Getting ready

The air was full last night. We had a debate. The Taylors, across the road, weaned their calves. The coyotes were showing their disdain for having to listen to mama cows bawl longingly for their whiny baby calves. So, there was political jabbing, mooing, maahmaahing and yipping. It got a little noisy at times.

I felt warm fuzzies at the end of the debate, and I'm not being facetious, to see the families gather on the stage. It looked to me as if the adversaries and their clans could actually become good friends if they spent some time together. It's nice to see such things in the back-biting world to which we've become so accustomed.

In the interest of keeping my audience, I'll refrain from scoring the debate. Although, as an English teacher and journalist, trained to strive for fairness and specific reasons for general statements, I'd love to critique the performance. Maybe after the election!!!

After the debate, I went outside to call my cats, and that's when I heard the evening air so alive with desperation. The noise signaled a transition within the transition. Bovine babies must leave their mommies. Fall is here in full force, and much will change for bovines and humans alike as the month rolls on.

To address those changes, we're spending a lot of time here in North Idaho getting ready. In fact, I heard someone once say that we spend the majority of our year preparing for winter.

Well, that won't be true for this year. Most of this year will go down as "winter," when we consider January to mid-June with more snow than we've ever seen and then move on to the possibility that the ground could turn white within the next few weeks. That means a possibility of eight months worth of winter for 2008. So, whoever made that statement had it wrong for this calendar year.

Bill has been getting ready for winter for several months, collecting, chopping and piling wood. I'm guessing, with thoughts about the economy, that I've been preparing since May when I put in a garden with a record number of tomato and potato plants. I've spent the past several days harvesting bags and bags of tomatoes, and four big boxes of potatoes. Tomatoes by the dozens are still turning red out there in the north garden.

The corn cobs harvested might outdo those eight plums but not by many. I know I've tasted fresh corn on the cob once, and Bill has enjoyed about half a dozen servings. Four more ears sit in a box on the garage floor. There's still much to do with the garden to get it all cleaned up and ready for winter.

Horse preparations are just about complete except for finding the short in wiring that runs through the automatic waterer network. We've got to have juice to all those units before the first winter freeze.

Meanwhile, Larry Eby has brought the shavings, and I've purchased more rubber pads to protect the floors in the stalls. We've got enough hay, and the present pasture will last for another few weeks.

Bill's wood pile is growing, and Norm's crew swept the chimney with ease the other day. It makes us pretty nervous to see those young guys scale that steep roof, but they know what they're doing, and we feel comfortable knowing that we'll have a safe chimney for the winter stove fires.

The yard is yet to come. The leaves are hanging in there, and they'll do that for another few weeks, so that endless job of cleaning up millions of poplar, maple, cottonwood and oak leaves will have to wait. Fortunately, that allows time to get most of the other tasks of autumn completed, like apple picking, canning, freezing, jelly-making, winter storage, etc.

Hard to believe we're here all ready. Hard to believe those baby calves bounding around the spring fields have reached the age of independence from moms. Hard to believe the seemingly endless Presidential race is soon coming to a close and that we'll begin anew with a different administration. Much preparation will go into its final stages, just like we're doing here for our endless winter.

Soon the cow bawling will stop. The candidates will quit jabbing and we'll enter the quiet of winter. And, during that lull, a more muffled preparation will again open the way for our life cycles to start all over again.