As an older Nevada gentleman thumbed through a dusty stack of faded photographs from yesteryears, he asked me what I noticed about the photos. “Is it the lack of fences in the backgrounds?” “Nope.”

Normally I try to keep things on the lighter side, but we’ve got some serious stuff going on in cow country.

Having grown up on a ranch, I never gave much thought about what ranch life looks like to a kid. To me, it was just life – I didn’t go to daycare as a kid, and my parents both worked on the ranch.

My cattle wintered well, and I had a nice calf crop this spring, but the heat and humidity of summer here in south Texas makes me anxious for a nice rain.

Recently I was reading a novel set in Great Britain during the time of the Viking invasions. At one point, a peasant was trying to hoist his pregnant cow out of a mud bog. When the cow emerged, with a broken leg, the devastated peasant went into his hut, retrieved a knife and cut a live calf out of the cow. The loss of the cow – representative of his family’s worldly wealth – was bad enough, and the man would save the calf if at all possible.

Spelling was not my strongest subject in elementary school (to be honest, it still isn’t), but thankfully spell check is as common as the cold nowadays. Whether it was your forte or not, some schools had an annual spelling bee to determine who the queen (or king) bee was.

Would you do the dishes by hand if you own a dishwasher? Or cut your firewood with a crosscut saw when you have a chain saw? Yeah, me neither. I like time- and labor-saving tools and information. Technology should make life easier.

There is something about saddling up a fresh horse on a cool spring morning, trailing cows into the corrals and getting ready to brand slick calves that compares to nothing else. Early morning jitters from lack of sleep finally give way to good morning hellos and laughter among the help.

Today, the day that I am writing this, is the first day of spring. It has been a long time coming, but the unpredictable weather patterns prove it is here. It is quite appropriate that I spend a part of my day treating a scouring calf. It just comes with the territory, but this year it seems so much worse.

We as human beings put up so many guards and make tons of excuses to protect ourselves from looking like idiots. We don’t want to admit we don’t know something for fear of hurting our image. Those guards and excuses I am talking about can all be summed up with one word: pride! Pride is the enemy to potential.