NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS - DOWN THE DRAIN

Published in Intermountain Farm and Ranch January 7, 2011

        By this time in January all of my New Years Resolutions have been broken, displaced, abandoned, or ignored. I start out each New Year with a list of things I’m going to accomplish and every year the same thing happens, I don’t follow through. Perhaps I am being too hard on myself, perhaps my resolutions are really unattainable or perhaps I am a procrastinator and like my life the way it is.  Whatever, I think I need a plan. What are the things that I want to change?

• My weight - This is something that everyone wants to do, lose weight. Maybe I’d be better off writing down specific things I am willing to do to lose the weight. I am already going to water aerobics, so maybe I could put that down. Is that cheating? It would give me a head start on something I know I will do.
• My lack or organization - It isn’t always easy living on the farm. I have often wished that I could lovingly send my husband off to work at 8 in the morning and greet him, just as lovingly, at 5 or 6 in the evening. Instead, my husband and sons are in and out of the house 24/7. (I still try to do the “lovingly” thing.) It seems sometimes that I am a short-order cook besides being the main gofer and extra hired man. So to become organized is almost impossible. But I could plan menus for the week and have supper organized while I’m fixing breakfast each day. Then when (not if) I’m called out with the cows or spend all day chasing parts, I would have a head start on meals.
• My messy office – I’m not sure anything can be done about that. I share the office with my husband, Boyd, and I’ve decided I’m the best “clutterer”.  I have piles everywhere, important stuff: information for taxes; calf weight numbers; bank account statements; etc. I have a hard time throwing things away, but maybe I need to invest in more file folders and get things filed, or a bigger garbage can and use it. 

 I have a sister who sets three- month’s goals instead of the standard yearly resolutions. This works well for her. I tried that last year and I still have my first three-month list of goals taped up over the computer in my office where I can look at it daily. I have finished or met most of these goals, but never got around to writing up the second three-month list. 

As I think about this I believe I will scratch this year’s resolutions list right now. It has been a waste of paper and effort before and nothing has been done so far this year.  Instead I am going to resolve to enjoy and appreciate each day as a new opportunity for growth.

• I will look forward to and enjoy the winter storms, the birth of new calves, the long evenings in front of the fireplace and face the challenge of slick roads.
• When spring arrives, I will welcome the sight of the first robin, marvel at the song of the meadow lark, and anticipate the spring cattle drive.
• The long summer days will give me the opportunity to garden, work in the yard, take photos, and have picnics, with the chance of spending time at the ranch and with family.
• Fall time, the time of harvest has always been a time of celebration for me – the hard work is over and we see the fruits of our labors as we harvest our crops, preserve the vegetables from the garden, enjoy the cool evenings and hot days. And we have the added benefit of being able to observe our annual color show when the trees and shrubs put on their fall wardrobes, which prepares us for the black and white of  the coming winter.

Yes, I believe I can keep this resolution!

CHRISTMAS MEMORIES

Published in Intermountain Farm and Ranch December 24, 2010

Christmas is so much different now than when I was young. Back then, Christmas advertising didn’t get started until close to Thanksgiving. We didn’t have TVs, so radio and newspaper were the only means of advertisements. No one had artificial trees, either the families would go out and cut their own or buy from the local gas station.

No one decorated outside of their homes, and the inside decorations were usually minimal. We had “bubble lights” on our tree. These lights had a round base, filled with colored fluid, and what looked like a birthday candle on top of it. When the fluid warmed up it would bubble into the candle.. These were fun  to watch the as they bubbled. 

There were no malls in Idaho Falls, but we did have Woolworths and Newberrys. right downtown Idaho Falls on Park Avenue. This is where we shopped to get the presents for our brothers and sisters. They sold “Blue Waltz” perfume, the perfume all pre-teen girls wanted.

We exchanged gifts in our school classes, drawing names early in December. The most wished-for gift was the Lifesaver book, which is still available today. One year I received a handkerchief and a pencil.  Not something a forth grader would look forward to receiving. I can’t remember if I was a gracious receiver, but I remember the boy who had my name, and the circumstance of his family. I believe the handkerchief was handmade by his mother, and I don’t believe I appreciated the effort it took to make it, nor the embarrassment of the boy who had nothing else to give.  

Schools had Christmas programs, and as students we looked forward to the preparation for those programs. We learned songs and memorized speaking parts. Mothers made costumes out of crepe paper. And all of the parents, brothers and sisters, and a lot of grandparents showed up the night of the program. Cookies and punch were served to everyone following the program. The evening of the program started our Christmas vacation from school. We looked forward to that as much as we anticipated the program. 

Our family met with grandmother, uncle, aunts, and cousins on Christmas Eve, for a special family program and gift giving. We didn’t have central heating then, and I remember returning from these parties to a cold house. Dad would have to stoke up the wood heater in the living room and we sat around it to get warm.

We hung our stockings from the mantel on Christmas Eve, and there would be a tangerine and nuts in them the next morning. Christmas morning gifts weren’t fancy, often handmade. We girls got a doll, and Mother made the wardrobe for the doll. When we were young we didn’t notice that the doll clothes were made from the same material as some of our dresses that Mother had sewn for us throughout the year. Paper dolls was a favorite gift, and a Nancy Drew book was always looked for. Our brothers got toy trucks, tractors, tools, and such. I remember the year they got the electric train set. Blocks, Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs were popular then as now. I cannot remember needing batteries for any of our gifts, most of them required hand labor and imagination.

Maybe we have become materialistic and our children want way more than they need or even deserve, but there is still beauty in this season of the year.  Christmas time seems to bring out the giving spirit, people are more cheerful although more stressed. neighbors take treats to neighbors who they maybe haven’t visited with since the previous Christmas.  The words of the song: “Peace on earth, good will to men,” should be something that we implement in our daily lives, not just once a year.  But at least we do it once a year. 



A TIME TO SHOW GRATITUDE

Published in Intermountain Farm and Ranch November 26, 2010

            As a child, I looked upon Thanksgiving as a time to eat turkey and get together with family.  The idea of gratitude didn’t play a big part of it, other than the prayer at the meal on Thanksgiving Day.  I remember one time we were each ask to tell something we were grateful for.  When it was my grandmother’s turn she told us that she had a lot of things to be grateful for and a lot of things that she wasn’t grateful for. Because she was afraid she would get the lists mixed up she said she wouldn’t say anything.

            I’ve thought of that day with my grandmother and can see the wisdom in her thinking.  Too many times we expound on what we are not grateful for and mix it up with the things we should be grateful for.

            As people who live on and work the land, farmers and ranchers have a lot to be grateful for, not only at this time of the year when the harvests are rolling to an end, but all year round.  I would like to list some of the things I’m grateful for, and try not to get my grateful list mixed up with my ungrateful list.

• Our families.  They can and should be our support group as we face the challenges in our lives. 
• The chance to live on the land, to be a steward of the land.  To work the soil, watch seeds sprout and grow, to harvest the crops.  To be able to spend all day out in the fields, and return to our home at night tired but knowing we have accomplished something.
• Water!  Our cattle need to drink, our crops need water to grow, and we need water for personal use.  The saying “you never miss the water until the well goes dry” certainly hits home in dry and drought years.  In being grateful for water, we need to recognize the necessity of preserving the water we have, and be wise in the use of it.
• Our mild climate in this part of the United States as compared to other areas.  We don’t have hurricanes; rarely have tornadoes, and not often floods.  We do have blizzards and winter storms and dry years with droughts, but those are rarely extreme. 
• Our means of communication.  Yes, technology has become big and sometimes overbearing, but there are so many advantages to it.  The cell phones alone have saved us many miles of traveling when someone can call from the ranch and order parts, get a service man to come, get help from home, and let other’s know your location. 
• The beauties of nature that are all around us.  Each season brings out a different aspect of these beauties.  Sometimes we get so involved in what we are doing we fail to take the time to look around, enjoy what is in our own backyard.
• The opportunities we have to vote. This time of the year it is easy to grumble and complain about all the advertising that goes on with the voting.  But we are blessed to be able to choose, to vote for the people we feel will do the best job, and then to respect and support those who are voted in, whether they be our choice or not. 

This list is by no means in order of importance.  And there are many other things we as farmers/ranchers have to be grateful for.  Sometimes life gets so busy that we fail to be grateful, to give thanks for small favors, to simply say “thank you.”  But as we take time on Thanksgiving Day to give our thanks, I for one am going to set a goal for the next year to try to overlook my list of things I’m not grateful for and increase my list of things I am grateful for.

APPRECIATION FOR MODERN CONVENIENCES

Published in Intermountain Farm and Ranch November 12, 2010

As I walked in the door of our valley home the other evening, the smell of supper  revived my tired bones. We had been at the ranch all day separating the cows and calves. The fact that supper was ready made me stop and think of the people that settled in the area where our ranch is. Back then, as now, the women were out in the fields helping their men along with doing their own household chores.  What wonderful conveniences we have today to save us time! What challenges they faced without them.

I use the crockpot often, as I did the day we weaned calves. My early settler grandmother didn’t have electricity to use a crockpot. But she did have a wood cook stove. Many of those stoves had warming ovens that would keep food warm, and if not it would usually have a shelf above the stove that worked the same way. To cook food slowly they could push a pan to the very back or far side of the stove. That is probably the best they could do and the closest to a crockpot they had. Another modern convenience the early settlers didn’t have was a microwave. No eight minute baked potatoes for them!

Refrigerators and freezers provide us the means to preserve fresh and frozen foods. Back then, keeping food cold and from spoiling was not easy. If they had an icebox, it had to be kept full of ice. As the ice melted in the ice box, the water would often run out onto the floor of the kitchen. In order to have ice in the summer, early in the spring they put straw over snow and ice, thus insulating it. Back in the early 1900s, many ranch homes didn’t even have an icebox, and depended on a nearby spring to keep their food cold. They would put a wooden or metal box into the spring and put food items that needed to be kept cold in the box. Or if they had a well and put milk and other foods needing refrigeration down the well.  Some had cellars, which remained cool all summer.   Potatoes, apples, carrots, and such were stored in these root cellars..    

They baked bread in their wood cook stoves. A women I visited with recently told me that she was able to determine if the oven in her wood cook stove was the right temperature by opening the oven door and putting her hand inside. If it was not hot enough, she would put more wood in the stove, if it was too hot, she would leave the oven door open for a few minutes to let it cool off.

To bathe, they had to haul buckets of water from the spring or well. While the water was heating on the cook stove, they would take down the big tub hanging on the outside of the house and set it on the floor in the kitchen. When the water was warm enough, it was transferred into the tub.  After a bath, they would have to empty the water out of the tub, a bucket full at a time, then hang the tub back up.  Not something you would do every night or morning. Bathing was usually a once-a-week occurrence, and the entire family used the same water, with a bucket of hot water added between each bather. No twenty minute showers for them!

They faced these challenges because they had no other options. This is the way things were done back then. They didn’t have the exposure to more modern conveniences that we have. Sometimes it is good to look back so we can appreciate the things we have and that we take for granted.

That evening’s reflections on the past made my hot bath and crockpot supper even more enjoyable.

BOOTS

BOOTS

(Published in Intermountain Farm and Ranch, December 10, 2010)

            I like to be dressed appropriately, according to the situation I am in.  That is sometimes difficult if not impossible when you are living on the ranch.  I’m always wearing jeans, though, so that is one thing that is to my advantage.  I had a friend who once questioned why I didn’t get me some “nice polyester” pants to wear.  She explained they were cheaper than jeans and always looked nice.  I asked her if she had ever climbed through a barbed wire fence in a pair of “nice polyester” pants.  The conversation ended there.

            I bought myself some boots to wear when I’m out working with the cattle or helping in the field.  These are not cowboy boots, more like a hiking boot.  They will keep the stickers out of my socks and give my ankles some support. 

            Well, one raining morning this past spring we were in the kitchen visiting and the phone rang.  Boyd answered it, only because it was sitting right at his elbow.  Usually he just looks at me as if to say “get that because it’ll be for you anyway.”  He did get that look, but picked up the phone anyway.  His end of the conversation was:  “Hello” pause, “we’ll be right there.”

            “Let’s go,” he said as he hung up the phone.  “We have cows out up on Foothill road.”  I grabbed my sweatshirt, Jon and Boyd grabbed their coats and off we went, Boyd and me in the pickup, Jon on the John Deere Gator.  No time to change shoes. And it was muddy! 

            The cows had crossed through the canal, gone up on the far side and were happily eating green grass in someone else’s pasture.  They didn’t want to go back through the canal into our pasture and did everything they could to thwart our plans of moving them.  In fact, I had a couple of close encounters. 

A Hereford cow and I played tag, moving back and forth.  She had her head down like she was going to butt me out of the way, finally she moved to the left, I followed and she quickly moved to the right and went around me.  Jon was able to get her back. 

The Black Angus cow was a different story.  She looked me right in the eye as she tried to get around me.  Black Angus have evil looking eyes, and they use it to their advantage.  But I’d been around them long enough to know that this was a staring match.  I stared her down and won. She didn’t get around me.

            We got the cows back where they belonged and returned home. My shoes were soaked and muddy, almost beyond recognition.  Too bad I hadn’t had the time to change to my new boots.

            Then a couple of days later, Boyd opened the door to the kitchen and hollered, “I need you right now.” His tone of voice let me  know that it would be waste of time to ask why or how, but to follow him.  So off I went to stand in manure up to my ankles and open the gate when and if they needed it opened.  Of course, they didn’t need it, but I was there just in case.  Another time when there wasn’t a chance to change into my boots. 

            I know I could wear those boots in the house, put them on in the morning just in case.  But they are heavy and mud clings to the soles, thus dropping mud off wherever I walk in the house.  There probably isn’t a solution to this shoe problem, and I know there will be times when I need the boots that I will have them on..  I guess I just need to be grateful that I even had shoes on the other times, whether they were appropriate apparel for the situation or not.

     The day after Christmas, and the plummetting of spirits have progressed rapidly the past twenty-four hours.  There is such a build up of emotions getting to Christmas that it's a wonder there isin't a world wide explosion about Christmas Eve.  Hectic shopping, baking, wrapping of presents, delivering presents, receiving presents, cleaning the house, preparing for company or prparing to go be with family, all tends to add up in the weeks before Christmas.  Because of the media's play in Christmas, this build up starts about the time school starts in the fall. This gives all of us at least four months of pressure and stress.  You know, even a pressure cooker will blow up eventuallly if the pressure isn't controlled.  So is it anywonder that tempers flare, children become too excited and cry. 
     We have always had our big Christmas party of Christmas Eve, getting together the grandchildren and adults that evening.  It is a good evening of eating, listening to the Bible story of Jesus' birth, and opening presents.  When the grandchildren were all young, it was sometimes a hilarious evening for the adults as we watched the children finally able to open some of their presents.  Trying to stay organized is difficult underthese trying circumstances, but we have held fast to the rule of only one person opening a present at a time.  Sometimes hard for a little one who hasn't had a chance to open a present yet.  This year we only had two wee ones, a 7 year old and a 2 year old.  The older of the two was controlled, just barely, but the younger flitted around, helping everyone open their gifts, and tearing paper off from his own.
     Then waking up Christmas morning at our home was like reading a book  and just finished the part of the biggest climax only to find that the book ended abrutly.  I felt like I had been dropped flat without warning, splatted right on the concrete without a parachute.  There hadn't been a warning that the end was near, no gentle let down or tying of ends together.  No, just "it's over."
     This is the first time I've felt this let down so dramatically.  Is it my age? Is it circumstances  around us? Was it the fact that we had a friend bring his mentally challeneged son to be with us on Christmas Eve because they had no place else to go, and I got caught in the emotion of that? Was it because of challenges we've faced throughout the year all of a sudden seem too big of a mountain to climb right now?  Don't know, but I do know it hit me hard. 
     I normally love Christmas and the days after Christmas I have always enjoyed the slowdown in pace, the chance to look around and appreciate those friends and family close by, to keep in touch with those far away.  Not so this time.
     I'm going to have to start shoveling hard and furious to get myself out of this hole. And I know I will, but this morning I just want to pull the blankets up over my head and not look out.

HUNTING TRADITION

     Hunting has been a part of my life forever. i can remember, as a young girl, working in the potato fields and the goal was to get the potato harvest finished in time for the men to go deer or elk hunting, or both. the men talked about it all the time. and it seems like we always accomplished that goal of getting the harvest finished in time. I never went hunting; it was a "man" thing to do back then.
     When Boyd and I were first married, a productive hunting season heped feed our family through many winters. i learened to flavor the meat of even the oldest deer so it was edible. maybe not delicious, maybe not tneder, but edible.
     The day before opening day of hunting, I would load the car with groceries, get the kids off to school, and drive to the ranch. I'd light a fire in the wood cook stove upon arrival and shut the doors to the rooms next to the kitchen so as to centralize the heat in the room I would be occupying. Then - I'd mix bread, start a big stew on the stove, and make pie dough. While the bread was rising and the pies baking, the soup simmered
 and I would sweep and mob the floor - even venturing into the colder rooms to straighten the beds and sweek and mop those floors. while the bread baked, I'd wash and dry the dishes to leave everything neat and clean.
     I know that souns like a lot of work, but I loved being at the ranch as much then as I do now. There was and is a peacefulness there that I love to bask in. Having no electricity, a battery operated radio is used to give us any news that we think we might need. Most of the time that radio isn't even turned on, leaving us with the opportunity to enjoy solitude and peace.
     After a day of cleaning and cooking, I would be able to get back to our valley home by the time the kids got home from school. And the hunters would be going to a warm house with the smell of freshly baked bread and hot stew greeting them as they open the kitchen door.

     There have been many years of hunting, many stories told involving our family and the hunts they have been on. This year, as our youngest son, Jon, and one of our grandsons, Skyler, prepared to go hunting on opening day, I fixed sandwiches to send with them. As they walked out the door, Skyler looked at me with a big grin on his face, grunted like a cave man and said, "Me, Man!" He was going out to provide food for his family.

     Were they able to get their prey. No. In fact they didn't see much game that morning, but did see lots of hunters. But they participated in the tradition of hunting on opening day, a big event in the life of both young men who come from a family of hunters!