Summer day with watermelon . . . .

What can be more fun than a visit to the Big Horn Mountains and a couple days at a cabin with a stream nearby.  Add to the experience a pal to run around with and a big slice of watermelon on a hot summer day.  My memory of those childhood days had grown somewhat hazy,  but it was brought back suddenly with the recent death of my pal Donald whom I had not seen in person since we were still in high school.

cabin by the creek . . . .

The cabin belonged to Donald’s aunt and uncle, Toots and Domingo Goyhenex.  They had a ranch near ours down in the foothills and were good friends as well as good neighbors.  Donald came to live with them in second grade.  He was one of only two boys near in age to me in the area and became a playmate.  Even at that age he was a complete gear-head who spent his waking hours driving trucks, flying airplanes, and fast cars.  He would run up and down, shouting out gear changes, (whatever is “compound anyway?”) in a frenzy of driving his imagined machines.

And a collie named Judy . . . .

Judy, a giant golden collie was our constant companion.  She would follow us on our rounds, her tail swishing back and forth.  She is pictured here with Donald, my brother Jimmy and me.  Dad’s 1953 Cadillac is in the background and once again, we are enjoying a visit to the cabin in the Big Horns.

My favorite pastime was to run down the creek, leaping from one rock to another, attempting to stay dry.  The water was cold and icy, coming straight from banks of snow in the high peaks. Getting soaked would leave you shivering and blue with cold.  Invariably, we would end up wet and forced to climb up the hillside to some  rocks to warm up.  We wasted endless hours trying to catch rock chucks whose burrows were in the crevasses in the rock, to no avail.  I don’t think we ever wondered what we would do with one if we did catch it, and I found the dens to be stinky and pretty disgusting.  I can still hear the shrill chirp of the rock chucks early in the morning as they were the first up to greet the sun.

Branding day on Nine Mile . . . .

Ranch neighbors gathered to help brand cattle and sheep and this day the fence sitters had no immediate jobs to do.  Left to right, my mother, me, Jimmy, Donald and Edna.  The men are down in the corral dogging the calves for branding, vaccinating, and castrating.  The round-up and branding usually takes place late May to early June and my summer wardrobe consisted of sun suits my mother made from flour sacks.   I am wearing one of her ensembles here and I remember being very comfortable and cool. We usually got to have a sip from somebody’s cold beer after the branding was done.

I could not wait until I was old enough to go on the early morning roundup to gather the cattle.  It meant getting up when the birds had just begun to sing and the air was crisp and cool.  As the morning wore on, the heat would build and it seemed like we would never get finished driving the cattle into holding pens to sort calves from their mothers.  By then I was ready for a shady spot to catch a nap but the real work had just begun.

Dad wields the brand . . . .

Domingo, far right, looks on as the brand is placed on the calf’s hip.  Toots is above on the corral post.   After many hours of branding calves, my mother would serve a meal to all who came to help.  It was a long day, but everyone seemed to enjoy the camaraderie.

Domingo catching breakfast! . . . .

Actually, this little fish wouldn’t be enough to feed the crowd that gathered at Domingo’s cabin.  So he fed us pancakes–the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten!  They would fill the plate, were light and fluffy and drowning in syrup.  Domingo was a great cook and his mulligan stew and rice pudding were our favorites (after his pancakes, of course.)

In winter the North Fork of Powder River would freeze over in the sloughs and backwater ponds below Domingo’s house.  Donald and I would take our skates and cruise up and down the creek, leaping a few strands of barbed wire in one spot, and trying to avoid falling in the openings in the ice.  The creek wasn’t very deep in most of the areas we skated, but a slip under the ice could have been fatal.  We didn’t dream of having adult supervision for this free-range frenzy on the ice and they didn’t seem to feel a need to watch over us.  The duels we fought with cattails torn from along the edge of the creek would leave the ice so cluttered with fuzz our skates stuck to it. When we were thoroughly cold, we would head to the house for a warm drink.  We polished our skates with mutton tallow, at Domingo’s instruction, to keep them water proof.

Dinner time at Domingo’s house usually meant the kids drank wine with the adults.  The Basque culture of the Pyrenees was liberally laced with wine and I can still taste the stuff Domingo would pour from a jug of dry red (I seem to recall Mogan David or Marco Petri?) into a metal glass (easier to take on the sheep camp trail – they always served from metal glasses) and in no time the kids would be asleep.

My memories of Donald are closely embedded with my memories of his aunt and uncle.  A couple summers I was invited along to trail their sheep to summer pasture in the Big Horns.  I loved being outdoors in the mountains, and as the sheep grazed and ambled along, we had time to wander and explore.  It was a special time.

Donald left for Viet Nam after highschool and settled in other parts of the country.  But he never forgot his old home town and old friends.  One summer he pulled into town riding a big motorcycle.  He captured my brother for a ride, which my brother later described as the most frightening experience of his life.  I did not witness the event, but my imagination runs amok when I envision Donald, at 6 ft. tall, and my brother, a giant at 6 ft. 5 inches aboard a motorcycle, screaming up and down the roadways near Kaycee.  A little off-road bump and grind added to the experience and convinced Jimmy never, ever to crawl aboard another motorcycle.  A few years later Donald arrived back home in a helicopter.  He landed it at the Sussex ranch where Jimmy resides and appeared out of a dust storm to invite Jimmy for a ride in his “chopper.”  Jimmy politely declined, recalling his trip aboard a motorcycle with a maniac.  Good thing Donald didn’t land at the home ranch north of town, he would have been tangled up in the cottonwoods and scared my grandmother’s chickens into the next county.

I had not connected with Donald until a friend request turned up on Facebook a little over a year ago.  We shared some experiences, filled in some of the gaps in our lives,  and I learned that he was suffering from health problems.  He didn’t let on that he was nearing the end, however.  I remarked to my husband over breakfast a couple weeks ago that I hadn’t received a post from Donald in about a month, and that very day I received word that he had died.  I feel like a chunk of my childhood died with him.

RIP, Donald

“I’ll just have a little nap” . . . .

A little dog came into my life one winter day, and soon came to be my best friend, protector, and daily shadow.  She was fearsome, and stood her ground when a vet-tech brought her into my home in Laramie.  She was wet from a bath and it was 肥肉小说.  I remember going for a towel to dry her and gave her a good rub to reduce her shivering. A friend’s big dog (about 10 times her size as a 4-month-old puppy) tried to offer a friendly sniff and she bristled and barked, approaching the much larger dog in an aggressive stance that said, “don’t mess with me!”  I had no need of a dog and tried to convince the kindly vet-tech that, although this little dog desperately needed a home, I was much too busy to get involved with owning a dog.

“I know this is TuTu’s throne, but I can fit!” . . . .

Sooooo, ten years later I am left with trying to figure out how to fill the hole left in my life by the loss of this little dog, who I named Rosie (my mother’s nickname) and came to love dearly.  She died after a four-day struggle with what we can only surmise was due to ingesting something poisonous or toxic.  We are still puzzling over what it could be–a dead animal carcass?  The vet said that can cause botulism but Rosie’s symptoms would have been more severe immediately.  Rat poison?  Again, the vet said they ran a test that ruled out that as a cause.  Fertilizer?  We have none on the premises, having used all we purchased last fall on the lawn.  Our garden fertilizer is kept in a secure place.  A dispenser with Round-up was sitting on the porch where I left it recently, but would have 雯雯的肉奴生活1—48 Rosie to open the handle, depress the pump and drink out of the hose.  Not likely she would have been attracted to the taste or smell even if she could have managed to drink it.

“A little sun is nice” . . . .

We were on the way home from a trip to Colorado when we got a call from Joyce, our caregiver.  She was alarmed that Rosie was nowhere to be found as she was doing evening chores.  A little dog who for 10 years has always been at the gate or nearby, waiting for the people who matter to her to return, had disappeared.  When we arrived home it was growing dark but we began the search with flashlights.  We called her name, whistled and poked into all the sheds and likely places for her, to no avail.  By 10:00 p.m. we gave up and went to bed.  I did not sleep but tried to imagine why Rosie would have vanished.  And shed a lot of tears.

“They could make these cat beds a little bigger!”

We put a photo of her in the post office and hoped if she had decided to leave home to find us, someone would have seen her along the highway.  We knew something was really wrong with her, because there were dark ominous stains on her sleeping pad out on the porch and her nighttime perch on our sofa was stained.  Rosie must have been mortified, because she has never in her entire life left a mess in the house. Later that morning Michael was coming from dropping off a salt block at the pond, and saw a white blob near a neighbor’s cattle guard.  He drove closer and found Rosie, still alive but barely.  When I saw him walking up the road toward our house with her in his arms I thought she was dead.  When I called to her,  she lifted her head.  We wrapped her in a blanket and raced to the vet clinic in Kaycee with her, knowing there wasn’t much time.

The straw boss . . . .

Rosie never left our side.  Our daily travels are as varied and taxing as can be imagined but Rosie was not to be left behind.  She would snarl at Ricky, our goose if he became too aggressive when I penned them at night; she flew at Cromwell, our rooster when he decided to get too frisky as I was placing feed in his pan; she nipped at Michael and the entire universe of visitors if they came too close to me, which could be exasperating.  We tried a variety of things to reduce her insistence on protecting me, fearing she would eventually bite someone and we’d be in real trouble.  Nothing would deter her.  Michael fed her daily, warming her food and trying to win her over.  After nearly eight years, it didn’t make any difference.  She loved him too, but not enough to alter her fierce protection of me.

“Bleu is bugging me!” . . . .

Competition for attention was foremost in Rosie’s mind.  If our cats Bleu, Oscar, TuTu or Mr. Mouse came around for a rub or a scratch, Rosie could not tolerate it.  Consequently, the cats migrated to Michael’s lap, leaving me off limits and bereft if Rosie was around. When I worked with Tilly, our horse, Rosie was vigilant and would try to sneak in a nip at her tail, which would get her a scolding and banishment from the barn.  She would wait patiently in a shady spot nearby, watching and waiting for me to finish.  To understand her psychosis, one must merely know that she is half Border Collie and half Australian Shepherd.  She looks more Aussie, but her obsessive compulsive personality is pure Border Collie.  She loves to herd the guineas and chickens and while her methods are not always successful, her failures can largely be attributed to her mistress who has done a lousy job of training her!

“More critters to herd!” . . . .

X-rays determined Rosie had no broken bones or bruising, nor obstructions from a bone in her digestive tract.  She had suffered from severe diarrhea which had evolved into a yellow fluid leaking from her behind which she seemed unable to control. She was severely dehydrated.  She could stand for a short period, but could not walk. Diagnosis was inconclusive.   We were referred to a clinic in Sheridan, 84 miles north.  As we neared town, Rosie seemed to rally a bit.  She moved around on her pad into a new position and when I looked back at her, she was trying to sit up, panting and grinning like she always does when she gets to go with us for a ride.  High on her list of favorite things to do was go for a ride and her only regular opportunity was a monthly trip to the landfill in Brownie, our old trash truck.  Now here she was, getting a real long ride!

Coming up Rosie . . . .

We answered a battery of questions regarding Rosie’s environment as they prepared to do more X-rays, ultrasound and get her on fluids and antibiotics. We left her believing she would perk up and overcome whatever illness she was suffering from.  A lengthy message from the vet when we returned home confirmed all the ongoing tests and efforts being made in her behalf throughout the day since we had departed. We were to pick her up in two days since we had dental appointments in Sheridan and we were confident that she would recover. The next morning we had another message from the vet with a lengthy update and a request that we call her.  The update was not encouraging and I began to fall apart again. After a thorough discussion with the vet, we concluded we should return to Sheridan right away and bring Rosie home.  We would care for her over the weekend and have her euthanized at home.

The only diagnosis the vet could come up with was a wild card and quite rare–dysautonomia–a condition currently under study at the 大叔我要 State Veterinary Lab.  Some, but not all of Rosie’s symptoms seemed similar.  It typically appears in dogs age three or younger; living in rural areas; spend half time outdoors; and it is prevalent in Kansas, Missouri, and some reports in Oklahoma.  The vet had arrived at no conclusions on this diagnosis. She was not optimistic they could do more for her, however.  Rosie’s vital signs were all pointing in the wrong direction.  She offered to euthanize but we declined, deciding to bring Rosie home and say our goodbyes.  We picked up some supplies for her care and when we arrived at the Sheridan clinic, we were ushered into the waiting room while they prepped Rosie to go home.  After what seemed an interminable amount of time, the vet came to us with the bad news that Rosie had just died, probably just a few moments before we arrived.  Her IV pump had stopped and they did not notice right away.  We were devastated.  I only wanted to hold her once more and tell her how much I loved her.  I was too late.

A quiet place in the orchard . . . .

We buried her wrapped in a shroud in a white cardboard coffin furnished by the vet, with a few mementos tucked inside.  The fruit trees and flowering shrubs are just beginning to bloom, and the Maine bell hanging above her chimes softly in the breeze.  I will plant a climbing rose bush in the hope it will cling to the rustic metal stock panel we erected in the orchard as yard art.  It will be a place we visit often.

R.I.P., Rosie . . . .