Studly Offers His Services

 

First things first.  The definition of a “ranch” in Texas is any piece of property over 2 acres.  I’ve heard people talk about their ranches and when I find out their talking about 5 acres I want to laugh, but I don’t because I have so few friends as it is.

Spring is usually the time new babies are popping up all over our ranch, (heheh, that still makes me laugh) but this year the bull was a little late in coming (seriously, no pun intended). After spending some years dealing with a cantankerous bull of our own, we sold him and now borrow stud services from HBL’s barber.  No, not the barber himself, but the barber’s bull, Studly.  True story, I swear, except for the name of the bull because I just made that up for this story.  

Mr. barber gives a great haircut and is a pretty darn good cowboy but he’s bossy, like really bossy.  When he came to the ranch and dropped off his bull to stay a few months and pleasure our cows, apparently he zeroed in on all the trees he passed getting to the corral where the bull was to be unloaded from his stock trailer.  Cowboy b would return in a couple of months to retrieve Studly, after his job was done here on the ranch *smiling*  but apparently cowboy b wasn’t happy with all our beautiful trees and was thinking ahead to the next time he’d be back because…….

Cowboy barber called HBL and told him to be sure and have those tree branches cut back before he returned to pick up Studly since he was buying a new stock trailer and didn’t want to get any scratches on his new haul.  This made me laugh out loud and then say You’re kidding, right?   No, he wasn’t kidding.   

I grew up on a farm (that’s what we call much bigger acreages in Oklahoma) and I never knew any true farmer/rancher who had any kind of equipment without scratches, dents, dings, and various other forms of battle scars.  Those were badges of honor and proved you actually worked for a living as opposed to drug store cowboys/farmers who dressed in their fancies and drove shiney unscratched trucks and had soft hands.  Soft hands have their place, but it’s not on a rayanch, as they say in Texas.

The difference between HBL and I is a vast degree of stubbornness so where I would have dug in my heels and refused to trim any trees just so I could sit back and watch Mr. b zig and zag through the pasture trying to avoid all the tree branches, HBL took the chainsaw and trimmed them up nice and neat.  Cowboy b came on the scheduled date to retrieve Studly and the cows mourned I’m sure, but went back to eating grass and enjoying life on a Texas ranch to await the fruits of their labor.  *pun intended*

I still think the wrath of a pissed off barber would have been worth the entertainment of watching cowboy barber try and figure out how to load Studly and still avoid any scratches to his new trailer. 

HBL’s hair would have eventually grown back, right?