It was 6:15 p.m. on a cold, windy, dark mid-January evening. I was sitting on the end of the front bench of the bleachers in the Oakley High School gym, changing my shoes after chasing rebounds for a couple of girls who were shooting a few free throws at the end of a two-hour practice with the girls’ basketball team.

It was another one of those nights. I slowly brought myself back to reality from one of those crazy dreams that makes no sense, opened one eye and glanced up at the old digital clock radio on the dresser next to the bed.

The annual state convention of the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation is usually held around the first week of December every year. As president and board member of my county Farm Bureau, it behooves me to attend the two-and-a-half-day event where state policy is cussed, discussed, developed and argued over.

We’ve got an old circa 1980 786 International tractor that, for all its faults, is, for better or worse, the do-it-all workhorse of the place.

It was getting on into late fall, and I was trying to figure out how and when to, among other things, get all the calves weaned.

I led the freshly shod and saddled little buckskin mare around the front of the pickup and back to the trailer. I smiled to myself as she jumped up into the trailer, and I casually slammed the door shut.

I was making a trip to town one early fall morning, the grand purpose of which I can’t recall.

My corrals are a mess, and frankly, they’ve been in a dismal state of repair for quite some time.

I’m well aware of its inevitability, but such thoughts are ones I usually set on a shelf of that closet in the back recesses of my mind that I only open on occasions of sheer necessity.