Not always pretty, but always blessed

Saturday was branding day. I didn't take any pictures this times so I'll try to paint a picture with words.

I look forward to this day all year long. We bring all of our cows and calves in, along with my uncle's cattle, and brand, vaccinate, and castrate the bull calves while also working their mothers in the corrals next to them.

Everything was going pretty smoothly and we were on our last pen of calves for the morning. I had saddled up our new horse (Blaze) earlier and then dad finally got the chance to get away from his other duties to try roping calves off of her. He had already roped and dragged in at least 5 calves and she had been working beautifully. She was calm as could be and was handling all of the chaos beautifully.

For those of you who have never been around it, there is a lot going on when we work these calves. Picture this: We had over 8 guys waiting to sit or already sitting on the calves (2 people per calf) after they had been roped and dragged in, three different men on horses swinging ropes to rope the calves, around 20 to 30 little calves running around, a propane tank with a hose hooked to a metal stand with fire and at least four different branding irons in the fire, two different people walking around with syringes and sometimes exposed needles rushing to give each calf two different vaccination shots, about 5 or 6 little kids running around with paint sticks to mark the calves that have already been worked, one or two men walking around with knives and buckets of disinfectant to castrate the bull calves, another young boy with spray to keep the calves from getting infected after being castrated and at least three to four other people taking pictures, etc.

Phew! Hopefully that sets the scene for you. At any given time there could be as many as four calves on the ground with all of these things going on around them, so it is a lot for a horse to deal with. That's why it was encouraging that Blaze was handling it so calmly.

Well, there were three to four calves on the ground with people sitting on them while they were all waiting for me to get more vaccine loaded into my syringe (we were having problems getting the transfer needle to work properly to mix up the vaccine.) I heard some commotion and when I turned around, dad was dragging a calf he had roped and Blaze had started to jump around. He held on really well until she kept going and was bucking/rearing up even higher. He lost his balance and fell off to the left side. He landed really hard on his left side.

As everyone cleared off of the fences they had jumped up on (while grabbing little kids and jumping up from sitting on calves) at least five people rushed over to help my dad. He stayed knelt down on the ground for what seemed forever. When he finally stood up he was extremely pale, could barely talk and then almost passed out.

Being the true cowboy he is, he refused any more help other than to make it over to the fence so he could stand against it and clear his head. Eventually he made the decision that he needed my mom to take him to the emergency room nearly an hour away. While I drove him slowly over to my parents' house and discussed with him how to break the news to my mom, he was insistent on the fact that Blaze is still a good horse.

As mom and dad went on their way, I had cousins kick into gear and take over for my mom to finish preparing the lunch for the hungry workers who would soon be arriving. I tried to pitch in the best that I could and no one missed a beat. It was just natural for them to do what needed to be done. Meanwhile, my uncles, cousins and life-long friends had everything under control over at the corrals to get everything under control and finished before lunch.

After lunch, my cousins once again took over and cleaned up all of the food and dishes while I went over and called my sister before heading back to working the last set of calves.

We finished things up relatively quickly and then we used horses to take all of the cows/calves back to two different pastures while they used people on foot and small UTV's to take the remaining ones back to the closer pastures. During this whole process we finally heard that my dad had broken 6 ribs, one of them in two different places and also had a lung that was 15 percent underinflated. People were genuinely shocked and saddened to hear the news.

One of the neatest things about the types of people my family is surrounded by is the fact that even in the sadness for my dad's injury, person after person went out of their way to offer support in the form of work. I know these people, and as much as I complain about being busy, many of them are even busier than me. I KNOW the sacrifice they are making to help us out, I KNOW that they won't even think twice about it, and I KNOW my dad would do the exact same thing for them.

I want to be like these people. People that don't have to speak the love of Christ. They SHOW it in their actions. I'm trying to do some things for dad in terms of coordinating people to help out since I'm unable to do some of the jobs. But the silly girl emotions keep coming out and I get a shaky voice while I'm talking to them because I'm tearing up when I hear the tone of their voice. You can't fake being genuine. You just can't.

I love my family, I love my neighbors, I love this community of people my parents have carefully formed relationships with because in times like these we will rely on them so much. Thank you for all you have done and if you are still reading, I hope that you now have seen a hint of the wonderful area I live in.

P.S.
Blaze is still staying on our ranch. Dad was very firm on that fact today. My cousin rode her for the rest of the day and dragged in calf after calf with not a single problem after she had bucked off dad. After watching her work and asking for advice, I determined it was safe to ride her out as we took the cattle back to pasture. She was the calmest horse out of the four horses in our group. The only thing we can figure out is that something on the saddle pinched her and she reacted by rearing up.