Gray Hair

Raising children will cause you to become prematurely gray.   The amazing thing is that they don't realize the stress that they create until the grow up and have children of their own.  One of those times happened when my son was about 13 years old. 

This was during the time when we were hauling show cattle around to various shows over the summer.  We were a shoestring operation so we did everything we could to cut corners.   While the cattle on the show string we kept them stalled in the barn.  For easy clean-up we bedded their stalls with shredded bark that we bought from a local lumber mill and hauled in by the truckload.  We piled this huge mound of bark just outside the barn.  Naturally, since our farm is mostly hills, it never is simple.  The bark pile was just outside the barn but down a short slope.  To make hauling this up to the barn easier we found a home-made two wheel cart for the kids to use. 

When you take cattle to a show you are provided with a spot to tie them when they aren't being actually shown. It's up to you to provide everything else. That includes their bedding that they will lay or stand in during this time. Most of the bigger shows will have companies that will supply this bedding for a fee. For us, one of the corner cuttings was to supply our own bedding.   Since we were getting ready to take the cattle to the state fair the kids had been assigned the chore of sacking up bags of bark to take.  .  This amounted to a lot of bags, since the kids wanted the cattle to stand high and proud on a bank of bedding in the barns.  The sacking had been going on for several days and the number of sacks was mounting  up, but more were needed.  My job was to keep them working until they had the required number. 

On this day they had a helper in the form of a friend of my daughter.  The three kids had been having a ball working and playing while they sacked the bark.  The friend had finally brought us all to laughter when she proceeded to pull a lawn chair to the top of the small mountain of bark and announce that she was the official "supervisor".  Lunch time approached and I went to the house to get ready.  It wasn't long until the two girls just appeared in the kitchen.  "What's wrong/", I asked, knowing that look too well.  "Oh, nothing.  He's just being stubborn."  I finally pried out of them that they had teased my son too far and he had lost his temper.  So they had left.

We chatted on for a while and I gradually became aware of a thin sound coming in through the kitchen window.  It soon organized itself into a thin, high scream coming from the direction of the barn.  "Help me. Somebody please, help me.  Help me!  Please,somebody, please help me!"  Each call getting weaker and more desperate.  Immediately I knew that something horrible had happened in the barn.  Flashes of him being pinned under the tractor or caught by a piece of equipment tumbled through my head.  I started running.  Never has the distance to the barn been covered as quickly or taken as long.  With every stride I was screaming, "I'm coming. I'm coming. I'm coming!"  By the time I rounded the corner of the barn I was in full rescue mode and ready to lift that tractor off my baby.

I was greeted with the sight of my son trying to pull the two wheel cart up the slope to the barn with a too heavy load of sacks.  As he pulled the front of the cart higher the center of balance moved back over the wheels until he reached the point where he could no long make any forward progress.  He also couldn't go back because the cart would immediately overbalance and pull him down the hill.  In other words, he was stuck.  Realizing that he wasn't in danger just totally pissed, drained the adrenalin out of my legs and I went down in a heap. 

We did eventually rescue him, but I lost ten years and developed a lot of gray hair on my way to the barn.