Muffy Mead-ferro - Its Head Came Off by Accident

PREFACE

Dont have chickens, my mother said to me one day, but she didnt go to the trouble of adding why not to. That was like herto make a pronouncement Id presumably be expected to remember and follow even if I had no idea how it could be relevant, given that I was perhaps eight years old at the time, and fowl were not on my wish list, but I still remember wondering what it was she didnt like about them. They were noisy... dirty... meanwhat? My mother never said. Not elaborating was typical of her, and so a general lack of background information about things my mother held as truths was a key feature of my childhood, growing up on a cattle ranch in the northwest corner of Wyoming.

But then, not asking for background information was a key feature of my own personality, so the pros and cons of chickens werent the only things I was not too clear on. My hope was that by not making inquiries I would somehow appear inherently knowledgeable (or at least, not appear inherently ignorant), so I wasnt in the habit of asking my mother why we made the decisions we did when it came to livestockchickens, cattle, horsesor just about anything else. To ask why, I feared, might have elicited the question, Why do you think? since my mother really seemed to enjoy having my brothers and me figure things out for ourselves. And to that I was afraid Id have a wrong answer so I simply, most of the time, did as she said. And then on a more frequent basis, as the years went by, did not do as she said, but in either case without usually knowing the why behind her ways. She wasnt big on volunteering explanations for things, and I wasnt big on requesting them. I preferred to remain secretly bewildered, and just keep my fingers crossed that things would eventually come to me.

What might be wrong with chickens never did come to me, but my mothers comment on them stuck, and I noticed, after she died, that some of her pronouncements carried even more weight with me than when she was still with us. Not only could I not seem to get out from under my mothers words, but my unasked questions could never be answered.

Cats are a nuisance. In what way? And does this make dogs a nuisance, too, or just cats?

Wyoming girls dont have umbrellas. Not ever? Or only when were in Wyoming? What if weve gone out without a hat?

You always undo the back cinch first. But how could that make any difference when Im going to undo both of them?

Dont have chickens. Fine; as an eight-year-old, I wasnt planning on it.

But then chickens became a possibility for me a number of years after my mother died, when my husband Michael and I, along with our two children, Belle and Joe, came into possession of our own Wyoming agricultural property: an old pig farm on the very western edge of the state. The place has plenty of room for a chicken coop, and some of the neighbors have chickens and seem to get along fine with them. Ive wondered if we would enjoy tending the hens and having fresh eggs, but we havent gotten them. For all I know about myself, its because Mary said not to.

I did call my mother Mary, and I called my father Pete. I cant remember when we started using their first names, but I once heard someone else ask my mother why we called them Mary and Pete, in a way that suggested they might be more interested in why my parents allowed it than why we did it. Marys explanation was that we were just following the example of the hands who lived with us on the ranch. She didnt go on to say whether that was for good or for bad, but the way I took it was that it was for good, because I didnt think Id go too far wrong if I did what the ranch hands did. That they were not only my elders but my betters was a fact of ranch life I did pick up on without help.

When Ive thought of the Wyoming cattle ranch I was raised on, the variety of people who worked there, and the importance the operation had to so many of themand to meIve had to wonder how Mary, if she were still alive, might have regarded our little pig farm.

But I almost hate to ask myself that question. Its not a cattle ranch. Its not even a pig farm. When my husband Michael and I first bought it we found, in the dirt-coated detritus of the cinder-block pig barn, that the animal vaccination records didnt go beyond the late 1970s. The neighbors to the south, Lorin and Liza Wilson, recollected that the hog operation had been abandoned sometime shortly after that, more than thirty years ago, and we werent planning on resurrecting it.

We ended up calling our property the Pig Farm anyway, because everyone else in the surrounding community of Alta, Wyoming, called it that and we gave up trying to explain where our place was by other means. You could tell people it was that property on the corner of State Line and Kaufmann Road. You could tell them it was the farm just north of Wilsons. But whatever you told them that would finally locate the property in their minds, theyd still say, Ohthe Pig Farm.

Id wanted to call it the M Lazy M, myself, after we took possession of the place, because that is Michaels and my livestock brand. Mary and Pete had come up with the M Lazy M brand for themselves when they bought their first cows back in the 1950s, and to mark the occasion Pete had an engraved silver buckle made for Mary, with the m lazy m embossed in gold. Pete held on to the M Lazy M brand from then on, even though it went out of use, and stayed out of use for decades. Of course, ranches themselves often go by the name of the brand thats used on the cattle, and the brand will change hands when the land does, as a part of the property. But sometimes a brand will stay with an individual and go where he or she goes. Most of my ancestors have had a habit of holding on to their brands, as a separate asset.

The Double T and the X Diamondbrands that had been in our family a long time, and had been seared onto the hides of many thousands of cattlehad been given to my brothers, Brad and Matt, respectively, to use on their own places. And my father had said, once we bought the Pig Farm, that he wanted to give the M Lazy M brand to me. It was a good brand, too; not as good as the Double T or the X Diamond, but a good brand.

Mary explained to me when I was little what was so desirable about both the Double T and the X Diamond, and this also illustrates what gives the M Lazy M slightly less utility. As I said, it was not my mothers habit to volunteer much in the way of background information, but Id made a remark one day that did call for her to inform me of some basic facts. With all the wisdom of a grade-schooler Id questioned the worth of the Double T.