Baby Cows and Sheep
With spring comes so much hope. I hope it doesn’t freeze my peony and lilac bushes. I hope the weeds don’t come up until it is warm enough to get out and spray for the little devils. I hope, and this one is a hope beyond hope. I hope, hope springs eternally year after year.
The best thing I wait for happened this morning as I was out changing the GPS of my three sprinklers on my lawn. Better known as pulling hoses from here to there. It was nearly 40 degrees, that’s not bad for 6 a.m. The morning was alive with birds twittering. That best thing I was waiting for? Is to hear somewhere in my neck of the valley, baby animals. I know baby cows are calves and baby sheep are lambs. To me they have always been baby cows and baby sheep. This gray, overcast, and lightly rainy morning, sounds are caught under the low hanging clouds. The sounds of baby sheep. A lot of baby sheep came across the air. Talk about a mood lifter.
Then a double whammy. In another direction the sounds of baby cows came lightly within ear shot. Maw. Baw. Baw. Maw. What a way to start a day. It sometimes gets past me that there is life outside the day-to-day world I get caught up in. Oh, here’s an example of that.
Moons and moons ago during early fall we had just put the last of the alfalfa we had raised that summer, in stacks in the stack yard. It was a beautiful sight. Haystacks lined up some one hundred feet long and eighteen feet tall. All green and ready to be laid in front of waiting cows in dairies in California. Now we just had to wait for the byers to line up and grab our lovely money green grass. So we waited. And waited.
Winter came in with an early snow. A good sign we thought. Early snow and the hay would certainly start to move. We waited. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s. They all came and went but the buyers didn’t even come, let alone doing that “went” part!
When you are in a pinch everything becomes about that pinch you feel. In each section of life. Pinching dollars soon becomes pinching dimes then pinching pennies. You miss so much that happens around you when you are so focused on that pinch.
Late winter was approaching and all that hay was still in the stackyard. Buyers were scarcer than hens’ teeth! We waited. Bills piled up; pennies were stretched to the point of pinging off the empty pantry walls. Every farmer, rancher, for that matter every family has at some time felt that pinch. Between paydays. Between end of harvest and the sale of crops. Between selling yearlings or keeping them one more year. We all have lived through those “in-between” spots in life. But! Yes, a spotted, crack separated “but.” Then something amazing happens.
For us “it” didn’t happen until mid-spring. A hay buyer stopped one morning. I thought he must have been lost for sure! Nope. He bought it all. Every single 2012 ton of now brown weathered hay bales. Whew. Success. Well except for the fact we sold it all for the huge price of forty-one bucks a ton. A loss of more than I care to remember. The thing I do remember is this. As we were in the stackyard making the deal that would cost us many more days of worry of how to cover the loss, I heard a faint Baw Baaaaw Baaaaaaw of baby sheep somewhere to the north. The best sound. The best hope. The best of life.
As I walked out the door this morning, I was worrying about how I was going to keep up with my yard this year. It seems each year my yard gets bigger and I get slower. The worry has been growing in me since last fall. The worry getting bigger as the green of spring started to appear earlier this month. So, as I was out pulling at my hoses this morning, I remembered that sound. That clear, lovely, cry of hope. The baby sheep. The baby cows. The worries of life never go all the way away. If it did, I am sure we would worry while we waited for the other shoe to drop!
Mark Twain may have said it best, “Worring is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”
Trina lives in Diamond Valley, north of Eureka Nevada. Contact her at itybytrina@yahoo.com or Trina Machacek HC 62 Box 62101 Eureka, Nevada 89316
