Smiling Hills Farm

Simple Pleasures:

There is a dairy farm in the town to which we moved. "Smiling Hills Farm". It is located on a country road, from which you can see the pastures and the Holstein cows grazing, or depending on the time of day, lying in the shade of a woodlot up the hill above the road. Its sign board shows a happy smiling cow!

This time of year you are also pretty reliably going to see wild turkeys and their young ones taking possession of a portion of the field, living harmoniously with the cows. It is "Smiling Hills Farm" after all.

There are two ponds you can see from the road, on which there are Mallard ducks; lots of ducks. This spring was a busy time with many downy brown ducklings with their attendant mothers. They delight the children who come to the dairy on field trips and family outings for ice cream.

The family that owns the farm have been there for the past 7 generations, on the same land, running a dairy, providing milk and dairy products to the community. The continuity and tradition is very appealing to me. The milk is put up in glass bottles, as I remember from my childhood. The milk you drink is from the cows you see in the pasture.....they don't sell to a large distributor or bring in milk from other farms. It is a local, family operation.

It puts my mind to the childhood verse entitled "The Cow" by Robert Louis Stevenson that my mother used to read to me as a child:

"The friendly cow all red and white,
 I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
 To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
 And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
 The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass
 And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
 And eats the meadow flowers."

It is that innocence and simplicity that I love and this simple family owned self contained dairy brings that to me; in glass bottles no less.

In addition to the milk and cream, there is a small gift shop that offers the "tried and true" standards, some new and innoventive flavors with exotic names such as "Moose Tracks" and containing Maine's wild blueberries and the traditional New England flavors such as Coffee, Grape Nut, Frozen Pudding, Pistachio, Black Raspberry.

Ordering is not as simple as one might think. Before ordering you have to decide on one, or a combination, of the many flavors, select a size cone, and choose your type of cone; will it be waffle, sugar, or a jumbo cone dipped in chocolate and studded with candy sprinkles? Don't panic when you get to the counter.

And the moral to the story is:

Throughout life we have to make decisions, and live with our choices--woulds't that they were all as sweet and as free of disappointment as those made there by the delighted children.