Category Archives: Ranch Journal

XXOOXXOO

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Dear Dawn, I await you in a cavern
of wet blackness, upstate exhaust hangs
between me and the suns and stars

of my reward, (or as far as I have seen
of infinity), as the dew from the last rain
clings to each unhealthy particulate,

camouflaged to look and feel like fog.
I have missed your smile, bright eyes,
and warm touch across the landscape

of my face, but we inhale this wet veil
holding clay slopes damp, moistening
each cotyledon struggling to break free

from the earth’s grip to make grass,
turn hills green with the circumambulation
of black dots—cows and calves grazing.

Another ugly day without you, feeding
hay in gray, but it ain’t all bad—
I’ll see you when I can. xxooxxoo, J.

 

WHERE THE BOYS ARE

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I inhale deeply. Cigarette,
bad air, taste of damp earth
spinning in a picture too big to see.

Against one another,
the young bulls rub like teen-age
boys built for work, flexing

between play and combat,
clods of first-rain mud
dried upon their foreheads,

they sway like one beast
plodding towards hay,
from habit more than hunger.

In two weeks, bellows
will fill the canyon, the world
will change from maternal peace

to untamed cacophony,
primal roars and screams
piercing our pastoral quietude

for another calf, another day—
one more season of grass
to inhale deeply.

 

DOWN IN THE VALLEY

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Bad air from the Bay
trapped beneath the warm
sunshine and new grass growing.

 

 

WPC(2) — “Minimalist”

 

Surprise Feeding

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It’s a waiting game now for our bare hills to take on a shade of green as the first cotyledons of our grass seed break the crust left after Friday and Saturday’s remarkable rain. It’s not typical to begin our rainy season with 1.76” on Dry Creek, or 2.62” in Greasy Creek. Usually, we hope to get a half-inch to start the grass, but more often than not fail after our first storm event.

Everybody’s hungry and there’s really not much to eat, actually less immediately after a rain, other than what we are feeding our cows. With some calves two months old and growing, demanding more from their mothers, it’s starting to show on the cows, less fleshy now than a month ago. We’ve been increasing the amount we’re feeding right along trying to keep everyone in shape, hoping that when the grass comes that the calves will keep right on growing, and that our cows will be in good enough shape to cycle and breed back when we put the bulls out next month.

All very subjective. Working around slick roads elsewhere, we fed the girls above a day early yesterday as we drug our road up into Greasy Creek to fill in some of the gullies and ruts accumulated after the past two years of not enough moisture to effectively smooth them out. And good that we brought a little extra hay, as the calves were as glad to see us as the cows.

 

FOREVER WORN

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Dark brown and naked after rain,
these hills have held together
despite their deep dust and our fears

after years of drought. Impossibly,
we even see a tinge of green
before the clouds clear the ridges.

Come alive and breathing, ready
to raise lush leaf and grass, they will
never be the same again in our eyes!

Nor we, forever worn by lack of moisture
on this earth and all across our minds—
growing closer and more grateful.

 

 

RECIPE FOR SOUP

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We’ve been getting ready for a week—
cleaned the gutters and the woodstove,
stacked and corded oak and Manzanita,

brazed a soup bone with plenty meat
and vegetables, just in case the neighbors
drop by to watch it rain—some more.

Inch and a half overnight, we take
and release a deep, moist breath.
For all ingredients, just add water.

 

RUNNING MATES

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Blazing summer between calves,
grazing our world
with clean water to drink.

 

 

CIRCLING THE HOUSE

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Dogs bark into the early morning blackness,
up-canyon scent of something feline, half-bayed
young lion in the oaks to rock piles arched—etched

in their minds, they become a pack of oddities
standing-off coyotes, rousting coons from the garden,
escorting possums and skunks—we know their bark.

Your Beagle inheritance, inside fat, old and waddling,
following his nose to new frontiers beyond a life
on the couch, instincts fired to chase and bay

sharp claw or teeth he’s never dreamed before,
barks in his sleep—deep furrows in his derrière.
The dark stranger, jumpy, blockheaded Queensland

slinks and investigates the far water trough
every evening for smells—fell out of a cowboy
pickup and moved-in waiting to be found

likes his soft outside bed more than anything. Just
how they admire your Border Collie Jack-the-Good-Dog
                    keeps them lined-out circling the house.

 

 

 

Jack-the-Good-Dog

“I Wish It Would Rain”

The trailing end of a storm front that brought heavy rains to the Pacific Northwest lingered along our Sierra Nevada foothills all of yesterday, keeping temperatures in the mid-70s beneath dry, but fairly constant, cloud cover. The below-60° chill lasted well into the morning, a winter feel that made us want a fire. A near-perfect day as Robbin was playing and singing a Nanci Griffeth song in the other room while I was at my desk.

Humor us:

With the weather change, testosterone levels down at the bull pen (Go Giants!) have elevated a notch leaving me substantial fence to fix after they ostracized a young bull into our buffer zone between the cows and calves. Though he was the loser, he had found his way to the cows nevertheless, 30 days early — leaving a another job for today after we finish feeding.

The Internet weather prognosticators are still holding to fair chance of a 1/2-inch rain for Halloween:

Forecast

Until then, we wish it would rain.

 

PILLOW FIGHT

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Heron ripped from the sky,
gray feathers hard ground—
an eagle’s trail remains.