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For some
it comes down
like a sprinkle of rain
as if from heaven –
a slow soaker, shirt
matted to the flesh, that
bare-chested feeling
reborn again – even
spun in summer’s clutch
of dust and drought.
No urgency or rush
to that last embrace
when winter waits
for everyone, each
moment counts
like drops of rain.
Kaweah River as it enters the Valley
Robbin’s collarbone seems to be healing well. Shorthanded without her, and Chuck on another fire in Napa, Clarence and I have enlisted my son’s help. We’re tickled with his youthful humor.
The weather’s warmed into the 100s, shorthanded we continue to wean calves. Fires around the state this past week have pulled our right-hand man away from Dry Creek. Robbin’s collarbone is healing, which leaves the gathering, feeding and processing to Clarence and I, 10 years his junior. We’re plodding methodically towards an end that’s not yet in sight, but making progress.
Red-headed Decons
Yesterday, while fevered-up with some new foreign strain of the flu, I was nodding in and out of sleep as Errol Flynn played Custer on the Western Channel. “They Died With Their Boots On,” the 1941 version of George Armstrong Custer as a duty-bound hero who rode to the Little Big Horn apparently knowing that he and his men would not return. I thought of my friend Henry Real Bird and the Crows’ annual reenactment of that battle, the Canadian-Montanan phrase “the last-best west” and James Earle Fraser’s sculpture, “The End of the Trail” that slumped among Visalia’s Valley Oaks at Mooney’s Grove for 48 years.
But nothing like a fever to take you down a notch or two, or undermine delusions that we Americans have the inside track on good management decisions, both political and business, but Roger Cohen’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (June 2, 2008), “The World is Upside Down” is the ‘tailor bob,’ the end of the thread that most Americans cannot yet wrap their minds around. Link: (copy and paste)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/opinion/l02cohen.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=
The opinions expressed in the Western Folklife Center's Deep West online journals are those of the online journal participants and not the Western Folklife Center. The Western Folklife Center does not moderate these journals and as such does not guarantee the veracity, reliability or completeness of any information provided in the journals or in any hyperlink appearing within them.