Thoughts on a Dark and Stormy Night

It’s come to this…sitting in an office littered and cluttered so beyond belief that I’d burn it if I didn’t share the building with two other humans and six equines.


And if I didn’t love it so much.

The Gala is coming, and this is the week before the Gala, and it is a dark time indeed.

Before the Gala is the Golf Tournament, but that’s easy. Guys (and a few gals) show up. Guys grip funny sticks. Guys chase little white rocks over the countryside.

The Gala, by comparison, is a monster. We must gather great groups of people together and inspire one another to unnatural acts, like asking for sponsorships and donations and goods and services.

We must secure the hall, hire the band, and work far into the nighttime hours logging items, describing items, ferreting out information that got lost in the shuffle, muttering dire imprecations against one another and altogether forgetting that which we learned in Sunday school concerning proper Christian behavior toward one another.

Then we must go to large warehouse stores and buy quantities of consumable beverages and haul them about here and there. We must stuff golf goody bags, and rent table linens, and find someone to get certified to be a bartender for five hours out of his lifetime.

We must proofread programs and bid sheets and signs again, and again, and again—finding ever more tiny little things to change, until the originator of these things is ready to strangle us but we’re lucky and live 40 miles away from him.

We think dark thoughts concerning our true vocation as regards Down Home Ranch and recall that people actually write us things like “We’re wanting to start a Ranch like you have. We dream of taking our coffee out the back door in the morning and gazing into the woods as day breaks…”

And we laugh. Bitterly.

But then we look at the video a young friend put together of our Ranchers and we remember, “Oh yes, this is what it’s all about.”

This is why we do what we do, and God knows that nothing else in the world would be worth it all.

But they are.

See you at the Gala.