06/04/2026
the corn will be milk
Excerpt from my journal on May 25, 2007
Today I spent the day with my dad and a family friend working on the farm. Well, I was hanging out, and they were working. I got to the farm after lunch, and they had finished pregnancy testing on the heifers and were getting ready to move the pregnant heifers from the holding pens by the barn to the open pasture where they would stay until they gave birth. After we made a couple of trips with the trailer to move the agitated heifers, my dad asked me if I wanted to ride with him to Solberg’s farm to get some old gates he was going to use to construct a makeshift cattle shoot. I hadn’t ridden with my dad in the cabin of a John Deere tractor since I was a little girl, so I enthusiastically said yes. As we were approaching Solberg's, my dad was telling me about the crops he had just planted that year, pointing to the tiny shoots of corn curling around the tops of the rolling hills in perfect rows. Then he says, “That corn will be milk. We will feed the corn to the cows. The cows will eat the corn. From the corn, they will produce milk. With the milk, they will also produce waste. The waste will be laid on the field to fertilize the corn.”
This connection in the cycle of life that I grew up with, without any awareness, reminded me immediately of my favorite movie, The Wicker Man (1973). Ever since I saw that movie—after randomly discovering a New York Times review— I have been obsessed with it. I never saw a connection between my foundation on the farm and the film quite like that before. I always loved it because to me it was one of the only examples of healthy s*xuality I’ve ever seen in film or really anywhere. One of the songs from the film that I love is called “The Maypole Song.”
My dad has never seen The Wicker Man.
