Babes of March

There’s some bald eagles hanging out in the calving pasture. Mark saw up to 14 one day, many of them juveniles. They’re fun to observe, but they make us nervous that they might harass the newborn calves. So far they’re just eating afterbirth.

Birdsong surrounds us now as we go about our work. Starlings are doing acrobatics in great clattering murmurations, swooping and swelling from one cottonwood to the next. Red-wing blackbirds are making a racket in the tules.  And oh, the meadowlarks!

There’s a certain tension, a happy tension, hanging in the balance on the ranch this spring. No, not the annual arrival of a few hundred baby calves; something more profound than that. Leah and Seth are expecting their firstborn any day now. Our first grandchild.

I came upon Leah walking her puppy last evening. She said it was all quiet on the western front and asked how things were in the barn. She is quick to smile and reassure grandma that all is well.

It was early March, 28 years ago, that Anna was born. The snow was deep that year. I had been helping with the calving, what I could, then stopped abruptly to turn my whole attention to a new little life. There’s an entry in my diary a few days before she was born. “We agree that this baby coming just doesn’t seem real.” Anna would bless our lives in all ways. And the years have kept rolling by.

I had a blog written about calving. There’s always a lot to write about. But that’s not the story. Even on a cow-calf operation it isn’t. The story is happening in the little white house at ranch headquarters. The same house where Seth’s great-grandfather was born. The house where now grows a new life, tucked in close to Leah’s heart, just about to introduce his or her self to us. Soon we’ll look into those eyes, wise from the ethereal womb experience. “Oh, so that’s who you are!”