The cute little old lady said she “got up to go to the icebox.” I realized that she and I were only two people in the room who had a clue what she was talking about. My mind went back to the days of my youth when as a three-year-old we lived in the old World War II barracks, on the second floor. Every day the Iceman came stumping and jingling up the stairs, with a huge block of ice hanging in the steel tongs, and he clunked the block into our icebox, on the left side compartment. The food that needed to be kept cold to prevent spoiling was kept in that ice box.

Sometime later I remember seeing my first refrigerator. It was at my grandma’s house. There I saw the wonder that science had produced. The name on the door was “cold spot.” It was a white porcelain cabinet about 5 feet high with a round “layer cake” of coils on top. It was colder inside than our icebox.

We still have an icebox in our house, though. It is now used as an extra storage cabinet. It hasn’t had a block of ice chunked in it for over fifty years, but it’s pretty and I’m glad it’s there. Who knows maybe one day the power will fail and will need to use it. No, I have no idea where we’d go to get a block of ice. With the type of winters we have in Texas we rarely see ice, much less thick ice. I guess we’d have to go back to the really old method of eating everything fresh, and then throwing out the leftovers for the hounds. Biggest problem we’d have if we didn’t have a fridge – where would we put all the pictures of family, and the grandkids artwork?

We never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity – Abu Eben

There has been much bumping together of gums concerning staying fit over the past few decades. All kinds of expensive exercise gadgets are advertised on late-night television. However I don’t seem to find the time to ride an exercise bicycle. I am too busy walking back and forth the hundred yards from house to barn, as I forget something at one place or the other and a have to go back for it. Then, after lugging fifty pound feed sacks, and delivering buckets full of feed to not so patient equine diners, I don’t have much desire to lift weights for exercise. Finally, shoveling, sweeping, hooking up implements to tractors, hauling water hoses like sailors pulling hawsers, takes up even more of the gym time I could have had. As I walk circles, training young horses in hand before I get on to ride, I clock miles every day. Mounted,clenched upon the “hurricane deck of a Texas cow pony” my “core “gets plenty of “Pilates” trying to stay balanced in the saddle and not become a yard dart. By the end of the day, frankly, I am too pooped to do exercises. So I sit on the porch in my rocking chair and sip my beer while I watch the sunset. A friend, helping me work colts one day, remarked as we sweated and cussed, with a group of stubborn three-year-old colts “I don’t know why we get paid to do this, the horses do all the work! “I guess one of these days I’ll have to start driving the thirty miles to the gym, to get my exercise. Meanwhile, I am too tired, I’d rather sit on the porch. Where’s my Lone Star long neck?

Sitting out on the porch this morning, I looked up at the sky, and there was Orion, where the Milky Way had been the night before. I went in to build coffee, and returning to the porch the fog was so thick I could no longer see the stars. That fog reminded me of what a pivotal role water plays in our lives. The reason we can exist on this planet is that here we can have water in all three forms, or states, of matter, solid, liquid and vapor. For example, the snow and ice of the Rocky Mountains melts into the streams that cross two or more states to reach the sea, in our case, the Gulf of Mexico. Then finally, as in this morning, we have fog, or in the worst case, on a hot summer day we have ninety percent humidity.

The Brazos River, which runs between our county and Brazos County, starts in New Mexico, a little north of Clovis, where we once lived, in an arroyo called Running Water Draw. That’s a misnomer, as I never saw water in it running OR standing. But it’s the headwaters of the meandering Brazos River which also accepts a contribution from the creek called Second creek that runs through our ranch and waters our grass. This year, thanks to legendary rainfall amounts, Second Creek has been running almost continuously. Today we had fog, which left a heavy dew on our grass. In a few weeks that same moisture will become frost, as the fall temperatures drop into the 30s. Another form of solid water, hail, has claimed crop damage to our north, and in the spring the floods wiped out homes in the flats of Fort Bend county on the lower Brazos to our south.Great delays in spring planting have been the subject of many conversations at our local watering hole, the Caldwell coffee shop called DK’s. The coffee, even, is made with water, though cowboys say, “damn little water.” So cut me off a slice of cowboy coffee, please.