Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle, September 13, 2023

Down in the yard below the house, mama cows with their hale and hearty calves come in to water at the tank in the horse corral. Some do the cow version of a sneak, some run like they’ve got someplace to be, and some chit-chat as they mosey in. It is a pleasant sight, and one we haven’t seen for months. It signals a change.

The springtime branding season closes with cows and calves getting moved into their summer pastures – a bittersweet event but rather a relief to have them out from underfoot. They become obnoxiously like oversized pets, hanging around the yard all calving season and getting into things in significant and irritating ways. They spend the summer dispersed in the pastures farthest away from home, on the periphery of the ranch, or hauled to more remote leases as many ranchers do. The reasonably self-sufficient critters spend the summer eating and fattening, nursing a calf and growing another, with pretty minimal human contact, if they behave themselves, which inevitably they don’t.

Summertime is a constant flurry of activity—by turns exciting, fun, tiresome, defeating, delightful, and harrowing—something always happening, something always needing attention, whether it is the constant need to be flowing water to something somewhere, animal or plant, especially in drier parts of the summer, or the constant, endless tasks around the house and yard, or the constant harvesting from the garden, or working on weeds in the pastures, or cleaning up after a destructive storm. Work ends for the day notwhen there isn’t more work to do, but when you just have to be done. Then there’s the constant cropping up of half days spent fixing problems cows created. They create their share.

Gathering up animals that took a social day with the neighbor’s cows, for instance, or gathering up a neighbor’s animal that took a social day with ours, haphazardly steals anywhere from a few hours to a half day here and there. Working through a remote herd to find the handful that are sick and doctoring them in their summer pastures can easily become a half or a full day of work, if not several. Even regular water checks and patching holes in the fence take up a surprising amount of time. Then there are the bursts of neighborly days helping each other get done the necessary and larger tasks, trailing whole herds of cows in from their summer pastures, rounding them up on horseback and bringing them down to the corrals to vaccinate calves, treat everything for flies, and doctor any sick animals.

But all that shifts at the end of the summer, when the cows are brought home for good.

Summer has been wrapping itself up over the last few weeks, and we’ve had our first truly cool nights of the season, when temps have dipped down into blanket-worthy digits. We’ve been a mere handful of degrees away from a frost out here by Hermosa, and I can see breath on our early morning starts. Fruit is ripening everywhere, and the harvest is getting put up, evidenced by the gleaming jars on the countertops and bags of frozen produce in the freezer. One more time mowing the lawn and that’ll do it for the rest of the year.

We need the seasons. We need the shifting of the weather, the changes in the temperatures, the change in the work, the traditions and customs that come, each in its own time. We need the fire and flurry of summer, just like we need the chill and sleep of winter. We need the waking of springtime, just like we need the slowing down of autumn. Each season brings its own challenges and graces, as the year cycles through periods of renewal, of change, of struggle, of ease. The fiery heat to remind us of the beauty of the snow, and the bitter cold to make us long for the heat. The dry months to make us appreciate the rain. Relentless sun to cause us to enjoy the clouds. Bare trees of winter to make us dream of spring. The shadows have been lengthening out with that strange slant of the light that means chilly mornings, cozy evenings, and fingers warming around mugs of something hot. The Big Dipper has been righted in the northwestern sky, no longer pouring out constantly on a thirsty world. Soon Orion will greet us from his place above the eastern horizon in the later evening. There is that spice in the air, that unmistakable taste of fall. And down at the water tank, cows and their calves are coming in to drink, sleek with a layer of summer fat under their glossy black hides. Summer is coming to an end when the cows are coming home.