PALESTINE — Farming and ranching is a great business, if you don’t care anything about profits or sleep, or time off for good behavior. You can’t just head out for a weekend in Galveston without making prior arrangements for the care, feeding, well-being and security of whatever critters you have lounging about the grounds. In our case, besides our cats Pete and Petunia and Millie the wonder dog, we tend to something like 30 or 40 head of cattle. I am not sure just how many there are, and believe me, I have tried counting them a thousand times. They just won’t hold still for a census most times, and one or a dozen are like as not to wander off right in the middle of head count, just to be difficult. There might be 50 of them, or there might only be five who make enough commotion for 10 each.

Juggling a full-time job and tending to regular chores leaves little space for leisure-time activities, unless you make your leisure part of the process. In other words, raising grass, building fences, digging ponds, removing fallen trees from fences, and chasing cattle all over 300 acres is fun and relaxing in and of itself if you can trick yourself into thinking that way. Some folks, fools for the most part, pine for the country life and its freedom from the rules and regulations of life in the city.

We decided to thin out the herd and split them up recently, a time of year some are fond of calling “summer vacation”. We refer to the same time frame as “Drought 24/7”. Judy and I slept in late one Saturday recently. We gulped down a leisurely cup of coffee at 6:30 and got out of the house at 7 a.m. to take the trailer over to the Lanier pasture across the road from our place. Why we call it the Lanier pasture, I don’t know, but we do. I think somebody named Lanier must have once owned the land, or died on it during a stampede.

We had been feeding the cows near the corral for a month, to lull them into a false sense of security. Cows are easy to fool, once.  After that, they will remember an injustice for 20 years and infect every other member of the herd with their suspicions. This particular Saturday, their guards were down and we were able to easily and quickly sort out the calves we wanted to sell after only an hour of fun, frolic, and healthy exercise. In the process, Judy managed to sink one foot ankle deep into a fresh example of what we like to call cow exhaust. She said words that I cannot precisely recall at this moment, especially when she went back in to retrieve her shoe. In the corral, it was easy as pie to shoo the young ones into the trailer. I did discover a nest of black wasps who had erected their homestead in one panel of a sorting gate. They stung me three times; twice on the hand, once in the forehead.  Wasps are God’s creation, I suspect, and may perhaps serve a useful purpose upon this earth. What that purpose is I cannot say, but their sting packs a wallop far in excess of size or necessity. I made a mental note to return with wasp spray next trip.

Soon we were out on the paved farm road motoring for the Saturday Auction Sale in Buffalo. As I drove, I idly stroked my swelling forehead and right hand, just to make sure they were still attached.

From my earliest youth, I recall the Saturday Sale at Buffalo. I can clearly remember buying nickel bags of fresh peanuts from an old man named “Strawberry” when I was only seven or eight. In all the intervening 50 years, that sale has plugged along with its regular Saturday edition, the one constant thing you could count on in Buffalo besides Saturday night fights and Sunday morning confessions. I cannot recall there ever not being a sale on Saturday at Buffalo, but others tell me there have been exceptions. We arrived at the sale on one of those exception days, I guess; there wasn’t a soul on the place. We took the calves back home and turned them loose. Nowadays, they travel in a wall-eyed pack and relocate to a far corner of the pasture whenever they see me coming.

Wanting to have some good come from this disappointment, I decided to take a couple mother cows back to their summer pasture by our house. This is just across the road from the Lanier pasture, as noted previously and we already had the trailer hitched up, so it seemed a logical decision. We managed, with only the slightest effort, to get Dixie and Ramona aboard and ready for the short relocation ride. I was only stung twice this time, and counted it as nothing, as my limbs were already numbed and swollen out of proportion by this time. As we bumped along through the hay meadow beyond the corral, I glanced in the rearview mirror and noted a cow that looked to be Ramona’s twin come bounding and frolicking past, kicking joyfully this way and that as she disappeared over the next hill. It was then I remembered I had not latched the sliding door on the back of the trailer, despite several reminders from my associate cowpuncher, Judith. My hand was swollen to the size of a softball by this time, and my left eye shut.  I itched all over. Judy says that itching means you are allergic to wasp stings. I suppose she is right. I scratched and itched all night long, like I had five coats of paint to sand off and only five minutes to do it. I think I will retire from the cattle business one day, and pursue a more rational business; like maybe running a kindergarten day care or a lunatic asylum. I have experience at both.  

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Guest columnist Michael Thomason is a Palestine business owner.