At the ranch I live in a small, but rather comfortable, second floor apartment. It has a nice view overlooking the Cheyenne River Valley and into both Little and Big Corral Draws, which empty into the river. It is real summer now and my cooling system consists mainly of trapping the cool evening and early morning air and breezes in my rooms. This convection system mostly works unless, like today, I forget to close up the well-insulated structure and my window fan pumps hot air into the apartment.
That is what happened as of midmorning; and even though my south facing windows have a huge overhang shading them, it still gets warm; so I just tell myself about what it was like to grow up in southwestern Oklahoma and about how I used to stand barefoot on the scorching concrete sidewalk just to toughen up my always bare feet. Ah, yes, and that was years ago.
Now in the heat of the day, even if not all of the work is done, I hunker down in my at-least-cooler-than-outside apartment with a big glass of ice water in front of a fan and look out the window or read book or write in my journal. Here’s the catch; it is a real toe stubber when you believe yourself to be just a little tougher than you ever really were.
Outside my windows, in the ancient flood plains of the Cheyenne River, where Meadowlarks line up on the ground in the shade of a fence post, there is this herd of buffalo, with which I am fairly familiar, lying on the ground in plain sunlight, dozing or rolling in the dust of a Prairie Dog mound, seemingly at perfect ease and in no discomfort at all. They utter no complaints about the temperature or the weather. They utter no complaints. That is their day, and it doesn’t matter how hot and dry it is. If they have access to water and food, the weather hardly matters. It is the same in the worst of the winter as it is in the worst of summer.
The calves play and run full-steam ahead just as we did on those awful summer days when our parents watched us in awe and amazement, having perhaps forgotten (or perhaps remembering) when they too had run the summer days through and stood calmly barefoot on scorching hot concrete. So now, when I realize that I am not so tough as I once thought, or when I seek the calm of life, I watch the buffalo carefully and hope that the adage, “you are what you eat” is true.