"Praesto Sufficio"

I put out a roll of hay for the horses on Saturday evening and I was reminded again of how bad a shape some of our fences are in. I think that the cows are staying in the pasture just out of sympathy for me. The calves get out every now and then, but they are too young to have any sympathy. When Dad was alive and healthy he kept busy trying to keep the fences in decent shape. I can’t seem to get enough spare time to work like Dad did, and to be honest I just don’t have the will to work like he did. So, I will have to hire some fencing done in the near future.

When we moved out to Wolfhill in 1961 there were very few fences standing on the place. The land had been in the “Soil Bank Program” for several years with no grazing or cultivation taking place. Dad worked steadily repairing existing fences and building new ones. He bought two steers and two heifer calves. The names of the steers were Sugarfoot and Dynamite, and the heifers were Elsie and FlopEar. It remains a tradition on Wolfhill that all cattle are named. Dad built a temporary corral and shed for the calves. We used those temporary facilities until they started falling down twelve or fifteen years later. Then it was time to build more “temporary” facilities.

Many was the time that I heard Dad say, after finishing some such temporary project, “well, it don’t look like much but it’ll do.” If you’ve seen the mini-series Lonesome Dove, remember that Gus had a saying in Latin painted on a board that he carried to Montana. It said, “Uva uvam vivenda varia fit”, which I have read means, “the changing vine becomes the living vine”. I guess since we are Texans on a very small cattle ranch we need a Latin motto too, although a somewhat shorter one. So here it is, in the closest translation that we could get into Latin, “Praesto Sufficio”, the English translation; “it’ll do”.

Ronnie