The sustenance of rural living
Cowgirl Sass And Savvy

By Julie Carter

If ever, even for one short minute, you doubted why you live in a small community where everybody knows your business, what you eat for lunch, where and with whom, what you drive and when you last washed it, what your real hair color is and how you look before 6 a.m., stop wondering.

The heart of a close-knit hamlet is as big as the countryside around it. Sometimes you don't see it until you, or someone you know, needs it.

You may not even know you need it until the community pours its understanding, sentiment, prayers, ideas, suggestions, and even a few casseroles, upon you.

It happened this week; it has happened often in the many years before.

A death in the family, tragedy of any kind, accident or something that affected a child happens and the people put down their causes, their differences and their issues and rally around for support.

"Let me know if there is something I can do," echoes through the air day and night and comes from the deepest sincerity.

Phone calls, emails and chats on the sidewalk, in cafés, offices and at the post office supersede any mass-media attempts to offer information, condolences or support.

When the saints pray, heaven moves. When the community rallies, walls fall.

This time, it was one of our kids who pulled back the curtain and exposed the power of caring people.

As teenagers will do, he got almost grown up, he thought, and decided he didn't have to live at home, be in school and all that "stuff" that requires meeting standards and following rules.

So he walked away from school and left his mother, dad and hundreds of people looking for him, praying for him, sharing information about what they might know and seeking to find resolution in something that could happen to any of us.

Right now, he thinks it is all about him and what he wants. He has no idea the things his emotional decision set in motion behind him.

However, his family does. His friends do. His school friends, his teachers, his church and pastors, neighbors, and friends and associates of his parents do.

Within 24 hours people in half-a-dozen states were sending prayers and support to the appropriate places.

There is a long list of teen runaway statistics.

Between 1.3 and 2.8 million runaway and homeless youth live on the streets of America each year.

One in seven youths will run away from home before the age of 18.

This incident became a statistic in the big picture. But locally, he is one of ours. He has a name, a face, a personality, and he belongs to us.

For us, he is not a statistic. He is one of ours.

His peers have watched this unfold. There is a lesson here for the teens that he passed in the halls every day at the high school. A lesson they need to grab ahold of and remember always.

Life gets hard, life seems unfair and sometimes, life, right at the heart of where you live, seems unbearable.

The remedy for that is not being somewhere else out of reach of the people who can help you. The antidote is right where you stand with the people who know you, love you and are willing to help you without ulterior motives.

What I want them to understand is, if they run, they only take the pain with them. They also leave plenty of it behind with a community who will take it on until things are made right again.

Then, and only then, will we return to the normalcy of small-town living in the endless blur of small talk, local politics and weather predictions.

Meet Julie on her Web site at www.julie-carter.com



It’s The Pitts: Wasted Wisdom

Darol and I were sitting around commenting on the condition of our country when a rare and highly improbable thing happened: Darol got a great idea.

It may never happen again in our lifetime.

Darol thinks that Congress and the President might cut down on their expensive errors and idiotic ideas if they had an advisory council of old folks to warn them when they were about to do something really stupid.

I like the idea. Advisory councils are cheaper than consultants and use smaller words than economists and professors. Admittedly, some advisory councils are largely ceremonial but what Darol has in mind is an active advisory council made up of really ancient people. Since the government likes long names, which they can then abbreviate, we thought we’d call the advisory council the United States OLD Council of Obviously Terminal Seniors or, USOLDCOOTS for short. A lot of wisdom is just going to waste in this country and our politicians could benefit from the advice of people who have seen and done everything. For example, before going to war our politicians might ask the advice of someone who had actually been in one before.

An advisory council would provide a continuity to our government that we don’t have now. For example, how many Secretaries of Agriculture have we had under this administration? I lost count. They don’t seem to last as long as a bunch of bananas in a monkey house. Which seems an apt description, don’t you think? With USOLDCOOTS on the job our government might not keep repeating the same old mistakes.

As for the makeup of USOLDCOOTS Darol and I would like to see it composed of an octogenarian rancher, a retired grunt from the military and a school teacher wife who has raised at least three kids and supported her farmer/husband for a minimum of 35 years. Here’s an example of the type of person we’d want on USOLDCOOTS.

Lester Wilshire, Darol’s grandfather, received a visitor from the USDA who wanted to count his cows. It was during the Depression and USDA was giving farmers about 35 cents for every cow they killed. It was like the dairy buyout only with bullets.

When the USDA official got out of his official USDA car he handed Lester his impressive business card. It shone with a bright luster and had his name and USDA logo embossed on it with a six-line Washington DC address and all sorts of big words. The USDA man was quite full of himself and puffed up bigger than a bloated bull. You could just tell he was a real expert, the kind of guy who could look at any animal and tell you instantly if it was a male or a female and be right about half the time.

The USDA official stated his business with a great degree of confidence as he put on some rubber booties over his shiny soft shoes and explained to Lester that he was going to go into his pasture and count his cows. Lester offered to gather the cattle and place them in a holding corral but the USDA official would have none of it. He wanted to make sure that there’d be no cheating the government out of 35 cents.

Lester tried to warn the USDA man that there were dangers lurking in the tall grass but the USDA man paid him no heed and went off tiptoeing through the cow pies. Lester was not at all surprised when, in less than five minutes, here came the USDA official running faster than Jesse Owens with Lester’s Jersey bull breathing right down his trailer hitch. I think you get the picture. The USDA official looked to be in considerable distress as he passed Lester going 40 miles per hour and was begging Lester for either help and/or advice on how to deal with his present pursuer. Because the USDA official and the Jersey bull were rapidly getting out of hearing range Lester yelled at the top of his voice, “Show him your card. Show him your card.”

Now that’s the kind of person I’d put on the old persons advisory council.