Day Thirty Eight: It has been another week sense I have worked Happy. The days have been really hot, the first real hot of the summer and I have been falling behind on my own horse. Happy is still very quite and I like his new out look on life. I round pens him a few minutes and then tie him in the barn, for my morning lesson just arrived a little early and so happy will have to wait until I’m done. It’s only 10:00am and the sun is intense so after my lesson I spray myself off with a little water :0P and take Happy to the indoor arena to get out of the sun. Happy is lazy again and I feel like I am riding a pleasure horse as he drags his feet around the pen. I go through the lessons of moving off my leg like before. He remembers the lessons from before and moves slowly but without resistance so I am happy with Happy. I work both sides, moving off inside leg and out side leg. Today instead of stopping and waiting in between working each side I wander and worked both sides at the same time seeing how well Happy will switch one brain to the other. Horses are one side separate brains with each eye and some transfer well and some don’t. Horses that want to grab there ass and run usually have a hard time with the transfer but Happy is very relaxed and stays thinking about what I am asking of him today. I show Happy the flag today and walk him back and forth, like I would when working it, but without someone to run the thing for me that is all for today. I will try to work it for real tomorrow;0)

Sisters poem

Sisters a bond like no other
different than a brother
made stronger without a mother

Dad did the best he could
with two little girls trying to be good
but fight Oh they would

On the roadside, our thumbs sticking out
hours waiting for the next ride no doubt
tired, bored and just plain worn out

Sister sing me a song to pass the time
Father make the stories fun and rhythm
walking home, the last hill to climb

Rain coming down, time went so slow
Dad playing his songs by fires glow
two little sisters sitting in a row

you color that one, I'll color this one
hours spent laughing and having fun
in our shack on the hill waiting for the sun

Summer time fun and running free
with no particular place to be
riding horses all day long, you and me

The Chicken Coop

The Chicken Coop

A friend of mine gave me a Miranda Lambert CD and every time the song The House That Built Me would come on I would cry. What an amazing song and even though the house that I grow up in burned down, I found myself thinking a lot about the house that built me. My Father passed away Nov. 30 2009 and I had not been back to the land since his passing. I knew it was time to go back to where I grow up and the new house that stood where my childhood house once stood.

To begin this story I need to tell a little bit about my childhood…

My Dad, my big sister Brigette live in Michigan where we live on my grandpa Terry’s dairy farm when I was two and my sister four. Grandpa bought the farm as an investment but had no interest in running a dairy farm and hired my Dad to run it for him. We lived in a little trailer and we only had 10 cows to milk. The farm was a big dairy but Dad was a city boy and had to learn what he as doing so we used only a small portion of that great big barn. We lived their for a few years but my Dad and Grandpa didn't get alone well and so my Dad saved up money and bought some land in California. When I as four, we move to Humboldt County. We had no car so we hitched a ride with truckers and whoever we could bum a ride. We bought five acres of land and lived on it like, well homeless people i guess, with a fire and a small lean to made out of branches. We had one pot and one frying pan and three sleeping bags. We had to haul water from a near by creek in gallon jugs. I can remember rolling around on the ground in protest and my Dad telling me not to come home without that water leaving me to cry and after I was done crying I picked up the jug drank as much of the water as I could and carried the rest home. We camped out all summer and by winter my dad had built a small structure, 8x8 the size of plywood with a smaller room with a little wood stove for cooking. He found most of the things at the dump. There was no electricity out there, if you wanted to cut something it was with a hand saw so the house was crude to say the least. Wood and some tar paper and there you go, a dry place to live. My sister and I slept in the beak of the roof, there was just enough room for two sleeping bags and we could sit up in the very center of the peak. My dad said if we could not sit up, it would kept us from fighting, I remember it differently and I think my sister would agree;0)
The second year my Father built us a bigger house 12 x 24 with wood he bought from the mill, fine redwood straight and true and we had a house, no bathroom, we had an outhouse, a hole in the ground covered with plywood with a bucket with no bottom and a toilet seat on top. One time my sister dropped the only flash light in the shitter and after much crying, my Dad finally talked my sister into letting him holding her by the ankles and lowering her head first down into the shitter to retrieve the flash light while I held the kerosene lamp thankful I had not dropped it down there.
As the years went on the house got bigger as my dad add room after room in his style of building and our house became know as The Terry Shack. The house was like a big tree house with some of the rooms you had to climb into. Steps all different sizes. We had this one step that was the end cut of the tree so it was rounded on one side and had a great big old knot in the middle of it, I can’t tell you how many times I slipped off that rounded step and took the hide off my shin. Oh how my father loved the unusual. We had two trees growing in the middle of the house and they found there way out of the sun roof only to die off each year from frost. In the winter the roof would leak but the plants love it. Our shower was standing on those steps between the two avocado trees and Dad would heat water on the stove and then pour it over us from a 2 gallon plant watering pal. A little water, soap up and then rinse off. During the summers Dad felt swimming at the river was good enough. I was a very dirty little kid with hair matted, my Dad gave up on trying to brush it which I did not mind at all until I got lice and had to have kerosene poured on my head. I never learn to read or write until I was 12 and went to live with my mother, she had left when I was four months old but later came back into my life and helped me find the little girl in me. She cleaned me up and brushed my hair out and bought me new cloths. Dad shopped at the Salvation Army for my cloths and they never fit right. I was so skinny, if my pants fit around the waist they where too short. And Oh my god, I had a mouth on me you wouldn’t believe, I would get down right ugly if you tried to make me do, well do anything I didn’t want too really. My father believed I would learn to read and write when I wanted too and he was right but a little miss guided on how hard that is when you are so far behind and the other kids make fun of you. I had buck teeth when I was little and was tease a lot.

The school system in Oregon, where my mother lives wanted to test me to see if I had a learning disorder or something? Well that made me mad and so I decided to try after all. I wasn’t dumb, I just didn’t want too. It seems funny that a man who was a writer himself and loved to read would have two little girls who couldn't. He read to us all the time and he was great at it so we didn't feel the need to learn and honestly he was a terrible teacher, and that had a lot to do with it. He would get mad and yell when we wouldn' t try so we would shut down even more.
My Dads house was the place to be in our little valley where I grow up.my house was the fun house because my Dad was a big kid himself and loved to play.
We didn't have enough land to support the horse and so the neighbors and our horse ran free like a wild herd in this little valley and we had to learn to track and catch them if we wanted to ride them. Sometimes I would follow them all day and have to start again in the morning. I was determined and it might take me days but I always got my horse. My Dad left the horses to me seeing I was this horse crazy kid so he just let me run free and do what ever I wanted with them.






After his passing it was amazing to me to hear how many of my childhood friends considered my father a father figure to them as well. As unusual as he was, his heart was good and kind and he was crazy smart and would talk your ear off if you gave him the chance. You really didn’t mind cause he had this way of telling a story that would hold your attention for hours. Sometimes my friends would come over just to visit with my dad.
As I drove up to the new house things look so overgrown with half dead plants everywhere. I noticed most of the plants where still in pots, some had made it through the holes in the bottom and where now on there way to growing wild.
I open the door and my heart sank. The house had been gutted. My Dad had remarried and had more children, three girl and two boys who are half my age and are best friends with my kids. They all have his quick wit and sense of great sense of humor. My younger sister who lived in the old house when it burned down, had decided to remodel the new house. She lives over there and spends time there so she had worked through the need to keep things the same. HIM for me, there was nothing Him to hold onto and I began to cry. Standing in my fathers house sobbing I had to find something of him, I found a coat in the closet and put it on and went back outside. I went around back for I remembered he had built some rooms on. He never like the new house it was square had no personality. As I made my way I saw a room that was built in his style and I remembered him telling me about it and how I would be proud of him for he even put curtains on the windows. And there it was a few rooms like the old house with curtains and a little sheet rock, the old house with improvement. The same indoor outdoor feel that gave it the smell of my childhood, dirt and mold I think but comforting to me. I sat in his chair, cried some more, looking around I noticed he had started to replaced the books he lost in the fire. As I reached up one book stood out to me. I never read it but remember him telling me about it. Letters from a woman homesteader and as I read a little I realized something important to me. We were not just poor dirty hippies, the image I have been running from my hole adult life, I realized we were original homesteader and my father was always a cowboy at heart. Looking around that room with his Cowboy and Indian battle models everywhere. Yes looking back it was always cowboys and Indians and shot outs and the old west. There was as many pictures that would fit on the walls of old movie stars, he loved movies and it is so fitting that he worked at the Garberville Theater that my sister Brigette and her husband Chris Brannan owns. He lived his life just the way he wanted.

He took us from the city where I was born, Hollywood Ca. to raise us the way he always wanted to be raised. You see, my father was the next up coming film maker back in his day, at least he thought so and he gave that up to raise us right. No rules except the law of nature. His middle name was Order, given to him by his abusive Father and he wanted to be free.
I sit in this room cherishing every memory of the father who did his best to showed me how to love. He made some whoppers of mistakes along the way but in the end he shared his love, wisdom, faith and the joy for the struggle of life. He always believed that the struggle of your life is where your heart is so embrace it. I totally understood that now, as I struggle with the loss of the father I love so much. He was my father, my mother and my best friend, the one person who understood and loved me just as I am. The love I feel and the pain of that loss is equal. Joy and Sorrow and I except my love and I'm thankful.
As I left I decided to take as many half dead potted plant that would fit in the back of my truck home with me.
The grasshoppers had mowed down all my plants and I had gotten some chicken and duck to eat them, witch was working well on the grasshopper problem until the neighbors dog killed all my ducks and chickens. I came out one morning to a mass murder of ducklings and chicks all over my ranch. Heart breaking, my little friends.
I got new little duck but I knew I couldn’t let them run free so I decided to build a pen. I started to gather wood from old scraps around the ranch and just like my dad used to do, I started hammering. Old school style, even though I have power tools now, that wasn’t the point, I needed to build it like my Dad.
It was about a hundred and five that day so decide to build my new chicken pen in the shade of the hay barn. I gather some wire to serve as more hands to helping me hold this thing together while I hammer. I can’t tell you how much fun I had building this pen but before I know it I had nailed so many boards trying to get this thing to stand on it own, the pen was way to heavy to move by hand now. I pull my truck around and tried to slide it up two boards on to the bed of my truck. It would hang over but looked like with the tail gate down it might fit. It’s really heavy and falling apart so I lower it back down. I will have to wait until I find someone to help me.

My son came home for the weekend and was nice enough to take it part way apart and put it on a trailer for me to move and reassemble later.

Notice the fine workmanship here;0)

I put the pen under a tree and got the chicken wire on it and there it was, my new chicken coop. I still need a run for them but I had a pen to protect them from dogs or Coyotes and it didn't coast but a little chicken wire. All it needs now is some plants to grow up around it and a top so they won't fly out when the grow up.

I had been in the process of fixing my place up with some old wire I found lying in the grass. I had forgotten about it and then I found some pipe my ex husband had left eight years ago, half buried in the dirt. Rock I have lots of rock on my ranch and my fences need mending so I went to work.

The last conversation I had with my father I was complaining about my life, my love life and how it never works out, my work, how tired I was, he got mad at me and told me to stop wasting my energy crying about men and save my ranch. And then the phone went dead and he had a massive stroke an hour later, he was never able to speak again.

With the inspiration of my dads plants I brought back with me, I went to work. I'm a little embarrassed that I had this stuff laying around and waited so long to get it working for me but better late than never. God Blessa

Day Thirty Seven: It’s another hot day and Happy is quite. I get the play out by running him around the round pen. He is lazy today and I think I’m working as hard as he is keeping him going so I decide to get on. He is good today, walk , trot and loped both directions nicely. I put a slow sheep in the pen and ask Happy to track it. He is a natural and hooks on with only a few minutes. He is still green so I try to keep it slow but Happy wants to eat this little thing and I have to pull him up. He get nervous, like before with me pulling on his mouth but the sheep keeps his attention and he is happy to follow the sheep again. I follow the sheep about 15 minute and Happy is stopping with the sheep and waiting.

Lazy Happy

Day Thirty Six: The wind died down today and it’s a pretty nice day out so I saddle Happy and take him to the round pen. Bit him up until he is done playing and wants to stop. I step up on him and he starts to walk off when I ask him to stand, he starts to get upset again so I take a deep breath and just sit there for a few minutes. I was happy that Happy decided to stay and relax with me. I start him off to the left walking him keeping him relaxed and then I start ask him to move off my leg. He is good and remembers the last lesson well. I stop and sit for a bit, letting him take a deep breath. He is still a little nervous to the right but works through it faster today for it is heating up and the wind isn’t blowing. Happy starts to get lazy and I have to kick him hard when asking him to take a step to the inside. Today I feel the need for spurs but I will wait and see if he is still grabbing his ass tomorrow. Hot horses go through this faze when they work through their fear and relax, they get dull and heavy. It is important to push them through this faze gently. It can be frustrating and you want to put your spurs on and hick them through it but it’s better to start kicking softly then harder until he starts to respect your leg and moves off again. It feels like your riding a Mac truck around but let him be lazy, when he learns to think and not just react is when it gets good. Keep asking him until he will step across himself without having to kick him hard. The challenge here is to get him through this lazy faze without making him nervous again so be happy with this new lazy horse, realizing he will not move off as before when nervousness was driving him. Remember less is more;0)

Day Thirty Five: The work around the ranch has taken my time lately and It has been a few weeks sense I have been able to work Happy. The wind is blowing pretty hard today so we decide to take him in the indoor and do a recap lesson . I lunge him until he is quite and then have Khristen ride him as a passenger while I lunge him. He stays quite until Khristen starts to guide him around the pen while I stand still in the center. When we get to the stop, Happy wants to stop and face me but she holds him straight. He starts to get nervous and dance around. The more she asks him to stand still the more nervous he becomes starting to grab his ass a little. I tell her to let him turn into me when stopping if he will not stand straight but make him go the others way using his energy instead of trying to contain it. He learns to stop and stand still going to the left but still is nervous on the right. She finally gets Happy to stop and stand still to the right, When she starts to dismount and Happy grabs his ass and jumps. We have to do the lesson again until Happy is relaxed again and Khristen was able to step down without him getting upset.

Day Thirty Four: Today I warm Happy up by round penning him until he is done playing and is ready to listen and relax. It’s important he is ready to slow down cause I want to teach him about moving off the outside leg and rein. I will have to bump my leg on him and we will needs to have worked through his jumpiness. I mount Happy and he walks off. I ask him to stand still and wait for me to ask him to move off. Happy gets nervous and starts to push through the reins, as I insist He pushes harder and then starts to tuck his ass and run, I have to pull his head around but he starts to panic so I step off. I lunge him until He settle again and then I start to flap the stirrups and make him jump until he decided do stand still even though I’m a little rude about it now. It is common for a horse to get nervous about leg at this point realizing that I’m asking for something definite. Work through it by pushing him past his thinking, leaping out from under me is a good idea. If he wants to leap to the side I keep making him leap. He will tire of this game and stand still. I mount again and Happy is back to relaxed and ready to listen. He remembers the last lesson well and will move off my inside leg and rein. I recap both direction and then start the lesson of moving off out side leg and rein. Move slowly and ask him to stop forward motion by lifting the outside rein and applying outside leg to keep him moving with a step to the inside. This drill is the beginning of teaching him to spin but most important in teaching basic guide. Keep it simple and slow and he will learn this lesson in one lesson, just one step that’s it, simple one step to the inside when I bring the rein back and across his neck bumping with my leg to keep him moving, then release pressure when he takes one step