It all started in Shreveport, Louisiana. At a sale barn where they sell cattle. Yes...cattle. The sale barn was owned by family friends and "Aunt Mary" was looking for someone to help out in the office on Wednesday nights temporarily. She called me to see if I knew of anybody. Melrose Place had just ended and although I was single, I had no life. We struck a deal: if she would pay me in cheeseburgers and could wait until I got off my real job at the casino, I'd be happy to fill in for three months.
Confession: I had never seen a cow. I knew what they looked like and what they should sound like based on my early years with a "See and Say." The smell was not ideal. The people who gathered at this sale barn were foreign to me. They wore work jeans, with cowboy boots, long sleeved snap shirts, cowboy hats, and a general smattering of "organic material" known to come from the south end of a north bound animal. I was not impressed. At all. The men I was used to working with wore custom suits and expensive handmade Italian loafers.
Slowly over the weeks that I was there, I noticed that these men that I discounted deeply for not being designer clad were truly salt of the earth people. People who actually work hard and would help anybody who really needed it. Looks were not important, but your word was everything. My view had softened. At the end of the night I was helping a buyer with his tickets. He was young, polite and seemed shy. Last one being the biggest lie ever perpetuated. I asked him what kind of cows he bought, to which he replied the ones that make money. So, cash cows it is.
We started talking in August and were married in February. I didn't need him...but I wanted him. I didn't want to live another day without him. He was the first man I looked at and saw having babies with...growing old with...and where didn't matter. Age thirty was old enough to know what I wanted and not waste time over it. I quit my good job, sold my little house, packed up my antiques and little yappy dog, and moved to his remote ranch in Texas. Population 333. Included the dogs I'm sure. Directions to my house now included "turn off the paved road." My momma cried in the drive way the first time she came to see me there. My friends thought I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. I had lost my heart...and my mind followed.
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