Brianna Walker

It was a long week. It felt like an August harvest week in the middle of winter. Usually by the time October rolls around, things slow down. This year, however, we just changed summer busy for winter busy.

Now instead of losing sleep because we’re in the field, we are losing sleep because of paperwork, bank work, school work and animals. We kicked off lambing season one bright, frosty morning with an adorable set of speckled twins.

The barn wasn’t ready — and we were in the middle of moving cows — but babies never seem to wait for opportune times. We scrambled for heat lamps on one of our trips through with the cows.

When the guys arrived to get the last load of cows, they had jumped the panels and were gone. It was already dark at that point, so they just let them be. Unfortunately, without the whole herd there, everyone was pushing the fences harder than normal.

We had tucked in for the night. My parents were over, and my mom and I were elbow deep in painting a Christmas church picture, when my husband got the phone call. One of our calves had been hit on the road. Everyone looked sick.

My dad went with my husband to take care of whatever it might be. Amazingly, the calf only had minor injuries, and they came home without having to start the excavator. The next morning, we had more lambs, and while I was fretting because we didn’t have fresh straw, my husband was having a worse day.

They’d gone to feed to the cows that hadn’t gotten loaded up — and they weren’t there. The fence was still up, but we were missing three pair and a yearling. The neighbors were called but they hadn’t seen them.

We searched three hours and 40 minutes for those cows before we got a call saying some extra cows had been spotted a couple miles away. We all held our breath. Were they ours?

We bumped along through the puckerbrush to get to where they’d been sighted. Sure enough, they were ours.

We bailed out of the pickups. We ran left. We faked right. We rolled under electric fences and dashed around tree saplings. We shouted and hollered, and we all probably need to apologize for the things we said (or thought) while herding those cows into a neighbor’s corral.

When the gate was finally shut behind the last cow, an exhausted cheer went up from everyone. Two guys stayed to keep them from jumping the corrals while the rest of us went back to get the stock trailer. It was already noon and we’d not checked off a single thing on our very full to-do list that week.

That night, I lay in bed thinking of the calf that had been hit, the cows that had been lost, the lambs that were born, and the things we hadn’t gotten accomplished. It felt like my boat had come near sinking several times, but at the end of the day, it had survived the storm.

“Whatcha thinking about?” my husband asked me.

“When you feel like your boat is taking on water, would you want a bucket or an oar?” I asked.

“I’d rather have a life jacket,” he stated matter of factly.

I laughed. I appreciate my husband’s outlook on life so much. When life’s storms threaten to swamp your boat, forget the bucket, just grab a life jacket and ride the waves.