A life-size plastic cow named Daphne, one of the attractions at the author’s book launch in April 2023.
IN SEPTEMBER 1889, when the Martin House hotel opened for business at the intersection of Railroad Avenue and Canal Street in downtown Westerly, Rhode Island, its owner, Captain Michael F. Martin, handed out cigars. In April 2023, when patrons of the Savoy Bookshop and Café bought a copy of my new book, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, in what had been the hotel’s lobby, they received one of the Cow Tales caramel candy sticks my sister Patty had bought in bulk. Then they wandered around the store’s wood-paneled interior and stepped outside to try their hand at milking a life-size plastic cow named Daphne, which also mooed.
Although I live on Boston’s north shore, I travel to Westerly often because much of my extended family still lives there. A few weeks before my reading at the Savoy Bookshop, I headed home in part to visit my cousin Frank’s farm. I wanted to see if he might have a calf we could bring to downtown Westerly as part of my book launch celebration. As a kid, my 4-H club had brought a cow and some calves to a mall outside of Providence to celebrate National Dairy Month in June. I figured parking a pickup truck with a calf on its bed outside a bookstore couldn’t be any more challenging than escorting animals along the slippery floors between Kay Jewelers and RadioShack and cleaning up after them as shoppers gawked, as I had done all those many years ago.
Located one mile from the Atlantic Ocean and positioned between two salt ponds, Frank’s Ocean Breeze Farm is aptly named. Frank stopped milking cows several years ago when a land trust, dedicated to preserving open space in this watershed, purchased the development rights to his farm. As part of the agreement Frank and subsequent generations of his family can live out their days there, but whether they do or not, this property will always be the same sixty-five rocky acres on one end of Misquamicut Beach. (Taylor Swift owns a mansion