Spring 2021

Spring is in the air around here. Puddles creep in, cats creep out, and when you pet a horse with one hand, somehow their hair gets all over your clothes.

April is a wild month. It’s that month where a lot of things come due because all winter we created a “We’ll have to do that when it warms up” type of list, but we become sandwiched between that and the “We gotta get this done before calving” list.

At this particular time, though, we’re sipping fine wine as we hurtle towards the iceberg, because it’s Easter. Easter is for celebrating.

We made it through winter and only really had to survive one cold snap, albeit quite a long one.

Early February blew in with a wicked two weeks of temperatures from -30 to -45, with some 40km/hr winds to go along with it. We were starting the tractor every day, as we had to feed the calves in the yard for shelter. Normally we feed them out in three different paddocks, then gather them into the yard every morning for grain and switch some gates so they find their way out to new feed. That way, we only have to start the tractor every three days, which is a lovely arrangement. It is not easy hooking hydraulic hoses up in -40. The hoses don’t want to bend, the couplers tend to pop out of the tractor a couple times before you get them in solid enough, and you’re trying to be semi-coordinated with big, floppy winter mitts on your hands.

Once the tractor was on its way, I got my cardio in not just running around to get gates, but also chopping open the big tire water bowl. Fortunately, we have an axe head welded to a crow bar to deal with thick ice, so I wasn’t chipping away at it with the hatchet that is normally used. It was still hard work, and I required lots of breaks to resuscitate my frozen hands.

When we bought new tire water bowls recently, we were chatting with the guy who makes them about adapting them for winter usage.

He told us that some people don’t even put heaters in; they just chop them by hand daily.

He looked us like he expected us to be incredulous.

We humoured him with some smiles and nods.

“Tsk,” we said. “Some people’s kids...”

If he had looked closely, he could have seen some life leave my eyes.

Oh well. It’s a good arm workout.

We survived the cold snap really well, actually. No sick animals, no break-downs, and almost no frozen water bowls. We were so close to getting through without having to thaw waterlines.

And then one evening, the last evening of the cold snap (though the next day still promised -20 type weather), I checked one of the small yard bowls to find a steaming hot bowl of nothing. The heating element was working, but no water was there.

It was almost dark, but we opened it up to see if it would be a quick fix; if water was frozen near the float. It was not, so we closed it off, watered the animals at the other bowl, then left it until morning.

The next day, our first plan was to dig up the well where the pipe going to the water bowl starts. When I say dig it up, I mean that we had piled it high with snow so that it wouldn’t freeze. We weren’t digging in dirt, thank goodness.

We got the well uncovered and Dad climbed down to check it out. It wasn’t frozen.

We went back to the water bowl and did some dismantling to get underneath it. Eventually, we discovered that the heat tape going into the pipe underground was not working, so we got some pumps and hoses together and trickled hot water into it until we got water coming through. We replaced the heat tape, put everything back together, and covered the well with snow again. It took all morning, but we were happy the problem wasn’t somewhere underground that would require digging in the frozen dirt.

That was the only important pipe to freeze, but the cold weather also crept in to the drain in the upstairs sink in the old house here. Sister lives in the upstairs, but doesn’t use the sink all that much apparently. The pipe that drains it goes out into the attic then levels out a little too flat as it joins the main drain pipe. It must have built up with ice and eventually closed right off. We put a heat tape in and replaced a section of the plumbing, since it was ancient and wouldn’t have gone back on after being dismantled. Putting in the heat tape required me to slither into the small tunnel in the attic. It is the second most unpleasant work environment I can recall being in. The first most unpleasant was the tractor cab that time Dad and I were trying to get all the bales up before the forecasted rain the next day. It was midnight, and he had stopped to check on me to make sure I was okay to keep going. Perhaps he had seen the tractor jerking a little as I nodded off - it’s all good; you have to weave a little on the swath to make a good bale anyway.

When he came to the door, I didn’t want to let him in, as moths were swarming at the tractor lights right at the door. In case you didn’t know, I hit level ten basket-case mode when exposed to moths. There was an Incident involving a moth being in my shirt fifteen years ago and I’m still not over it. Dad knew this, but I think he mistook my wild-eyed wariness for hyperbole, so he opened the door.

I pulled it shut in his face.

He frowned.

Dad became torn between amusement and impatience, but when he saw that I was serious about not letting him in, I’ll let you guess which path he hurtled down.

I don’t blame him (at least not now, almost a decade down the road). We had been in the tractors since mid-morning and were on a clock to get the rest of the hay up before it rained.

However.

I know for a fact his vocal range can penetrate tractor windows. In light of his message being a simple “Hey, are you awake enough to keep going? We have to finish this because it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.” I really think he could have communicated through the glass.

But neither of us were being our best selves that moment.

He threw the door open.

A few moths flew in.

I flew out.

Now outside of the tractor, we both began to showcase our ability to have our voices heard through tractor windows.

After a short exchange in this manner, Dad ended up going into the tractor and eradicating most of the moths so that I would go back in.

“Most” is the key word there.

And that is why the tractor cab was the first-most unpleasant environment I’ve worked in. Those creepy little moths would squeeze into some crevice in the cab, then come sputtering out at random. It was terrible. I kept my lips pursed and pulled my hood up, tightening the strings so that only a small circle of my face showed. It was a stressful time, and I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.

“At least you didn’t nod off anymore!” You might be thinking.

Oh no. I still nodded off a lot as we cruised around until three in the morning. I just woke up a lot more fearfully.

Anyway, I’m grateful the attic didn’t have any moths in it, because there wasn’t enough room to flail and panic or even curl up into a fetal position. It was just cramped, dusty, and a bit smelly. There was the mild threat of the possibility of mice, but mostly just in my imagination.

Anyway, other than that, we made it through winter fairly unscathed.

The cold weather kept us indoors a lot and if our method of passing the time was any indication, then it’s no wonder online auctions were so successful. Window shopping was a daily distraction, whether it was Kijiji, Amazon, Ritchie Brothers, or some horse auction.

I was driving in the city recently and went past one of those heinous payday loan establishments. They had a great big banner across their building that read: “The money you need for the things you don’t!” I don’t know if I saw it wrong and my brilliant mind just filled in the gaps with what I thought it should read, but there you have it. An honest slogan. Most auctions have similarly honest catchphrases of “All sales are final!” and “Buyer beware!” They can brag up equipment or a horse until they’re blue in the face, but in the end, those phrases are all they’ll stand behind.

Lately our mistrust of auction sales hasn’t even mattered, since everything seems to go way out of our price range anyway. But Kijiji sales can do you dirty, too.

Dad and my brother discovered this winter that you can’t take everyone for their word. Fortunately, no money transfers were made in these instances, but there was some wasted gas money.

Dad and Brother had been on the hunt for tractors. Both of them found some older models on Kijiji and made some phone calls. I don’t know about Brother, but Dad got to chatting on the phone with the seller of the tractor he was after and it sounded a lot like he just made a new best friend.

Granted, I hate talking on the phone and even when I am on with my immediate family, I can be pretty clammy. Sometimes my friend calls me and I answer the phone with a “Hello?” that sounds like I’m the last one standing in a horror movie. She knows I don’t have call display, so she has taken to aggressively starting off with “Hey! It’s just Friend!” I am deeply grateful for this, because otherwise it takes me half the very clammy conversation to puzzle out who has called me.

Anyway, Dad chatted with this Kijiji fellow for a while and arranged a time to go look at the tractor. In the meantime, Brother had also lined up a viewing of a tractor.

So optimistic, so cheerful, they travelled to meet their beautiful John Deeres.

Unfortunately, the owners had glazed over some details.

Actually, in both cases, they had mentioned the terrible feature that prevented both Dad and Brother from buying their respective tractors.

In Dad’s case, the guy had said the loader hydraulics were “A bit slow, but then, I just got a new Kubota, and those hydraulics are really fast!”

Turns out, it took a few minutes just to lift the loader.

In Brother’s case, the guy said “It starts real good; when it’s cold, there’s a bit of black smoke, but there always is, eh?!”

Turns out, the black smoke never did stop pouring out.

I wish people could just be honest. I wish people could be more like my Sister-in-Law. One time, Sister-in-Law was going through the self checkout at Walmart and accidentally hit ‘0’ for number of store-provided bags used. She had, in fact, used a couple. She didn’t know how to go back on the machine, and felt awkward asking for an employee’s help.

So she paid and left with the crime-bags.

Her guilty heart followed her around until she found herself back at the Walmart at a later date.

Eager to ease her conscience, Sister-in-Law bought some small item through the self checkout, then selected ‘10’ for store-provided bags used. Her conscience was clear, and then some, because she had certainly not taken ten bags.

Unfortunately, her telltale heart must have betrayed her. An employee came up and asked if she needed assistance. They saw that she had paid for ten bags, but only used one. They asked if she would like to change that.

Sister-in-Law didn’t want to make eye contact. She waved them off and assured them it was fine, no problem, gotta go.

And she scuttled off, having unthieved the bags.

That was her lighter infraction. This same Sister-in-Law also stole a whole peach.

Now, if you were at a grocery store and absentmindedly put a single peach in your pocket instead of the basket, you might think you have two options after you discover the peach once you’re checked out and are back in your vehicle.

You might think “Oh shoot. I forgot about that. Oh well; it’s only a peach. I’ll just eat it, I guess.” And you would eat the peach.

Quite possibly you’d want to avoid a crime-fruit, so you’d go back in to the till and casually explain that you’d forgotten it in your pocket, but would like to pay for it now. And then you would eat the peach.

Sister-in-Law could not decide which of these options to choose, so she chose a third route.

Using her best sneaky-but-casual demeanour, she sashayed back into the store, peach in pocket, and ambled to the fruit section. She politely browsed the fruit and seemingly decided upon peaches as her fruit de jour. She seemed to look them over carefully, apparently contemplating which would make the tastiest treat. Shifting her eyes around to make sure no one was watching, Sister-in-Law eased the stolen peach out of her pocket and made as though she had just picked it up from the display. She squeezed it gently. Rotated it to look for blemishes. “Yes,” Sister-in-Law would have seemed to say to herself, if observed by any onlookers, “Yes, this is the very peach I have decided just now that would be perfect to buy for myself just now. I have never seen this peach before in my life, but I like it and am going to exchange legal tender for it now.”

And she bagged the peach and took it to the till, where she bought it.

And then she ate the peach.

Anyway, if you ever buy something that Sister-in-Law is selling, you can rest assured that she has been honest about it.

Standing in sharp contrast to Sister-in-Law is Oldest Brother, her husband.

Boy, did he ever marry up.

I have recently uncovered that Brother routinely cheated in Monopoly throughout our childhood. I grew up just accepting that Oldest Brother was smarter. I gave him a generous helping of the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was not only in possession of more years lived on earth, but also endowed with God-given keener wisdom in the form of Monopoly economics. It was simply a given that Oldest Brother would win. It was his birthright.

Now the truth comes out.

He didn’t volunteer to be banker every time because of his giftedness. I think you can probably guess, even though I never suspected, why he wanted the sheets of money next to him.

When he told Sister about this recently, he tried to play it off like we all did it.

No.

NO.

WE DID NOT ALL DO IT.

When Oldest Brother slipped some $500 bills from the bank, he would slide them under the board out of sight. When he wanted to buy properties or build his threatening hotels, it would look like he didn’t have enough funds; we would be thrilled to point this out to him, happy to escape his awful rent fees. Smugly, he would carefully lift the board a bit and swipe out his “rainy day fund”.

We were in horrified awe as he doled out the money to pepper the board with hotels.

We wanted “rainy day funds” too.

But we were sweet, stupid plebeians.

SO WE DID IT HONESTLY!

We scrimped and saved until we could finally scrape together enough to exchange our money for a $500 bill; then we carefully slid it under the board out of sight. Our rainy day fund.

Sometimes we would peek at it just for the satisfaction.

And then we had to spend it to pay Brother for landing on his crime-hotels.

Monopoly usually ended with Brother kindly offering to put us out of our misery by taking our tokens to settle our debts. It was like selling our souls.

AND IT WAS ALL A LIE!!!

I am deeply unsettled by this new knowledge.

Maybe we’ll have to have a rematch. I might have latent skills in Monopoly economics that were stifled by Brother’s crime-wins.

In fact, I recently celebrated a victory against all my siblings in a new game called Wingspan. I had squeaked by with a win in the final tally, and let me tell you, it felt pretty great. Unfortunately, they checked my math and I actually squeaked by with a second place. It was like that time that poor girl got named America's Next Top Model, only to discover there was a big oopsie, and she was actually in second. Dad always figured she should have been happy with the mistake, because at least she got to experience the joy of winning for a little while; the alternative was never experiencing it at all. I know I appreciated my moment of glory.

Anyway, to get back to my pre-tangent topic...

When Dad and Brother found the tractors not as advertised, I think their hearts got a little bit broken, but they got back on their horses and both found good tractors in the end.

Once we were through the cold weather, we figured we better get the cows out to their summer pastures before the fields got too muddy to cut across. We brought them home from the pasture where they had been bale grazing and sorted them.

The spring sort of the herd is a long process. It’s a four-way sort based on the cow’s number, so we have to pull just a few cows into a smaller pen, take all their numbers, reference the list of numbers that we made ahead of time, and then sort them. If one gets too stirred up in the small pen, she gets blacklisted and goes out with the culls. There was just one this year. She was on the list to go in the “very good cows” pen. As I was looking down at the list to mark everything, Dad yelled “Watch out!”

A cow scooted past me, but I thought she was just feeling a bit cornered and making a break for it. I didn’t know why Dad was making such a deal about getting her number and sorting her into the cull pen. I must have missed the particular glint in her eye; good thing Dad saw it.

By the end of the day, she was darting up from the back of the bigger pens, out of the herd and out of her way, to run at us.

So that’ll be a fun one to tag when she calves. Gotta keep one of those around, for old time's sake. Otherwise we'll forget what it was like to have Simmentals.

The sort took the better part of the day, then we ran everything through to be vaccinated. After that, the race was on to run all the different bunches down the road before dark. One bunch went a mile east first of all. Then, we raced back and got the other bunch down the road, north two and a half miles. Dad left me at a mile and a half and got the last bunch, which also had to come north a mile and a half. I got my bunch in and some gates set just in time to turn Dad’s bunch in to their gate. By then it was completely dark, and we were taking a bit of a risk running black cows down a road.

Mom knows how hard it is to see black cows in the dark. Back when we had our mostly-black Angus/Holstein milkcow, she tripped over her in the dark. We had gotten back from town late and had to put her in the barn to milk the next morning. Mom and I walked through her pen to look, but were having trouble finding her. Mom's search went something like this: “MICKEY!! Where are you, you goofy cow... oof!” I heard some straw rustling as Mom and the cow, both disgruntled, got to their feet. “I found her,” Mom said. “Did you trip on her?” I asked. “She's a black cow! It's pitch dark out here!” “You tripped on a cow, Mom. A cow.”

Anyway, I’m sure YouTube could supply us with what happens when oncoming traffic meets a herd of cows, but as usual, my imagination was plenty to keep me on my toes.

The cow herds went out to their summer pastures at the end of March, and we got the yearlings sorted and out just this week. And since it has taken me two weeks to complete this stretch of writing, we are now into the end of April.

Try to keep up.

The yearling sort went well, but it was a long day. Sister has a handy dandy nine-to-five type job that she does from home, so we nabbed her at 6:30 a.m. The herd of yearlings picked up a brisk trot for the mile down the road, and we had them home and in the corrals by 7:30. We quickly sorted off enough steers to make a load, and Mom assumed her job for the day, which was hauling ten loads of steers and three loads of heifers down the road about twelve miles.

We considered chasing the steers down to their pasture, but if you have ever worked with yearlings then you will perhaps agree with our decision to trailer them.

One time, Dad banged on the hood of the feed truck to open it and the three hundred yearlings standing by started stampeding in a circle around us.

Most times, whatever you go out to chase them with (horse, dog, or quad), they end up following until you can shoo them away, at which point they bolt in an unpredictable direction.

So it's like herding toddlers.

Anyway, hauling was the safest option, so that was our day’s work.

Dad and I did a heifer/steer sort first of all, and kept Mom busy hauling steers with an hour-long round trip.

Between loads then, we did our replacement heifer sort, keeping ninety heifers back for breeding and hauling about fifty out to the same pasture as the steers (same pasture, different paddock).

By the time we moved the replacement heifer herd back down the road a mile, it was evening and we were sporting our best cowboy mascara makeup (from the dust - and we looked ravishing), our crippliest cowboy struts (from the stiff, cold muscles), and our driest cowboy voices (surprisingly, due to dust and not from using our tractor-window-penetrating voices).

We’re just livin’ the cowboy dream out here.

Now it's time for a little extension on the “Butters the Very _____ Pony” series. This one is “Butters the Very Pregnant Pony.” I was observing Butters back in March and thought she was putting away a bit of fat into her udder. Suspicious, I held my hand on her belly for a while and, sure enough, I felt the kicks of a little baby in there. Since she was just running around on the reserve with goodness knows what stallions, I was pretty concerned about how big it would be for poor miniature Butters. The vet told me not to worry; it's a scientific fact that reserve horses don't die easily. And she was right! Butters had an extremely cute and tenacious little colt named Biscuits. In an hour between checking on her, the little guy was already up and at it! He probably would have been nursing already, but Butters was running at her full-sized, curious pen mate, doing her darndest to keep her away from her baby.

I'm pretty fond of the little beggar already, so hopefully he provides us with a better series of stories than Butters did!

This article of writing is coming to a close, now, but I have another noodle to throw onto the wall of spaghetti. It is a statement of thanks to my Great Aunt, who sent some books to me recently. They arrived through the mail, so when my nosy family asked me what they were, I replied in my most arrogant tone (which I have a lot of practice with), “Fan mail.” Fortunately for my family, who have to put up with my ego, the books turned out to be “How to Write Better” type books, so I'm still dealing with that emotional blow. I'm kidding. I'm obviously too arrogant to take instruction, but I am enjoying the books. They provide really excellent instruction for how other people should write. I'm currently reading a section on how important clear organization is for writing. That section feels a little personal, in light of my aforementioned spaghetti-on-the-wall style. This morning as I got ready for the day, I pulled one arm into my shirt sleeve, saw that the bed was unmade, and proceeded to make it with my shirt half on.

Looks like you'll just have to ride the tangents, folks.