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Somehow, on this chilly morning at barely dawn, without enough light yet to see the red bud maple's brilliant red spring blossoms outside my south-facing window, the dim-lit vista makes me think of an old man in Texas whose passing scientific facts are not facts anymore. Only the vague, distant memories of his worldly adventures matter to him now as his personal history.
Maybe it's my own memories that elicit these images in my imagination. I remember plowing big fields with a mule and a turning plow when I was 10-12 years old. I could barely reach up to the round piece of wood that held the plow handles together in order to guide the plow through the ground. The plow handles proper were higher than my head.
I might have weighed sixty pounds at best, but I haven't been around small boys enough in decades to guess their weights. The mules and draft horses we owned or rented were huge and they weighed over a thousand or more pounds. My father would put the work collar and trace chains on the mule and I'd hook them up to the singletree attached to the front end of the plow. I couldn't reach high enough to put the leather work collar around the mule's neck myself, much less lift it up there.
My father would get me all set up out in the field I was gonna plow. In the bejinning he would plow the first row to set the line I'd follow back and forth all day with the plowed section growing wider and wider as me and the mule made round after round, and then he would leave to go work as a high school teacher.
If it started raining while he was gone I just plowed until he came back. I didn't know how to get the mule and plow back to the barn for a while. Sometime the mule would decide to go to the barn anyway. It would just stop going forward along the rut the plow made and head for cover. I would yell and scream for it to continue to work in fear of my father getting mad at me, but I was a little boy shouting in frustration. Nobody heard me with the rain beating down on the tin roofs.
The mule wouldn't work later than sunset. Even if it was still enough light to finish a little piece of land I wanted to get done to make my father proud of me. There was no choice for me but to learn how mules are and resign myself to it's ways. How was I to know how handy that would later be as an adult with some cantankerous people?
Sometimes nature is just more than a little boy can handle. My family kept cows from before I was born. There were Jersey cows that it became my chore to milk up until I left home to join the Navy. Cows are big to little boys just like mules. I wasn't given a choice about how to boss them around and make them do what had to be done. Those were the facts back then. They didn't remain facts for long.
The mules eventually (and sorrowfully) became dog food as they aged and couldn't pull the plows and wagons anymore. The plow handles rotted and the turning blade rusted and eventually became antiques if it wasn't sold for scrap iron to buy chicken feed after my father bought his first small tractor. The milk cows were sold to buy beef cows after I was gone away running to see the world and have my own say so.
The fields I plowed are now covered with brick houses with neat, orderly lawns tended by young husbands and wives trying to raise a family, and played upon by children that don't know how to plow or milk cows. They might probably run screaming to their parents terrified of huge animals like milling herds of cows or fierce hunting dogs that could tear boar coons apart in synchronized teamwork, much less a child.
Maybe it was fate that I learned to handle animals at such a young age. There were times as a child that I was terrified of animals myself, but by the time I left my parent's home and protection to see and experience the world on my own, I did lots of things that other people appeared frightened to do.
The one situation I wasn't prepared for, at first, was being alone with no safe place to rest my hungry and weary body. It got easier over the years. I realized that all I had to do was to step away from the city lights and nobody would follow me out into the dark.
Today, sitting here in front of my computer writing blog entries to pass the day and contemplate my life, It's a little like sitting around the dinner table, telling his stories of what used to be as if he were asking the blessings of God, and passing the plates, but there is no one here but me. At least it's not dark for a while. Shit happens. Things change. '-)
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
