrome, not colour. Anything in black and white is stunning: the panda, the penguin and my handbag.
My friend Catherine had invited me to her dairy farm and I was really excited to see these lovely creatures, up close and personal. For a farmer, it could be just routine to walk amongst these majestic animals but for one who only sees them at agricultural shows or in the fields, it is something else.
I wonder what it is like to live on a farm. My exposure to rural environments consists of taking a scenic drive through the country or visiting a model farm or petting zoo that is open to tourists.
The closest I ever got to living on a farm was the hope of being a volunteer on an organic farm (WWOOF-World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in exchange for knowledge, food and lodging. But, somehow, the timing wasn’t right, so that pursuit is still on my bucket list.
Now, a dairy farm is different altogether.
As the electric bar rises for me to drive into the farm, I was already tingling with excitement. I’ve seen so many signs prohibiting trespassing, from beware of dogs to rifles, that I felt a great privilege of entering one without fear.
When I entered the house, there was the smell of freshly baked bread. Heat was emanating from the AGA cooker — a cast iron cooker invented by the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish physicist Gustaf Dalen. I sat in the kitchen with the flotsam of a bucolic life around me — honey from the beehives and, of course, jugs of milk — all products of the farm. The wellies stood by the door. I thought I had seen all this before, but then again, only on the pages of some Enid Blyton storybook that I had read as a child.
As someone from the outside looking in, it is very idyllic. It is very quiet and peaceful. There’s this serenity about the atmosphere that helps you realise what is important and what is not.
It is the perfect outdoors to grow up in — to climb trees, to tease the cats, to hug a newborn calf or simply to romp around in fields of freedom. In addition, the air is so clean you would think you are living on another planet.
It is also the place to learn to be disciplined and to work hard at chores, like cleaning out muck in cow pens. Work builds character.
Indeed, there is a lot of hard work to be done. The cows have to be fed and milked at certain times. Then, there are the long hours, the elusive holiday and the leaving of a warm bed on a wintry night to help out with the calving of a cow.
My daughter once had a patient who is a farmer in Tipperary. She advised him to go to the hospital in Cork to have further tests done. Now, Cork is only about 98km from Tipperary. There was a great reluctance on his face. His sister who was with him explained that he had never left his farm in Tipperary.
Farming is a vocation. And we who work in the comfort of the office complain we are too busy.
But I can think of the feeling of security to have your beloved working close by, especially in an emergency or even for simple things like the need for a pair of strong hands to open that stubborn lid of a jar. When lunch is ready, he comes in from the fields. Very convenient indeed.
I think I can have a lot of privacy. Imagine there are acres and acres of land around me. I can do a rain dance in my nightgown and no one can see me.
What about at night? I wonder if I lived on a farm and looked up at the night sky, would the stars be brighter? Could I pick out the constellations?
There is this rich essence of life on an Irish farm.
Dr Koh Soo Ling was a lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Mara and now spends her days enjoying life as it is