With apologies to any Yellowstone fans, I’m hypercritical of anything out of Hollywood that tries to portray the Western, small town or agricultural lifestyle. Very rarely do they get much of it right.

The old blue flatbed Chevy pickup, surrounded by a dozen hungry cows, crept slowly along through the rough, half-frozen field as I flaked hay off of the bed.

As we celebrate the Christmas season, let’s not forget that light will always overcome darkness. Let’s try to illuminate that light for our fellow travelers on life’s unpredictable road. Appreciate and seek the one whose birth we honor this time of year, the one who would leave the 99 to find the one.

The late-afternoon shadows of early fall cast by the sinking sun in the west were growing longer as I at last urged the final stragglers of the 50 or so cows out of the bottom of the draw.

It was late afternoon on an early September day. Just a hint of fall hung in the air as I jumped my horse up into the trailer, a light fog of defeatism looming over me like the gray of the smoke from so many western wildfires that enveloped everything for hundreds of miles.

Mine is a horse-poor outfit. I’m aware that the term “horse-poor” is subject to interpretation, and I’ve seen it thrown around and used in a variety of ways in the ranching world.

I wasn’t really thrilled about it, but circumstances dictated that I make several trips and spend several days in the concrete and asphalt jungle of Salt Lake City this summer.

Summer was rolling along. We’d flown by the solstice so quickly I didn’t even recognize it before it was a few days behind me in the rearview mirror.

It’s probably never wise to overreact or panic, yet I find those responses are all too often my default mode. If I took a little time to think about it, I’m sure I could come up with several dozen examples through the years where my initial answer to some unexpected circumstance was some minor form of hysteria.