HAT TIPS
Hello,
Well, Shirley is home. And I guess you could say she is doing quite well. You hear of people who really suffer with knee surgeries, but she says it doesn’t hurt near as bad as her other knee the past 10 years! She picks her way around pretty good using a walker. Still has kind of a tough time bringing my dinner and coffee, but she is trying.
But, then again, she isn’t carrying feed buckets through the mud, and we do have mud. I’m not a weather forecaster, but I’m predicting that we will freeze up wet.
Speaking of limping, we had a horse named Susie. Now, I know you probably never had a horse named Susie. Not many people have. We always named our horses after the person we bought them from or their color. Sometimes both. We had Buck (buckskin), Wally Buck, Grandpa’s Buck, Roping Buck, and Little Buck. We had Albert, Alfred, and Clayton. You get it. And we had Susie.
Susie was kind of homely. The horse. Not the Susie we got the mare from. And she was smart. The horse. Not the Susie we got the mare from.
Susie was a good walker. She would settle into kind of a running walk and you could cover a lot of miles in a comfortable day. And Susie was a cow horse. You show her which cow you were taking to the yard or the corral, you could just sit back and enjoy the ride. She would get her there.
One day Grandpa saddled Susie up to ride out of the yard and she came up lame. I mean real lame. She was pretty much packing a front foot. Grandpa unsaddled her and turned her out. She let out a whinny and galloped up the hill.
The next day, we watched closely as she came down the hill for grain. Not a bad step. Saddled her up and dang, she was crippled. Turned her out. She whinnied and up the hill on four good legs. Every day, she came in fine, but limped when you saddled her. We checked her legs and feet and could find nothing wrong.
About the fifth day, when Susie limped out of the yard, Grandpa took down his rope and whipped her across the butt. She forgot she was lame and took off like she was in the Kentucky Derby! After that, when Grandpa took down his rope, she never limped again.
Another lame story (many are) was about Wendell. He bought a team at the horse sale in Dickinson. He swung into the Buckskin Bar to show them off to his friends on the way home. Tom noticed one was limping. Wendell told Tom, “I asked seller about that, and he said he wasn’t lame, he walked like that all the time!” That, ladies and gentleman is a horse trader.
Now, I wonder if Shirley is fak….
Never mind,
Dean