The frost was so thick on the windshield that morning that I had to scrape it twice.
It was the first week of November. Cold enough for frost. Not cold enough for snow. That in-between kind of cold in Iowa that gets into your bones and stays there until April.
By the time I got the truck warmed up, Mom had already been out in the barn for an hour and a half.
She was seventy-four years old. She still got up at four-thirty every morning. She still pulled on Dad’s old brown Carhartt coat, the one with the torn left pocket she refused to let anybody fix. And she still walked out to that barn in the dark with a flashlight in one hand and a coffee thermos in the other.
She never missed a feeding. Not once. Not when she had the flu in 2019. Not the morning after Dad’s funeral. Not ever.
“Jess,” she said when I came into the barn, “we’re about out.”
She was standing by the feed bin, looking down into it. I came over and looked too. There was maybe enough left for one more day. Two, if we stretched it.
“I thought Luke picked some up last week,” I said.
“He did. Ten bags. That was all they had.” She snapped the lid shut. “We need twenty more to get through to the next delivery.”
Our family had raised cattle outside Redfield, Iowa, for three generations. My great-grandfather bought the first hundred and sixty acres in 1931, right in the middle of the Depression, when everybody told him he was crazy. My grandfather added another eighty. My dad added the big red barn and built the herd up to almost two hundred head.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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