I swung the gate's two sides together, closing it. After wrapping the chain around both parts, I dropped a link through the slot. There are two latching chains on a cattle gate, just for safety, so I repeated the action on the other side and turned to walk away.
Then something stopped me.
"Nope. That's not right," I thought. I turned around, lifted the latch chains out of their slots, and unwrapped them. When I redid the five-second job, I pulled each chain in the opposite direction from what I had done at first. "Left chain goes counter-clockwise, right chain clockwise. There. That's right."
You can wrap either chain either direction. Why does it matter? Because you always want to leave the dangling chain end hanging outside the pen. If you use a counter-clockwise wrap on the right chain, for example, you'll leave the chain's tail hanging inside the pen, where a curious cow with a curious tongue might, eventually and accidentally, work the chain link out of the slot.
The chances of cattle doing this, and especially doing it twice--once for each chain--are small. But rounding up a loose pen of cattle could take a day or more, with lots of stressing and sweating and maybe even some cussing. So my farmer friend taught me early on to leave the chains dangling on the outside of the pen.
I grew up in the middle of Houston and Dallas, concrete and shopping malls, where we didn't pen up cattle, drive tractors, bale hay or gather eggs.
But thirty years ago today, I married my best friend and drove off to Nebraska to start putting down roots--literally and figuratively. Decades later, as I walked away from the now-properly-chained gate, it struck me that, over those thirty years, I have learned a truckload of tidbits and trivia about rural living. Things like how to chain a cattle gate.
But thirty years ago today, I married my best friend and drove off to Nebraska to start putting down roots--literally and figuratively. Decades later, as I walked away from the now-properly-chained gate, it struck me that, over those thirty years, I have learned a truckload of tidbits and trivia about rural living. Things like how to chain a cattle gate.
To celebrate these thirty years of marriage and country living, I've made an online journal that I'm calling "Thirty Years from City Slick." It covers thirty different bits of learning that I've acquired in the last three decades as I adapted to a new framework from which to view the world.
I'll be posting these thirty notes, one for each year I've been a farmer's wife, right here on this blog over the next few weeks and months. Some of the thoughts are pretty small, like how to chain a gate. Some are more significant. And one of them was life-changing.
I hope you enjoy my discoveries. Happy anniversary, John.
