Howdy friends and neighbors. Well, Sunny Point, OK is living up to its name. I would sure trade anyone out there who has gotten too much rain some of my sunny and dry weather for about a week of the good wet stuff. It seems that we have a chance of rain about every day this week. I hope we who need it can hoard it all up so some of you folks hip deep in it can dry out a little.
My Granddad always said that during Noah’s flood, Sunny Point just got and inch and two tenths. I like his other saying that when a good downpour hits Western Oklahoma, we’ll have three year-old catfish that need to learn how to swim! I’m on a roll. When asked what our annual rainfall was, his response was, “About 20 inches a year, and you ought to be here on that day!” Oh why not? I’m still on a roll. One rare occasion when he and I were trapped in a barn while the rain poured down I looked at him and said it sure was raining hard. He smiled and threw this one at me, “The precipitation is of that of a mature, post-partum ruminating bovine urinating vertically and perpendicularly onto a perfectly level piece of geography!” I replied, “What?!?!” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “You know, it’s raining like a cow %#@&ing on a flat rock!”
The only other thing I can come up with this week for my little article, other than making fun of politicians, is a story that came back to me as my wife and four-year-old discovered a snake in our barn the other day. I’ll be repairing that barn’s roof and sidewall tomorrow. But anyhow it jogged a story.
It was mid morning in muggy South Texas when I tried to call an old friend to check on his prediction of the cattle market, but he didn’t answer. About an hour later my phone rang and it was my South Texas connection returning my earlier call. I was looking for guidance on where August feeders were headed and he told me that he had just been part of a miracle! My need to lose even more money in cattle futures was going to have to wait because the man who read a bible passage at my wedding was going to witness something larger to me.
Marshall was still trying to catch his breath as he spoke to me. I was preparing myself to hear whatever tale I was going to receive. My mind wandered to thoughts of him escaping a raging bull, or narrowly missing an oncoming and speeding render and tallow truck. I held the phone tight to my ear and Marshall started to explain.
He told me it was a fast and furious morning as he started his day. He needed to grab a half empty (or half full) bag of cubes out of a small shed so he could try to trick some cows into coming to the lot. As he bent over to grab the sack, a rattlesnake made his presence known to my friend. The rattler was inches from Marshall’s feet, coiled and ready for battle. Marshall stood straight up in this short shed and hit his head on the rafter above. He now had a coiled snake at his feet and a bump on his head.
The cool cowboy didn’t panic though, not yet anyway. Instinct took over and he told himself to back out slowly. He gently turned his head to plan an escape and discovered that when he hit the rafter above, he stirred up a wasp nest that was now at eye level and inches from his head. He said the snake was rattling and the yellow jackets were warming their wings to prepare for an aerial attack.
In the middle of all this, a dumb Okie (me) tried to call him. He found himself with a snake at his feet, wasps staring him down and a cell phone ringing in his shirt pocket. Marshall said when his phone rang, he couldn’t stand steady anymore, with one eye on the snake and another on the wasps, he gently backed out of the shed.
He told me that neither the rattlesnake nor the wasps bit him. I exclaimed that that was indeed a miracle. He replied that not getting bit wasn’t the miracle; in the heat of the moment he forgot to grab the cow feed. The miracle was that he was able to lot all the cows and their calves without a sack of cubes! God works in awful funny ways!
I’m Monte Tucker, and that is what’s under my hat!
