\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There sure wuzzn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a shortage of baling wire on the farm where you grew up, Trujillo.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
There are many things one can say about this, not the least of which is that, for me, there was no farm to grow up on. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a Las Vegas city slicker.<\/p>\n
Baling wire? Oh, you mean that two-story pile behind the barn? Those tons of metal wrought by decades of having hay loaded on to the loft in the barn?<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
My father-in-law, Stanley Coppock, invented the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Coppock Cobble.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s simply any temporary fix that becomes permanent on what we all call Cocklebur Ranch. In this case, spending summers on Stanley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s farm north of Springer in the late \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, I agreed to repair the barbed wire fence around the property, roughly a square mile.<\/p>\n
I took a generous supply of baling wire with me, along with gloves and fence pliers. That fence has four strands (almost), and my job was to cut lengths of baling wire to wrap around the fence post and the barbed wire, to hold the wire to the post, as many of the original steeples had fallen off.<\/p>\n
For decades, Stanley had removed wire that wraps bales of hay and tossed it against a barn wall. In time, some of the wire returned to the earth. That represented possibly 50 years\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 accumulation of wire. In their youth, Stanley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s four daughters \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Bonnie, Kay, Donna and Beth \u00e2\u20ac\u201d would climb the barn loft, join hands and take a dive to the soft cushion of baling wire. They hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t heard of tetanus.<\/p>\n
It would have taken many forklifts to remove all that wire. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in part why I was extra generous in doing the repairs. Four miles of posts, spaced 10 feet apart, each with four strands of barbed wire \u00e2\u20ac\u201d well, you do the math. But I doubt that even having wrapped each post, candy-cane style would have made a dent in the stash of mostly oxidized wire.<\/p>\n
Stanley had enough wire to gift-wrap all of Texas.<\/p>\n
Well, we made some progress on the Coppock Cobble, after I was lectured on the need to pre-cut all lengths of wire and make them fit.<\/p>\n
That advice applies, but from birth, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve realized it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true only if all the fence posts are of a uniform girth. Filled with mirth, (for what it was worth) and there being no dearth of wire, I started on the project, but never got to complete it.<\/p>\n
The same thing happened when I was performing roof repairs on the barn, with my sister-in-law, Donna, then 14. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Trujillo, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re hammering like if you wuz killing a snake,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Stanley would shout.<\/p>\n
My father-in-law\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s middle name is Earlton, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been tempted to substitute a few letters and make it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Frugal.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Once, when the local minister called to request that one of us take a chicken feather to church as a prop for a sermon, Mr. Frugal said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Aw, geez, Arthur, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if we have any to spare.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This from a man who owned more than 1,000 layers and was happy to have me wash, sort, candle and package eggs for delivery to the four grocery stores we had in Springer.<\/p>\n
It must have been an enigma, having a city dude donning work gloves to perform fence repairs. My only exposure to agrarian life before having met and married a farmer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s daughter was watching westerns at the Serf.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m the one who had to think hard after hearing Phyllis Diller, the comedienne, say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We used to have a cow that wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t give any milk, and so we sold him.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I needed to have the joke repeated.<\/p>\n
And I wondered what exactly my father-in-law meant when he told me to join him at the barn to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153check on the male cow.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d What is that? Well, raised on a farm himself, Stanley and his seven siblings had a strict Church of the Brethren upbringing, where people simply didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use terms like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bull,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153breast\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153leg.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
I realized later he was simply poking fun at his own parents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 lexicon of agricultural terms, but for a while I expected to see an animal that Barnum and Bailey would take on the road and charge admission for people to gawk at.<\/p>\n
Though not successful, Mr. Frugal took some urbanity out of me and tried to make me a bit more rustic. My father-in-law slowed down through the years, divesting the farm of cattle, hogs, sheep, geese and, finally chickens. That was a bit of a relief for his four sons-in-law, two of whom were as citified as I.<\/p>\n
As the spouse of the oldest daughter, I got to help with branding, de-horning, vaccinating, spraying for ticks, castrating, and my favorite \u00e2\u20ac\u201d helping attach metal rings to the snouts of boars three times our size.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Well, we lost Stanley on Saturday morning. He was on his way to age 95 when his body simply gave out. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be delivering his eulogy in Springer on Thursday. We expect a large crowd at the memorial service.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m grateful, in my clumsy, oppidan way, to have been exposed to my share of bucolic life.<\/p>\n
Now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m tempted to buy a few cows, hogs and chickens to keep me busy in my retirement.<\/p>\n
But then again, maybe not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There sure wuzzn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a shortage of baling wire on the farm where you grew up, Trujillo.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There are many things one can say about this, not the least of which is that, for me, there was no farm to grow up on. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a Las Vegas city slicker. Baling wire? Oh, you mean that two-story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":735,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions\/735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}