An unexpected dulcet chime
of chain on steel
reminds me that all of life has resonance
By Ma. Eugenia Guerra
Once too often, I suppose, I marveled
at the oddity of November ranchland awash in a sea
of lush green Buffel grass, so much so that I failed
to notice that an early winter frost had toasted the
tops of the anacahuitas and the pasture grasses.
It took a recent vuelta round the ranch perimeter
on a windy, nippy morning to understand that the freeze
-- widespread enough to change the color of the landscape
-- had spared only circles of greenery at the base
of trees. It wasn't a killing frost and so there is
still plenty of forage for cattle who still look like
a million bucks, a surprise for those of us who have
ranched against the weighted odds of a drought that
has a foot in this decade and the last.
Year in and year out, skipping fall, we have gone
to brief winters after blistering summers that have
far more devastated the pastures than frost would.
In the past, frosts, if they do come, arrive early
in the new year and late in the winter to settle on
pastureland that is often, after summer grazing, parched
soil sparsely covered. To go into winter with grasses
that cover soil and dwarf the cattle is an anomaly
for December, as is the sight of plump, healthy livestock
navigating through pasture-sized expanses of grass.
At this hour on this vuelta around the ranch perimeter
-- el amanecer -- I am alone, unaccompanied in the
truck, but acompañada nonetheless by the last
coyote serenata and a family of javelinas that moves
down the sendero ahead in a dark brown patch of mayhem
and grunts. It's jacket weather, the wind stout and
blowing at my back from the north.
At the blue gate on this remote spot on the ranch,
this spot I love because it is the portal to the wilderness
ahead, I step from the truck onto soft red sand in
the same by-rote reflex that has moved me through
this gate perhaps several hundred times over the years.
On this day that I step alone onto red sand at the
blue gate to inhale this first breath of winter and
to see the muted greens of monte foliage stand in
tall grasses toasted by the first frost, I feel all
at once the newness of the daybreak and the season.
And there on red sand by the blue gate in winter,
as chain meets steel to release into the early morning
air an unexpected dulcet chime, I understand that
all of life has resonance.
