Well, it’s the last week of April- obvious by the layer of snow, cold days with cold nights, and green tips of grass peeping out from the cracked Wyoming earth.
Here are some highlights:

1. Franny Anne was born. I love her.

2. Josh’s shop floor is officially cured. We have a concrete floor that will hold his equipment steady and still.

3. We are moving into the barn. Literally. We’re going to be living in a steel barn. Josh promises to install a wood stove and a toilet before the end of this week, and a fridge and a stove top by the end of next week.

4. Emma Gates has successfully NOT killed either Josh or myself- picture below is Emma and her calf (a heifer) Ypsi Gates.

5. Diego and I explored a new part of town, a beautiful crevasse up the Rawlins Uplift where we viewed not only the breadth of the town, but all parts north and south including the ranch. We sat on rocks, chased rabbits, and watched a buzzing world below. Typically, I don’t love being licked by my dog. I’m not sure why I look so content here…

6. We picked up a mortgage application from the bank with hopes that the yurt will be built by the end of July. Not that I don’t love barns and all, but I’m kind of looking forward to the yurt.

We haven’t quite reached what I would describe as a world of Spring here, but there truly are little tufts of random green grass coming up. I can’t wait for the cows to get there nozzles into it.

There is one heifer still needing to calve. She looks a bit bewildered at the little ones bucking and bawling around her, not quite sure what it means to be standing around without her own. Soon, very soon she too will have a teeny furry critter to play with the other five. It’s funny to watch the babies stand around, trying to snack on the alfalfa hay. The look a bit like I would munching on grass, like a goofy guy not sure how to say what’s actually brewing in the mind, straw hanging from the corner of the lips like a partially spoken statement.

Off to build a space in the barn to lay our heads….

I figure that if you were really interested in hearing about what it’s like to see for the first time tiny hooves, with the bottoms splayed white, coming out of the ass-end of a cow, you would be out here braving the wind and seeing it yourself. It is, after all, not all that interesting. There can’t possibly be that many reasons you’d want to hunch around, your knees creaking, brushing your hand up against dog shit, breathing as silently as humanly possible, all to stare through a grey and dilapidated fence. Your hushed caution comes from straight up fear that the nervous cow will just buck up and refuse to give birth because she knows that you are creepily stalking her during this sort of normal yet odd show. How would that feel, knowing that you are responsible for the hooves that perpetually peep past her tailbone, all because she’d rather not give birth with an audience? But again, if you really wanted to see these things, you’d find a way to live amongst it yourself, right?

As it turns out, cows aren’t so hot on the idea of company during childbirth. In fact, despite the fact that they are herd animals, when the time comes that a cow’s body tells her the baby is going to be arriving shortly, she quietly and stealthily excuses herself to head towards the hills. If that plan is thwarted, the cow becomes anxious and distracted and, as it turns out, pretty much lethal. That momma cow knows that she wants to have the baby in privacy, on a clean patch of ground, protected from both wind and predators. You quickly learn that in that cow’s sight, you are no longer the blessed alfalfa and apple angel, you are a predatory and stalking creature deserving a speedy death- the sooner you can be gotten rid of, the sooner that squirmy little squealer can come out of her abdomen.

So it just seems natural to let them do their thing.

The first pair to awaken to our Meadow Ranch, Wyoming (pathetic) interpretation of spring was discovered after the heifer was missing in the morning count. A cow missing in the “spring” means you might as well put on a helmet and shield before you go investigating the meadows. If you stumble upon her and her calf, you might be in for a scurry of a muddy run back to shelter. Or it might be just fine. All could be calm and the mother might just bellow at you a bit to keep your distance. That seems to be the case when you mostly stay out of the way of the whole birthing process and give the mother her space. Go figure. Our first pair was a sight to see, cuddling together against the sage brush, snow brushed on the long hair of the mother but the baby dry as a desert day. That was the first calf I have ever really had a chance to notice. And geez almighty was he a black beauty.

The next two, well, we are still bruised and battered. If only the two ladies knew our intentions were for the best- that we only stood between them and the isolated hills in case they were to need assistance during their first calving experience. Not their idea of a good idea. And they haven’t been the same since.

But wait, really, if you were at all interested in these things, you’d be out in the Wyoming wind, wading through the spring mud. You don’t need someone to tell you what it’s like to see a cow first learn of her baby… to watch her lick and caress and beg with her voice for that baby to rise and suck. And to see them the next day, together, the mama a bit slow and happy and seemingly satisfied to be curled in with her little one. I don’t think I ever even remotely fathomed what this experience would be like, or how deeply in love I would fall with this intimate connection to animals.

The calf born just this evening makes five total out of six. The last baby doesn’t look to be wanting to come anytime soon. We know that of the first four, three are bull calves and one is a heifer calf. Strangely, the heifer calf is from our wild Emma Gates with the unruly horns (you know, the one that had us climbing the fences to escape from her lovely motherly instincts?). The baby is named Franny Gates, after my mother and hers. Girl calves are named in a heritage breeding scenario like ours, and boy calves are simply numbered. They’ll live a shorter yet substantial life out here with us for about two years. Then they will become part of our cyclical life cycle. They are here with us to die- and quite honestly, they wouldn’t be alive right now if they didn’t have a food purpose. Maybe we all need to realize that that is a cycle that will keep happening long after we are dust again. And none of us would be here if we weren’t meant to only pass through this world, not to stay.

Garrison Keillor with The Writer’s Almanac appropriately sent this to his email subscribers today, a Shakespeare poem. Quite lovely and appropriate I’d say:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

And of Vladimir Nobokov:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”