The Price of Patience

After a quick couple of drenching afternoon showers, there was no rain in the ten-day forecast, and the alfalfa’s deep green leaves covered the axle of the pivot tires.  It was prime, if not overdue, time to cut.

Tentative Curing

Two weeks later than usual Next Summer hay was cut and dried in four days, one over par for our area.  Out came the balers.  With warm days and humid nights, it should have baled quickly, but that was not the case.  Two hours here, three hours there.  Either the wind would blow making it too dry, or it wouldn’t blow making it too damp.  On the last night, waiting for dew to set in, it sprinkled. A drop, a second drop coming in sideways threatened to ruin the last 50 acres waiting to be baled.  But yet again, the wind came in right on cue and with a little too much force, not only drying those few minutes of agonizing raindrops, but also necessitating a final baling the following morning.  

It took four 6 am mornings and 11 o’clock nights to bale the 160 acres.  While the cutting seemed to drag on forever with a rollercoaster of excitement, disappointment, close calls, and two very tired farmers, our patience was rewarded with a 40% increase in yield over last year’s first cutting.  Our small bales were stacked by the house, and the beautiful bales sit so stately on the field waiting to be picked up.  One day, two days go by; the stacker was broke-down.  So we waited patiently.

Last Chance

From the top of our small bales stack, we had set tarps on an eerily still evening.  Intensity from baling and the nervousness that every Colorado afternoon in June brings, doesn’t juxtapose well with a calm, humid, evening.  From the top of the stack, one can see a year’s worth of income in big bales sitting on the field which was just budding back into existence.  The foreground green on green intersected by the pivot on a blue backdrop looked like a color setting from quiet generations past.  

A glance to the south affirmed the anxiety.  Shades of blue fought on the Front Range.  Twenty miles away there was rain. As the wind picked up, the tarps jerked away from the stack, sand storms gritted and burned our arms and faces, and we rushed to save these bales from rain.  Our fingers were raw from pushing twine along the stems of alfalfa and pulling it against the wind, tying knots to keep it down.  The cacophony of whipping and slapping against the stack was painful to hear, not for these bales but those.  Those big bales sit, and so do we.  Waiting patiently.  Watching patiently.  The storm pushes east of us, and our patience is rewarded yet again with dry green bales sitting in a cool green field.

Storm Symphony

This afternoon brings long bellowing thunder, flashes of lightning over streaks coming from a heavy purple cloud.  To the west, the gray rain curtain masks peach skies beyond.   As the wind picks up, the dogs are panting.  Storm.  One drop, two, and bales sit in the field.  It is a sickening feeling for a harvesting farmer to see heavy rain move in, like watching a tornado in the distance move closer to your home.  Your hard work and all its material rewards endangered.  The often awe-inspiring symphony of thunder, lightning, clear skies, and dark turns into a nightmare that settles in the pit of any farmer’s stomach.  A drop and another hit dry skin like needles.  The storm is directly overhead rattling up through the porch and our feet, and flashes illuminate the entire sky.  When the drops get big and splash as they fall, the windows get blurry.  They come with the force of hail and eventually turn.  For several more painful minutes, we watch the rain.  This time from inside because there is nothing that getting soaked outside will do to save our bales.  

With a few sad words of optimism for the hay, we retired for the night, listening to a gentle hum of soft rain on the walls and windows, and on our bales.  Patience will prevail.  So we will quietly wait.

Such is Life: Fathers and Sons

With all the moisture that came this spring and a little over a hundred acres of rained on hay, the humidity will not let it dry, and thus we have an interminable first cutting.   The only breaks that remind us days are actually passing are the entries into rodeos and the excitement that the morning of the rodeo brings.  The beginning of summer brings hay season and the rodeo season.  Though in the midst of coordinating these events with raising children, their individual excitements diminish into another string of events that eventually blend into one another, passing imperceptibly through the summer and right into the fall where begins the next season without notice.  Bringing little ones on the field or to the rodeo has its novelty at first, but eventually it all melts back to mornings with oatmeal on tee shirts, wiping little hineys, and looking for a single lost cowboy boot.

In the routine that is the morning, tidying up toys and clothes from the night before, a belt, buckle, and pair of jeans lay across my grandparents’ trunk.  Without scale, one would assume it was the first of a summer full of times my husband would leave his clothes out after a rodeo.  Shining in the morning sun, it sat stately in its small size and age.  It was indeed the father’s buckle, but on the son’s belt.  Mutton Busting, 1991.  

The first buckle he ever won is now proudly worn by a pint-sized cowboy.  Our son wears his dad’s childhood hat, misshapen from taking it off and on and pulling it down around his ears like he’s getting ready for a rough 8 seconds.  At gatherings, he pulls his shirt all  the way out to show off the buckle, and his boots are louder than he is.  He rides a stick horse and climbs on the back of anyone lying on the floor.  At the rodeos or implement stores, he is beyond hand-holding because he really thinks he is all grown up; even though, he can’t yet say “all grown up.”  Pants get folded and returned to the dresser, boots go back to the mudroom, and I carefully roll the belt for safe keeping until the next rodeo which might be tomorrow or a week from now as the days are all the same.  Even in the spurts of activity on the farm or at the rodeo, no event distinguishes itself from the one before or the one after, and a little boy seems to stay little but so much wants to be grown up.  Such is life with little ones; days are long, but the years are short.

Yet at one time, in 1991, there was a little boy winning that buckle.  He turns 30 this year.  Now with a little boy of his own, he doesn’t notice the years passing by, but perhaps his dad does.  Coming home from the same first summer rodeo of the year, there were three generations of cowboys with blue eyes and jeans in the truck, day after day and year after year.  In 1991 there were also three generations riding to and from rodeos in different trucks and wearing different styles of jeans, but still three generations of cowboys.  Then each day inched by.  Each of the cowboys grew older, some grew taller and some shrunk, but those days somehow turned into years.  Eventually death and birth backed against each other, and again three generations of cowboys go to and from the rodeo together.

One day this little boy is going to surpass his own dad the way his dad did his.   “Papa” was once a young father climbing the rodeo ranks while his little son trotted along with Grandpa.  Grandpa has passed, and that little son turns thirty this year.  One day this little boy is going to get bucked off a bull and tear his shirt on the horn of a steer the way his dad does and grandad once did.  One day this little boy will be thirty with a little boy of his own.  

How that one day will arrive is beyond the comprehension of any of us now, but today and probably tomorrow too, this little boy just needs a hug from his daddy after tripping on his own boots.  And the thirty year old father, he still needs the advice of his own older, wiser dad.  Such is life when the days are slow, but the years go fast.

Regardless of Circumstance

In the cool air of a gray morning, it was time to feed Tia.  Moths fluttered in the air like suspended leaves from the previous fall reincarnated this spring.  Their little gray bodies floating on an inscrutable path were just trying to sustain themselves for their short existence.  Not a nuisance, not at all.  Born and proliferating in the spring, only to die in the heat of the summer, they feast on the innumerable gnats and mosquitoes that the rain brought.  

The crunching of sand below my feet led the way to the corral.  Recent rains beat down across the region, leaving behind little landslides of sand in previously established walkways and farm roads.  Just relocated.  Nevertheless, vehicles found ways around the washouts and drove more slowly on washboard runoff, and the ranchers wore their better boots to keep their feet clean.  

Pressing On

Two weeks ago the lush grass of a sub-irrigated pasture nearly closed in on a newborn brangus-cross twin.  Her mama abandoned her perhaps because she was born later than the other twin or perhaps because the mama subconsciously knew she couldn’t provide for both in her older age.  In any case, the calf came home with us.  Three times a day, in the cool morning, the windy afternoons, and after the sun had fully set, I fed Tia.  I would bring down a warm bottle and mimic the height of a natural mother.  I used my free hand to wipe bugs from her swollen eyes and gaunt yet silky flanks like a mama would do, if she had one.   I was a poor substitute for a mother cow, but nature doesn't always allow for perfect replacements.  Nature presses on regardless of circumstance.

Tia was not alone.  With each feeding, the delicate little trotting footsteps of Tia approached and were usually followed by the lumbering hop of Peg, a calf with a broken leg.  Peg at just a week old had most likely been stepped on by her own mother, #79 a beautifully-built black angus.  Even cows make mistakes, but the cost of them is high.  In nature, Peg would have hobbled around for a month or two but eventually died of starvation when she couldn’t keep up with the herd.  Tia would have met the same fate in just days.  Hunger doesn’t relent, so they three have come home with us.  

Settling In

In the heat of the yellow afternoon, I saw Peg and Tia following the cow.  There was a distinct difference though.  The oppressive heat of the day settled on the view of them, and aside from the blurriness that heat and bugs create, it was clear.  No longer was there a faint dust cloud caused by an uncomfortable kicking “shoo” of the mama toward Tia.  The dust previously surrounding them had settled back to the ground.  As I approached closer, and my own footstep clouds of white sand settled, I saw nature and the perseverance of it had come full circle.

With that warm bottle in hand, I tried to coax Tia to drink.  She drank but not with the same thirst as before.  When I crouched down closer to her, I was certain her flanks were fuller than they should be.  That mama encroached on the space I thought was mine and Tia’s.  Looking straight ahead, I saw some of her engorgement relieved.  The jabs for milk and the bubbly sound of nursing ended, and when I stood up, I was met with the big wet nose of the mama cow overhead, poking through the rungs of the fence.  For the last week, when I came down, she would lift her head, and with darting eyes and alert ears, she would see if I were a danger to her calf, and now, calves.  

When the sun’s color changed that evening from gold to orange, to pink, and then to the deep lavender that means night has arrived, I took one last bottle.  My days playing mama to Tia were numbered.  I fed the cow and offered the bottle.  I could see the calf look to me with the eagerness of a child to see a friend, no longer as a provider of sustenance.  As #79 began to snort into the flakes of alfalfa, and Peg hobbled into position for her supper, Tia was torn.  The night was calm and humid, a perfect setting for a nature to take its proper place in a perfectly planned chain of events.  A few mosquitoes were making their way onto my skin, and I brushed them off but decided I would not do the same for the calf.  In the heavy air of a dark evening, she left me and nudged up behind her new mama and nursed.

For Farm and Ranch Women: A Damn-it Kind of Day

For Farm and Ranch Women: A Damn-it Kind of Day