Carolyn Dufurrena

Branding season is in full swing. Although my school schedule prevents me from going for another couple of weeks, we have a young friend of the family up from Reno to help out. She and I ride out in the afternoon after I get home from school, exploring. We find a nest of baby ravens in an abandoned chimney, just about eye level on horseback in the late afternoon sunshine. They are big, pointy-beaked sooty things, flattening themselves into their tangled mess of sticks and baling twine and lumps of old sheep wool. They almost overflow the nest, the three of them; blink their cold blue eyes at me, and it's a wonder that they don't fly.

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Marking lambs at Texas Spring after rain. CKD photo

They leave before the crack of dawn. I drive up later, just at sunrise, with the breakfast fixings: big folding table, seven dozen eggs, bacon, sausage, chorizo that Linda has cooked already at the house; red wine, salami, yellow cheeses, French bread. There are fifteen pounds of parboiled potatoes to be sauteed in the giant paella pan with the sweet red peppers in the shelter of the sheepwagon. There are at least twenty-five of them this year, Linda says, and quite a crop of trainees--shall we say sheep-handler interns??--Basque guys from town who are brining their sons to see how it was done years ago, how it's still done today, twice a year in the chilly mornings of spring time.

Julia does her part. CKD photo

It rained steadily last night, but there's a breeze and the sunshine loosens everyone up. They devour the mountains of food we prepare, and more that they have brought, cookies and doughnuts and coffee. The sun warms their stiff arms and hands as they relax after this day's hard work, over by noon.

Ryan Dufurrena and Don Jones enjoy a break in the action. CKD photo.

I see the first antelope twins of the summer on the way back.

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 10:51 AM | Permalink

We build the yearly Mother's Day project at school
the Friday before
It used to be hand cut tissue paper flowers
soup cans wrapped in bright foil
this year, it's digital photos in a CD case
popsicle stick frames
decorated with bright jewels.

We write a memory
to our mothers
and slip it inside.
Dear Mom, I loved when you played basketball with me
When you took me to the movies
when you stayed with me
when I was sick.

There's one
Gangly bear
Somewhere between bright-eyed kid and Yakima warrior
who's currently between mothers.
He's had three; no
maybe four.
His real mom gone years ago:
car wreck.

He makes it through the day
with two nice notes
to his caregivers,
may they want to take care of him
forever.

And I think of my mom
Always there
No matter what,
Love like the sun
radiating from your heart.

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 11:43 AM | Permalink

The river settles back into something more like a river than a raging torrent; it spreads across the meadows below the house until I can almost pretend I live by the ocean. Its sparkling silver surrounds the haystacks. The deer are all living in the yard these days, evicted from their sleeping places by the high water; sandhill cranes, blue herons, poke around the shallows in the Payne Field; ibises float in puddles in the yard and ponder nesting in the ditches of what will soon revert to county road.

Evening in the Horse Pasture CKD photos

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 11:15 AM | Permalink