I am too busy today to think about what the neighbors are doing with their cash crops. The grass is gone and the creek place I have leased is gonna have to have water hauled in if it gets any worse or if it doesn’t rain within the next ten days. I just wonder again why so many of us are in the cattle business. And then I wander down the fence line to see if it is greener on the other feller’s side.

I was on the highway this morning about halfway to noon and the traffic was bad. There were five or six bull wagons full of cattle going to a local sale barn. I know we are in for a good hard winter if it continues like this. My cash crop, the spring calves, is sparse because I have more in the fall calving season. The male offspring have theirs in the best part of February, the week it snows and sleets on the sheet of ice.

I helped the offspring load out their calves earlier in the week, choking on the dustand wishing the calves had another hundred pounds on each one. The calves were all good, stylish and blocky, and will make good feed yard steers but the need for cash doesn’t wait for the best outcome where cattle are concerned.

My close relative watched the cattle load and had lots to say when I got in that evening. Do any of you gentlemen have an inclination as to why close relatives hesitate to say to their own offspring what they want to say? I sure as heck don’t. I do not have any power over decisions made by others, close blood relatives or just little limbs on the family tree. My ears get worn to nubbins by the time it is allsaid.

Yes, they all live differently than we did when we began and, no, we didn’t have anything given to us and, yes, they could eat at home more and in town less but it is their lives and as long as my Grands are fed, who am I to fuss? My Pappydidn’t think I needed a horse trailer either. I could haul my roping horse just like I had been, loaded tail first in the back of the pickup with wooden sideboards held partly together with baling wire. But I bought a trailer anyway.

The offspring have good heads on their shoulders and they wished they could retain ownership through the feeding process to the box and if they want it bad enough it can happen. Not this year but, thank the good Lord, all years are not this bad. So if it works soon for them, they will give ‘er a try.

It is my opinion, and everyone has one, I am not in the dog house for lawn work left undone since we no longer seem to have a lawn. I do not have to sit on the patio and swat flies out of my pie plate because it is too hot and dusty for her out there. I sure enjoy pie a la mode better than pie a la dust and under the influence of the A/C my mood seems to brighten up considerably. I hope you can find some good in this dusty old weather. Fall is coming and so is frost!

Bill is a pen name used by the Gravette author of this weekly column.

Opinion, Pages 7 on 09/01/2010