Caterpillars and Cows

When I moved home, my greatest fear was that ALL MY ADVENTURES WOULD BE OVER. That’s how it felt in my head, looming and large.

I remember telling people as I left Denver that I longed to feel rooted, to plant hollyhocks and be there to see them grow year after year, to hear locus at night and feel the sense of place, the comfort of the woods, the pastures. But those feelings hadn’t overwhelmed the other side of me, the one who wanted to go back to Vietnam or China or maybe even hike Kilimanjaro someday.

Years later, I am amazed. I still have wanderlust, still travel when I can, but never have I ever felt that I am missing an adventure. The farm is filled with stories, packed every year with life and death and anxious moments, funny moments—never, ever has it been the staid life I imagined.

I would say it’s because I love the animals, but that makes me sound like I’m a fifth grade girl who likes cats and ponies. No offense to fifth grade girls. I do like cats and ponies, and there’s a beautiful story in loves like that. But that isn’t what I mean. Raising animals, witnessing and working with animals is filled with the hard—and sometimes ugly realities of life.

Yet watching the animals, interacting with them, sharing their world, watching their stories unfold is the very best part of this place. Large and small, bees and wild turkeys and bison and cats and caterpillars and cows, this is the gift of living here, the adventure that never ends.

Some days it’s just a glimpse, a moment, an eagle’s flight across my path, or the meadow larks landing next to raked hay, or finding a tiny fawn in tall grasses, or the first time my Hereford bottle baby ran to greet me. It’s the buffalo herd that grunts and finds me every time, no matter where I am working in the woods, soon wandering over by my side in the skid loader, nosey about anything new, coming to check out what I’m doing.

Other moments play out over days or months: finding the turkey’s nest when mowing hay, marking it so we wouldn’t run it over with the baler, then, mid-summer, seeing all the babies running and coasting across the field. Or feeling dread because you know the scrawny new bison isn’t going to make it, then over the summer, watching her fatten faster than I ever would have predicted—then watching her have a calf the next spring.

I often say that one of the most powerful and beautiful gifts of being a farmer is the intensity of our experiences. In most people’s lives, someone will experience births, deaths, tragedy and triumphs over the course of ten years. On the farm, we live out those experiences in a season. Some of the stories end in triumph: a crisis averted, a Hereford calf finally suckling on its own. Some break my heart: watching a deer returning at dusk after her fawn was killed, still lingering even as I approached, still determined, trying to find her baby.

When I piece those stories together, they create quite a life here on the farm. In the most stressful moments when I was working with my dad, when communication was hard, when both of us would reach that quiet, aggravated-and-in-total-disagreement moment, it was always those stories, the animals, that would help break the tension.

The chickens crowding around us as we tried to change a tire and Dad would say, “No, you can’t help,” and we’d chuckle. Sitting with Dad on the front porch disagreeing about the cattle grazing new grass too soon. Me, taking a deep breath, looking over at the farm cat stretched out on the porch bench. “Grey Boy seems pretty upset about all this.” I say. And in that total-disagreement moment, it’s enough to laugh together and to find a way back into a comfortable place, a place we where we share the same feelings and we’re on the same side.

My dad was a very old-school farmer. Three years after coming home, he told me that I would be the one “in charge”, but he would whatever he wanted to anyway. Many of our days working on the farm together felt like an arm-wrestling contest. The impossibility of two generations working together, of a daughter making decisions instead of the father.

But I remember those other stories, too: Stopping in at the farmhouse, Dad sitting at his desk in the dining room, Grey Boy the barn cat stretched out in his lap, Peanut Butter the house cat curled behind the computer screen. Ellie the dog who Dad always said is only allowed in the kitchen lying at his feet on the dining room carpet.

There was a day early on, shortly after I’d come home. We were trimming grapevines off the windmill. Dad drove the tractor, and I stood in the loader bucket with the chainsaw. (This is how farmers trim their trees.) That day the loader was stretched high, and as I cut a swath of leaves and branches away, I saw a tiny pale green tree frog at the verrrrry end of a grape vine stem, holding on for dear life, clutching the branch with his little suction cup fists. If I cut the neighboring branch, the vibration would knock him down, falling fifteen feet below. I turned off the chainsaw, set it down, and reached out to save him, cupping him in my hands. I motioned to Dad, holding up the frog in my hands. Seeing the frog, he lowered me down to the ground without a question.

Those are the stories: The man who didn’t argue about saving a tree frog, who cared as much about the animals as I do. Despite all of our arm-wrestling contests, I will always be grateful for the values he instilled in me: to see and be invested in the lives and the stories here. Not just the cattle and the bison, but all of the life here on the farm.

The lists of moments goes on, none long enough for a story, but beautiful and sacred all the same:

Sitting in the skid loader, watching a bright green inchworm crawl across my knee.

A buffalo heifer shakes her tail in mating season, a flit, a flirt as the bull curls his lips and follows.

Sandhill cranes dancing in the pasture.

Seventeen turkey chicks running across a field.

The big buffalo bull eating an apple from my hand for the first time, coming up to the truck window slowly, scared as the tiny tree frog.

A baby buffalo with the zoomies romping laps around her mother before it storms.

The yellow light on a flickering cottonwood tree.

The crabapple blossoms filled with bees buzzing so loud I can hear them from my front door.

I’m grateful to be a witness to each moment.