Searching for Inspiration

In the midst of a fiction novel I have run into my first bout with writer's block. I am about three quarters of the way through and as of lately I have a hard time imagining myself being creative anywhere other than in the middle of a pasture at dusk about 4 miles north of Sharon. Growing up I was always so disappointed that my parents didn't live in town. Now, I hate that I don't live in a pasture. Literally. All I want is a small house in the middle of nowhere. I don't want to see city lights, I'm rather partial to the lights of R.C. Phillips Cattle Company whose only purpose is to light the pens of cattle whining outside their house.

Another source of inspiration I've come to love is the sale barn. My mother recently told me how strange it was that when I'm having a bad day I prefer to go to the Woodward Livestock Auction and climb to the top of the old wooden stairs to catch a single seat in the corner and watch the cattle run through the pen. I can't explain the calming effect of the noise. The hooves of the cattle on the scales, the auctioneer taking bids from ranchers up and down the rows of seats, some dressed head to toe in fancy cowboy suits, while others clearly just came in from feeding their own cattle in their overalls and trucker hats.

Christmas On The Farm

When your living is dependent on the cattle market or the weather, it seems that it is often feast or famine.  Being one of six children of a farmer/rancher, I can tell you that results of these less than dependable factors can be glaringly obvious at Christmas time.

My parents, though, were smart and resourceful and always made the most of what we had at the time.  I never really knew which year was feast and was which was famine.  Instead of dragging us along to shop among the throngs of frantic holiday-goers or fretting about excessive decorating, my parents chose to spend more time over more money and gave us holiday memories that still echo in my heart 20+ years later.

Each Christmas, we would load up and make the two hour trip to the Christmas tree farm where we would drink hot chocolate around a large outdoor fire and ride in a horse drawn buggy among the rows of fragrant green trees.  They would let us choose the perfect tree and then we cut it down ourselves and drug it to the cart path where it was picked up and loaded on our car.

Once situated in our living room, the smell of pine permeated the entire house - an amazing scent that meant the Christmas season had begun.  After stringing it with twinkling white lights and covering it with years worth of accumulated ornaments, we would often drink eggnog and watch Christmas movies.

Thinking back, I couldn't tell you what gifts I received or what kind of holiday goodies were baked or even how the house was decorated, but I can vividly remember cutting down our own Christmas tree and the warmth and togetherness that it inspired each year.

Take the opportunity this holiday season to purchase quality memories with your time, just as you purchase quality gifts with your money.  Many years down the road, your family will remember the things you did together, even when the memories of the gifts purchased and money spent have been long faded.

Prairie Tempest

I watch as the clouds billow and rumble overhead. The oppression of the sun's ominous fury has been squelched by these merciful pewter masses.  Leaves scorched by drought and sun swirl slowly to the ground as a soft breeze begins to ripple over the prairie grass and through the Honey Locust trees.

The farm is eerily quiet - not a bellowing cow or a chirping cricket - just the sound of the wind.  The sweet smell of impending rain is muddled by the acrid stench and sage brush and ripe vines full of gourds.  Though half devoured by this summer's plague of ravenous grasshoppers, they still manage to perfume the air with their strange familiarity.

As the windmill at the old Thomas place creaks and groans back to life in the wind, I wonder what early settlers on this prairie thought when these thunderheads rolled across the plains.  Today, this late afternoon prairie tempest has stirred the drought stricken prairie to life. Against the slate colored sky, the golden grasses of the dry fields almost seem green.  The barn cats have began to mingle in the yard and the pasture cows are now grazing up against the fence nearest the house.  They know what is coming.

I look at the row of mangled trees just across the dirt road from our farm house and consider, with reverent respect, the potential fury that I know exists in the Oklahoma sky.  The booming clouds draw nearer and speak louder and I am reminded of the security of our storm cellar.  As the plains interact with the wind and the rumbling sky, it paints a picture of a much younger prairie.  From my seat on the porch, all I can see is sage brush and love grass whipping and nodding in the breeze.  I see a trail that the cattle have tromped that slinks and wanders into a large thicket.

A wall of clay colored dust  rises from the thirsty road and pings and scuttles as it hits our prairie home and metal outbuildings with stinging force and at this moment, I know what my great grandfather felt as he looked out on this very same rugged piece of land almost 100 years ago.  I connect with this land in the same way you connect with an old friend.  No matter how long you are away, when you finally meet again, it feels like you never left.  I am comforted and reassured that just as the storms and and tempests of life may bring destruction and desolation, in this moment, this prairie tempest reminds me of where I came from and who I really am.

Rain, Rain, Please Don't Go Away

Amber once said, "as farmer's daughters, we learn at a young age to pray for rain." This statement is entirely true to this day as 20-something-year-olds. I pray for rain daily and long for the sight of green grass in the ditches beside the highway near my parents' house.
Tonight we got lucky enough to have a small rain shower. No matter where you grew up rain always smells the same. I think that smell is possibly the best part of a rain shower. I will never get tired of standing in my front yard in the rain, feeling it come down on my skin.

Our garden comes to life, soaking up every coveted drop of sustenance. 

The calm after the storm right after the sun goes down is one of my favorite times. Those moments where it's not quite dark yet and the only thing besides the single cloud in the sky is the blinking lights of the radio tower a few blocks from my current residence. I don't think I will ever get used to living "in town," as my dad says. It's hard to remember that you can't run outside and yell or wrestle your sister in your front yard when your neighbors may or may not be inside calling 911.
I will be on the lookout for more June showers, maybe I will even be able to get better pictures next time!

"Paints the Perfect Picture of What It's Like Growing Up in the Country"

This is the epitome of growing up in the country. I never quite understood people who could live without stars at night or Oklahoma sunsets. I don't even see the point of living somewhere other than the south when you know you're going to lose the beauty. Amber and I make a lot of jokes about growing up as the "ranch hands" but the truth is we wouldn't be anywhere close to the people we are today if we hadn't grown up in the manner that we did or with the people we did. It took me living in the big city while getting my degree to realize that there really is no place like home when this is your home.

This picture is only a small portion of the family members.
The nieces and nephews we grew up with were more like cousins and the brothers and sisters were like aunts and uncles. We didn't necessarily understand this until we were older, though. Although we are an entirely mixed and complicated family, we are entirely integrated with each other. We enjoy each other, even if outsiders don't enjoy us. I tend to warn people before bringing them into my grandmother's house during a holiday not to be overwhelmed. We are large and loud and completely insistent that outsiders join in on the chaos that is the Phillips family. I also joke that we love picking up stragglers. You can guarantee that there will be at least one or two new people at any given holiday... especially Fourth of July.

R.C. (or Bobby, as I like to call him) is the glue that holds us all together. There have been hard times in our family just like everyone else's. Sometimes all you need is for Dad to tell you that everything will be okay.. "so quit your crying. There are cattle to work and fences to build. I'll wait for you in the truck."
I'm only partly kidding about that. Dad is a tough one but he has made us all survivors. I think he and I clash the most because we have such similar personalities. I helped him on the farm all through my high school years. I quit about a hundred times from the time I was 14 until I was 18. While other girls were working in clothing stores and waiting tables I was chasing a black steer down the highway in cowboy boots and sweatpants, wishing I had remembered to shut the gate!

Humble Beginnings

My sister and I are the youngest of six children. There is a 14-23 year age gap between the four eldest and myself, then my younger sister came along five years later. For the two of us, life began humbly on a ranch in the country near a small town in East Texas.

When I say I grew up on a ranch, in no way does that mean that I was a cowgirl with a show horse and fancy western boots. Occasionally, we had horses, but they were for rounding up cattle, not barrel racing. I also had boots, but they were suited more for working in the pens when the East Texas weather turned the soft ground in to rancid muck and greatly resembled galoshes. I would liken myself more to a glorified ranch hand.  Normally, ranch hands are boys, but since my brothers were grown, I guess my dad decided girls were just as able if trained early enough.

A little background information on our operation....
Our dad runs a cattle preconditioning operation where he buys heifers, and stocker and feeder cattle when they are old enough to be away from their mother.  Often these cattle are not even his.  Other, less inclined, cattlemen pay him to precondition their cattle before they turn them out.  He facilitates the transition from being with the mother to being independent and eating grain and grazing.  This is not as simple as it sounds.  It involves carefully screening and immunizing the groups as they come in based on their appearance and their geographic origin, as some locations are more prone to certain health issues than others.  It usually entails de-horning and branding each calf - a stinky process that can be smelled for a mile when the wind is blowing.  It also involves castrating the bulls, which not only changes their anatomy, but their name as well.  A castrated bull is called a steer.  Unless they are going to be bred, it is more desirable to have steers in a herd.

The whole process takes place in a cattle working chute with an array of tools including enormous needles, a somewhat clean, but far from sterile scalpel, a pair of pliers that my dad always wears in a holster on his belt, an ear tagger, a branding iron and a dirty Styrofoam ice chest full of medicine with used needles embedded around the top.  All of these things are set up on the back of a flat bed farm truck. 

I officially became a farmer/rancher at the tender age of 10.  Our dad traveled three to four days a week buying cattle and during those days, I was officially responsible for feeding all of the cattle on our property at that time.  He would leave a note on the back of a sale barn card telling me what to feed in which pen and just before twilight, I would head to the barn to ready my steed.

My trusty steed was an old beat up riding lawn mower fitted with a small wooden flat bed trailer.  I would load it up with 30 lb. buckets of corn and "cake" feed that I would catch from the grain room in our barn.  I would drive down the half mile of pens that lined our "driveway" and carry the buckets in and distribute them among the four troughs in each pen.  In the pens with bigger cattle, I could only carry one bucket at a time because I had to carry a whip in the other to ward off the more agitated ones.  There were quite a few times that I abandoned my buckets and jumped up on the metal fencing,  very similar to the way rodeo clowns do, to avoid being charged.  At that point, I would scale the fence back to my "steed" and dump the remaining feed over the fence into the dirt.  Hey - it beat letting them starve for the night and they always ate it all anyway.  I'm sure it was just a little grittier going down.

Inviting friends to stay the night was always interesting.  I'm not sure if riding along with me to feed was mystifying or traumatizing to them.  In any event, I eventually stopped inviting guests when I knew my dad was going to be out of town.  It was way to much to explain, and honestly, I was annoyed when having to do so.  This was literally a way of life for us and I felt judged and misunderstood when having to answer a million ridiculous questions from ignorant "city girls" about my very grown up ranch duties.  I also found the endless stream of "yuck" and "ewww" and "gross" that inevitably ensued completely annoying as well.

I picture my inner monologue as sounding somewhat like Hank The Cow Dog for those of you who are familiar with him.  If you're not, you should be.  It's a book series - Google it!

When I was 13, the dairy market crashed and our operation essentially went under.  My dad still had a house and acreage near the Oklahoma panhandle where he was born and raised.  So we packed up and headed west.  Our operation in Oklahoma eventually grew and although my sister and I have fancy college degrees and numerous professional accolades, when we come home, we're still R.C.'s girls, those Phillips gals and often, the farmer's daughters.  Enjoy.

Click here to view the entire "Working Cattle" Gallery.