We rubbed our hands between our knees, waiting for the present batch of cows to milk out. I sat on an overturned bucket; my father was on the steps that led out of the pit. It was the middle of February, where the cold still crept through the edges of the window panes to frost the glass and froze the manure at the end of stalls. It was still the type of weather where your toes got cold through the boots and might not warm until much later in the day.

Several years ago, my friend brought me to her house in the suburbs. I can’t recall the rows of houses we passed to reach hers, only that it seemed indefinite because I couldn’t tell them apart.

There are various theories on how they came about, depending on what coffee machine in Canaseraga you were leaning on and what old-timer you were talking to. Some would say they’re hippies who had moved into the woods and gone native. Others think they’re offspring of Bigfoot.

Milk flashes into the claws, crashing against the plastic windows in steady pulses. The inflations squeeze each teat that they hold, gently, and then release them in perfect unison. Yellow hoses shake along the pit. The vacuum is the unseen force that drives it all in a deafening throbbing sound that you, if you didn’t know any better, would assume was your own heartbeat.

I learned forward, hunched over the buzzer, as if the closer my brain was to my hands, the quicker they could react. Omaha, Nebraska, 2004 – Junior Holstein Association National Dairy Bowl Finals.

When I was young, having to milk Christmas morning was – I was sure then – the purest form of torture. Every Christmas song, every frosted cookie, every time “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Charlie Brown Christmas” aired on the television set was part of the countdown to getting to the presents under the tree.

“[Extrapolation] is similar to interpolation, which produces estimates between known observations, but extrapolation is subject to … a higher risk of producing meaningless results.” —Wikipedia article on Extrapolation

It could happen. Movies have shown us how. Whether from the radiation of a NASA Venus probe, the mutation of prions from Mad Cow Disease or – as postulated by Harvard psychiatrist Steven Schlozman – a virus leading to the condition known as Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome, the threat of the infectious brain-eating undead looms over us all.

Our family’s history starts with a pond on top of a hill. It was first dug by my great-grandfather, Claire Dennis, as a watering hole for cattle. He lived and milked there for two years without electricity. Because the milk carts, pulled by horses, would not make the climb, he had to haul his milk over a mile in metal cans every day.