I'm Mostly Ready to Laugh About it Now

I am going to have to look back to see when I last wrote, but I’m pretty sure it was not in this calendar year. In fact, I’ll be lucky if I even get through writing this in this calendar year, because this calendar year has been a doozy. 2023 has not been kind to my people. I don’t mean ‘my people’ racially. Just familially. As far as I know, the Germans are doing okay.

Anyway, I guess I’ll just jump right into the main event of this year. I had thought of several ways to drag this out and mention it last, but my biggest fans (my Grandmas, obviously) have been chomping at the bit for me to write my next post.

“So... have you done any writing lately,” Grandma asked me, delicately (a word which here means, ‘I felt she was hinting at me to get going with that’).

“No, it’s been too busy lately... but I should get on that,” I replied.

“Oh yes, I know you’re busy... but it’ll be good when you write. I sure like your writing. Should be a good one.”

My takeaway from this conversation is that my Grandma has gathered (perhaps correctly) that the more stressed I am in a situation, the more colourful my retrospective hot take is likely to be. Since the initial fright of this event has long passed, it is now expected that I will publicly process my trauma in the form of this blog. I should be charging my parents for performing therapy on myself. But then they might stop traumatizing me and I wouldn’t need therapy anymore. No one stands to gain from that.

I wrote a poem once (actually, I’ve done this more than once, but I only wrote this particular one once), and in a rare moment of vulnerability, I am going to share it here. If you’re wondering what the rhyme scheme is, it is called “Whenever it was convenient”, and the meter is “(Snoop)Dog’s breakfast”.

Now that I’ve hidden my artistic insecurities behind those defensive walls of self-deprication, here is the poem:

Always using humour

At the wrong moments.

Can’t be serious for long,

Just feels wrong.

Don’t want to use mirth

To hide the pain,

Suppress,

Repress,

Or confess,

Under disguise of nonchalance.

But still I laugh.

Find a tickle of irony

In the jolly racing stripes

Of tear-tracks down my cheeks.

But not to dull the pain,

Chuckling Novacaine,

No.

It’s just harder to navel-gaze

When I throw my head back

And laugh.

In that merry, open position,

As I gasp for breath,

I can see the stars

And know:

The infinity that remains

Goes on much longer

Than the pain.

Now, I know what you’re thinking,

“Holy crap, she really was traumatized. She was writing poetry! Poor girl.”

But don’t worry; I wrote this back in 2017, not long after attending a writing workshop. I haven’t yet resorted to poetry in my self-administered therapy.

Anyway, the point of sharing that serious poem about levity was just to say, don’t worry about me, I’ll laugh it off. In fact, even when I was at my most not-okay during this, that’s what I kept reminding myself: “This doesn’t feel great right now, but someday you’re gonna laugh about it.”

Today is the day.

(‘Today’ is very much a figurative word here - I’ve been in the slow process of picking away at this article since August)

Anyone that’s been around or connected with my family has probably heard that Dad got into an accident this spring. I watched as he got his chest stepped on by a horse, then was with him while we waited for help.

Now, if I could have looked into the future and seen that my father was laying there badly injured, and that he would recover eventually, even though it sucked for him a lot and not a little for me too, I would have maybe been okay. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I saw him get stepped on, saw him try to get up, then saw him fading. I thought he was dying.

Just to be clear, I’m still in the pre-story phase here. I plan to go into greater detail on what happened, but I just wanted to explain, for the people that had been around me when this all first happened, why I looked like I got slapped on the face with some deadly spring allergies. News flash: it wasn’t allergies. I was crying a lot. When I wasn’t crying from the shock of replaying the memory of it, I was crying because of how people responded to the crisis. Not in a bad way; just the opposite. Everyone wanted to help in any way they could. Sometimes it was prayers, and sometimes it was practical help with the farm work. One of my ranching cousins, who lives a province over, within hours of the accident was offering to send his hired guy out to us. I was so grateful for the way people responded, and for some reason, the generosity triggered tears. Even simple words of sympathy were enough to trigger me. Somehow the words, “Oh, I’m doing okay,” lose their lustre when they’re squeaked out two octaves too high because my own throat is throttling me and my eyes are tapping into their moisture reserves in a watery response to stimuli that, from an evolutionary standpoint, makes zero sense to me. Like, at what point did a monkey get upset about something and cry and nature went, “That’s it. That’s the one that gets to live.” I’m not mad, I just have some questions for upper management.

Anyway, thank you to anyone who offered kindness in any way whatsoever. If what you did made me cry, just know that it’s not you, it’s me.

Speaking of sympathy, I noticed a distinct difference in the way that men and women responded in offering theirs. Pretty consistently, the minds of the menfolk went to the workload. “Yikes,” they’d say, “that puts more work onto you, then, doesn’t it?”

But the womenfolk looked past, or maybe beside that. They looked into my eyes and asked me if I had been there when it happened; it was the women who recognized that I got injured in a way, too. They were the ones who acknowledged that broken ribs were bad, but watching someone break their ribs was not great either. I’m not trying to garner sympathy here. In fact, please don’t express sympathy towards me, because it still makes me cry for some reason, and then I get embarrassed and sweaty, and being embarrassed also makes me cry sometimes, so then it’s double sweaty. I do not know why I am like this, but I have always been this way, and can’t seem to change, so please, if you see me get so embarrassed that I’m tearing up, the very best thing to do is cover me with a sheet or large piece of cardboard or something and just leave me alone for three business days to recover my composure. Also, just so you know, I can get this way from second-hand embarrassment too, so if you see me crumbling and are thinking I haven’t even done anything embarrassing, you need to have a good hard look at what you’ve done or said in my presence. You can assess your actions while you’re covering me with a sheet and walking away.

Anyway, now you know the embarrassment recovery emergency response procedure for me, and have perhaps gained a little insight as to why I don’t go out into society much (or maybe you had plenty of insight already as to why I’m not fit for society).

Aaaaanyway, since this is the third time I’ve started with the word ‘anyway’, I guess it’s time to take you back to the 6th of May, the very day that unravelled not a few of the brittle strands that comprise the basket case that is me.

Dad and I had decided to take the horses out to tag calves on that fine Saturday morning. A few days previous, we had sorted all the yearlings, selling all of the 2022 calf crop except 60 replacement heifers. The previous day, we had gone in to the market to watch them sell. They sold well, and we were gratified to see that they looked pretty darn good sorted into their weight breaks. That’s just a bit of the high we were riding on when we rode out that fine, sunny, Saturday morning.

Also, in the previous week, we had gone and watched the local rodeo. That is really all the backstory you need to explain the errant thought that zoomed across my mind some time after the accident which was, “We never should have gone to that rodeo; friggin old man was feeling way too punchy. Acting like he’s friggin 18 when he’s friggin not.”

I’m getting ahead of myself, but not very far ahead, because it was when we rode out for this first time in the season, into the first pasture of the day, and just after tagging the first calf on horseback that the accident occurred.

In hindsight, which is the bitterest and most useless of all the sights, Dad and I both acknowledge that Mexico, his horse, was acting pretty jumpy. That was typical for Mexico. He had some baggage, some undisclosed history with the lariat when Dad bought him, but had improved how he handled it in the last three years of riding. When we first brought him home and Dad saddled him, we discovered there were some holes in his upbringing. What had been sold to us as a nicely started, easy-going 4-year-old was looking more like a young horse that had had a saddle thrown on and been rode out several times. He wasn’t easy-going about anything, but would sort of freeze up and tolerate stuff, building up anxiety about things until he couldn’t stuff it down any more. As we got to know him, we could see that anxiety cropping up, even if it was very small, in most interactions with him. Even brushing him and picking up his feet, he would stand tense and watchful.

But Dad had bought a horse to tag calves on, so tagging we went. Barb was able to do most of the work; I’d snare the calves and keep the cows away, and mostly Mexico just had to keep up, then stand around while Dad was tagging. Not long into doing this, Dad happened to be coiling a rope from the ground, and the end of it was sliding past Mexico’s hind feet. When he noticed, his head shot up, eyes got wide, tail clamped down, and he started striking out, kicking at the rope. Not just little errant kicks, which would be bad enough, but real, deadly, trying-to-kill-a-snake-in-the-grass stompy kicks. That was the first time we really clued in that this horse had some issues. The other stuff we had, until then, written off as just holes in his training.

When we saw Mexico do that three years ago, we should have called up the seller and asked him for a more detailed history. But we didn’t. Dad did some work with flags and ropes and got Mexico to where he wasn’t trying to kill stuff with his back feet.

Over the next couple years of riding him, Mexico improved a lot. Dad was able to use him for roping and treating calves, rounding up in the community pasture, and even roping a couple cows and bulls. However, if he was feeling fresh, he would pull out that old trick with the rope, where he wheeled and bolted blindly away from it for fifty yards or so.

That’s how our morning started. Dad went to just toss a rope on that first calf, and as soon as it left his hand, Mexico did his wheel-and-bolt trick. Dad was able to just ditch the rest of his rope and go with him that time. I watched him until he was under control, then went in and snared the calf. Dad came back, cursing the horse, and tagged the calf. When we finished with that, Dad grabbed the tail of his rope and got back on Mexico. We started walking off, and Dad coiled his rope as we went. We could both see that Mexico was still acting uptight about that rope. He was walking stiffly, with his head up and his tail tucked, but was seemingly tolerating the rope being coiled. When the rope was fully coiled, Dad just went to relax the arm that was holding it. In doing so, the coils tapped against his right leg. Mexico started into a bolt, but Dad was half ready for him this time. He immediately threw his rope away and grabbed the reins in both hands. I think because Mexico wasn’t able to do his old standby of bolting, and with the added scare of the rope being dropped behind him, he decided to pull out a new (at least, new to our knowledge) trick. Mexico shook his head a few times, trying to free up his face to go for a run, but when Dad held tight, he decided to buck. Wrenching his face down to the ground, and pulling the reins from Dad’s hands, he went right to it.

It wasn’t a rodeo-style, heels-in-the-air kind of a buck, but after a series of enthusiastic crow hops, coupled with some erratic backing up, then twists, turns, and trips, Mexico stopped and froze for about one second. Sometime within the last couple hops, Dad had landed behind his saddle. When Mexico froze, Dad did too, for a split second, then he shifted a bit, probably trying to prepare to hoist himself back into the seat. But the back of the saddle is called a cantle, because if you end up behind it, recovering is something you likely can’t-le do. It appears that Mexico had just stopped to see if Dad was still there, and Dad’s shifting answered his question. Mexico went right back into his erratic movements, and Dad fell in a heap on the horse’s left side.

Dad fell near to Mexico’s front feet, and I remember thinking, among other words that were shooting across my head, “He almost got stepped on with that one front foot; thank goodness it missed!”

And then, with the reins no longer arresting his forward motion, Mexico’s back feet came up, nearly to where the front feet had been, and the left hind foot smacked and ground into Dad’s chest, as the horse propelled himself forward and away from the scene.

As Mexico buggered off, I jumped off of Barb and ran to Dad. I was hoping that I had seen it wrong. That the deep, thumping sound had been a hoof against Dad’s jacket, and that he was only winded. Fuelling these hopes, Dad had actually rolled partly up and was kneeling when I got to him.

But he went quickly from kneeling upright, to sitting back on his legs.

It was clear, after a few moments, that Dad was more than winded. He was taking shallow breaths, using his exhales to alternate between cursing the horse and just saying my name. His words were barely above a whisper, and in the course of a few breaths, I watched the blood drain from his face.

“I’m blacking out,” he whispered, and he sort of sank and rolled, still in control, so that he was laying in grass.

In this short stretch of time, I was asking Dad if he thought I should call an ambulance or Mom. When his face got so pale so fast, I thought that was probably shock. But when he got faint, I was running through what internal organs might have been damaged. I was worried that a damaged liver would account for such rapid blood loss, or that if his lung was punctured, it could fill with blood and he would suffocate. When he laid down, I called Mom, then Oldest Brother, telling them to come out to the pasture. I gave a brief explanation, but relied heavily on the high-pitched squeak of my panicking voice to add urgency to their steps.

Fortunately, we were at the pasture right behind my yard, which is two miles from Mom and a mile and a half from Brother.

I didn’t have to wait long for Mom and Brother, but in between asking Dad questions on how he felt, my mind was racing. My brain is, at rest, so much spaghetti on a wall. Many memories, phrases, songs, movies, and books are running around in it as background noise, as well as the thoughts on the forefront. Under duress, it’s even messier. As I waited for Mom and Brother, my main thought was to keep Dad talking to me so I would know if he lost consciousness, though I didn’t know what I would do if he did pass out. All the possible scenarios that could be, or that could have been if we’d just done something a little differently that day, were playing as background noise in my head. Joining the cacophony was the scene of the accident, the sights and sounds playing on a loop. Every now and then, an errant thought would emerge, louder than the background noise, such as the one I mentioned earlier, about Dad acting 18 when he’s not. Another one of the thoughts that kept rising to the front of my brain was a memory of Dad instructing me to sell all the cows if he dies. I think the last time he said that I was a fair bit younger, and he was going in for surgery because he broke his leg. I think the first time he mentioned it, I was much younger than that, and he had just laid down in the pasture after tagging a calf because he was having heart palpitations. Anyway, that little audio snippet of his instruction to sell the cows kept playing in my head, and along with it came a little voice that was saying things like, “Not all the cows, surely...”

“You can keep yours, surely...”

“And the brockle-faced cows; you can keep those ones, surely...”

I do like a nice black brockle-faced cow.

Anyway, I didn’t have to spent much time alone with my thoughts (though it was still too much time), because Mom and Brother arrived shortly.

Mom drove up to us with my truck, and Brother got there a minute later on a quad.

Dad had stayed conscious the whole time, and we were able to discuss what he thought should be done.

Initially, he wanted to just have us all help him get into the back seat of my truck, where he could lay on the way to the hospital. However, since we were worried that he might have a rib poking somewhere it shouldn’t be, we didn’t want to risk moving him and jostling it into a worse position.

My Sister-in-Law had the good sense to have an ambulance on the line, even though she had only had a briefing on the matter in the form of Brother flying into their house, yelling something like, “GET THE KIDS IN, I NEED TO DRIVE THE VAN OUT! DAD’S HAD AN ACCIDENT!”

By the time we called Sister-in-Law to ask her nursing expertise, she already had an ambulance dispatched, so that they would be more relevant to us than a 45-km drive would have made them. Since they were already on the way, we decided it would be safest to let them transport Dad. He was staying lucid, and said that he wasn’t in pain when he didn’t move. I took my truck and drove out to the highway to meet the ambulance so that I could guide them over the grid roads to the pasture. It wasn’t a relaxing wait. I was not in my zen zone. But they did eventually show up, and, from an objective viewpoint (which I certainly didn’t have access to in that moment), I supposed they made good time.

I led the ambulance to the pasture, then up through the grass to Dad. Fortunately for the low ambulance, it’s a tame grass pasture, so though there were some mole hills and gopher holes, it was relatively smooth going.

The two responders got Dad assessed and sat up so that they could get him onto the stretcher. While they got the stretcher positioned, Dad made Mom help him get his jacket off, because he didn’t want them to cut it, as it was a good quality thing. Back when he broke his leg, he was quite miffed that they had cut his perfectly good jeans and long underwear, so he didn’t want a repeat. I could roll my eyes at his priorities, but my own background thoughts had made an inventory of the cows I was going to keep against the old man’s wishes, so...

Anyway, once on the stretcher, the mechanical lift of the ambulance hoisted him smoothly into its belly. They got him hooked to some sensors to track his vitals and gave him some pain killers to make the ride back through the bumps more tolerable. Mom rode with him, and Brother and I collected all the things left behind.

Brother drove the truck back out behind the ambulance and I rode Barb out in front to try to spy the smoothest path for them to take.

Good old Barb had stayed right where I left her through the whole thing. Mexico had run off back to the yard, but Barb stuck with us. I will try to recall her loyalty the next time she deposits me belly-up beside a spooky anthill.

Dad broke a few ribs and punctured his lung. He was in the hospital for a couple of days before he was able to go to a bigger centre and get surgery to plate the bones up.

While he was awaiting surgery, Dad didn’t look that great. He’d had to get a tube put into his lung cavity to suck out any blood that pooled there. The hospital staff were pretty excited to be able to use some new equipment for that procedure on him, but having several people looking at it, reading the instruction manual, attaching tubes and detaching tubes and debating where to attach tubes and which end to stab into my father didn’t inspire that impending receptacle with confidence. There were also nurses and EMTs that were enthralled with the bubbling that had formed under his skin from the air that escaped his lungs. He was quite the superstar with his bubblewrap-like right side, and staff would approach and ask to poke him, as they had learned of such things in school but never experienced it in person. Both of these being novelties mean, I suppose, that we must congratulate the general population on their ability to not get their lungs punctured.

Dad has probably gained some anonymous notoriety from this rare event he facilitated, but still probably not as much my brother did when he went to the emergency room to get a plastic CPR dummy head cut off his finger, that appendage being swollen and fastly jammed into the thing’s mouth hole.

Brother must have delighted staff, as they got a full inversion of the stereotypical “things stuck in a$$holes” with his generously provided entertainment of “a$$holes stuck in things”.

*please note that I’m only calling Brother names to be funny; he is an excellent brother and I cherish him and also he lives next door and is very helpful and I can’t afford to offend him*

*also, sorry for using profanity, but Grandma S recently swore in front of me for the first time in my whole life, so now I am allowed to use bad words*

Anyway... a lifeguard friend at the local pool has informed me that they now use Brother as an example of why students should actually listen to them when they say not to put their fingers in the mannequin holes. I feel like that is more relevant advice than “don’t get stepped on by a horse”, so Brother has more local fame.

Not that the latter is bad advice. More so just unnecessary.

Anyway, back to Dad getting stabbed through the ribs...

this is kind of an upsetting story, because I feel so bad for Dad having to go though it, but I’m going to look on the bright side of it, as it was majorly ego-inflating for me.

I wasn’t there, but Mom was. That devoted wife was in the room with him, not able to do much, but doing all she could, holding his hand and trying to distract him.

The doctor didn’t mince his words when he told Dad that the stabbing of the suction tube into his lungs was going to hurt like a son-of-a-gun. However, Dad describes the pain as so acute that it felt like a near-death experience. Being psychologically near death (though thankfully not physically much nearer to it than before the stab - granted, he was walking closer to it than usual that day), he was inspired to look my mother desperately in the eyes and tell that dedicated wife and mother of his children,

“Tell Youngest Daughter that I love her.”

Mom was incensed.

“What about me?” She asked.

“Yeah. You too,” he gasped. “All the kids.”

Maybe Mom would have expended more energy on resenting his priorities if she hadn't nearly fainted from witnessing the procedure. The staff had to supply her with a chair, and she had to be a supportive wife from there, with her head between her knees.

But enough about Mom; the point is, this obviously makes me employee of the month.

Banker Sister may have her own temperature-regulated office, get a plaque on her door, and even earn actual wages, upon which raises and bonuses seem to be undeservedly heaped... but she’s never been employee of the month. She is likely very bitter.

After the tube was in, Dad could remain fairly comfortable as long as he didn’t move at all or breathe much or try to sleep. He remained in this restive state for a few days, awaiting the phone call that would call him to Bigger City for an operation.

In the meantime, I was holding back tears down the fort at home. Fortunately, the cows were, for the most part, already settled in their summer pastures, ready to start calving. Unfortunately, they were ready to start calving.

As I mentioned previously, Cousin had offered to send his hired guy out to give us a hand, so I arranged for him to come out for a couple of days. Oldest Brother had also taken time off of work to help me, and Sister had come home so that she could be a total girlboss, working from home and making meals for us all. Sister loves to be called a girlboss; if you see her around, definitely find a way to call her that.

Anyway, Brother, Hired Guy, and I all went out with horses that first day and got caught up on tagging. One of the quietest cows in the herd had been in the process of calving when the ambulance was going by her in the pasture a couple days previous, so we had a perfect candidate to teach us the new ropes when we went out a-taggin’.

I roped it, made up a tag, then Brother helped hold it down while I tagged and castrated it. Hired Guy stayed on his horse, ready to step in between us and the cow if he needed.

For the most part, this was our system. Hired guy or I would catch the calves, then he’d keep the cows away when they were a little snorty.

Brother and I would get the calf down and tagged.

Most of the time, the cows were really good, but we had a fourth member on our team that really pulled its weight: Tingbat.

Tingbat is a kids-sized aluminum bat that I rigged up to clip on my saddle. It was given to Dad last year for Father’s Day because he had often said, “What I need is a little aluminium bat, so when they get close like that, I can give them a little swat on the nose. I think if they just heard that ‘ting!’ a couple times, they’d change their ways.” He would usually say this when a particularly grouchy cow had dodged his rock-missiles, or when he had to search for a long time to find a rock of adequate dimensions.

The inaugural swing for Tingbat met the unfortunate poll of 21c. Cows with the letter C on their tags are coming up to nine years old now. That’s a nice, mature age for cows, if a little over the hill. Similar to women that find themselves over that hill, they begin to not care about what others think and instead prefer to do things their way. When you’re working these cows in the corral, sometimes they will decide to go somewhere and in order to walk through you, they just close their eyes and walk. When you’re working them on a horse, they will brush right along your horse and push you aside to get where they want.

That was the attitude of 21c when we got to her to tag her calf. She wasn’t really being snorty or wild, but Hired Guy just kept getting brushed past when he tried to take her away. Since I knew the cow and didn’t think she was a menace, I decided to just get in there and try out the Tingbat.

I assumed that a good rule of thumb for the short bat was that if a cow was lingering within its 30-ish-inch range, a good wallop was in order. With tools in one hand, Tingbat in the other, and tags between my teeth, I approached the cow. As I walked up, the cow stood her ground and bellered at me, so I raised up Tingbat and let her fall with a little more than just her own momentum directly upon 21c’s poll.

I think everyone winced, though none more than the cow, who seemed so astonished at the upheaval of the status quo that she just turned and walked about twenty feet away and quietly watched the proceedings from there. I was able to tag her baby as she reconsidered her life choices. When I was packing up the tools, I noticed Tingbat had a substantial poll-shaped dent. Brother advised me to put a little less steam behind the swings and I quite agreed.

I got a lot gentler with the cows once I embraced my own mortality, since fear is a strong driving force at the end of a bat. My daily prayer became, “God, if you want me to live, I’ll live. If you want me to die, I’ll die.” This prayer did help me to stay calm for the most part, though plenty of inner voices were offering their two cents with things like, “What if He wants you to run?”, “What if He thinks your soul would be nourished by getting piled by a cow??”, and “Don't you think that prayer is a little unspecific about the vast amount of painful middle ground that could be realized between those two outcomes???” The inner voices make some good points, but sometimes it is best just to ignore them. Nothing to memento your mori like committing to sit on a calf that a mother cow looks willing to kill for.

Three hundred times.

Aside from the integral role that Tingbat played, the other MVP on the field was Brother. Apart from a few days when we had outside help, he and I were able to keep up with the tagging. When it was just us two, Brother would usually get the calf down for me, then keep the cow away as I tagged and castrated it. Since every calf needed a pill delivered to it (‘delivered’ here meaning shoved down its throat), a tag in each ear, and to be testicle-free by the end of the interaction, our checklist-mantra before letting them go was,

“One pill, two tags, no nuts.” So far as I know, we didn’t miss any of those things, and got through the season with all of our limbs, and none of the bull calves, intact.

Only a handful of cows required the quick footwork of Barb to be chased away, and these were usually ones that had a really fresh calf, so they can’t be blamed for being a little too protective. In those instances, Barb and I would take the cow away and Brother would tag and castrate. The only cow that this wasn’t an option for was old 88x. 88x is so far over the hill that she is allowed to be as miserable as she wants to and we will still venerate her as a good ol’ cow. Since, at the ripe old age of almost fourteen, she is sound, in good shape, has a good udder, good feet, and raises a good calf, she gets a pass for ramming into horses for about a week after she calves. Since she is known for this behaviour, it’s easy to get around by just not riding near her calf. She is notorious enough for this quirk that Dad, laying in the hospital bed, mentioned her specifically when he was coaching me on how to tag the calves.

“And if there’s a few that you can’t get to, don’t worry about it; we’ll tag them when we brand. Like 88x. She won’t chase you when you’re on foot, but don’t worry about tagging her calf, because she’ll hit the horses.”

88x calved a couple of weeks into the season. Brother and I were proving to be an effective team, and had thus far not passed up on tagging any calves, no matter how rankled the cows appeared. We were just heading back towards the trailer on our final sweep of the pasture we were in when I spotted 88x looking mighty fierce, standing not far from a little black spot curled up in the grass. I met up with Brother and told him to take his horse to the trailer and drive the quad back, so that he could quad up to the calf and grab it. I explained that that particular cow would hit the horses, but was quite well mannered towards one on foot. Brother saved his dubiousness for when he got back with the quad. He drove up to me, where Barb and I stood at a safe distance.

“So I’m just supposed to drive in there and catch the calf?” He asked. I have asked that sort of question many times. It is the sort of question asked not because the assignment wasn’t understood, but because the inquirer is giving the boss-man a chance to change the plan, which the inquirer feels is a bad one. But this time, I was the boss-man. So I sent my lackey in there.

“It’s okay,” I assured him, “she’s really bad with horses, but she’s never chased us on foot.”

Of course, there was a time in her life when she didn’t chase horses either. That’s why I didn’t want to just walk in there and tag the calf. If 88x woke up one morning and said to herself, “I bet I can take on a horse,” and really lived by that decision, then it stands to reason that she is just one errant thought away from taking on a two-legged opponent. I’m pretty sure the only thing keeping her from that is the fact that she has made horses run away from her, but not people (‘people’ meaning Dad, who is the only one I know who would park his horse fifty feet away and walk up to the cow that just finished ramming it). If ever old 88x finds out she can make people run away, I’m certain she would embrace that power.

Anyway, that is why I sent Brother in there. He takes ice baths to improve his circulation, so really he should be thanking me for the opportunity to test out his blood flow.

As per the plan, Brother drove in there, nabbed the calf, and carried it to the trailer on the quad. He was able to execute this manoeuvre without getting more than a few feet away from the quad, which still made him farther from the quad than he was from the cow at times, but he got ‘er done. We got the calf all done up in the trailer, then Brother went and dropped it back off near the cow, who had her nose to the ground, trying to figure out where it had gone. She looked quite indignant.

With that old girl done, the rest of the season was smooth sailing.

Dad was already beginning to bounce around in a tractor by the beginning of June, and by July, he was back in the saddle, though the saddle was certainly not on the same horse.

In fact, his recovery was going so well that Mom apparently began to think that it was high time somebody paid attention to her again. So, in a fit of dramatic flare that could only be expected from the Frenchest one among us, Mom broke her wrist. The injury was obtained when she put her arm into the stock trailer to push a door shut behind a cow we were loading. It’s one of those things that Dad has warned us against doing every time we load stuff. You have to put your arm in at a specific angle so that if the cow kicks the door, you can just let it go, instead of having your arm flung back into the window-posts of the trailer. Mom did the textbook wrong thing, and the cow did the textbook bad thing by kicking the door, and Mom ended up with a broken wrist. It’s one of those classic ranch injuries that you know can happen when you’re not careful, and eventually you’re not careful.

I’m sure Mom didn’t do that on purpose, but her timing is uncanny, because she was milking her cow twice a day and was up to her eyeballs in cheese already. Probably the most effective method of getting us to help her with this issue was forcing us to milk the cow. It worked. We found an extra calf for her and came up with a system of letting the calves do the milking.

Dad also had to figure out how to pull Mom’s hair up into a ponytail for her, as well as help her roll out and roll up a batch of butterhorns when she had first broken her wrist. The first, I mention because I wish you could have seen those two old people execute that task, one wincing face at the roots of the hair, another at the end of it, wincing in concentration. The second I mention because Dad himself would not like it to be forgotten how good those butterhorns were that he made.

Since I have dragged away at this article over a number of months, the year is nearly done now, so hopefully we can hobble our way through the rest of it without any more injuries. I can do without any more reminders to put life insurance on these darn old people.

When one of my aunts heard of Dad’s accident, she offered me these words of encouragement:

“This is an opportunity for you to show how supremely capable you are.” I remember sitting at the kitchen table when I read that, smiling at the words, “supremely capable”, and I remember how those words often flitted through my mind when I had to face unruly cows or make phone calls (the latter being the more burdensome of the two).

“I am not barely capable of this,” I would tell myself, “I am supremely capable of this.”

This egregious lie was the start of being able to laugh about it, and now, at the tail end of the year, I can (mostly) laugh a little more easily. Also, Dad has all of his usual vinegar (&etc.) back, so the memory of him without full lung capacity seems quite distant. Quite.

It was certainly a year of growing in ways that we never anticipated, and learning to appreciate good health when we have it. Despite finding some good in it all, I hope next year brings some slower paces and softer landings.