Some days, the bear gets you. Other days, it's the cows. And some days, it's the dragon.
Before he took off for New Mexico, Bill moved Texas, Blossom, and Mutton to the barn pastures, where the bluestem and Johnson grasses grow rich and thick. (Johnson grass has its virtues. At least, the cows think so.)
Yesterday, being smart animals, they figured out how to get the gate open and get out. I discovered their sleight-of-hoof yesterday evening, when I drove the ranch truck out to the end of the lane with the week's garbage (we don't want the garbage truck mudding up our driveway). It was getting dark, a storm was barrelling down from the north, the lightning was electric, and there were three loose animals, having a high old time in an unmowed pasture where there's even more bluestem than there is by the barn.
Mutton (the Barbado sheep) is fairly tame, although he has lately fallen into the bad habit of butting. (Want to see my bruise?) The cows are not tame, although they do seem to recognize me as their Main Mama, and will occasionally look up from their grazing when I call. Occasionally.
They do, however, have a hankering after a concoction called sweet stuff, a mix of sorghum, molasses, and corn. So I drove up to the barn, got a bucket of sweet stuff, and spent the next half hour yodeling, shaking my bucket, and trying to look irresistably alluring in the middle of what was cranking up to be a monster storm. Finally, the cows came home. In the rain, I rewired the gate. (The cowboy who wired it in the first place forgot to wire the crucial parts--we won't name him, but his initial is B.)
Then I went home, took a hot bath, went to bed, and spent most of the night comforting dogs who were not happy about the thunder and lightning and driving rain. We all woke up to a flood. Yep. Here be dragons, indeed.
But the animals and I are okay. The barn meadow isn't flooded, and the cows and sheep are wet but safe. Serenity (that's the name of our house) sits high and dry, an ark in bad weather. But it's a different story over in Marble Falls, where people are perched on the roofs of their houses and sleeping in the high school gym. Our rain gauge overflowed at 6" (I emptied it before the storm), but there's a verified report of 17.5" about ten miles south of us, and the doppler radar shows 18" here between midnight and six a.m.. I haven't been out to look at the low-water crossing above the lake, but my neighbor says the road is under water.
The dragons are out and about. It's be a good day to stay in the ark and write.
Reading note (a longish one), from Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, by Scott Ruseell Sanders:
What did the Ohio mean to the Mound Builders? . . . I would guess that the river was a god to them, a brawny presence, a strong back to ride through the forest, a giver of fish and mussels, flowing always and flooding when it took a notion. If you look at the most stunning of all the earthworks, the sinuous, quarter-mile-long Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, with its coiled tail and gaping mouth, and then look at the twisty Ohio itself, you can see that the river is a snake, the snake a river. . . If you are going to survive in the land, if you are ever going to be at home, you must know and honor the local powers, and nothing in this region is more steadily, undeniably powerful than the river.