“It’s going to be a yellow year,” my son said last spring. Most of the wildflowers that bloomed were yellow, and we knew that trend would continue. Now, sunflowers cover the landscape, all the way from roadside ditches to hilltops. Someone remarked that the green and gold is beautiful, and they’d be right, but the truth is that this is the norm when we are recovering from a drought year. Plants that lie dormant during years of hot and dry, spring forth in abundance when the monsoons return.
Abundance is the blessing of a summer that has grass belly deep for the cattle and puddles in all the draws. But it’s a mixed blessing because damp ground breeds foot rot. If you thought ranchers have nothing to do in summer, other than haying, you’d be mistaken. Besides making sure the herd has plenty of water, there’s fly control, and in a year like this one, doctoring. And rotating pastures, not only for grass management, but to get cattle off of ground where the foot rot virus lingers. Sometimes you’re moving them daily, and even putting them in places where you didn’t want them. There’s medication for foot rot but like everything else, of late, there are supply issues. Used to be, you had to rope a critter with foot rot to treat them. Now there are medicated darts that save the rope step, if you can find a place that has darts. And just when you get one bovine healed up, another starts limping, or the first batch gets re-infected. Pinkeye has been a problem in some herds too, and that often requires putting them in a chute to apply medication.
My dad used to say, “Never complain about rain in the Sandhills,” so we don’t, especially after last summer. But even blessings have collateral damage, and plenty of people are complaining about that. One of our neighbors had major damage to an outbuilding in one of last week’s storms, and we had a tree on our roof. A lot of the tomatoes that were about to ripen got split open with hail, and we’ve been eating cucumbers twice a day to use up the ones that have holes in them. But the flowers survived pretty well, so there’s that to be grateful for. Someone told me years ago to write down five things I’m grateful for every day. Following that advice has proved that blessings outweigh the frustrations.
A year from now, or even next week, there will be something else to deal with, and we’ll have to figure out solutions all over again. An old Chinese curse says, “May you have an interesting life.” But I don’t think it’s a curse. Life has always been interesting—always will be.
For now, enjoy the yellow. It’s probably as close as we’re going to come to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Meet me here next week, and meanwhile do your best. Somebody might like it.