Sally Gerard

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I remember when I first started teaching how my principal would remind us before longer breaks about why some students would act out. She told me that many students looked at school as their safe zone, a place where they would get a meal, find some quiet, and could escape the chaos of what went on their homes. It made a lot of sense to me with my own little girl connection to school as a place that was safe for me.

It isn’t any different in high school or with my online students. Two experiences brought this home to me again. The first was with several of my online students who had the whole week of Thanksgiving off because of the schedule of the public school they are connected to, but who continued to work every day and to email me all through the week for help or just to tell me what was going on in their day. Even on Thanksgiving Day, they were

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working on assignments and asking me for help.

On Saturday morning, as we were out feeding cattle and horses and working in the corral, one of my students called my Google Voice number which I set up to ring through to my cell phone, and she asked if I please had time to open my office and help her with her research report. I headed inside and began to work with her in live time, and Robert even got in a word or two as her face shone out from my computer screen. All they wanted, really, was to know someone was still there.

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In my brick and mortar school today, I asked my students to write about the best part of their long weekend. Most wrote about pie or stuffing or menudo and spending time with family in town for Thanksgiving. It was fun to hear about all of their various traditions. But one young man read from his notebook, “There was nothing good about my break at all. There were no best parts. It sucked.” At that point, I so missed my little loving angel from last year because I would have moved him next to her right then and there so the love that pours from her spirit could maybe send a bit his way. And Christmas break is even longer.

Part One

Part Two:

“What the hell? That damn tractor of yours is circling around!” He jumped off the rack to rescue the steering, because we were heading almost south again. He ripped the tarp strap off the wheel and half of it went flying as it tore. Stepping up onto the tractor deck, he wrenched the wheel around until we were going north again. “This no-good machine has a mind of its own. Why I oughta take it out behind the barn and strap it to an ant hill.” He had to wade back through the wave of heifers to get back onto the hay rack. I was still rolling my eyes over the derogatory comments about my tractor.

Continuing to pitch hay while he pushed his way back through the heifers, “You girls get back. For Christ’s sake, get back-go eat.” They did not obey his command, but got even more rowdy circling around the rack. He stayed on the ground now, using the pitch fork to make more piles of hay on the ground, hoping they would calm down and go to eating.

Stalking back to the tractor to correct the steering, he jerked the clutch and sent me flying into the cascading round bale. Covered in hay now, I continued to pitch and tried to hide my laugh in the long handle of the pitch fork.  Climbing back onto the rack, we got back into the rhythm: he pitched east and I pitched west. Until his east became more south and he glared at my tractor.

“I’ll get it. You just pitch hay.” I jumped off and corrected the tractor. The bale was almost unloaded now and I kept on the deck between Robert and my tractor. The rack was empty and he set down his fork and leaned against the wooden rail on the back. He was smiling now at the antics of the heifers who continued to follow us, leaving the piles of hay behind. I shook my head and pulled my jacket tighter, patting the hood of my tractor.

I heard his whistle at the same time that it registered we’d left the gate down and all the heifers were still with us. I stopped, but they went right on past me at a full run toward the pick-up. Robert had leapt off the rack and was running, cowboy boots churning up dust, for the pick-up. Reaching the driver’s door, he froze looking from the pick-up, to the heifers, to the gate, to me.

I continued the game of tag, turning my tractor back to the west. Sure enough, those heifers came barreling back towards me. I saw Robert’s pick-up spin around and in a cloud of dust, he beat it back to the gate. Pulling the pick-up up onto the road, he got out and picked up the wire gate and waved his arm at me to come on.

I brought the tractor slowly, but the heifers came along with me. They raced me to the gate. Robert stood with the gate post in one hand, frantically waving the other to shoo them back. He jumped back and forth keeping the heifers from following me and barely managed to hook the post and shut the gate after I drove rack through and up onto the road.

For their part, the heifers stood in a bunch at the gate, their baby faces staring at him. He put his hands on his hips, looking back at them for a minute and then got back in the pick-up to follow me back down the road to the barn. My last thought was, “Let’s do that again!”

Heifers are little more than baby-mammas. Heifers often run, kicking up their heels for no apparent reason. They will shy away from the windmill they’ve been drinking at for weeks. These will not earn ‘cow’ status until they’ve had their first calf. Somehow this triggers a more adult response to stimuli. A cow will plod along, knowing the routine from experience. Heifers though, are completely unreliable and unpredictable.

This particular morning was crisp, making coveralls and Carhartts necessary. My husband, Robert, drove his pick-up, while I pulled the hay rack, loaded with a large round bale, with my ’49 Minneapolis tractor. He opened the wire gate, laying it on the ground and drove his Chevy a little way down the trail road and parked it. He waited for me to bring the hay rack into the pasture. “Now remember, I want you to pull the hay most of the way to the windmill before you turn her around. We’ll unload going north.”

He looked up at me and I nodded. I could see the heifers way off to the south. Robert climbed onto the rack and I put my tractor back in gear.

As soon as they heard us, those girls came at a run. Some simply headed for us straight on. Others veered off kicking up their heels, leaving their big bellies to float momentarily. His whistle caught my attention and when I turned, he twirling his hand in a circle. We weren’t at the windmill yet, but I turned the tractor around to head north.

We were surrounded by heifers. They weren’t paying any attention to the hay Robert was desperately pitching off the rack. He was trying to shoo them back, but they were having none of it. Those who came first were covered in hay. They stayed right with Robert, ignoring the hay they were supposed to be busy eating from the piles on the ground. His arm jerked toward me and I put my tractor in low gear, aimed it as straight as I could and jumped off. Grabbing the side of the rack, I hauled myself up to help pitch hay.

We worked in concert, him at the back of the rack and me at the front, dragging the heavy sheets of hay to the edge and off the rack. Although he’d managed to dump large piles of hay, strung out behind us, only a few of the over one-hundred black and white faced heifers had stopped to eat. The rest were running along the side of the rack, touching the piles and then throwing their back legs in the air while their bellies hit the hay rack, like a strange game of tag.

Part two tomorrow!

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I believe in coffee with cinnamon rolls. I believe that humans were meant to love and be loved. I believe that horses are good for people. I believe that God is good. I believe that I can be anything I want to be. I believe that I deserve the best, fullest life I can imagine and so do you.

I believe in second chances, that just because someone else makes up rules doesn’t mean I’m a failure if I can’t follow them.

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I believe that freedom has to be fought for. I believe in joy, in awe, in discovery, in surprise, in truth, in beauty, in integrity, in the hope of things to come, in the depth and breadth of the human spirit and the capacity of that spirit to love.

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I believe in the rising of the sun, and that the turning of our planet to meet that sun was meant to lift our spirits, to remind us that even in the darkest place, the light cannot be held back. Goodness can also be found in that dark place, and in the faint twinkle of even one far off star.