{"id":19632,"date":"2023-05-31T00:44:54","date_gmt":"2023-05-31T00:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=19632"},"modified":"2023-05-30T19:45:59","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T19:45:59","slug":"our-common-chore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/31\/our-common-chore\/","title":{"rendered":"OUR COMMON CHORE"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bryce Angell – The outdoors has always been a large part of my life. My father was an outfitter and guide for 35 years and I was there to shoe and care for the horses and help him do the cooking. We took many great trips into the Yellowstone area. Even now that I\u2019m older, we still ride into the Tetons, Yellowstone and surrounding areas. My poems are mostly of personal experience. I am now retired and enjoying life to the fullest. I plan to do more riding and writing.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our friends and all our cousins grew up living country style. We lived on farms, we all had chores, stayed busy most the while.<\/p>\n

But the chore we shared in common, more than tractors pulling plows, was spending night and morning in our barns to milk the cows.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t matter if you only milked a cow or two. Or if you milked two hundred, milking time was always due.<\/p>\n

Every night at 5:00 p.m. or morning 5:00 a.m., you\u2019d find yourself next to a cow and milking once again.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d wear those coveralls that came two sizes extra big.You were always readjusting, like Miss Johnson\u2019s curly wig.<\/p>\n

When finished with the milking you would take a long hot shower.\u2019Cuz if you didn\u2019t you would smell like pungent cow manure.<\/p>\n

Some of the boys who milked the cows were on the wrestling team. The wrestling room smelled of manure bursting at the seams.<\/p>\n

The coach called all the boys together, said, \u201cWe\u2019ve got a smell. So when you\u2019re done with milking, would you take a shower as well?\u201d<\/p>\n

The farm boys must have listened to their coach\u2019s word, and yet. Still a hint of cow manure. I swear it ekes out of your sweat.<\/p>\n

The cows were so annoying, like your daughter\u2019s new boyfriend. A milk cow won\u2019t stay milked. There never is an end.<\/p>\n

Vacations only happened when another milked your cows. But no one liked the smelly job. Good help was hard to rouse.<\/p>\n

An older man once told me that milking cows, to him, was fun. He must have left his hat off, baked his brain while in the sun.<\/p>\n

Milking cows was not so fun, more tedious to me. But it\u2019s where I learned to work and farm life was the life to be.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d just got home from school one night, and talk about good luck, when my father drove up in his empty Chevy two-ton truck.<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cThere are no milk cows. I up and sold \u2019em all today.\u201d My mind was all a whirl and I was speechless, you could say.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been in jail except to see a friend or two. But no more milking cows felt like jail time served and through.<\/p>\n

I must admit I\u2019m thankful for the milk that we can buy. \u2019Cuz if it weren\u2019t for milk, my Oreos would go down dry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our friends and all our cousins grew up living country style. We lived on farms, we all had chores, stayed busy most the while. But the chore we shared in common, more than tractors pulling plows, was spending night and morning in our barns to milk the cows. It didn\u2019t matter if you only milked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160,2],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19632","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-cowboy-poetry","7":"category-commentary"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19633,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19632\/revisions\/19633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}