Ruminations and Ruminants

If I was more clever, I'd have made that the title of my blog. Perhaps and album title someday.

Recently, my cousin came up to help us castrate, tag, vaccinate and move cattle to some wheat grazure. It was threatening rain. We failed. It rained.

Last Saturday, a heavy thunderstorm drifted in while we were building a corral (that we realized we should have built before attempting the aforementioned activities with my cousin). I thought it was going to just miss us. It did not. We were out in the pasture and as we headed back into town, what appeared to be rain up ahead turned out instead to be nickel-sized hail. I've never been in hail of any substance before, and I can assure you that the crack of ice-balls whapping up against the windshield and sheet meat is entirely disconcerting. We turned around and high-tailed it out of there. We had to make for the farm, to try and get in the shed, dodging precursor hail the entire time. Our shed is sort of a Quonset hut type structure, large enough for a combine, two tractors, and a two-ton farm truck. We nestled the pickup in between everything and shut the door and Wham-o!, the hail started pelting the metal shed, making an obscene racket. There is something unnerving about being attacked from the sky. It seemed like there was an army of tebuchets in the heavens loading up ice-balls and whistling them out at us. It's probably the first time I've ever had a "nowhere to run" experience. I kept thinking, "I'm glad we're in this pickup." "I'm sure glad to be in this shed." "What would I do if I was a cow right now?"

So that was exciting.

We finally got the corral built today. It's a poor man's corral. It's shoddy. We had to use line posts as corner posts and the barbed wire just bends the posts when you try to tighten it. So everything's kind of just leaning eschew, looking bad. We bought some gate-type panels to use as a pen and runway to the portable loading corral. Tommorrow we have to put posts in to anchor the panels and then we'll be ready to work the cattle. *Unfortunately*, all this has taken so long that the wheat has headed out and we can't put cattle on it now. So the whole point of this is for naught, except we still needed to work them, so it's still useful for that, but all that electric fence is useless now. It'll be handy sometime, no doubt, but not soon.

This morning we found out that my Aunt Margaret died. It was unexpected. The funeral will be here in Alva, so I'll be seeing my cousins this weekend. It's sad. It's sad, no so much for me because she's gone, but just her life in general contained the sadness of a life never fully realized. Not a bad life, nor a bad person, or anything like that, but it was never what it could have been and I would have liked to have seen that change. Of course, for my cousins, their mother is gone and that's hard. I'll miss her, too. But mostly I'll miss what could have been, I think. I'm confident that death has been sweet to my Aunt and that she's better for it, but, you know, we don't live outside of time like she does now. For us, everything goes on incomplete and imperfected and disjointed.

Cheers to you and yours,
prewett