Tag Archives: Calving

ODD PERSPECTIVE

Photo: Allie Fox

It’s that time of year when the cows begin calving, and these two girls were in the bottom of a Ridenhour Canyon when Allie, her sister Katie and the two 1 year-old boys, Asher and Hayes, passed by on the way to check water in Paregien’s. Robbin and I have been checking the first and second calf heifers after they’re fed… and yes, we’re feeding hay too, having just increased the amount to keep up their strength before they calve. We have a few on the ground already, coyotes thick as fleas on a ground squirrel. It’s always exciting, and sometimes disappointing when you lose one.

Naturally, we love this time of year, especially now that the temperature is running in the 90s. It’s our beginning of the year.

MATERNITY


Dilated and making bag,
first-calf heifers choose to graze,
closer to our familiar voices

over morning coffee. Perhaps security,
or our loving pride they feel
long distance as we imagine

a pasture full of calves clinging
to a mother’s shadow, the buck and run
as they get older like the thirty years

before them. We begin another season
of grass with rain, with feeding hay
ready to face the future with them.

REGAL (3030)

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We know the ones up-close,
go looking when they’re missing
from the bunch lined-out on hay.

Most girls like their privacy,
find draws of rock and brush
that feel good, secure apart

from any other day. It changes
them, this first motherhood—
some find the carriage of a queen.