by Rhonda Erickson

Created on: October 07, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

"Kitten"

The summer of 1972 stands out vividly, and bittersweet in my memories as a child growing up in East Texas. I turned fourteen that spring, and had lived the entirety of my young years there, in a house supplied to us by the owner of a large cattle and horse ranch, where my Daddy worked as the foreman. Normally, the summer vacation months from school seemed to go by much too fast, but this was the summer before I was to start to high school in the fall. As I anxiously, and not so patiently, anticipated beginning my freshman year, the hot, muggy Texas summer days were dragging by at the pace of a crippled snail. This was also the summer that Kitten died.

Summer was the busiest time of the year at the ranch, not that there was much of a slow time on a ranch that size, at anytime of the year..... but summer was when there was the most work to be done. My Daddy was a firm believer in "an idle mind is the devil's workshop", and my two brothers and I were taught the values and ethics of a hard days work from the time we could sit up on the back of a horse. This firmness was tendered with my Daddy's gentle, loving nature when it came to teaching..... his children and his horses. Those were the values passed to him from his father... my Grandpa....... my hero, and the man that taught me just about every single thing I know about horses.

My Grandpa, being of American Indian and Irish decent, was not a real big man.... about 5 foot 10 inches, a hundred and sixty pounds or so.... but he was larger than life to me. I loved him from the top of his old tattered cowboy hat, that never left his head.... except at the dinner table and in church, to the tips of those pointy toed boots he always wore. I loved the way he smelled, like horses and sweet feed, and the way his spurs jingled when he walked across our wooden floors. His legs were bowed from spending more time in the saddle than he ever did anywhere else, as was the cause of every pair of his jeans being worn out thin in the seat, and he walked with a little limp from an old horse related hip injury. His hair was thinning on top, a little long on the sides, and he seldom shaved on a regular basis. His skin was the color of tanned leather, and had about the same texture. His huge hands were scarred and ruff as sandpaper, often still looking dirty even right after he washed them, and he always had a rip or tear somewhere on his shirt. I adored my Grandpa, and everything about him. He loved me just as strongly as I

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