Rough weekend

We had a date. Just my husband and I. Off to check cows.
I would check cows. He came along to see how his wheat fields were looking.
As we came over the hill to the first windmill I was telling him how I had set the break on the windmill so it wasn’t pumping all the time. Just the solar pump with a float so it would shut off when not needed was going. No point in pumping water that wasn’t needed when the cows weren’t drinking out of it anymore.
And there they were. A large bunch of cows laying alongside the tank. Just to prove me wrong. We adjusted the float, checked things out, and continued on to the tank they were supposed to be drinking out of.
There we found the rest of the herd gathered around a slightly muddy tank. Not a drop of water.
The windmill was just repaired barely a week ago. And here it was broken in a new way.
We scrounged through the pickup for my usual windmill repair tools. Fence stretchers, fence pliers, and a regular pair of pliers. It took a bit to convince my husband that fence stretchers will work to pull the rod up out of the windmill enough to reattach it. He’s used to working with real and proper tools.
I found the chain that had been attached, before they ‘fixed’ it and thought we could use that to hook things back together. He doubted my ingenuity and went looking for better. For lack of a large washer he found the piece that used to hold the spare tire on my pickup, up underneath the box. It had broken off one day this summer. At another windmill luckily. I went to check it and there was a tire laying there that I swore I hadn’t even seen there before. Turns out it was from my pickup and had fallen off at just the right place. Now it would work to hold the windmill together.
Holding my set of pliers as he turned the bold with the fence pliers IΒ held to close to the joint. They slipped off and I pinched my finger. Cussing the newly forming blood blister I went back to holding. Then realized I was holding in the same place again. That was stupid of me I thought. As the pliers slipped again and I pinched the other finger. Not as bad this time. That was brilliant.
As we worked Ghost and another cow who had eaten from my hand for the first time last time I was there were begging frantically for food from outside the windmill frame. When I had a moment I gave them some of the cake I had brought along. The new cow hasn’t learned manners yet. She chomped down enthusiastically on yet another finger. The bruising began immediately under the nail.
My hands hurt!
When I turned around my husband was gone. Weird. I thought he had been standing right behind me. He must have gone to the pickup. I gathered a few things and carried them back with me. He wasn’t there. Where could he have gotten off to?
Finally I looked up.
He had climbed the windmill! No breezes were coming along to turn it for us so we could check our repairs so he was tuning it manually. Needs must, make do or do without, and all that. There’s always a way to get the job done when you don’t want to make the rather impressive drive in there to the middle of nowhere again.
It looked good. Guess I’ll find out for sure tomorrow when I make the drive again.
It was perfectly still.
With the fourwheeler shut off the silence echoed in my ears. It was overwhelming, nearly deafening. The absolute lack of sound came as a shock. We get so used to noise in our modern lives. The hum of electronics, radios droning on, people, vehicles. I stood for a moment and listened. I remember thinking how there wasn’t even wind through the few scraggly trees.
It’s my favorite old house. The one I would choose to live in if I could pick any of the houses on the place.The practicalities of modern living make that impossible of course. As much as the completely fallen down state of the house. There’s no road in, no electricity, no hope of internet. Just a house sat out in the middle of a pasture. The roof is gone. So is the floor. Walking upstairs would be suicide, even though the stairs are technically there.
Not too long ago the carcass of a yearling bull had hung from the floor joists. He had found his way in through a missing wall or maybe the door. A part of the house has a cellar. The floor wasn’t enough to hold his weight. With front and hind legs on opposite sides of the joist I will hope that his back was broke when the legs went through. If not, he hung there until he died, fragments of skin held the skeleton there as a grim reminder not to take chances with a falling down house.
Now his bones shine white under the house.
Shaking off the eerie stillness I went back to work. My job was to keep any more cattle from sharing the young bulls fate. We wanted to make use of the grass growing around the house, but keep cattle out of the house. One wall is gone and one door easily accessible. I had to fence them out. Walking about the house, hammering and stretching wire, I looked down and saw a penny! Picking it up I recognized a design no longer used. Peering through the pattena I thought I saw 1929. Excited by my find, but busy at work, I slipped it into my pocket, it could be cleaned up and inspected closer when I was done.
As I nailed wire to the house bits of plaster and dirt rained down on my head. It made me keep a wary eye out above. As the walls begin to bulge out at odd angles it’s easy to imagine the whole thing coming down on my head. More and more pieces of trim and eaves are being scattered across the ground with every wind storm. This beautiful old house only has a short time left. There’s not enough left there to save.
Once home I was telling my husband about fencing out the house. About the silence there. How everywhere else I traveled through the day, fixing fence and moving cattle there had been the noise of wind, cattle lowing, distant traffic. But not there. There had been silence.
Which reminded me of my penny!
Excitedly I dug into my pocket to show him. Searching the depths I found only lint. Then the other pockets just to be sure. Nothing.
They kept it, he said.
The sun shone bright under dark clouds as I picked the kids up from the bus. They had gotten rained on in town. Here there was no more than an occasional mist.
At home they hopped out at the corn field. A small corner had been wind-rowed for hay and was more appealing than they could resist. They were going to pick up some ears! I just happened to have a bucket in back of the pickup. They were set.
I went on to the house and started feeding animals and gathering from the garden for supper. The footsteps of my daughter echoed through the yard as she ran for the house. I waited until she got to the door then yelled at her from where I was hidden under tomato trees. Apparently she was looking for me, not headed inside. She ran towards me then, gasping out of breath, and saying…Β Β something.
It took awhile before I could catch it. There was a rainbow. With the misty rain coming down in bright sunshine that wasn’t surprising. They had found the end of it though! Come quick, we could catch it. Looking around I could see it. There at the edge of the stackyard, into the cornfield. The rainbow came right to the ground. There was no way I was running that far. Instead I ran the other way to the shed.
On the fourwheeler I picker her up then we went for her brother. All children gathered, we took off after that rainbow.
It was no longer at the edge of the corn field. We chased it through the middle of the corn, down the sectionline, then stopped on top of a hill to look at it over a friends house, way off at the highway, We were too late. Too late didn’t make it any less fun.Who needs a pot of gold wen we have all the riches we could want right here.
Turning for home the kids asked me to come pick more corn with them.
After a busy day I still had chores that needed done, there were dirty dishes in the sink, and supper to get on the table. I paused with all the reasons I couldn’t on the tip of my tongue.
Sure! I said and we wen off to play in the corn. Some opportunities are to great to let slip by.
We were cruising down the road, The Goblin Child and I. Should she have been in school? Probably.
At the last second I saw a snake stretched out across the road. My wheel was lined up with it, I never swerve, too late to hit the breaks. I was looking in the mirrors trying to see if we had hit it, talking to The Goblin Child, asking if she had seen that. Just then as I was distracted I looked back ahead and saw a herd of deer along the road hidden in the shade of a tree. Thinking how funny it was that we could have almost hit the deer and the snake I was caught by surprise again as one of the deer jumped into the road in front of us.
It takes loner to write one word of the story that it did for all of this to happen.
We didn’t hit any deer. I did slam on the breaks and finally come to a stop. We watched the does and young bucks gracefully hop away. Then backed up to see about the snake.
I love snakes and we are blessed with huge beautiful bull snakes in this area. They eat snakes and legend has it that they keep the rattle snakes away. They may bite but are not venomous. I guess their size and that combined with the lingering fear of any snake that people seem to hold to means we often see the giant beauties dead along roads where people swerve to hit them. It makes me sad and I didn’t want to be a member of that club, even if it was unintentional. We backed up hoping to have missed it, but instead saw a snake still there in the road.
This road is gravel, we weren’t baking down or parking in the middle of a real road. I feel I should mention that.
Pulling alongside the snake I leaned out my window for a good look. Just in time to see the snake strike at the pickup. A rattle snake! But bull snakes will pretend to be rattlers, I couldn’t be sure unless I could see the rattler. The snake coiled and hissed. Then I saw it there. A rattle, shaking enthusiastically at us. I told my daughter to climber over to my side and see this!
We are lucky not to see rattle snakes at the house. Not for as long as I’ve been there. I credit the big bull snakes we consider pets. She’s never actually seen a rattle snake. We look, me fascinated, her disgusted. We hadn’t missed the snake. It was injured, it’s insides spilled onto the road, it just wasn’t dead yet. We looked and talked, thenΒ I backed up farther and took careful aim. As we went over the snake again I asked one more time if he understood why we were killing the snake. She said yes, she understood. Even if it was in that disgusted teenager voice she was still able to repeat, we needed to end the suffering. Rattle snakes have a purpose in life too, we don’t kill them just for the sake of killing. When an animal is suffering the kindest thing we can do is quickly end that suffering.
The deer were long gone as we passed the shade tree again. Corb Lund played loud on the radio, singing about cows, as we drove on home together.
We ran out of milk over the weekend.
Driving clear into town for a jug of milk was more effort than I was willing to put in on an already busy weekend. After all, we have a milk cow sitting out here in the corrals. Why not make use of her?
Not that she isn’t already working hard raising a couple calves.
Women are well capable of multi tasking. So I separated the calves for the day. She enjoyed a break from the kids, hanging out and eating in peace and quite. They may have called for her a little as the day went on but she never even came back to the gate to check on them.
That evening I went out to milk her. She came running and didn’t lift her head from her grain even though she hadn’t been milked since spring.
My husband, dutiful but reluctant, came along and gagged in disgust after he mentioned how foamy the fresh milk was and I drug a finger through it, licking the foam off enthusiastically.
Back inside the kids were excited about fresh milk and worked together to make absolutely delicious caramel with the milk striaght from their cow.
The next morning I got the bowl of milk out and set it on the table for breakfast. Ladling it over the cereal was easier than finding a pitcher. Yummy. Milk fresh from the cow!
Eeewww!
How could I expect those same poor children to actually ingest milk that didn’t come from a grocery store out of a jug! A reminder that this was the same milk they made caramel from the night before didn’t help anything. That was ‘different’.
Being hungry enough to force down cereal covered in fresh milk didn’t mean they were hungry enough to enjoy it. There they sat all through the meal. Faces turned down in looks of total revulsion. The cereal was eaten if not cleaned up completely.
They walked out the door to school ordering me not to eat the rest of the caramel while they were gone. The double standards are amazing.
The link had been open on my laptop for months.
I enjoy listening to podcasts while I clean house, so not many had been listened to lately. Horses In The Morning is a big one. It would sure be fun to get an interview there! I always thought. So I pulled their page up and looked for contact info.
Hard as I looked I could not find any or figure out how to get a hold of them. Guess that one was out of the question. Finally, I clicked on the tab again. There were too many open, I was going to have to close a few. But, one last look first.
Immediately an email address popped out at me. Weird. I had looked and looked and could never figure out how to contact them. That is, I may have seen the email address before, obviously it had been there all along, but never been able to comprehend how to go about contacting them. That day, suddenly it was crystal clear. I dropped a quick email, introduced myself, said I’d love to talk about whorls someday if they ever wanted.
Then forgot about it. They would never want to talk to me.
Then one day I checked email to find one from Horses In The Morning! They had an opening and would like to do an interview. The next day! We got everything lined up and I was nearly sick with nerves. But I didn’t realize until the interview was just about over just how important my lack of ability to contact them had been.
As we finished up talking Glen said that he had received my email just after talking to a friend about horse whorls. The timing was perfect and made him want to talk.
Had I been able to figure out how to send that email sooner the timing wouldn’t have been right. The interview may or may not have taken place. But sent just when it was everything fell into place.
Sometimes God puts blinders on us. He stops us from seeing things that are clearly visible right in front of our faces. These blinders hold us back and make us wait on God’s time, instead of rushing forwards on our own. When He knows the time is right, He will remove the blinders and send us out to do what is needed. Everything is on time when it’s on God’s time.
You can find the interview here: https://www.horsesinthemorning.com/understanding-whorls-evacuations-and-horse-bread-for-sep-14-2022-by-state-line-tack/