Flower Paintings

 

these times

the rains stay away,

angry,

til the anger gone,

when it seems they all come home on the same day,

the prairies and deserts wise,

only the people dumb,

forgotten, the ways of ancestors,

thus look to the land,

the prairies and the deserts,

holy and everlasting.

 

A Family Story

 I remember my Grandpa, teaching me how to “run the hills”. It started one day when I was probably under 10 years of age. I asked Grandpa what he did for fun, and one of the things he said was he would run the hills. Not knowing what this was, I asked him to teach me. He said most people didn’t know how to do this the right way, in his opinion. You didn’t run directly down the hill, you tried to find a ridge with a small incline, and you would start there, on the ridge of the hill, and then run and look to the sides to see a gradually incline on the side, not too steep, then you would run this, gradually heading down to level ground. The route you took, should look like the cow trails down the side of a hill. I loved doing this.

       When we moved deeper into the sandhills, the hills were much larger. I used to “run the hills’ in the evening in the horse pasture, where the horses were. I would change to tennis shoes, and put a curry comb in my pocket and go run the hills. The horses would come and I would brush them a bit, and then when I ran the hills, they would sorta run them with me. They would beat me down the hill I chose, and then wait there for me to come brush them again.

       A family friend saw me with our horses one day, and said “Damnit Doug, I don’t know how you have done it, but you got these horses believing they are dogs instead of horses”

      I didn’t see the problem with this, until working cattle, and  sometimes the horse would question what I was telling them to do. Guess that was one of the reasons I didn’t make a very good cowboy.

one liners

Swirls going nowhere.

Purple and pink, and green and yellow, colors in a lake

scary and dark, monsters awaking in the night

a serene blue, covered in Christmas colors, as if a Christmas tree just recently blown apart