Under the Wire

I can’t believe I did it but I forgot about winter. I’ll admit that seems pretty silly but it happened. It must have been all those pretty pictures I’ve been looking at. My eyes have gazed lovingly at scenes of snow covered mountains, trees blanketed with pure white snow and frost covered fences. I have lingered over a picture of a snowy meadow scene where a team of horses pulls a sled of hay, with cows strung out behind eating the fresh green hay being thrown on the marshmallow like snow. As I marveled at the beauty of those Christmas card like scenes I must admit thinking “Gee I wish I was ‘there’ instead of ‘here.’” I even found myself saying “I wish it would snow. “What was I thinking of?”

Finally, one day, it snowed. Not the usual half inch that blew into the fence rows but real, deep snow, about a foot of it. The kind that piles up on top of the fence posts. I have to admit at first I was excited.

Hurriedly I pulled on my overshoes and winter clothes and rushed out. The horses seemed to be enjoying it as they ran, rolled and played in it. The cows didn’t seem to mind as they grazed eye-ball deep in the fluffy stuff.

As I plowed snow with my tractor I became a kid again playing in my sandbox with toy trucks and tractors. It was great!

Then reality set in. I needed to feed the cows. With snow falling inside my coat collar, I loaded hay. As I fed the cows, not from a horse drawn sled but from a tractor that didn’t want to run very well, all I could see were dollar bills as I threw the $120/ton hay out, only to be tramped into the snow by an old cow I meant to sell last fall, but didn’t.

That night the wind blew. The next day all my carefully bladed roads and paths were blown shut. It wasn’t as much fun the second day of playing in the snow. The horses didn’t seem to be as happy either, probably because their automatic waterer was frozen. The cows had gotten tired of waiting for me to come feed them. They’d broken down a gate to the hay pile and proceeded to hold an “all you can eat” special on my precious hay supply, wasting ten times more than they ate.

That night the wind blew again. It took an hour to get my tractor started before I could, once more, blade that darn snow out of my way. The cows were obviously disappointed with the old, brown, damaged hay they’d left for me to feed after yesterdays events and once again, the horse waterer was froze.

Today I’m sitting here thinking this sure has been a long winter. Darn it, I forgot what winter really is like!