Family dairy farms are disappearing in Maine and with them, a way of life. Author Trudy Chambers Price has captured the daily joys and struggles of the family farm in a way that ensures this Maine way of life will not be forgotten.
Price and her husband raised two sons and hundreds of cows on Craneland Farm in Central Maine. The work was never-ending and exhausting, but also exhilarating and rewarding. The bittersweet memoir covers two decades of dairy farming. Chambers writes of the daily trials of haying, cow breeding, and milking against a backdrop of gentle and entertaining rural life. She introduces kind neighbors, eccentric neighbors, visiting city folk, and loveable pets. The Cows Are Out! is a tribute to hard-working family farmers and Maine’s historical and cultural heritage.
The Cows Are Out!
Written by Trudy Chambers Price
Binding: Softcover
Pages: 250
Genre: Memoir | Nonfiction
Ages: All
ISBN: 978-0-967166-29-2
Publication Date: Softcover 2004
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.63
Shipping Weight: 0.69 lbs.
Trudy Chambers Price, author of The Cows are Out! and Thirteen is a Lucky Number, was born in Island Falls, Maine, and grew up in the Aroostook County town of Caribou. Her family has lived in The County for more than five generations. She was one of three children and, like most County youths, earned money picking potatoes, starting at age ten and working for twenty-five cents a barrel. Trudy graduated from Caribou High School in 1958 and from the University of Maine in 1962. She married Ron Price the day she graduated from college.
In 1966, she and Ron purchased a 150-acre dairy farm in Knox, Maine, where they raised their children, Kyle and Travis, and worked together for the next twenty-three years. During her time at Craneland Farm, she also spent two years teaching third grade at Mt. View Elementary School in Thorndike to help pay the farm bills. She also began to write about her experiences as a dairy farmer. The Cows Are Out!, begun on a typewriter in her old farmhouse on Knox Ridge, is the result of that effort.
Trudy and Ron Price divorced in 1991 and didn’t speak to each other for many years. But following publication of her book, they reconnected in 2007 and soon began spending an increasing amount of time together. Finally, on Dec. 10, 2010, roughly nineteen years after they were divorced, the two were re-married at a family Christmas celebration.
