One More Year

Texas Icons: Cotton and Oil
or
Biodiesel in the raw

The drive down to see Dad was uneventful. We had lunch at Edgar and Glady’s in Nordheim. The food was not very good, but Dad loved it and that’s what matters.

On returning to the farm, we sat down to chat in the living room. I eventually dozed off in the chair closest by the air conditioner, the only spot in the room cool enough for water to remain liquid—Dad likes it hot. When I awoke, he had gone out to plow. I stretched out on the floor to finish waking up and get my legs working again. That old chair is not meant for long sitting spells.

Dad plowed under a small section of fence. While he didn’t want to fix it today, he did need help blocking it so the cattle don’t get loose. We used baling wire to secure a gate and a cattle panel across the gap, proving once again that you can fix almost anything with bailing wire and bubble gum.

That bit of exertion tuckered him out so much he wouldn’t eat anything for dinner except a small bowl of ice cream. Even so, his general condition is good, and his attitude is better. He is planning crops for next year, and he was genuinely put off when a neighbor asked, “So you’re gonna farm one more year?” I reminded him the guy was only parroting what Dad had been saying for more than twenty years.

“I know,” Dad said. “But it sounds so final when he says it.”

Home Again

Dad is home again.

The new calf was not with its mama at the water trough this morning. Its absence is concerning because calves born this time of year often do not survive the heat. Chris and I searched for it in the grazer. We finally found it hidden among the tall stalks. It didn’t take a lot of herding to get it back with mama.

When we got to the hospital, Dr. W had already released Dad to go home. Two bits of really good news: The abdominal scan revealed no metastasis, and Dr. W. says dad has “a long time.” Combined with the medical news, the news about having a new calf made it a great day for Dad.

Shortly before lunch time, we were ready to roll. On the way home, we passed a Victoria county sherif trolling for tickets. He was driving a dirty pickup truck with a tool box and a headache rack—not lights on the roof. Only the logo on the door identified him as a cop. Sneaky bear! I wonder if he has trouble getting people to pull over because of the lack of identification. These are paranoid times, but paranoia has survival value.

Dad was almost himself by the time we got back to the farm, and the calf was still with mama at the water trough—very shady and cool there. I went into Yorktown to get prescriptions filled while Dad napped and Chris got ready to drive to Tildon for work. As I was pulling into town, Chris called to let me know Dad has a second calf. There was a new white faced calf to go with the brindle calf we found yesterday.

Another new calf to brave the August sun

Back at the house, Dad was feeling good enough to go through several of his standard rants: business, lawyers, politicians, and the decline and fall of the US at the hands of greedy Republicans out to destroy the middle class. I let him rant. It is good to see him with that much energy.

He is stronger today, able to move around enough to take care of himself. He still doesn’t have much appetite, but he is eating about as much as before the procedure.

A Quick Trip to See Dad

Dad thinks deep thoughts after a nap.
After the rains, the corn looks really good and stands more than six feet tall.
Many of the stalks have two ears. Some have three, but no more than two will make.
Roughnecks dismantle the rig in Betty Ann’s field.
The coastal is green and lush.
The recent rains helped the small patch of jigs take off. The grazer beside it is doing well, too.

While Suna did her thing, I went to visit Dad. He’s looking much better than he has for more than a year now, even though he celebrated his 89^th birthday this week.

When I got to the farm, he was out fixing fence. Yesterday a neighbor’s bull had wanted to come visit the cows enough to break four strands of barbed wire and challenge a mature Brahma bull. Dad chased the intruder out with the mule. After Dad ran into him a couple of times, he hit another stretch of fence at full bore,

Dad fixed that stretch of fence and another break yesterday. When he went outside this morning, something just didn’t look right with another stretch. Closer investigation revealed a gap there, too. Luckily, the Dad’s rented bull and his harem were laying under a shade tree looking at the gap and taking bets on how long it would take Dad to notice it and fix it.

After working up an appetite fixing fence, I took Dad into Yorktown for lunch. The local pizza parlor wasn’t too busy, so that’s where we settled. We ordered “The Monster,” which consists of everything they have to offer except jalapeños. Dad finished off two good-sized slices.

On the way back, we visited with the neighbor who bought Uncle Carol’s have of the old homestead. We talked about innocuous things and watched the roughnecks dismantle the drilling rig across the road on Betty Ann’s place. They’re moving it one piece at a time around the corner to another neighbor’s spread.

Soon it was nap time. Dad and I each dozed and then philosophized before wandering around the farm.

I sure am glad I still get to visit with him.

New Corn

The corn Dad planted just in time for the rains is popping out of the ground.

We went to visit Dad this weekend. Suna did a great job documenting much of the trip in the Ursula blog. So, I’ll just hit on a couple of the high points.

• Dad now has his doctor’s blessing to take himself off all his medications. He is completely done with his radiation, and no more chemo. Yay!
• Dad is getting his strength and appetite back. He basically (not quite) cleaned his plate at both Aunt Di’s and Don Bravo’s. (To be fair, I could’t clean my plate at DB’s.
• Between Dad, Chris, and the rain, the farm is looking better than I can remember seeing it. It is good to hear Dad talking about doing things for the future of the farm.

It Was My Birthday

Once Dad would have been on his feet, pacing around the fire. I’m just glad he’s feeling good enough to be out watching it. Photo by: Chris

This will be my third attempt to post a birthday blog. Blogger ate the first attempt for an improperly closed HTML—which X2 used to pronounce “hate mail”— tag. The Blogger editor used to a little more forgiving than that, but I guess they’ve made it so easy to use that it’s extremely destructive.

Other than disgruntlement with Blogger, this has been one of the best birthdays I can remember. Unfortunately, since it’s taken so many times to get this post done, I don’t remember all of the things I was going to list. Here are some of them:

• Quality time spent with loved ones
• Good health
• Word that Dad’s radiation is done with and he’s starting to get his health back
• Enough rain for burning the brush pile at the farm to be thinkable

Thanksgiving at the Farm

Here’s the reason we changed directions after two hours on the road. This is Dad's fun. It's also what keeps him alive. The field that burned is now one of the greenest parts of the farm. Tiny shoots, but green.

We went to see Dad for the Thanksgiving break. Full details are in the Ursula blog, so I just want to focus on how Dad is doing in this post.

We got to the farm at about 21:30—long after he had gone to bed on Wednesday night. By 09:30 on Thanksgiving morning, he was out in the fields. He took a couple of hours to rest mid day, and went back out to plow for several more hours. I estimated six hours in the tractor on Thanksgiving Day.

He worked even harder on Friday and finished his plowing on Saturday, just before the sky spit for a while but refused to settle the dust. So while he doesn’t have the stamina he did when he was a young man of say 70, he is doing great for someone who is pushing 89 and fighting cancer.

The only down news is that he seems to be trying to convoke himself that the doctor won’t be able to resume treatments on Monday. He says he may tell the doctor he doesn’t want to continue with the treatments.

On the other hand, he continues to set goals and work to see them accomplished. I’m hoping his pride and determination win out over his pessimism. To use his favorite phrase, “We’ll see.”

…Home Again Hippity Hop

The first thing we did was rebuild the fence Chris knocked down while saving what he could of the hay crop. We also hung two new gates by the driveway so Dad can let the cows out to graze in the fields after harvest. Here’s the “Hippity hop” part of the title. Suna told Chris she wanted a picture of me This was the best we could do given the glare on the cab plexiglass.

Dad was feeling much better this morning, but he was still willing to listen to reason with regard to following the doctor’s orders. Instead of insisting on doing the work himself, he sent Chris and I out to hang gates and plant fence poles.

I drove the tractor while Chris did the brain work on the ground. He made sure the posts were aligned both along the fence and vertically. I would guide the front-end loader over the post and push it in the ground using the flat on the bottom of the pivot.

While planting the posts, we managed to scare up a bunny nest. I clipped one little guy’s left leg, but he seems unhurt otherwise. We took him back to the house for Dad to nurse back to health. He’s very friendly and seemingly unafraid of anything. Might be why they didn’t run from the tractor soon enough.

Later Chris found a pile of fur he thinks was their mom. She had been gone a week or so, which gives us hope that the little one we rescued and its siblings will survive OK.

By the time I had to head back to Austin, we had planted 61 posts and hung two gates. Dad was feeling “better than since before May” when he was originally diagnosed with cancer.

Home Again…

Moon rise and lens flare over the farm with a little hand-held jitter

Chris and I got to the hospital this morning about five minutes after the on-call doctor made his rounds and told Dad he was good to go home again. This was after the floor nurse last night told us the on-call never released patients on the weekend, and we would have to wait for Dad’s regular doctor to return on Monday. Luckily, they didn’t get the release paperwork ready until after they served him lunch, so we weren’t in trouble for making Dad wait.

Have I mentioned that he hates hospitals. He says, “If you say in a hospital long enough, they’ll kill you.” So there is nothing that would have made him madder than having to wait on someone to get him out of there.

We got him home, and he decided he wouldn’t push the doctor’s orders again. He laid down and slept most of the afternoon. We watched Lawrence Welk, and he went to bed. So did we. It’s been a long one.

Cancer and John Deere

Dad and Chris discuss farm things while we wait for Dad’s new John Deere to be delivered. This should have been our first indication of what kind of day we were in store for. The smoke the driver is pointing to was actually on the other side of Cuero—more than 20 miles away The driver carries the Slow-Moving-Vehicle placard to install on Dad’s new, larger tractor while Dad wanders over to kick the tires. Chris points out something about the tractor controls as Dad moves hay. Chris buries the last of the burning hay after the fire is contained. At lest the sunset was spectacular. Maybe it was just a new appreciation of the sunset. After a long, stressful day, Dad concedes we need to take him to the Emergency Room.

This date was supposed to be an auspicious one for weddings, movies, and other things. It certainly turned out to be eventful.

I got a call the day-before-yesterday that Dad’s cancer had returned. Chris had taken him in for some tests, and they were going to keep him over night. There was a lot of anxiety and gloom in the message. The doctor felt it safer to err on the side of pessimism. I told Suna and my boss that I would do what I needed to do to tide my work project (a conference call with Singapore and some paperwork) for a few days. Then I would head to Yorktown to hear from the doctor first-hand what was going on.

It turned out that I was at the office until after 21:00, so I didn’t head out until work-time yesterday. I got the hospital just after the doctor made his rounds and determined Dad could go home. The prognosis was still very pessimistic, but Dad was chomping at the bit to get home to his cows. So we headed that direction. We did get him to eat at Whataburger on the way. He slept most of the afternoon, and we all went to bed early.

The big deal for this morning was that Dad’s new tractor was being delivered. He was excited, despite being tired and complaining of problems with his catheter. Some minor adjustments, and he said everything was good. So we went outside to wait.

Dad couldn’t stop talking about the new tractor. He listed all of the features it had that the old one didn’t. He was especially proud that after using the old tractor for three years, the dealership offered him a thousand more in trade than he paid for it to begin with. When it arrived, a huge smile broke through the fatigue covering his face.

The driver unloaded the new tractor and got it set up while the salesman talked with Dad and Chris about a spreader Dad wanted. It had been laying in the yard for almost two years and had accumulated some sun damage, which resulted in some small breakage around the edge. Dad finally agreed to take it as-is for the price the salesman said he couldn’t reduce.

After they left, Dad was agitated that he couldn’t play with his new toy. Chris and I finally gave in. We decided that if he left it in turtle mode, it wouldn’t be any rougher than riding in a car. Dad climbed in to the cab. You could feel the joy radiating out of that tractor as he moved the eleven bales of hay that comprised the total output for the year. The drought hit hard, even though Yorktown has had more rain than the Hill Country.

After the hay was all lined up neatly along the fence, Dad wanted to hook up his disc so it would be ready when he was able to work the fields. That’s where the trouble began. The bold that forms the top pivot of the three-point connection was rusted solid. A spark from cutting that bolt loose set the grass under the implant alight. The fire spread quickly as dry grass fires are prone to do.

Neighbors were showing up to help within just a few minutes. The woman from across the road got Dad to sit in her pickup while Chris and I, soon to be joined by others, fought the fire as best we could until the fire department arrived. We may have had it mostly contained, but we would not have been able to hold without the massive amounts of water they could dump—much more than the puny water hose I was using.

All-in-all, we lost only a couple of acres of dry grass, but we lost half of the hay crop. We would have lost it all if Chris hadn’t driven the tractor through the fence and pushed the unburnt bales into the empty field across the driveway. Chris showed he could make the tractor dance while fighting the fire. The house was unharmed as were most of the implements. Two of the rubber wheels on the planter melted, as did the valve stem on a tire that must have been 20-years-old. Very little damage indeed considering the potential for disaster.

After Chris finished burying the last of the burning hay, we went inside and ate some pulled poke tacos for dinner. The meat came out of a plastic tub. The tortillas were store-bought, and the cheese was the lowest-price sliced variety at the store. It was delicious.

Then Dad said he thought we needed to go to the emergency room. His doctor was out, but the answering service said to have the ER nurse call his on-call when we got there. It turns out that the anti-clotting medicine they had prescribed for Dad causes the clots to become gummy, and one had plugged the catheter, causing Dad a lot of pain. They decided to keep him over night to make sure all of the clots were cleared out.

A Day Waiting in the Hospital

Citizens as it looked when I was born. It’s more modern now, and it takes up more than a block.Photo source: Ancestry.com

I know I haven’t been keeping this blog up. But here’s the setup: Dad needed minor surgery, and I made the trip to wait with him. I had parked the RV there on a previous trip, so all I had to do was get there. This is the day of the surgery.

Early morning this! Dad needed to be at Citizens Hospital—it has now self-promoted to a Medical Center—around 07:30, so we had to be off about an hour earlier. That isn’t difficult for early risers like Chris and Dad, but for us former alleged musician types, it’s closer to the time we’d rather head for bed than the time we’re programmed to arise—no matter how much reconditioning we’ve done in the years since. We piled into the Black Dodge, and Chris was kind enough to stop for coffee before we got out of Yorktown.

We made it to the hospital and got dad checked into his waiting room. (His procedure would normally be day surgery, but The Doctor wanted to keep him overnight because of the remonteness of Da Farm. But nobody had told the hospital that. Or nobody who mattered.) And there we waited—Dad formost, but also Chris, my brother Jim, his wife Waynette, and me.

08:00

08:30

09:00

09:06—They came to take Dad away. We walked him to surgery. We were told the procedure would take a little less than an hour, and recovery would take another hour. Then we could find Dad in his Day surgery room. (Remember the bit about nobody telling the hospital about The Doctor wanting to keep Dad overnight?) So we went to breakfast, barely making it to the commissary before the gates (literal gates) were closed at 09:30.

For those of you unfamiliar with Victoria (and who really is?), the commissary at Citizens hospital is something else. Many locals make it an dining destination. So much for the myth of bad hospital food! We all had hearty American breakfasts filled with too much bacon and too many carbs. We ate like that one meal would have to hold us all day even though we didn’t yet know the truth of that.

10:15—We went back up to Surgery to wait for a status update.

10:25—The Doctor told us everything went well and he had taken “random biopsies” to check for any tumerous recurrances. We would just have to wait for Monday (if the stars align in a way that rearranges the fabric of space-time but doesn’t open a portal for the return of the Old Ones, and everything else goes well) or later (more likely) to know what the next steps in Dad’s treatment plan will be.

Citizens has an aquarium filled with really interesting fish like this neon blue thing. The aquarium is in the waiting area near my favorite napping spot.

11:15—We started asking where they will take Dad so we can be there. “The day surgery room where they got him from.”

“But,” we explained again, “The Doctor wants to keep him overnight.” Of course, nobody the people in surgery were aware of that. They directed us to Admitting. Admitting doesn’t know about post surgical room assignments. “That’s all handled by the Surgical nurse.” This time we asked a different Surgical Staffer, who verified that post surgical room assignments were indeed handled by Sugical Staff when the patient is ready to leave Recovery. A few minutes later, she tells us, “He'll be in 638. They’ll be bringing him out in a few minutes, and you can follow him up there.”

This little fella is waiting at the farm supply for someone to take him home. My friends tell me his name is Buford, and kids love to ride him and practice roping.

11:55—True to her word, a few minutes later, we saw Dad wheeling by and start to follow. But the elevator ws full. No worries; we kew the room number. We caught the next ride up to the sixth floor and begin looking for him. Unfortunately, there is no room 638. We all confirmed that we had all heard the same number. Then we found him in 628. He was still on another plane, phasing in and out of our reality, so we each told him we love him and we’ll let him sleep it off in peace. Then we drove off to buy fertilizer.

13:30—We found Dad still sound asleep and went downstairs to wait and inadvertantly nap.

15:00—We returned to find Dad somewhat awake. We spent the next few hours watching him gradually shake off the anesthesia and rejoin our world. We joked and told old stories and picked at each other mercilessly—you know: the kind of things families do to pretend they are not having the shit stressed out of them.

18:45—They brought Dad dinner. We made a show out of telling him what there was and getting the nutritionist to “sell him the menu” instead of just saying, “here’s food.” If you offer Dad something to eat, he’ll invariably say, “No, I’m not hungry right now.” But if you tell him what it is, he’ll realize he likes whatever is being served and start to take interest.

After getting him to eat a little of his dinner, we could that he was starting to get tired. We bid him a fond adeiu (or is it a bon fondu?) and headed off to eat too much at a new Chineese buffet. Our old favorite Chineese buffet is now a Mexican buffet—still run by the same Chineese staff. Imagine that.

20:15—We made it to the farm. Chris spread the fertilizer he bought earlier and put 400 gallons of water on the Jiggs he is sprigging over the pipeline right of way. Jim and Waynette went to bed in Dad’s trailer. Chris and I stayed up talking about nothing in particular until way too late.

The Trip Home

Dad reassures Suna that the AC in his tractor works.

As I mentioned yesterday, we stopped off at Dad’s on the way home. We couldn’t stay as long as I would have liked, but we got to see him and eat some ice cream at DQ.

My favorite part was when he showed off his new tractor to Suna. He gave her a really good tour of the cab. He even started it and let her pretend to drive.

Suna and Beccano enjoyed riding around on the Mule that Chris loaned him. That gave Dad and I a little chance to talk—mostly about nothing. And that is just fine.

This week, I’m grateful to be able to talk to Dad about nothing in particular.

John Deere Green

Dad sits in his new tractor.

See the album on Facebook.

This was a long Saturday. I started, as usual, by oversleeping. Mom once gave me a plaque for my bedroom door that reads, “There has to be a better way to start out the day than by getting up in the morning.”

Suna had a beading class in the afternoon. So after reviewing the calendar earlier this week, I determined that this would probably be the only weekend this month that I could make the trip down—even a day trip.

Other than just seeing Dad again, I wanted to meet his new tractor. After five years of arguing with him, we were finally able to talk him into the tractor. Not only does he deserve the new tractor, he needs it to be able to stay on the farm and continue working it. He hasn’t had air conditioning in his old tractor for several years. I believe this lack contributed to and worsened his recent health problems.

Chris and Beth were again spending the weekend at the farm. Chris was busy fixing things that, being neither a farmer nor a welder, I had no idea how to fix. He built a couple of new stands for Dads implements. Dad had been propping these implements on rickety collections of scrap lumber and stone.

After lunch, Beth and I drove into Victoria to buy a connector I needed to hook up speakers to the new TV Chris gave Dad a couple of weeks ago. It took much longer than I thought because we made several pointless stops, learning, among other things, that the Radio Shack in Cuero no longer exists and that the Best Buy in Victoria Mall is a dark and scary place.

While we were doing that Dad took a nap and Chris fixed the generator on Dad’s friend Robert’s antique tractor. By the time he got back, I had smoked sausage coming off the grill, and Beth had made another big batch of Grandma’s German sweet rice. Chris was a little miffed that we hadn’t called to rescue him. He spent five hours total for a half-hour’s work.

I headed home about 22:30, glad that I had taken the truck even though I didn’t see any deer on the side of the road. Maybe I should be glad because I didn’t see any deer. You’re more likely to hit the ones you don’t see.

I’m Back

I’m so glad to have this guy hang around for a little while longer.

I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a while—neither writing nor doing much in the way of reading. I’m sorry. It’s been a couple of months where life just got in the way. So I thought it appropriate to resume this endeavor with Grateful Monday.

I have so much to be grateful for, and so much has happened since 22 May. I hope to back-post some of what has happened, not that I think anyone is all that interested. I just have a thing for completeness.

So here’s what I am grateful for:

• Dad is alive and well. He is going to keep farming for at least another year and has decided to buy a new tractor. All of that has been in question at one time or another since May.
• Suna’s position at the company with which she has been contracting seems secure. They may even bring her on as a real employee.
• My contract at the Fruit Company will end about a month earlier because I have accepted an offer to work there (albeit in another department) as a real employee. I’m looking forward to getting back into tech support training and working with some old friends.
• TrackGrease seems to have gotten married. I don’t think I was officially invited, but I am happy for him. And I’m proud of him. I don’t think I tell him that enough. I know I don’t call enough.
• TubaBoy has been getting ready to start his undergraduate education at Southwestern.
• Beccano is getting ready for his junior year of high school. He continues to play guitar really well. Getting better all the time.

That’s the short version.

Dad's Birthday a Day Late

Dad at his farm

Yesterday was Dad’s 86th birthday. I called to wish him the best, but I couldn’t get ahold of him because he was out looking at the full moon. I knew it was a full moon, and I knew he does that. So I had asked Sweetness to let him know Suna and I would make the trek to see him today. She had shipped him a bunch of candy and was going to keep calling until he answered.

This morning we headed out. We arrived to find him napping with his cows. We talked awhile, played him the CD of the church choir singing the Schubert Mass in G, then drove him into Victoria for a birthday bash at Texas Roadhouse. He ate almost all of his catfish.

After “supper” [dinner for most of us], we stopped in to visit some old friends from church who up and moved to Victoria last year. We all had a good time.

Back at the farm, we watch the moonrise. Then we talked until well past Dad’s bedtime.

Photos and copy editing to come later.

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5/10/2009 Update: Added picture and edited.

Food for Thought #2

All these vegetarian enchiladas need is a nice bowl of pinto beans or maybe some refries slopped on the plate. Oh, and some salsa on the side.

Photo source: sweet and saucy

I need a logo for this series. Any artist types got an idea?

Appetizer: Look to your left. What color do notice see first?

Suna is wearing a quiet brown jacket and shirt. She usually picks a much more festive pallet, so brown is very noticeable. I like it.

Soup: What type of beans do you enjoy most?

Pintos. They are very flexible. You can put them in chili (if you don’t follow the Terlingua rules), serve them in bean broth, or fry them again. I love them.

Salad: What was the most interesting thing that happened during the last week?

To me it was that a CEO acted with dignity and honor rather than taking the money and running. See my post about Howard Schultz yesterday.

Entré: What was the most difficult decision your had to make in the last year? How did you decide?

That would be the decision to sell part of the old family homestead. I needed the money, but I didn’t want to do it. Finally, Dad said he couldn’t take care of it anymore and wanted a neighbor to have it. The neighbor offered a really fair price, and it was done.

Dessert: Among your friends and family, who has the next birthday?

I think that would be TrackGrease, on the 10^th of February.

Working for Another Grateful Monday

This lonely flower lived just long enough to bloom. Dad says we have to be more like plants and animals. They do whatever they can to survive. Maybe that’s why he has lived as long as he has.

This is a time of sadness for me. I have been having film noir dreams again about an alternate reality where I live alone in a dingy one-room shack somewhere on the Texas coast where I grew up. Last night I dreamed I awoke to go to the bathroom, where I knocked over the box fan that cooled the house and circulated heat from a space heater in the winter. Then I explored a countertop piled with debris, junk gathered over a lifetime but with too much sentimental value to throw out. All this with a sense of comfortable resoluteness and acceptance of such a fate.

I think these dreams—I can’t call them nightmares because no matter how horrifying they are, they are not scary until I wake up and think about them—must stem from the trapped feeling that unemployment brings.

I hate not having a job. I hate not being able to provide. And I hate that I had to sell part of a farm that has been in the family for more than a hundred years—even if Dad suggested it and basically told me who he wanted to have it. It is a bittersweet legacy.

But sometimes to prosper in the long term, we have to survive the short term. As Greenspan once said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” So I am grateful that I have that bittersweet legacy to help me survive the short run. I am grateful that Dad advised me to sell. And as much as it irks me to listen to him tell the same stories over and over, I am glad that he is still around at 85 to do so.

Job and Other Updates

Beccano says this is another cute picture of Scrunchy. I say, “How can you tell. It looks like all the others.”

Photo by Beccano

I had two interesting calls today. First, I should hear from a recruiter early next week about a six month contract developing short instructional segments in Captivate. Second, the fruit company called back and scheduled yet another interview for the first week in August.

In other financial news, I’ve hit a snag selling a piece of property my dad deeded to me. The title company wants a copy of a trust document, and dad can’t find it. I haven’t a clue where it is. And Dad’s lawyer is not returning his calls. The lawyer seems to be upset over having had to redo some paperwork three times because he kept screwing it up.

And there is still no Friday’s Feast posted. Whatever shall I write about myself?

I hope nothing bad has happened in the chef’s life.

To Sell Or Not To Sell

Land at Cotton Patch, TX

Photo source: Google Maps

That is the question today, as I head south to visit my Dad and probably sell part of a chunk of land that has been in my family for more than 100 years. Why sell? Two reasons:

1. Dad asked me to.
2. I would be much more secure with the cash.

To say I have mixed emotions about the sale would be an understatement. But I know I can never live there. I am deathly allergic to the area. Until Clarinex, I couldn’t even visit for more than a day without getting sick. At the same time, this is as close as I have ever come to having roots. This land has always been there (well parts of it, anyway). But when Dad deeded the place to me, I told him it was still his for the rest of his life. I would do with it as he said. And now he has told me to sell.

Of course, he would never tell me what to do with it. “I never tell anybody what to do. I had too much of that when I was a kid.” But every time we have talked for the last moth, he has enumerated the benefits of selling, making it very clear that he wants me to make this sale happen. He wants it, and it seems to be in my best interest. What choice do I really have?

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I reached agreement with the man who wants to buy. He bought my uncle’s portion of the homestead 12-or-so years ago. He has taken better care of it than my uncle did, and he has been a good neighbor for Dad.

Being an appraiser by trade, he brought documentation of every farm parcel that has sold within 30 miles of the place for the last 10 years. We sat down in my grandparents house, which he now owns, and I told him stories about the place. Then we got down to business. I believe we reached a fair settlement. It is less than I wanted but more than he did.

Now all there is to do is wait for closing and not let seller’s remorse depress me.

Scissortail Weekend

Scissortail in Flight

Photo by: Jim McCulloch

This weekend, I went to visit my dad. It was the first night Suna and I have spent apart since I moved in. We both survived and had a really good time. Suna and Beccano made it a mother-son weekend.

My brother and sister-in-law were there visiting when I arrived. We don’t really have that much in common, so these visits turn into a tall-tale festival. We have all heard each other’s tales so many times that we could almost save time by numbering them.

When Dad and I were walking through a recently harvested wheat field, we saw the summer’s first scissortail (Muscivoria forficata). (Unfortunately, I forgot my camera this trip.) In this part of Texas, scissortails are summer birds. Dad says you know it’s summer when you see the first one. All I know is that they are beautiful birds, and I really enjoy watching them fly. Among other things, it turns out that the scissortail is the state bird of Oklahoma, but I don’t hold that against the poor bird. (The Texas-Oklahoma rivalry is a tradition, after all.)

Dad wants me to sell part of the farm to his neighbor. For once, he and I agreed exactly on what the best thing to do is. Now all I have to do is work out the details with the neighbor. It is a rare situation where everyone wins. Dad is not using the part of the farm the neighbor wants. The piece will even out the a ragged border on the neighbor’s property and give his cattle access to water. The sale will pay off all my remaining debt, max out my IRA contribution for the year, pay for a needed repair around the house, and give me a nice nest egg to tide be over between contracts.

Grateful Monday

I am really grateful to have my dad still around at 85—still looking out for me. I hope he’s around when he’s 100.

Bird on a Wire

This owl danced for us as we walked back to Dad’s house.

Like a bird on a wire,

Like a drunk in a midnight choir,

I have tried in my way to be free.

—Leonard Cohen

Once we got moving, things went much better. The trip down to Dad’s was smooth sailing. Traffic was light, and we made really good time. We got there before noon in spite of not getting up until after I had planned on leaving. On the way down, we passed some interesting sights:

• A Christmas tree made out of old tires—painted gold and decorated
• Christmas tree made out of round bales—painted green and decorated
• Kids out playing on the street with their new toys

Dad watches the Cowboys lose.

Dad was in good health and spirits. He seemed really glad to see us and expressed how much he really likes Suna. We ate lunch at Aunt Di’s. Dad and Suna cleaned their plates. I couldn’t finish my usual order, and that is a good sign that I’m continuing to change my eating habits.

Back at the farm, we watched the Cowboys play poorly and lose. We went for a walk back to the stock tank. Once you get used to the emptiness of the countryside, you start to notice the biodiversity that is recovering now that more farms are retuning to grazing and pesticide use is declining. We saw lots of birds and got covered in floating spider webs.

AppraiserMan built a deer stand right on the property line. He and his son were watching the deer in distant field, but the animals were too comfortable where they were to come any nearer. He said that a few days before he had sighted some wild hogs walking right up to the stand. But when they got to where he had a clear shot, they scented him and ran. Too bad. They do a lot of damage to the habitat.

This is a good spot.

Photo by Suna

I had a really good time fantasizing about where I would site a house. But I will probably never build there. The local flora keep my sinuses in an uproar most of the year. Even in the winter, my sinuses were burning and my eyes were watering by the time we got home.

Photo by: Suna

Motion blur by me not stopping completely

On the way back to the house, I noticed a big fire on the horizon. We kept checking in periodically as we walked back. It continued to grow until it was truly frightening. Dad said it was 20 or so miles away, and he is a pretty good judge of distance. He has spent most of his life on that farm. When we left, we verified the distance, just for our own comfort. It was at least a few miles south of Yorktown, which is nine miles from the farm.

On the way home, I took Suna by the Christmas light display that Cuero sets up in the city park every year. She was really impressed by the community effort (each display is designed and maintained by a local business, charity, or group of individuals) it takes to put on such a display (more than a mile of individual creations) in such a small town. My favorite remains the sea monster swimming toward the paddle wheel boat, both of which are set in the lake so their lights reflect in the water.

It seems that just getting out of the house and doing something really improved our mood. This is something to remember when we start getting grumpy.