Its 6:29am and I have two guys at the counter, managing their own coffee and breakfast needs, here I sit. There is more snow falling and Russ says what has accumulated so far is more than we had all winter. He continues to be overjoyed. The kids start online school today. This has become neccesary now, after Covid variants combined with Easter holiday travel and rapidly rising cases numbers have led to more concern than we have known yet in the pandemic. Morg got up to do the morning check with Russ so that he could be back and ready to “go to school” at his appointed time. We shall see how this goes.
A little follow up from yesterday……..
Despite our best efforts, the efforts of all of us, one of our morning house calf guests lived and one died. It was the biggest and noisiest one that died and Russ figures that it was stepped on by a cow before he got it in. That was disheartening. If I can figure out how to post a video that Jill originally posted on our family chat I will do that. I like it. Its a glimpse of Rev. Kyle in her leggings and her Dad’s old shirt doing her best to bottle feed a calf that is not too interested. The other calf, Fifi Jr., responded really quickly to the heat and a few sips from a bottle and was trying to stand in short order. That was fun to see, she was quickly returned to her Mom and from what I hear Fifi was glad to have her back and all is well. Our heifer whose name is “Enjoy” is not taking too well to the calf we are adopting on to her. “Claire” had twins a few days ago and was doing fine with them but when Enjoy lost her calf we thought we would relieve Claire of her double milking duties and give Enjoy that chance to bring her mothering skills a go. (Heifers are first time Moms, they need extra supervision at first and most do well eventually.) Our calving season is slow to start, we only had one other calf yesterday and that was Penny, she birthed a beautiful big calf but seemed a bit disoriented by the weather, by mid day she had walked that calf way far from the herd and shelter. Morgan walked her back, on foot, (which Russ remarked was quite brave of him given that Morg has a healthy amount of fear of cows).
And its April 13th…….84 years ago today a brave and kindhearted 23 year old woman gave birth to her first child. It was 1937 and that baby was my Mom. This is our first April 13th since Mom’s death in October. Its hard to know what to do to mark a day like this. Last night my sisters and I shared our plans as we went back and forth on our Sister chat. The common thread through all of our plans was food. Another dimension was flowers and a plan to share some flowers with some of Mom’s special people. Food, flowers and sharing, Mom would be pleased I think. My Mom savoured creating and sharing food, receiving flowers and being generous. With a presence as huge as my Mom’s was in our lives I found myself compelled to plan something more than a single day or a single food item. For this year anyways it just didn’t seem enough. So we are having a whole week of celebrating Georgie here at the ranch. Yesterday I made the cake that bonded her and Russell forever, oatmeal cake with brown sugar icing. Today Jill is making one of her amazing Jill cakes to honour her Nana and I am going to try my hand at Yorkshire pudding tonight, along with a roast of beef. Later this week I do believe bran muffins and Christmas morning wife saver will be on the menu. A chocolate cake with brown sugar icing will figure in there too. To do this week right a batch of fudge needs to be included somewhere. Grief is such a sneaky bear and I have danced with it way too much for my liking over the last months. Somehow having a positive focus of creating food and getting to share it with the crew here helps me to hope, maybe naively, that this week can unfold without a flood of struggle. We shall see.
Until tomorrow, that is the update from the Bar MW Ranch.
As Far As The Eye Can See 