My life has
changed drastically since choosing this rural life.
When I lived
in the Boston area, I would have a harried list of things to do each
day, the least of which would be to fight traffic while running all my
errands. I chose a decidedly slower and less stressful lifestyle
when I relocated to Texas three years ago. Or, as I lovingly
refer to it, “Planet Texas”.
Now don’t
get me wrong, this is in no way a slight on the state. The name
came purely from my own feelings of being deposited on another planet,
far from my busy Boston area life. I would send letters back to
family and friends, titled “Missives from Planet Texas.” The following
is just one of those letters:
Dear
Gretchen,
Have you
ever had one of THOSE days? You know, the ones where anything
that can go wrong, just does? Like the one you had the other day
when your toddler locked you out of the house and the police and fire
department showed up and the neighbors watched from behind the
curtains? I think I’m having one.
My day
started like any other. I got up with the sun and went out to feed
the horses. My mare, Breeze, is still a bit under the weather after
her brush with mortality last week.
Remember how she ate too fast and
choked on her feed, resulting in a whopping vet bill to clear the
obstruction? I wanted to check her out thoroughly this morning,
so I tried to get a halter on her. There was no way she would come
near me after the injections I had to give her this last week.
She’d wait for me to approach, and then trot out of reach and snort at
me. So I figured she ain't acting sick, just off, y'know. So I
decided I’ll just have to keep a watch on her. No sense in trying to
walk down an endurance-bred horse in a 18 acre pasture. Some old hand
here told me that a body can walk down a horse if they are hard to
catch. He never met Breeze. I tried that a few weeks ago. The
object is to approach the horse to halter them, and if the horse
refuses to stand to be “caught”, drive the horse away. Repeat as
needed until the horse finds it easier to submit to being caught
rather than being made to move away. Three hours into it, Breeze
won.
Anyway, back
to today. About an hour after feeding the horses, my elderly
landlord shows up wanting to pick up his cattle trailer. He
dropped the trailer off a couple of months ago so we could clean up
the junk the previous tenant left in the yard. I had heard of
people collecting things that they could recycle/reuse, but this was
insanity. The entire barn, the yard surrounding the house, and
some of the pasture was filled with junk. I had backed the
trailer into an area between the house and the barn, an area about 10
feet wide. Since parking it there, the carpenters built a
stairway leading up to the barn apartment, thus reducing the size of
the clearance to about 8 feet.
Oh joy.
My landlord
is in his late 70's, failing vision… you get the idea, and no way he
is going to be able to back into that space, let alone hitch and pull
the trailer out. He is a very sweet and gentle man. I was not going
to make him move the trailer.
Not a
problem... I backed the thing in there (though the space was wider
then) so I should be able to get it out. I backed my truck right up
to the trailer and hitched it up without a problem. Did I mention
there is a century old oak tree opposite the stair rail? Very
tight quarters, but so far so good! I began pulling very slowly
and carefully to get the trailer out of the tight spot when I felt the
truck shift weight to one side slightly. I had (note I said "had")
about 4 inches between my truck cab and the tree. Then, I had none.
In fact, the
tree was pressed firmly into the side of my truck and the truck was
wedged. Oh yeah... nice big dent. Tree-trunk shaped. Apparently,
the trailer shifted to one side when a tire slid off a large, flat
rock and moved the back of my truck over to the side. At that point I
had no choice but to slowly ( and painfully, while whispering colorful
language under my breath) backed the truck and trailer up... which,
of course, added to the damage to my truck. But, if I tried to
pull forward I would have lodged the tree between the bed and the cab
of the truck.
