Since we were officially country people now, we decided we had to live like country people. This primarily involved the aqcuisition of livestock.

Bonnie and Lowell let us borrow or board two horses; Lady and Sugar. Sugar was an ancient, worn out Welsh mare. Her shaggy, dingy white coat was ragged and worn thin around the saddle area. However, being posessed of an exceptionally patient, long suffering temperament, she was well suited to a family of children who knew nothing at all about horses. Lady was bigger and probably some kind of Quarter horse cross. She was tan with a striped black and white mane. She may have had some Appaloosa or Pinto ancestry. Compared to Sugar, Lady looked like a prize steed, but she was also less tolerant of our treatment of her. In retrospect, I can see that both of them were bombproof old mares that could have been trusted with a three year old...but at the time, we viewed them as very adventuresome, and ourselves as quite brave and rustic when we were able to climb from a fence or platform onto their backs and stay there while the horse walked around calmly, without falling off. We had no saddles, so we rode bareback. It was some time before we were even able to put the bridles on them, and we frequently just clipped leads to Sugar's halter and hauled and heaved on them. We knew absolutely nothing about neck-reining or leg pressure. Our main objective was to stay aboard the horse and if we were lucky, to induce it to keep moving along and maybe even in a direction of our choice.

George was there to tutor us, and derived much mirth from our awkward attempts. He would sit watching us from the tall, majestic white Appaloosa gelding he rode (Pawnee), and then suddenly kick his mount into a wild gallop across the hay field while we looked on enviously.

What I really wanted was another cat. I was still upset about Mashy. Lowell had a lot of feral barn cats and said I was welcome to as many cats as I wanted, if I could catch them. They eluded me in the cracks between the hale bales....tons and tons of hay....I gave it my best shot but they were faster and very shy.

Bonnie and Lowell gave us four of the little brown ducklings, one for each child. How perky and soft they were! My mother said they were a rare breed (actually, they were Khaki Campbells, I know now) and very precious, an incredible gift. I thought back to the ducklings dead in and on the cage at the ranch and wondered why anyone would let such precious ducklings die like that. Ducks swim, right? We filled up the big utility sink with water and laughed with glee while the baby ducks paddled around in it. After a while, they started sinking in the water and seeming to drown. We took them out, but it was too late. They all died. We didn't know that new ducklings don't have oil on their feathers, to protect them from the water and help them float. We didn't know that ducklings need to have food in front of them constantly and that they really need a heat lamp so they don't get cold. Noone told us these things. Until they died, they were just novel, living toys for our amusement. It hurt to see them die, casualties of our (well intended) fun.

One day I looked out to see several family members looking into the holding pen by the dairy barn. Kary, Mike, George and Dennis were there. I ran out to see. There was an adorable little white and black goat kid running around, a gift from Bonnie and Lowell. They let him out of the pen. Immediately, he ran right up to me, his short little tail wagging eagerly.
"Look! He loves me! He loves me!" I cried.
Kary snorted; "He loves everyone."
George christened our new arrival "Cisco", for the Cisco kid.
Cisco wanted a bottle. Mike got to feed him. He sucked vigorously at the bottle and only butted it a tiny bit. I was afraid of most goats, but Cisco was so small and beguiling that he was the exception. We were terrified that the coyotes would eat him at night, so we shut him up in the silo every evening. During the day, we tethered him out. He had to have a bottle 2-3 times a day, and if George didn't brign it by, we went to get it from Bonnie and Lowell's. Lisa and Mike took on the chores associated with Cisco, feeding him, walking him around, tying him out, playing with him.

As for me, I was becoming horse crazy. It wasn't long before I was glued to the backs of those horses like a tick. From some odd reason, Dennis assigned me the task of cleaning not only the barn, but also going around the horse pen with a shovel and wheelbarrow and cleaning up any manure there, depositing it in our mother's compost pile. I have to do this before I could ride them in the morning, so I arose earliest, cleaned the pen, and then rode around the pen (we weren't allowed to ride in the pastures or hayfields) to my heart's delight, before any of the others awoke and demanded a turn.

We were all pretty silly about manure. To us, it was POOP, and treated with the very same disgust accorded to human feces. If we happened to step in it, we grimaced in dismay and quickly cleaned it off our shoes. George found this hilarious. One day we were in the field when a clod of horse manure came sailing through the air and hit me. "Ewww!! Gross!" I shook it off my clothes and felt defiled. He laughed at me, but what could I do? He threw another, and this time it hit me in the FACE. Oh, I was so mad that I forgot about it being dirty and disgusting. I picked up the nearest piece of horse crap and hit him with it. Pretty soon we were in an all-out pucky fight. I needed a bath afterwards, but I was never squeamish about manure again.

(footnote) In case you're wondering, I did have several more allergic outbreaks with the horses, but with exposure, they subsided and finally went away completely.