They named the calf after me, due to the fact that in the first picture they ever saw of me, I appeared to have very long legs. Patricia Long Legs lived 11 years, right up until November of 2021 when Pop passed away. She went the same week he did. I can’t help but wonder about the timing. Perhaps she died of sadness, or maybe she just knew her life had been an hourglass representing the time Pop and I would have to share together. I’d wanted to be brave and bold enough to tramp out into the pasture and skin her corpse, make a nice rug of her, at least pry her head off her bones. But too deep in grief and too filled with sentimentality, six months later I returned to find her head in a box on the back porch, retrieved as a favor I’d half-heartedly requested. Defeated, I turned away, wishing I’d done better by her.
Finally tonight, almost two years since she and Pop passed, after the hubbub of this
Fourth of July’s Christmas in July Celebration, during which she tolerated the humiliation of a red bow between her horns as she lay propped against a tree, I hung her skull on the house, cracked a Dos XX for both her and Pop, and then went to the river.
There, I recalled so many nights at the dinner table eating ribeyes, debating the fate of Patricia’s grade-A prime parts and deciding adamantly she would never see the fate of our plates; no matter how much I love a good beef tenderloin. I am happy to report the critters of Rio Frio gave thanks and ate well that November.
As the Frio tumbled at my feet, I also thought about Pop, about how I have yet to bring myself to write a blog post about his passing, how this would have to do for now. Before Pop passed away, I’d always stay after the Fourth of the July until July 16, so Pop and Nanny and I could celebrate our reunion anniversary. Two years on, I no longer hold to that tradition. But at least Patricia Long Legs now inhabits her well-deserved spot on the wall. I hung her head where Nanny suggested, and did it alone as I had always imagined I would, just not so soon.
As Patricia Long Legs’ legacy becomes another fixed and treasured feature of our homestead, I swig my beer and imagine the day when the story of her birth and my and Pop’s reunion at Camelot becomes another of our family’s long-treasured tales of those who came so many years before.
