So if your kid has ever participated in the pole bending you probably have a love/hate relationship with the “poles”. It can be the most frustrating sport. However, when you watch a pole horse that really digs the poles, it is neat watching! The point is to weave through them as fast as possible without knocking any of them over. (Often this is not easy to do, especially the leaving them vertical part!) Dalli has participated in poles since she began to rodeo and has qualified to compete in poles again this year at the National High School Finals Rodeo in Gillette, Wyoming.

She owns a pole horse named Heidi. Heidi is a beautiful palomino mare. She has run poles at Nationals several times. Before Dalli owned her, this mare was leased by a girl from Hawaii to use when the Jr High Finals were in Gallup, New Mexico. The girl loved her so much that she bought her and shipped her back to Hawaii! Later they shipped her back to run at High School Nationals! Some people from Hawaii, stopped our NM friends at the Jr High Nationals trade show in Georgia this year, wanting to know if they knew a palomino mare that runs poles in New Mexico!

David is the NM high school pole director! He has set poles since the girls started running them. He can hold up a kids rodeo making sure they are perfectly aligned! He even carries the poles (and a few spares) to all the rodeos! Anyway, my point (if I have one) is we watch a lot of pole bending and by default a lot of super cool horses. In the poles a super cool horse will clock under 21 seconds, many great ones stop the clock at 19 seconds!

Last week, (8 days ago) we were watching the pole bending at a 4-H rodeo in Farmington NM. In comes 9 year old Maddie Aragon on a beautiful brown horse. The horse effortlessly glided through the poles and turned on a dime! It was a fantastic run. We decided to find Maddie’s parents and ask about leasing that horse. I am sure they thought we were crazy for asking, because we definitely thought we were crazy for asking! We sat down together after the rodeo and came up with a plan. Dalli would try to ride her Sunday in the rodeo. I might mention that it isn’t easy to just hop on a pole horse and make a good run. They all have different buttons that need to be pushed to ride them. It is a difficult balance of being fast like the speed of sound, and at the same time leaving all 6 stupid pieces of pvc pipe upright! Sometimes it can take years for the rider and the horse to get it all figured out! If Dalli liked her we would lease Maddie’s mare “Fab” and take her to Nationals.

Since the Aragon’s had only owned Fab for 4 days, and we were leaving in 4 days, there were many logistics that needed worked out. If Dalli made a good run and liked her, we needed brand inspection/hauling papers, coggins, and and health! (good thing I know people). We didn’t want to start making too many plans until she made her run. Of course,the run was beautiful except she turned way too sharp on the end pole! (but we all knew that was an easy fix) So we started scrambling to make it all work. Maddie asked if we would send videos and her mom told her she could watch it live on the Cowboy Channel App!

We are in Gillette with Heidi and Fab! Today is the big day, she will shoot at 1 pm and then hop on Fab tonight and we’ll see how it goes! It will be the 3rd time Dalli has run her in a competition! Dalli will call Maddie for some advice before she runs! I’m not sure what the moral of this story is? You never know if you don’t ask? You don’t know if you don’t try? No regrets?

I have wanted to be a veterinarian since I was 12 years old.   Which may make this story even funnier!  The summer after my freshman year in college, I decided  to attend  summer school at  Panhandle State  University  in  Goodwill,  Oklahoma!  If one could overlook the heat it  was a  good summer.  I  enrolled  in history, botany and speech.  

The speech class was taught  by large,  stern,  individual named  Dr. Underwood.  I was not much of a  public speaker back then.  It took starting a family for me to realize the power that  public speaking  holds  for  me.   (The ability  to have a captive  audience  who wants to listen to what I have to  say!)  Anyway,  I was  assigned my first speech, it was on Martin Luther King  Jr.  and I survived it.  At that  point in my life, I  still didn’t love  public  speaking.   However, I  knew I  had done a great job on it.  So, with that  speech, my public speaking confidence soared.

For the next speech,  I was assigned the  topic  of “Youth in Asia”.  Well, let me tell you, this was right up my alley.   Several  years before,  I  had  spent  a month in Japan.  I attended  a Japanese  high school.  I  knew tons about “Youth in Asia”.  I  skipped to the library, and started  digging through some reference materials.   Footnotes  and index cards were generated to  support everything I wanted to talk about.  Then, on the  day of the  speech, there I was, confidently telling Dr Underwood, and  a  college  class of my peers all about  “Youth in Asia”.  It  was a hit.  I was amazing.

I was surprised, when I  was asked to stay after class for  a minute.  This was unusual, as Dr. Underwood usually  provided  our  feedback to us  on paper.  I waited patiently for the other students to file out.  When the classroom cleared,  he gently told me, that the assigned  topic had actually been,  . . . . “Euthanasia”!   Thank  goodness I  hadn’t circulated pictures of  me  in my kimono!  

A little late to type this one up, but better late than never! The girls have been competing in several rodeos throughout the summer and now, as we move into fall, they are competing in NM high school and junior high rodeos. This really translates into us NEVER being home. It is nice to rodeo, we have many friends that we adore and get to see many places of the Land of Enchantment that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. On rodeo weekends, we are usually hot and tired, but we are also all together as a family, this is different than when we are home, we tend to veer in different directions.

Anyway, the down side to not being home, is the definite neglect of our casa and a “to-do” list that is over three yellow legal pad pages long! If you know me at all, you know how I love my lists! I drive David crazy by putting things like shower on the list. I enjoy accomplishing tasks, even little ones. Then of course, if your list gets a bunch of things crossed off and is looking messy you have to rewrite it!

So we arrived at the three day weekend, and the laboring began! Of course we rode our horses everyday, and worked with Katy and Vegas (the youngsters)! Dalli and I loaded wood racks while Macklee cleaned the chicken coop. This maybe the first time in 20 years that we got wood ready for the winter prior to an actual blizzard. I advised David not to move mine too quickly, apparently stacking wood isn’t one of my strengths! We also cleaned out the horse trailer. We picked up the yard and packed for the next rodeo. I attempted to find my desk (that is the horizontal surface in our house where EVERYTHING gets placed!)

Sunday the laboring continued, as I balanced the ranch checkbooks and filed papers, still trying to find the wood on the top of my desk. Then I helped David with his CSP grazing plan. He is the one with the Ag degree, but I believe that my input and typing skills were quit valuable. Then of course all of the regular stuff, like laundry, toilets, and the microwave. Oh I almost forgot, changed the sheets and washed the rugs! I thought about adding dusting to the list, but what really is the point of dusting?

Once the work was close to done, the girls and I sat down to play one of our favorite card games, Canadian Salad! We had played a few hands, when David called needing some help. He was on the back side of the ranch and needed some drivers to move heavy equipment. So off we went to High Point storage to assist him! (Which is a separate blog see Bulldozing Mama)

Just a little glimpse into my dream life. (I know ya’ll thought it was all puppies, kittens and rainbows 24/7) I do realize that the list will never end. Life’s ‘to-do’s” are endless. We try hard to embrace every moment, whether on the road or home doing the tasks on life’s list. However, sometimes there is no substitute for the feeling of crossing stuff off your list! (I need to take a picture of my next laboring list!)

What a whirl wind week!  It started out with a presentation I had been asked to give to the Chuckwagon Cowbelles, then there was my day job, night schooling some FFA kids in veterinary science, homeschool duties, and lastly a ranch sleepover for Dalli’s classmates!

I hope I’m not too tired to continue typing!  Creating the Cowbelle presentation was difficult.  Usually when I create a presentation, I just put up impressive ranch views, tell about my hour commute (with no traffic), throw in a little veterinary medicine, of course a pinch of humor, and the crowd goes wild.  However, with many of these women living on ranches with similar views, I had to dig deep!

So, I focused on some of the problems plaguing (not plaquing for those of you who know my spelling is bad) our beautiful state, but more over our Nation.  The one that bothers me the most is that only 1.5 percent of us help feed this nation.  This is a profound fact.  Depending on what source you use, estimates will go as high as 2 percent of Americans are directly involved in food production for the rest of the country!  I knew we were a minority, but we are down right endangered.

I tell the girls all the time that their dad has the VERY important job of feeding America. She (America) may starve without us!   Ironically, 1.5% of us don’t mind the burden that we are faced with, we are quite passionate about it!  It is easy to become reactive and emotional when we are consistently being attacked by something my friend Rodney calls the “ethics of the affluent”.  If more Americans were involved in agriculture and had to worry about where their next meal came from it wouldn’t matter if it was grass fed or not.   In other countries, like Nigeria up to 88% of their populations are involved in producing the food that feeds their nation.

There are many romantic notions around what we do everyday (Holidays too!) but the reality is, it is hard work to feed America.   As people become more removed from agriculture (and hard work) it shows up in many different ways.  In my practice, I often see adults who have extreme difficulty coping with life and death.  Life and death is part of ranching.   Responsibility and consequences for your actions are mandatory components that seem to be lacking in our big cities.  We probably do not have to worry about Bernie Sanders redistributing the 1.5 “percenters” more evenly because the rest of the nation doesn’t want to work as hard as we do.

Appreciate the American Farmer and Rancher (the 1.5 percenters) we are working hard to feed you, doing the work that you don’t want to do.  Off to make eggs for a group of giggly girls, beef for lunch, popcorn later, and milkshakes last night!  We are doing our part to “Eat American” How about you?
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