Paul Marchant

Davin is my neighbor. He’s in the eighth grade, and he just turned 14. Like a lot of 14-year-old boys, sometimes his attention span rivals that of a cedar post, but he’s a big stout kid, so he comes in pretty handy as a neighbor, especially since I don’t have any kids at home anymore.

Once springtime finally arrived, I got to thinking it might actually be possible to think about the spring branding.

I was enjoying a dandy start to the new year. January was like a heavenly dream. We’d had some snow and a couple of cold stretches in late December, but the first few weeks of the year felt more like April than January.

I was having a discussion with Audrey the other day. I consider her kind of a kindred spirit, since she’s a farm girl turned journalist/editor who, like my wife, hails from a small-town dairy farm.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me well, but I was running late. I had to make the 230-mile drive to the Salt Lake airport to catch a flight to Dallas on my way to Tulsa.

We finally had most of the calves weaned. As a matter of fact, on the late October day when we gathered the bulk of the cows to pull the calves, you couldn’t have asked for better weather. After a two-week stretch where we’d seen the temperatures dip into the teens, we were experiencing some unusually nice weather.