Its Wednesday morning, we are about sixteen hours into the active weather that we are reckoning with and we got through our first night. Yesterday was a good day, very unusual and heartwarming. The pictures I have here are meant to tell the tale of life to this point.
Just a goofy one to start off. I guess Russ is saving his warm boots for when things get really bad, but he pulled up to me on his horse when I saw him late in the afternoon yesterday and said, “do you think we should start a ‘go fund me’ so I can get new boots? I thought “maybe no!” to that question.Our day started off very normally in some ways, getting to the chores of the day, Russ suggested we eat brunch in town while there to get vet supplies for the days ahead. We lingered long at the restaurant when friends came in for their lunch and joined us. It was nice to live some very normal moments. A box waiting for me at the post office included the children’s book Russ is holding. I had just read it to him while we drove home, we both loved it, it was funny and creative. Plan to hear it read to you at a fall cow chase supper if you are part of the crew.While at the restaurant we sat with a notebook and brainstormed every item we could need at the cottage. When our friends joined us they added a couple items to the list. It was pretty comprehensive. My main worry was water, because I needed containers for the house and cottage. Once home I stumbled on this container that I have never used on the trail and was tempted to give away. I forgot I had it. I was so proud of myself for the wash station I could create. This is wash water on tap, with face cloths and hand towels on the rungs and wash pails under neath the stool. The stool came from my home in Saskatoon, I think of it as my Dad’s stool, he spent much time perched on it chatting with Mom in the kitchen in later years. I use it for music gigs. It comforts me to have this used for another great purpose.Firewood in place in the cowboy cottage.The cottage as I left it, prepped for use. What would they call this on MASH? This was taken at 5:30 yesterday. As I came out of the cottage Russ and Morgan were arriving to round up the herd and tuck them into the calving yard, a corner of the calving pasture that has shelter on three sides and is right beside the cowboy cottage.Morgan getting his tack in place and while the horse was antsy, Morgan was calm as a cucumber. He is not upset about his days in grade 9 being cut short by the school closure announced earlier this day.After supper Morgan and I whipped back to the cottage because I had forgotten to take Russell’s changes of clothes with me earlier. The snow had started two hours earlier but had not yet accumulated to much at this point.I awoke at 7:05 today when Russ phoned. He had checked the heifers in the shed here and no calves had been born overnight. He told me he had a chat with them, they are to hold on til next Wednesday when it is finally seasonally warm. Lets see if they listen. Heifers are new Mom’s, they can have trouble with birthing as its their first time. We have 57, three have calved, we have many to go. Russ was with the rest of the herd and found this calf, it had been licked off, maybe by its Mom but then abandoned and it was cold and wet. So as I sit here and write, I have done a few minutes sitting with my hands over its tail and ears hoping to Morg came in this morning to get his chaps.The view here an hour and a half ago. The drifts in front of the cars have accumulated quite a bit since then. The wind is clearing the roads so far so we have been able to travel back and forth to the pasture so far today.
Russ called a few minutes ago. He has two more calves to bring me so I am signing off. However, the heartwarming part of yesterday was all the messages of concern, promises of prayer and offers of help we received. It helped us feel so much less isolated. From Victoria to Halifax and Saskatoon to Florida, we have faces and loving hearts to consider as we take each step through these days. God bless us all.
As I sit to write tonight it is with a bit of disappointment that six days have passed since I last was here. I wanted to be more regular. It has been a full week and a good week. We have had a really slow start to our calving season, and right now that is maybe okay. We have eleven calves so far. Our first one to need the in house obstretics unit happened today.
The big story tonight is that we are gearing up for a blizzard that is possibly going to be quite epic. We are told to expect extended power outages, a massive accumulation of snow, horrible winds, school and road closures and no sunshine for four full days. We are likely to have as many as 30 calves born in this time, I am guessing.
It is hard to get my head around this. It was a beautiful night tonight, a bit cool but rather still and peaceful. Its hard to believe that such conditions, which are sure to be among the most trying we have seen, are just around the corner.
We are trying to prepare. Things are to begin after lunch tomorrow (Tuesday). This is the kind of event that our cowboy cottage was created for. It is in place in the calving pasture. I am not sure how it will end up being needed but it can house humans overnight, provide them a place to change clothes and get fed. It can be a place to warm up calves and hopefully save several. In my mind I see Russ and Morgan staying there for a couple days and Jill, Ron and I keeping things steady on the homefront and calving out the heifers that will be here in the poleshed. I have no idea if that is how it will go or not. I sound braver than I am. I am not equipped to calve out cows, but necessity is the mother of invention, and with Ron’s experience perhaps we can teamwork our way through all of this.
Here are a few pictures from today.
Morgan carrying in today’s calf in need of help. This is the daughter of our heifer cow named “Raisin”. She was a very little peanut, not much bigger than our dogs. Her Mama’s instincts didn’t kick in right away.Jill hanging out with our wee girl.Her back legs were not working great, they had not been licked off properly so the stimulation of that had not happened. Jill and I rubbed them down alot to get her to this point and still she could not coordinate those legs.She is looking better and Jill carried her back to the shed and to her Mama. Raisin was not interested in her at all, I was disheartened. I called Russ for advice. He told me, “set her in the centre of the pen and leave, let her circle her and decide for herself that is hers.” I was thoroughly unconvinced that was a good idea. It seemed negligent. However…….An hour after Jill and I delivered her to the shed I got this text from Russ as I was helping to M.C. the music festival event in town. In the attached picture Raisin and her calf appear to be tight. I appreciated the update alot, but mostly I was glad to get that encouragement and affirmation.Russ and Morgan went over to the cottage and checked out its readiness. This is the wood stove that is going to be a saving grace.They got the calving herd locked up in a sheltered area which allows close monitoring and some protection. They can be seen through the north window in the cowboy cottage.Morgan chopped extra wood in readiness.
I hope that I can keep checking in each day as this unfolds.
Please pray for us. We will need strength and courage and wits. We will need to keep ourselves safe and of course as many of our bovine friends as we possibly can.
Two days ago I reported on the blog that we had our first calf of the season. That wee one is still our only calf. Russ went all day without seeing it yesterday but came home in the evening feeling easy. He said the Mama, our cow named “Even” (the Norwegian form of Evan, named after a friend of mine in my Up With People cast) had her calf stashed somewhere. “How do you know its not dead?” I asked. “I can tell by how she is acting, everything is fine.” This morning he came in while the kids were having breakfast and reported that he had seen Even’s calf and it was doing very well and is oh so cute, so small it can practically walk under its Mom’s stomach. I felt impressed with Russ’s accurate read of the situation yesterday.
This morning when Russ went to put the dogs out he found it had rained. A sound of jubilation came from the porch. In fact, it has turned into a rainy, at times snowy kind of day. I had hoped to sit at my desk this morning but when Russ cited the weather as a good reason to go to town for breakfast, I agreed. We got a couple of crucial errands done and had some very good visiting with a friend we ran into at the restaurant. We have travelled wide in the last month and never have found a breakfast better than the one we enjoy at the Flying M Diner. We checked the cows on the way home and found no new calves, though some pretty full looking girls were grazing. We sure love seeing our cows looking content, they have put in such a winter, I made sure to tell then how impressed I was with them when I saw them today.
Here are a few pictures of how things look on Day 3.
Muddy….it’s a sight for sore eyes.Coffee dog takes cows checking seriously.Our cow Jodi is looking well.Here is our cow named “Cowabunga” at a spot in the pasture that collects water at times. Russell calls it Lake Katherine. Today Russell told me this cow loves it when people shout her name out loud.🤣The cows are just hanging out today. That’s Kathy with bedding in her mouth. The Cowboy cottage in its official spot for calving season.Yesterday it was moved from the yard to the pasture.
When we got back from town we got down to doing some inventory and getting a list ready for our order from the vet clinic. We were assessing what we need for tags, vaccines, vitamins, rings, and ralgro. Russ is struggling with his glasses prescription at this point so asked me to read the expiry date on a bottle of vaccine. It was June 2022. “That is this year right?” was Russell’s response when I informed him of the date. I looked at him funny. Trying to normalize his fuzziness about this a bit I said, “Covid makes time all wonky doesn’t it?” He said, “nah, I have never been good with dates. I still write 1988 on cheques sometimes!” Oh Russell……you keep us giggling. Russell would like to report in that on day 3 of calving he has just had a haircut, he is clean shaven and as rested as he will be for a while. There is sure to be some changes to this status as the season unfolds, but for now he headed out the door for afternoon work feeling pretty fine in clean laundry.
Today we are thankful for every drop of moisture we have received, for good coffee and for friendship.
The men of this ranch are watching “City Slickers”. It’s a fun movie. I am hunkered down beside them, fighting a cold, not in the mood for a movie, so maybe a quick blog is in order. Things are a little lighter around here lately. We have been looking up literally and in our spirits. Some pictures tell the story.
Russ, Morgan, and Ron were the main crew who got a new sign installed this weekend.The old signs were more weather damaged than we realized and much of the info on them is different now. After much figuring out work it was Morgan and Russ who went high to get the sign placed while Ron ran the skidsteer.In the end they needed extra help to hoist the sign up and get it wedged in. Rev. Kyle was summoned up. Russ met the man who did our sign at Agribition. Rick from High Plains signs and I consulted to get this design figured out. We really like it.Russ replaced our Canadian flag. The old one was in terrible frayed condition. It told a tale of the horrible winter it witnessed. This fresh flag and the full pond behind it have us looking up with more hope within than we have known for a while.And last but not least…..we had our first calf today. This is Even the cow and a small but feisty calf. A new season has begun!
Its been a week since I was free to do any blogging. It has been an unusually intense week, we took many pictures over the days and invite you to glimpse a week in the life of a prairie ranch family in spring 2021.
Every day these two bond more and more, Coffee dog gives us all a lot of joy.Jill ate her evening meals with us this week, her quarantine period was hard for all of us, we missed her, when she joined us for supper we moved Buster’s chair over to Jill’s table so she could have company.Jill is sitting at my Nanny’s dining room table, Buster is sitting in my Dad’s old highchair, the table still has plant pot rings from my Nanny’s love of plants. I wonder what she would think of the leggy seedlings I have going here. That is not a dog accident behind Jill although it sure looks like one. Its a paper from a box of chocolates one of my sisters sent for Mother’s Day.We had twins this week, lots of twins, four sets in two days. Russ likes to bring them home so we can keep a close eye on them and how they are bonding. Here is the action on Tuesday, unloading one of the twins.Things can get pretty tight in the womb, especially with twins, leaving joints without proper opportunity to strengthen. One of the twins needed us to splint her back ankles, here we are using duct tape over odd socks to create a quick and gentle “cast.”Morgan carries the splinted calf to meet up with its Mom in the back of the shed.Wednesday we put 65 cow calf pairs through the chute (vitamins, vaccines, tags, etc.) afterwards there was tons of regular work to do. I got the job of checking the cow herd for calving developments and troubles. I immediately found “Iron Man” with her brand new twins, the fourth set of the two days.Thursday morning we got going early and thru the day got 60 more cow calf pairs through the chute. This moment is the very end of sorting the cows from the calves. Often the cows advance easily to their gate and we encourage that, we keep calves back then big groups of calves go to their gate, as you see here. Thats Ron, Russ and Morgan walking them down. Morgan was home to help us for three days. We really needed his help, hopefully he can catch up okay.I thought this was a fun picture of Bingo quenching her thirst at one of the cow watering bowls.Mostly I am including this picture because it is super cute of Russell. He is posing with this cow because she is named after his favourite kind of beer.Mozza Stick got a replacement tag and hammed it up for the camera. Thats a radio frequency ID tag in her left ear, the number on it is linked to our ranch, no matter where she eventually goes in the food chain, that tag links her to our ranch, keeping us accountable to how we treat our animals and how healthy they are as they enter the food chain. It encourages us to feel proud of our animals.One of the last big jobs of the day for Russ and Morgan, joined by Laurie after work, was to bring the cow calf pairs home that we would run through the chute the next day. I was helping to turn them into the yard.Our abundance of twins this season has meant we have extra calves to help keep alive. Here is Layne being bottle fed by Jill. We have two calves we are bottle feeding right now. The other is Bob. His Mom named Mary had twins whom we called Jesus and Bob, after a folk song about the brothers. Mary has Jesus but we have Bob. Bottle feeding is a hard job to do at the end of a long day, its not hard, but its just one more thing. We are glad Jill could do this. Its fortunate to have twins but its often a lot of work. Late Thursday afternoon I had the job of checking the cow herd again. A pressing issue was finding Iron Man and her calves. After an hour I couldn’t find them and the grocery store was closing soon I thought. So I left the herd and landed in at the grocery store at 5:58, only to find out that they close at 7 (not 6) on Thursdays. Whew. I had a leisurely stroll around the store and found delicious ice cream on sale, milk, cream and a few other things. I headed back to the pasture. Are you with me on this, are you thinking, “Kathy didn’t really think that ice cream purchase through did she?” I prowled the area where Iron Man was most likely to be and eventually found her with only one calf. (Thats Iron Man and her one calf walking away from me right at the centre of the picture.) Well crumb. I called Russ, he sent me searching for the other one, I quite quickly found her. I called Russ again, I needed advice. I rose to the challenge he gave me and became the abductor. I caught the calf by the tail and wrestled her into the back of my Expedition. I was not sure how the trip back to Iron Man was going to go. You know, that calf surprised me, she just hunkered down right behind my seat and sat tight. I pulled up beside her Mom and helped her out and there was a reunion. I then went home with my soft ice cream. This morning my sister Margie named the twins, Ebony and Ivory. (The Ice cream survived🥴🍦🌞)This was right after I had pulled the calf who would be named “Ivory” from the seat behind me and dropped her onto the ground, a reunion picture. I could feel how glorious the evening sun was, I snapped this selfie to see how it looked, the sun looks good, I look tired.Friday morning I was enlisted to help move 50 cow calf pairs from the pen they had spent the night in, into position to be sorted and readied to go through the chute. This truck push job was new for me, it was pretty easy. That pen is one Russ just built in the last year.Jill finished quarantine and got to go to school Friday. When she got home she joined us at the chute for the last bit of work. We had handled a lot of animals without her, she picked up a tagger and got right down to work. How did we handle the work without her and Gina both? New skills were learned. Morgan became very good at giving needles this week (what he is doing here) and he learned to brand and is doing very well with that. I on the other hand, learned Jill’s job of castrating steer calves. Thats an interesting challenge. The atmosphere instantly became brighter when Jill arrived with her competence and willingness. Extra hands equal encouragement.After feeding bottles to the baby calves I needed to change my clothes. It was about 7, “why not just put on a nightgown?” I thought. Then a phone call came, “can you run to the catch pen at the calving pasture and grab the calf pullers?” We had a heifer on the home quarter that needed help to calve. Russ grabbed this picture when I made the delivery. This is not Kathy Kyle at her best, but its my life.The next morning that huge calf Russ had pulled was doing really well, its Mom, named “Endear” was doing well also.Funny how some weeks seem to have themes………making another delivery in whatever I was wearing. This picture was this morning, in my robe, Russ called, he was administering some antibiotic to a calve with a bit of pneumonia and his syringe broke in the vehicle thanks to some dog action. He needed a fresh needle and syringe. The pic file says this was 9:30am, church started at 10. We were late, but we were all there. If you are against antibiotics in animals this anecdote might bother you. The way I see it, we give it this treatment and save its life. Were we attempting to produce antibiotic free beef we would see animals like this suffering needlessly and dying. This antibiotic will do its work and not linger in the animal. There are hundreds of days before this animal will become part of the food chain.One more theme, animals getting their water. Here is Buster at the lunch table today.
This was a hard week. We are all exhausted. On Wednesday I calculated at the end of that one day that between five of us we had worked 63 hours, I was not including our lunch break, but did include a fifteen minute coffee in the afternoon. Why bother telling of that? I think it comes back to the title theme of this blog, about being seen. Its a hope that when I give that figure people will understand that us agriculture people truly do work hard for our living, that we love our animals and we are busting our butts trying to manage all the variables that equal quality of life for them. As I sit here tonight I can picture all the pairs we put through the chute this week, they are doing their thing, many of them already at their summer pastures, enjoying endless hours of prairie sunshine, hanging out as Mama and baby cows together. It seems okay.
In the midst of all this we have lots of great moments, Russ is fun and makes us laugh. Morgan is growing and changing and adding skills every day. We have had time with our cousins Laurie and Dawson who we appreciate so much. I made some food that I am proud of. We have had hard times, its not roses and sunshine around here all the time. We are worried sick about the lack of moisture, one of our dugouts went dry this week. We are getting impatient with each other. Russell and I had some hard words and I gave myself a time out at one point this week. Things don’t feel too carefree when work is front and centre from sun up til sun down. You start to miss feeling a bit carefree. But then the grace sweeps in. The warm things that start to thaw the ice between a man and a woman. The wisdom found in an awesome YouTube video (more Maya Angelou for me, listened to while checking cows) reminds of everything deeper and wider than the present moment. Cousins arrive and remind you that you are not alone. That softened ice cream tastes delicious and makes you feel brilliant for finding it. The beauty surrounding us, sights and sounds, touches your heart. My people come up against the dangers of big animals and stay safe, again and again. I am reminded that God has given me a purpose for my life. You find a way to give permission to yourself to be just human and struggling. The grace sweeps in and in a slower moment gratitude bubbles up.
And that is the week we have known. Is it too early to go to bed?
We had a few more of the first calf heifers give birth today. This time it was Pray, Cuddle and Value. This post arises from the cow named Pray and how she shaped my day today.
First a bit about the name. Although I am a minister and Russell is a bible school graduate, we don’t prioritize time to pray together. We never have. We have tried at times, but it hasn’t stuck. Still we put the word “pray” in our list of words that reflect strength for our marriage. The bigger story is that prayer is a part of our life. On any given day either we do it silently and individually and/or we struggle with it and we talk about that struggle (more me than Russell) and we do it, out loud, gathered together, regularly and with heart, at the meal table. This seems to work for us. The truth is I am a minister and I have struggled for my whole adult faith life with prayer. Too many unanswered prayers is the crux of the problem for me and too much injustice for some in this world. This could get super serious and some day maybe it will be good to talk about all this, but for today, just know that we have a Heifer named Pray because we know that prayer is about relationship with God and we know we need that to carry out our lives and our marriage with wholehearted strength and purpose.
So what happened today? Pray had her calf at the far corner of the heifer pasture, in short grass with no bedding near. Russ found her licking off her calf. However by the time his heifer check was done it seemed as though Pray had abandoned her calf. What the heck?!?!? Surprisingly despite a cold early morning and neglect it was not too bad off. Russ got some hay from a nearby feeder, loaded it onto the hood of the jeep and took it over and made a bit of wind shelter/bedding with a good clump of it. Then his morning had challenges and he never got back to check the status of the calf and its relationship with its Mom. He called at 11:30, would I go and have a tour of the heifers and see what was up? Yes. I found that calf right where he told me he had first seen it. Pray was nowhere in sight.
As I checked the rest of the herd I kept a special eye out for Pray. I found her mingling in the midst of a whole group who were grazing and hanging out like teenagers at recess. She looked unconcerned. I said to her, with a sense of double entendre “Pray I expected more of you.” Unsurprisingly this rebuke did not phase her one bit.
After my tour I called Russ and reported in. He asked if I would make a bottle and return to the calf he would dub “little prayer”. I was a bit ticked by this, lunch would be late and I would get nothing else done for the morning, but of course I wasn’t going to say no. When I returned with the bottle I was fortunate to be able to get milk into her, with only a little resistance.
I had never fed a calf a bottle on the open range before, so I could chalk that up as a first. Ideally Pray would have caught wind that I was meddling with her baby and come stampeding over with motherly love flooding her, but nothing like that happened. What did happen is that after only about 1/8th of a bottle Little Prayer responded to the nourishment and worked at getting up. I witnessed her first faltering steps.
Once up she got tooling around. Her instincts were amazing. She nuzzled up to our Expedition as if it was her Mama. She nuzzled into me, I was sitting on the ground on my knees and my armpit seemed to her like something she should know about. From that vantage point I got more of that bottle into her. It was fun. Still no Pray in sight. I went home and lunch was served only 15 minutes late.
After lunch I was totally enjoying watching a youtube video about how to start seedling plants when Russ called. He needed my help. He was trying to sort out the issue with Pray. I won’t try and explain all the stages of this because honestly I am not totally clear on everything myself. What I do know best I understand after the fact, the initial hurried phone calls did little for me. When Russ called me he was on foot, playing a game with cow and calf which was a combination of tag and follow the leader. He was trying to get them together. I came along just about the time Pray had a change of heart and decided she owned that calf. She did not have a gentle touch. She bellered and danced around that calf and pushed at it, I feared she would hurt it. Russ sat in the jeep with me as this unfolded. I saw raw power in that Mama and it scared me. Pray definitely seemed to be scaring Little Prayer too. Meanwhile, the calf had maybe bonded with Russell and I. In Russell’s words, “I put her to bed for the first time and you fed her for the first time, she feels best with us.” It seemed to be the case.
Russ was using his shepherd hook here, to snag the calf before she hid herself within this group, he marked her back with a cattle marker.
In the dance around the pasture that took place over about 45 minutes, the calf went through the fence to the neighboring pasture 4 times working to escape its overwrought Mother. As Russ went through too, working to get it back in the proper pasture he said, “if that cow comes for me you drive through the fence and get me.” “Like…. drive throououough the fence Russell?” Yes, right through it was the prescription for salvation. That was the first of four times this happened at three difference fence lines and by the fourth I was definitely overwrought too. It was only in the post game analysis that I really understood that for the most part the calf was the one that Russ was trying to disappear from, it just wanted Russ. The cow seemed to mean no harm to him. But I didn’t know that so my stress levels were just crazy by the time I got the phone call with these words, “turn around and go hide behind that hill!” As I got in place the last I saw of Russ he was running through this rounded and somewhat deep large indent in the prairie, with dirt hills on the north side. I was hiding in the jeep behind those hills, Russ appeared, jumped in with me and said “back up, just back up”. He knew the game of tag and follow the leader had become hide and seek with the calf, I didn’t. When we stopped the jeep and watched from a distance there was a bit of hope in the air. I wasn’t doing so well though. I let myself acknowledge that I have post traumatic shock after the year of so many things going wrong and quite simply if Russ got hurt I would be wrecked. So after Russ said, “back up, just back up” and we had come to a stop, I said, “Russ, I am not doing so good,” not entirely holding back my tears. Russ offered to take me back to my truck, I could go home. I didn’t want to abandon him though. Mercifully that was when it seemed like we could let these two figure it out. We had drawn them out to the centre of the pasture, away from fence lines, maybe with some time for the brain to make some connections both of them would realize that they need each other.
I found it ironic that all this happened with our cow named Pray, because in the midst of all these shenanigans my best possibility for help was God. The thing is after seeing some of the big problems in my life not fixed by prayer I come to moments like this so confused, so needful but so confused. What I am working from right now is that prayer is about relationship with God, investing myself in my friendship with God, letting God in and drawing the strength that my friend has to share with me, its not about telling God what to do, but sharing myself. So observing the action at the third fence line, watching the dance with baited breath, I just repeated over and over again what I wanted, letting my friend know what my end goal was, what the need of my heart was, but trying not to be bossy about how it would happen. I want my husband to be safe. I want my animals to be safe. After repeating that several times I got a bit practical. If this circus was going to end it would be because that cow settled into her maternal identity and allowed her calf to feel safe. So I told God how I wanted that for her. This point in my prayer/conversation is about the time I got the call to go hide behind the hill. And then it seemed, that at least for then, things were moving in the right direction. I was so thankful. Sitting here now, its 5:45pm and I have no idea what has happened since. Perhaps no news is good news.
I didn’t mean for this to be so long. Thanks for sticking it out with me. Lets hope the rest of the heifers offer a slightly more straight forward experience. You probably don’t want to read this kind of a exposé arising from the names of some of the heifers yet to calve🙄😬😉.
My larger goal with my blog is to keep things very real. I can’t imagine what benefit there would be to projecting this message, “we sure have our sh*t together.” We don’t. Today that means nothing dark to report thankfully, just life.
Our dogs are a huge and constant source of joy, having said that they cost me. Last night around 2:30am I was wakened by our outside dog, she was defending our yard from coyotes (I think), her barks were quite ferocious and Coffee responded from the dog room and joined in. That’s a lot. I was awake. I could not go back to sleep for three hours. Now I am so whooped I am almost useless, so why not write a blog about it eh? Its 6:50pm, I think the guys will be working for another hour but I am tired so I am unusually hungry. I am generally trying to eat low carb but I just polished off a large bowl of leftover perogies. Its one of those days. Back to the dogs…….I was just rounding the counter when I started to trip over a noisy thing on the floor but ended up just kicking it. I thought it was a dogbone. No, not that pretty. Coffee had brought in a donkey hoof trimming from the ferrier’s recent visit. A couple friends with donkeys brought them over to meet with the ferrier. We had souvenirs. True confession here……..I have a regular appointment with a cleaning woman. Every second Tuesday she is here. I’ll be honest, I feel guilty about this. It’s a serious indulgence especially now that I am not working outside the home. It needs to be in place until I dig myself out from the pileup that happened when I was committed to too much. Maybe I will always give myself this treat. For one thing, it frees me up to have company without worrying about the state of the house, at least not as much as I used to. (I am operating under the belief that the day will return when once again our house holds regular company). Anyways, today was Joanna’s day to be here and two hours after her departure I have a horse hoof on my kitchen floor. If I used hashtags this would be the spot to place a #ranchwifelife.
This donkey hoof is not as gross as it looks.
As I write this Coffee is playing with the water dish. Its quite large and holds a lot of water and it can create a flood when she gets going, and I should be disciplining her, but here I sit. And this is the spot for a hashtag including these words…. if I ignore it will it go away? I always try hard to have the house clutter free before Joanna gets here, I can achieve that in places, but never in the 3 years I have had Tiki Cleaning coming here have I ever been truly ready in the whole house. Todays victory was slim, the kitchen was almost perfect by the time she got to it (better than it has looked in weeks and now even better after her handiwork).
The scene where, believe it or not, clutter has been reduced.
Back to the dogs…….this morning Coffee had another set of puppy vaccinations. She rolled into the vet clinic like a beast on fire. She was so excited by the bird in the lobby and being out and hearing other dogs and she made her presence known. As I was holding her for the early part of the exam I quietly urged her, “okay Coffee, now show these women your best self, you can do it Coffee!” Then I explained to Coffee that they were used to our old dog Foxy, a sweet and quiet Chihuahua, she needed to be like Foxy. There is nothing like negative comparisons to guide behaviour…..not my best moment, but really I was just trying to be funny. I was kind’ve embarrassed by her huge presence, her 15 kg was coming off as 50. The trip home was a bit outrageous. I had groceries in the back and Coffee was super reactive to vehicles we crossed paths with. Its like she thought she would chase them off so she would throw herself at the back window each time one went by. I thought she was going to give herself brain damage. After the third time it happened with no sign of it abating I roared. When I have mentioned my grouch factor before many people have said to me, “YOU….grouchy? I can’t imagine it.” I wish you could have been there. You would have believed it. She was driving me nuts and I was sleep deprived after all! Despite making myself hoarse after shouting her name only a few times, nothing changed. I pulled over onto the highway shoulder, got her on my lap and held on for dear life. She was perfect the whole rest of the way home, best pals, only damage was the wet mark on my pants from her slobbering on me. Earlier in the ride I had resigned myself to the thought that I had likely ruined 6 dollars worth of bread by letting Coffee near the groceries in the state she was in. It turned out the bread was perfect. It was the tortilla chips that died, I see a taco salad in our future.
In other news it has been a record setting day on the ranch. According to the names Russell is sending my way we have had 22 calves today and glory be, none of them needed me. There are some noteable ones for sure. We started the day relieved that Canada had safely calved and birthed herself almost a mini me. She is red and white so she earned her nametag. Later in the day another special red and white cow gave us a calf. Here she is…..
This is Mrs. Claus, she had just birthed her own mini me.
The heifers were really busy today too, emotion, fidelity and lust all calved. (Story behind these weird names in the blog post called “Love Me Tender”). One of the later ones today is “Abba.”
“ABBA” with her new calf. We love the music of ABBA at our house.
The sun is shining, the wind is low, the air is warm, it’s been an especially beautiful prairie spring day. A great day to have 22 calves. Now I am going to leave this and go work on supper. I am hoping for a super inspired finishing thought. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it won’t.
As I finish I am not super comfortable with this post. I am not really used to being so scattered and off the cuff, and maybe, like having a cleaning lady, feel a little guilty. Guilty for highlighting a bunch of passing details in a light hearted way. Life around us is serious, am I being irresponsible to turn my back on all the deep need in the world? Maybe its okay to appear to ignore the hard stuff for a bit. Maybe a day where the sun is shining and the air is still and the dogs are acting crazy and a cow named lust is calving, maybe that’s a good day to embrace that line in the 23rd Psalm I talked about a couple days ago…“He makes me to lie down in green pastures.” We are allowed to take a break and rest and let others help us and maybe try something different, something light and fun. Maybe despite being sleep deprived we can find ourselves saying, through all the craziness, “he restores my soul.” May that be so.
I thought I would share the story of how this blog came to be. A couple years ago a friend of mine (Deb) said “Kathy I think there’s a Blog in you dying to come out.” She might have been right at the time, I think she was, but there was no way I wanted to think about starting something at that point, I had a lot going on. Fast forward to this set of months we have been living. Its been hard and the writing and sharing I have usually done on Facebook just didn’t seem a good fit for me anymore. At the same time, maybe as part of my healing from grief and burnout, I started to have some dreams. They were slightly odd but they were helpful and I started to feel better. Then almost a month ago I had a dream about my grade 3 teacher. She was a good teacher and I had liked her very much. I was really pleased when at some point in the 1990s I came across her while she was doing some volunteer work in Saskatoon, she was retired, healthy and she remembered me. Now its 2021, and when I woke up from that dream that included her I thought to myself, “I need to see if she is still alive.” I picked up my phone and I put in her name. I was thankful not to have an obituary come up. Instead what came was a link to a blog. It was her nieces blog, the story I was directed to included a picture and a little bit about her, it was quite recent. I looked around at the blog and enjoyed it and I thought to myself “I need to ask this woman about blogging!” I found her email on her page and I sent her a message. I included the top two questions that I had. I also was able to get the address for her aunt and get a letter ready to send her, she is 98 years old now. It was awesome to receive Marylou’s reply. She said that one of the top benefits of blogging for her was the way it allowed her to connect with people from a variety of places. That gave me goosebumps. I decided to go for it, started getting set up and then did the launch a couple weeks ago. It has been a good experience for sure and different from Facebook which I seemed to need. As I think about what has unfolded I can’t help but think about the fact that my grade 3 teacher, who likely was among the first to work with me on things like sentence structure, has indirectly given me something at this late stage in the game. She is 98 and I am 52 and still her legacy, the impression she made on me, something, was stirring in me to make me dream about her. That led to contact with MaryLou and the courage/the push to consider doing this thing which i am really enjoying. I think that’s really neat. I wonder what it was about our connection that prompted that dream that night. Maybe the truth is, our teachers are never really done with us.
My school photo from the year I was in grade 3. The day this picture was taken I’m sure I spent hours with Miss Schmidt.This strikes me as especially true after the experiences with Miss Schmidt.Switching back to ranch life….A different kind of couple picture I caught yesterday. I was on duty to check the heifers a couple times today. There were more births among them today, one of them is pictured here. A few days ago I wrote about the tag theme for this group, they are all words that are part of a strong relationship, the heifers birthing today were “Romance” and “Warm.”“Cuddle” is holding on, but looking pretty rounded. 16 calves were born today, no big troubles, “Canada” is looking like she is ready to birth….maybe by tomorrow. She had trouble last year so we are watching especially closely.
I had my Covid vaccine first injection on Thursday. I was asked to sit for fifteen minutes after the needle to ensure no big reaction. I was also asked to come for the vaccine holding nothing but my health card, so I didn’t have my phone with me. I have to say I loved that fifteen minutes and was sad when it was over. I loved being with other people in a setting where nothing was needed of me and my thoughts could wander freely, but, I wasn’t alone. Maybe it was in those quiet moments that something hatched that I haven’t been able to shake.
Going from the metaphor of hatching to that of seeding…. earlier in the day seeds of doubt had been planted in my mind about this vaccine, because of things I read on facebook. They were seeds only but they joined seeds planted by various conversations over the last while. I am a people pleaser which creates a lot of stress at times. So it was that I found myself pondering….. if I was to have resisted this vaccine that would put me on board with some people in my world, but what would it cost me? Its funny, my thoughts didn’t go to the future, my thoughts went to the past. This startled me in a way, it was unexpected, but it was serious, my guts were hot inside of me, so I knew I had stumbled on something. You see, I am a privileged person, I have never been let down by the medical system, I know that mistakes get made and people walk away dissapointed from the way their health needs are met, at times, but that has not been my experience in our Canadian setting where health care is a universal right, funded by taxation. For most of the last day I have used almost every free moment my brain had to think over all that I have seen, that my family has seen and the ways that our moments of deepest vulnerability have been responded to by the health care system in Canada.
I thought about 1983 for sure. That’s when I was 15 years old and I needed my jaw operated on to correct my bite, I was slowly grinding down my teeth. I remember the moment before the anaesthetic put me out, a gas had been administered and it made me loopy, it caused me to think that my doctor had green hair, I remember thinking to myself “oh no, my doctor has green hair, I hope he can do this.” In fact Dr. Lanigan became a legend in my early story, he walked with me through a process where I started to claim my inner strength. (Five weeks with your jaw wired shut is no cake walk.) In that pre-surgery moment though I had to let go. I had to trust him, no matter what color his hair was. I’d like to think that I based that trust on everything that grounds the medical system, like the Hippocratic oath which is a pledge to do no harm. But lets face it, at age 15 I trusted Dr. Lanigan because my Mom and Dad seemed to. This was a time when they were called to do a lot of trusting. Within a matter of months three big things had our family making heavy use of Canadian healthcare. My older brother was diagnosed with brain cancer for the first time, I had this situation with my jaw to fix and my younger sister was diagnosed with Scoliosis and fitted with a brace. I don’t remember much about life at home in that time, but I can only imagine the stress my parents were under and how important it was to them to feel comfortable with the care their children were being given. How did they decide that they could let my brother be submitted to the harsh reality of radiation therapy, how did they just know that they could trust the working of that burdensome brace my sister endured, how did they come to peace with the pain and struggle they witnessed me live with, for the sake of some promised end goal? I think the truth is, they just had to. They did.
1990 rolled around and a second bout of brain cancer took my brother’s life. While he was battling through some treatment options people in the health community in Saskatoon were thinking through how to better serve people who are dying. A Palliative Care Unit was opened and Bob spent his last week there, among the first patients to ever use it. We had cared for him at home as long as we could. When we couldn’t we opened our hands, it was with profound thanks that we could entrust these people to take everything they knew about end of life care and love my brother into his death.
Only a couple years later my Dad started the very early stages of a journey with dementia. I find myself thinking about a time in that where Dad still lived at home, I did too, I was studying theology and Mom and I were primary caregivers. Every weekday morning a taxi would come pick him up and take him to an adult day centre for people with dementia. How did we do that? How did we come to know that he would be okay there, that people would understand his limits, that he would be kept safe, that he would be treated with the dignity he deserved? We didn’t know for sure. But we had to trust. Our trust was well placed. He always came home content, with an aura of pride, he too had been away for the day and had a life beyond his family. The principles of practice that informed how that place ran meant contentment for Dad and peace for us. We were so profoundly needful of them. In the later stages when Dad was in long term care things were much more complicated in terms of what he needed. He lived in a place that was not always perfect. The sheer amount of human contact and care combined with what we all know, that no human is perfect, meant that it wasn’t always ideal. However, the standards of care were high and always seeking to do and be better and these standards were like a magnet that drew everything towards a more human, more dignified, and dynamic living environment. How many times did I give my Dad a kiss on the cheek and walk away with so much hope and need within me? Hope that he be seen for who he really was and treated with kindness. You don’t live those experiences as family members without being changed. Maybe a spiritual muscle is getting conditioned, a muscle that is about hoping and letting go, loving and letting go, trusting and letting go.
All this would come into play over and over again. When we checked ourselves into hospital to deliver a baby two weeks overdue, I was a 34 year old first time Mom, hopeful and trusting in the skill of my doctor. When I watched the orderly wheel my 7 year old son to surgery for a complicated wrist fracture. When we participated in many different stages of the health care needs of my mother in law and father in law. When I watched ambulance attendants inch/shift/lift my 12 year old son onto a stretcher when he was in excruciating pain from a broken leg. When I checked my husband into day surgery for knee repair years ago, and then recently dropped him off under the cloud of Covid life for lots and lots of tests and doctor visits for recent injury. When I myself had surgery last March that resulted in a probable cancer diagnosis, a diagnosis reversed after closer examination of the tissues. When I left my Mom at the Cancer Clinic for her first and only dose of chemotherapy. When my sister and I checked her into the Palliative Care Unit, into the room right beside what had been my brothers. All of that. How many diagnositic machines, interventions, lab and xray technicians, doctors, EMTs, anaesthesiologists, surgeons, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists and specialists of one kind or another have I put my trust in?
Why would I become suspicious and act from a place of distrust now? What has changed?
I can’t think of a single thing.
Well actually I can. I know that money has corrupted medical research in some cases. I am not naive. How that has played out in this case only time will tell, however the scientific evidence is in telling me that once again medical research has given me an option for addressing my area of vulnerability.
The scientific method that informed the process of developing tools, interventions, programs and education processes that I have relied on is the same method that informed the vaccine development. That method has made a huge difference in my life. Maybe that’s why when I think about all this together, it feels like my guts are heating up. I have felt so vulnerable, I have been so cared for, I must not forget that, in fact I feel I must honor that.
As I sat putting in my 15 minutes at the vaccine clinic, things were hatching, things that were long and took a lot of words, if you got this far, thanks for sticking it out with me.
(To illumine that I am not going on guts alone I can tell you that I have done some research, not very much, the fact is I am not very interested in science, I do understand the principles of the scientific method. I have been listening to ZDogg MD, I find him on Youtube, as best as I can tell he can be trusted. He explains things and hosts guests that can explain their info in a way that I can mostly understand. He has made clear just how extraordinarily safe and effective the vaccines are and he has a rebuttal for every critique levelled at them.)
Here is a link to a really interesting and read-able article introducing us to the long term research and the woman herself who laid the groundwork for the Covid 19 vaccine.
A case study in vulnerability that unfolded on the ranch yesterday…..Russ called asking me “can you mother a calf?” He meant it. The mother was a 1st calf heifer and she had a hard go. She couldn’t care for her calf and it was so cold at 6am when she calved. This was part way through, that’s an odd sock on my hand.This is how she looked when she was brought in. Her sac stuck to her in places. She was suffering. I had lots of time to think about vulnerability and trust as I worked on her. I called her “Sweetcheeks” in passing and the name stuck.Mostly dry, head up, perky, trying to stand, having welcomed some colostrum in a bottle, and getting welcomed to the family by Coffee dog. Better moments for sure.Here is Russ bringing the Mom in after she had some time to recover. This is our heifer named “Epic.”Russ carrying the calf to the barn to meet up with its Mom. Coffee is still enamored.
Yesterday I had the chance to tell you about how it came to be that we have heifers with names like Listen and Support. Today seems to be the day to tell you about how our herd of cows came to be so international.
What do I mean? Well we have a cow named “A”, that’s in honour of a woman from Thailand whose full name is Apiradee. We have “Fredy” in honour of a man from Switzerland. We have “Klaus” in honour of a man from Germany. We have “Louise” in honour of a woman from Denmark. We have “Antonio” in honour of a man from Mexico. We have “Tara” in honour of a woman from Colorado, “Liz” in honour of a woman from Maine, “Lisa” in honour of a woman from Sweden, “Sharon” in honour of a woman from Manitoba and about 40 more names that all arise from real people I know that live in so many different places. “Ernest” from the U.S A. really made us feel amused when we saw that he used a picture of the cow Ernest, with the the clearly visible, as his facebook profile picture!
You might think it weird that female cows get male names. I did too at first. But somehow the bond of friendship just rises above the particulars. Maybe its because of the source of all of these names. All of the people I referred to were a family of sorts, back in 1991, we were all part of a cast of young adults travelling the world and singing, there were more than 100 of us. We were part of “Up With People.” We came from different backgrounds, different religions, different politics. We had a purpose to build bridges of understanding. It was a really cool experience. I lived with 66 host families in 7 countries in one year.
A couple years ago we had a lot of cows whose tags had fallen out through the year and I needed to make them new tags. I put out a request on Facebook for ideas. Liz from Maine said, “how about these tags are all people from our cast?” We needed a lot, like 40 or so, her idea worked. I selected names that were easy to put on a tag, “A” and “Mo” made it for sure, I selected names that reminded me of shared experiences, so “Antonio” made it, even though his name was darn tricky to fit on that tag. Some of the names on the tags could represent many different people in our lives. Names like Lisa and Liz are common and invite us to think about a few special people in our world. Thats why todays post is about Up With People, because as the day wound down both Liz and Lisa had calves, at the same time. Although there is absolutely zero concrete connection to my friends, those names elicit feelings and memories that equal connection. As long as I am not overwhelmed by other stuff I really get excited when I see the Up With People cows and my family have learned their names and are sure to report back when they calve. It has built a lot of connection. So when Russell sent me texts with pictures today I was just so happy to see those calves and know that those cows had that shared experience. Its nothing. It is not connection to reality. But it touches me. Maybe I am weird. The Liz and Lisa connection goes deeper though. Besides representing my travel friends, I have a cousin named Lisa. Her Dad and my Mom were first cousins. Her Mom was named Liz, she lost her Mom quite recently too. It gave me a lot of joy to be able to send her texts and pictures saying “look what just happened!” It just seemed meaningful that Lisa and Liz calved at the same time. The Liz connection is bigger than that though, in a big way. We have had a photographer named Liz documenting the work of ranching for the last year or so. We are completely blessed by her talent and what she has captured of our lives. I have said it before and I will say it here, her photographs have illumined the meaning in the work we do. So our photographer friend Liz also got a text today, because that name Liz will always remind us with such a sense of gratitude what she has captured for us. I also think it is Queen Elizabeth’s birthday. So that is a nice connection to this birth story too.
Here are some pictures relevant to this day and to the story above.
Thats me holding the microphone, in the midst of our Up With People stage show in 1991, I am not sure where we were performing at this point.Liz Griffin captured this beautiful picture of Ursula and her baby last summer. Ursula is named after a friend from Germany.One of a few pictures I took of the UWP tags in production. Maren made a really great impression on Russell when they met at a wedding we all attended, I am sure that is why she got the extra heart, to make Russell smile.The words heard at our lunch table today…..”now I have seen everything.” For a random reason the highchair (my Dads old one, used only for antique type decor really)was at the table. Jill popped Buster in, put a few nibbles on the tray, Buster handled it like a pro.The cow “Liz” with her baby.Here is Lisa with her fresh calf.
As Far As The Eye Can See 