The time I was four years old and we went to western pennysylvania to visit aunt anna and elsie, and they had that horsehair stuffed furniture and that dark wood trimmed house with that dark hard carpet and that dusty pump organ that we couldn't touch and elsie said let's go milk the cow, and she was sitting on a three legged stool beside the cow in the barn and she said to little robbie come up close, and I was wathcing as the sprong of the milk stream rang angainst the bottom of the little pail and she sqoze one nipple and then the other and there was a rhythm going in the sprong sprong sprong of the streams of milk going into the pail, and we were in the barn with the hard packed dirt floor strewn with straw and the old cow stood, a giant next to elsie who was also very large sitting on the tiny wooden stool she looked like a big man, sith her heavy farm coat and her short black hair, and she said, come closer robbie, see how the milk comes out, and then she twisted the nipple suddenly towards me and a stream of white milk shot out and into my eye, and I pulled back and cringed and wiped my eye as elsie laughed and everybody laughed and at that point the heavy red velvet curtain closes on the memory, just like in a theater. All I know is that Elsie was the woman who came to visit excentric old Aunt Anna at her farm there in western pennsylvania some thirty years before, and she never left, just stayed. That's what dad said. How strange. Who was this elsie? I was never to know. And what could I imagine about it? I was never to know.
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