the ranch in retelling

I wonder how many oranges a person would have to eat to overdose on vitamin C. In a day at the ranch, I must've eaten twenty oranges.

There isn't much to do at the ranch; I have a hard time imagining living there. It's that downtime -- that utter stillness -- that I love about visiting. Late in the evening, with no lights anywhere around, the stars above our campfire were so thick in the sky that I couldn't tell where the night ended and the stars began.

The little house out there is full of energy. It's hard to describe, but you're never alone inside it, even when there's no one else around. In the chill of the evening, I slept under a pile of blankets, beneath a portrait of a fine Mexican lady with a stern gaze. I never think of anything but the most respectful thoughts in that room, for fear of the well-dressed lady in the portrait.

In the morning, a misty fog lay low over the fields like a quilt, but the trees were bustling with birds and butterflies. Vivid green jays flocked into the trees, staying just out of range until my camera ran out of batteries, then approaching me, taunting. Red cardinals, titmice, and muted pyrrhuloxia ate from feeders along the perimeter of the yard.

We spent several hours puttering around the yard, doing odd jobs and feeding range cubes to the cattle before breakfast. The cattle live on a different part of the property. There are perhaps fifteen full-grown cows, one bull, and three or four calves, one brand new with his umbilical cord still attached. Two of the cows are very close to calving, as well. They came to us when they heard the truck's engine, bellowing loudly as they approached. The brand new calf is too young to be afraid of people, and he let my mother pat him. Most of the cattle are friendly and will eat from your hand, so my mom likes to acquaint the babies with human contact as soon as she can.

I had sustained myself on oranges in the meantime, but the homefries we ate were indescribably delicious and rich by the time we ate breakfast at noon. It was 2pm when we left for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Corpus Christi, after having swept, made the beds, and gathered everything we packed. Since my trip to Romania with C over the past summer, I spend a lot of time looking at the landscapes that are so familiar to me, and wonder whether they would be exotic to someone else. I find nothing exotic about the flat agricultural plains of the coastal bend. The roads stretch on to nowhere, past rustic old farmsteads and old-fashioned windmills until we reach the outskirts of town, where new housing developments are constantly cropping up.

And so we found ourselves home, walking distance from the bay, and it seems unbelievable that the landscape could be so different from the way it was an hour and a half away.