Cricket, Nellie, and Fiona wait for some apple treats at the gate.

Giddy-up is my new, most recent, motivational mantra. It helps me to “saddle up and ride at dawn” even when I’d rather stay in my jammies. Even when my body is screaming because I’m sore. Even when I’ve had a tough week and want to quit.

Farming, ranching, and caring for animals in Texas makes a person tough. I’m actually not TRYING to be tough. I don’t necessarily WANT to be considered tough, but it is what it is. (I don’t even like that saying, but here we are….using it in my own writing. It is what it is!)

Yesterday, it was “feels like 46 degrees” and I was wearing a jacket as I fed our animals. Today, I’m not wearing a jacket, sweating like its the height of summer, and experiencing humidity that is at least 1,427% higher than yesterday. It’s ridiculous. To make matters worse, I recently found some moisturizer with a much higher SPF factor so I felt like I was actually wearing a ski mask outside while I was feeding the animals.

For at least four days out of the last ten days, the wind has been blowing steadily at 25 mph and has gusted at levels of 35-40 miles per hour all day long. When I threw feed to the pigs and goats, the wind was swirling wildly all around me. It was impossible to keep it from blowing the feed and corn directly back into my face at times. My hair was whipping around and making it difficult to even stand in one place in our alley. I was impressed by the power of the wind and always equate the power of the wind to the awesome power of God as I go about my daily chores of feeding and caring for animals.

Because of the crazy winds, we have lost sheets of tin off of several of our outbuildings. The racket is deafening from the remaining tin sheets still clinging to the outbuildings by its fingernails with the loose tin screws we gleefully installed 10+ years ago. Back then, we had no idea we should have installed approximately eight times the number of tin screws we used to build everything. We didn’t understand that we needed to build our outbuildings to withstand years of drought, wind, snow, and ice storms that have recently become the norm in Central Texas.

To add insult to injury, The Outdoorsman and I planned a fun new adventure and decided to grow our own Christmas trees this year so I excitedly ordered fifty pine saplings from a nursery in Tennessee only to have them arrive four days before this year’s rendition of the Texas “Surprise Freeze Event of the Year” so we had to delay planting them until the next available weekend…..which was, unfortunately, three weeks away! The pine saplings were just a tad bit dried out and starting to turn brown when we finally got them laboriously planted in our fenced-in barn orchard……just in time for the four days of crazy, sustained winds! They are now dead as a doornail and leaning at a 45 degree angle towards the north as they gave way to the blustery, prevailing south winds that lasted for what seemed like weeks.

Then, to add a HUGE insult to injury, our stray, feral cat, Stormy, who snuck into our shed during a storm to have kittens in late September, got really sick during the freeze and wasn’t herself at all for weeks. I wasn’t sure whether she would rebound or not even though we put a thick, fuzzy blanket and a heat lamp for her and her kittens during the worst of the freeze. After a couple of weeks of laying around and hiding, she disappeared for a couple of days and came back still a bit unsteady on her feet and now, as of yesterday, I have determined that she is expecting kittens again!! I want to cry because I was planning to take her and her kittens to get spayed as soon as the kittens were old enough, but then she started having symptoms of being ill so I put it off…..apparently, a couple of weeks too late. (By the way, Sweet Blog Reading Friends, this paragraph in this blog is me actually confessing this news to my husband for the first time in a safe, but clear way so that he can’t freak out about the fact that, indeed, I am living my dream of having a “kitten sanctuary” but the timing is really bad for both of us!) Okay, now that it is in the open, I can move on.

Giddy-up.

So, even though I have told my friends that the farm is going lower and lower on the good outweighs the bad scales…..those are a real thing in my mind at all times…..I STILL won’t let it get me down. As long as the scales stay tipped with at least 51% in favor of farm life, that is what we will be determined to do until we cannot possibly manage it on our own….which, we are wishfully hoping, will not happen for another ten or twenty years! We are still trying our best to sell and auction off our farm animals and we have made some good headway. We will continue making hard choices and selling more animals in the coming months. (Except the number of kittens. Except that. No headway there.) But I digress……

I have told The Outdoorsman that, whether we have some hard things going on here or not, this farm is still a sanctuary from the stress of the outside world. All I have to do is shift my focus and the following things totally eclipse the hard moments: adorable baby animals, beautiful sunsets, refreshing breezes, flowers blooming on dewberry bushes and fruit trees, kittens chasing leaves and bugs, piglets squealing for food, and peaceful solitude both here and along country roads.

Yesterday, I drove to a nearby small town to go to Tractor Supply for some needed farm supplies. I chose to go to a less crowded location and was so rejuvenated by the beautiful scenic drive as I drove almost completely alone for miles upon miles on the winding country road. It was as if the world was sleeping and I was experiencing the beauty of the landscape completely alone. I smiled and rode in silence as I was reminded, once again, why The Outdoorsman and I work so hard to stay here even when its hard.

Giddy-up, Texas Farmer Girl!

It will all be worth it in the end.