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Barbed Wire Rug
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- Written by: Ray Oltion
- Category: Wyoming
- Hits: 588
Imagine you grew up on a dry farm in the middle of Wyoming. There were no trees on your place, nor any open streams, but you did have a windmill for pumping water that you used in the farmhouse and to fill the stock tank. It didn't rain much and the grass was not as plentiful as it was back in Illinois, but there was plenty of land. You could raise cattle on it, but not as many per acre as back home. Winters were tough, but with timber from the southern tip of the Bighorn Mountains, plus coal from the mines 90 some miles to the north, you could get by if you laid in your stock ahead of time. Your task as your father's main rider was to survey the herd, make sure no cows got their heads caught in stray buckets, and provide a profile along hill ridges to discourage cattle rustlers. You learned to shoot the .22 rifle you bought raising your own orphaned or rejected calves. You collected rattlesnake rattles and pressed them into the side of a clay jar you made. Life was simple, hard, and satisfying.
Your dad helped you see the reality behind the ideal image: you were becoming a young woman and needed to think about your future. That could include marriage and family, but in any case you needed an education. It was time to catch up with your peers, so you boarded with a trusted doctor and his family in the nearest town big enough to have a high school, and completed your high school education in two years. Then you decided to embark on a career in nursing, so you went to Denver and then Seattle for training. Of course, you met a handsome soldier and with the social imperative to regenerate the population after the war, you got married. Family responsibilities eventually won out and you abandoned your career in nursing.
Still, you maintained parts of your past. You returned to Wyoming with your family and bought a small acreage in a town on the foothills of the Bighorns. You had a horse and a milk cow. Your parents moved to town and came to visit more often. Your husband build a house out of logs milled from the mountains. You heated the place with a pot-bellied stove, but eventually things got more comfortable and you had a furnace and all the modern conveniences.
Later in life, you managed to purchase the original log cabin where you grew up from the rancher who was using it to store grain, and your husband, brothers, and son moved the logs up from the old ranch and reassembled the cabin on your acreage. There you had fir flooring like in the original, complete with the knothole that your dad covered up with a tin can lid to keep the mice out. There were two rooms: one for cooking and eating, the other for sleeping and sewing.
Those floors invited memories of your life on the open hills and meadows of the dry farm, and you might have enjoyed placing a rug like this one on the floor.
Easter Egg Clutch
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- Written by: Ray Oltion
- Category: Abstract Painting
- Hits: 489
Have you ever wondered what the world looks like from a nest hidden in the tall grass? Imagine the spears of grass as swords jutting up int the air, like a rampart against a hostile charge. Twigs laying across the perimeter establish an entrenched boundary, protecting the hen from enemy fire. Overhead the sky glows weird colors from spring sunshine filtered through overhead leafy camoflage. Your eggs reflect those colors, and blend in with the chaotic symphony of electromagnetic vibrations.
You hear your mate honking as he circles the area, but you and your precious clutch is hidden so well that he cannot spot it from above. You need a break so you send up a beacon that illuminates your location. He sees the flare and homes in to give you some well deserved relief, and assumes his place as a proud father to be.
Who can make sense of the totality of the world? Certainly not a goose, nor a human for that matter. All we can comprehend with any certainty is what we perceive in our environment, be it the close proximity of a circle of woven sticks and moss, or the vast reaches of space and time. Which world you inhabit depends upon your capacity to engage.
Blackbeard in Retirement
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- Written by: Ray Oltion
- Category: Abstract Painting
- Hits: 618
You could say I've had a full life, on the high seas scouting for rich merchant vessels and livin' it up with my mates on South Sea islands. Yeah, I don't regret a minute of it, except maybe the fight when I lost me leg, and the time when my best friend turned on me in a drunken brawl and put out my eye with a broken bottle. You know everybody wants to live the easy life and that was my dream when I decided I'd had enough of privateering and headed for my own remote piece of paradise in the Society Islands. Well, it hasn't been as rosy as they claim. Even with my fine clothes the heat and humidity still turns them sour after a week or so, but I can live with my own aroma, I guess. That way I don't mind if my parrot relieves himself on my coat. Also, the bugs are everywhere and get into my gruel, but some of them are kind of crunchy and add extra flavor.
I get around okay, going to the market for breadfruit and sometimes fresh fish, and o'course stopping by the watering hole to reminisce with old pirate pals. When I stay too long I get kinda bleary-eyed, which is bad because I only have one eye and can't really tell where things are in front of me until it's too late. That must be what happened the other evening when I was on my way home. Cursed root had grown across the path during the day and I didn't see it properly. Sure enough I caught it with my good leg and that left me teetering like a ballerina on the point of my wooden leg. Well, in my younger days I would have just laughed and made a pirouette to impress the ladies, but there was nobody there on the path except maybe a few lizards. When they saw me toppling they scattered, and o'course my trusty parrot friend decided to abandon ship.
Well, like a good captain I went down with the vessel, and I did drown in my sorrows for a time, laying there on the path in the gloom, feeling sorry for myself. But you know what? I figured this was my reward for escaping death so many times in the past. It isn't pleasant, this daily struggle, but it has its own kind of sweetness.