It’s 5:50 on the 6th of October.  Time to put on my shoes and walk down the road to my sister’s house.  Why do we do this?  Four aging siblings meet every Friday morning to do a 1 1/4-mile walk and visit, whether rain, snow, sunlight, dark, or windy.

It’s so warm here in my living room under my blanket.  Outside it’s cold and dark.  Do I really want to do this?  The truthful answer is no; but it’s tradition, it’s expected of me, and it’s always enjoyable.

I tentatively open the door to test the temperature.  Will my pullover sweatshirt be enough, or do I need a coat, too?  Stuffing my hands into my pockets to keep them warm, I decide that the sweatshirt is borderline adequate, and set out in the dark.

I’m immediately stunned.  There in the west, 30-degrees above the mountain, is a full moon.  Everything is bathed in moonlight.  I should run back and get Marjorie out of bed to see this, but she’s comfortable and warm like I was, and if I went back I’d miss the sights and my appointment.

I turn the corner and head down the road.  Again I’m stunned.  An orange and red dawn is trying to happen in the east.  Above the orange is a light blue sky that goes to dark blue to black as my gaze goes higher.  Thirty degrees above the eastern horizon is Venus, the second most brilliant thing in the sky.  The scenes are breathtaking.  I can’t decide whether to look east or west.  Venus and the moon are perfectly balanced in the sky.

At 6:00 my brothers simultaneously arrive in their vehicles as I walk through our sister’s gate.  She emerges from her house with her little dog.  One brother gets out of his pickup with his two canine companions.  The other walks to the back of his car and lets his daughter’s black lab out.  Halfway up the road I know that we’ll be met by my son’s big German shepherd.  Five excited and energetic dogs, and four humans ranging in age from 63 to almost 83 set off up the road.  I make them pause to drink in the sights on this cloudless, still, magical morning.  Tim informs us that he heard the elk bugling below his house as he got into his pickup.

“How many are there?” Ellen asks.

“Sixty or seventy, and some big bulls.  I watched them crossing the fence the other day.”

“How’s potato harvest coming?” I ask.

“Really good,” Tim says.  “They figure they got over 500 sacks to the acre on the last field.”

I comment, “Back in the day, my father thought they had a great harvest if they got 300 sacks to the acre.”

“That’s what my father said, too,” Mac adds with tongue in cheek.  “He’s the one who got potatoes started in this valley.  He went with his friend to Ashton, Idaho one spring, spent his time there planting potatoes, and was hooked.”

“I’d never heard that story,” I said.  “Are you half done yet, Tim?”

“Not quite,” Ellen answers for him.

“How come you’re operating the potato piler for them again, Ellen?” I ask.

“I guess they just couldn’t do without me.  Timmy hired a younger guy, but he couldn’t scramble up the pile like I can, so I got called.  And Tim, when I’m up on the pile, when I reach up and touch the ceiling, my hands are bent back like this, and Cameron tells me to add six more inches to the pile!  Is that all right!?”

“Beats me.  I don’t have to make the decisions any more.  Cameron is worried that all the potatoes aren’t going to fit in the cellar.”

“One of Timmy’s bulls was out on the road yesterday,” Ellen says.  “I couldn’t get hold of Mark, so I texted Savannah.  She said she’d take care of him on her 4-wheeler.  The bull went into Adam’s field.  I watched Savannah try to herd that bull with the 4-wheeler, and he wasn’t going to have anything to do with that idea.  And then she got the 4-wheeler stuck.  I texted her and asked if she needed help.  She said, ‘No, Mark will have to come and give this bull an attitude adjustment.’  A little later I saw Mark riding down the hill on his horse, and the bull was following him!”

“Teaching the bull to lead, huh?” Tim said.

“That would take a big horse to handle a bull like that,” Mac added.

“What I wonder is how Mark got the rope off the bull’s neck once he got him where he wanted him to go,” I mused.

“I had a cow with an attitude like that once,” Mac said.  “One year we pastured our cows at Hilgard.  At the end of the year we were missing eight cows.  Two or three years later I got a call from the brand inspector at Plush, Oregon.  That’s way down in southern Oregon.  A rancher was working his cows and found a stray with several brands on it.  I said it was ours, and that I’d come get it.  ‘No, don’t do that,’ the brand inspector said, ‘I have to come up your way anyway, so I’ll bring her.’

“We unloaded that cow and her calf in a corral, and she was on the prod.  We decided we’d better not let her out or we’d never see her again.  We were going to take her straight to the sale.  Brent wouldn’t let me get in the corral with her.  He bounced fist-sized rocks off her forehead to try to make her run up the chute, but all she’d do was face him.  I roped the calf and drug it into the trailer.  The cow followed her calf, but there was no way that she was going to get in that trailer.  Finally Brent trapped her in a small space and backed the trailer into her until she had no choice but to step aboard.

“We took her to the sale, and I told the receiving attendant to warn his workers because this cow was on the prod.  ‘Oh, we get that kind all the time,’ he said.  ‘We know how to handle them.’  That cow cleared the alley of men in nothing flat.”

Tim says, “This reminds me of what Fred Phillips told Vic Semingson when Vic told him he’d bought 80 acres and was going to get some cows.  He said, ‘Well, at least you’ll have something to talk about!’  Every cowman has stories to tell.”

“Look,” I said.  “Venus is just barely visible.  It’s 45-degrees above the horizon now, and fading out at 6:45.  And in another five minutes the moon will be setting over Red Mountain.

“Tim, look at your dog chasing that crow.  She thinks she can catch it!”

“Yeah, she has her dreams.  She’s actually a turkey dog!  Jan didn’t want the wild turkeys thinking they could come into the yard, so I trained the dog to chase them.  Turkeys is all she can think about.  We can be riding along in the pickup, and if I say to someone, ‘Look at the turkeys,’ she jumps up and gets excited.  If I want to talk about turkeys, I have to spell it!”

“Well, I was listening to a documentary about a border collie that knew 300 words, Ellen said.  “Someone would say, ‘Go in the next room and get the ball or bag or whatever,’ and the dog would come back with the right thing.”

“I heard about one that had a 500-word vocabulary.” Mac added..

“Dogs are smart people,” Tim agreed.

“Smarter than some people,” Mac added.  “I remember Mom once went to Phillips-Long Ford to buy a new pickup.  She had the cash in hand to pay for it.  She stood around for a while waiting for someone to help her, and they ignored her.  They all thought she was just a little old lady of no consequence, which wasn’t very smart of them.  She finally walked out, went over to Chet Smith’s, and bought her pickup.”

“There comes the sun!” Tim blurts out.

“What time is it, Ellen?” I ask.

“6:59.”

And so the conversation went.  I forgot that I thought I might get cold.  The morning went from dark to sunrise, and I’d gotten lost in my siblings’ remembrances and stories.  They all knew and remembered things I’d never known.  What interesting siblings I have.  We were never this close before.  As youngsters we were too far apart in age.  I escort them back to my sister’s place, and then retrace the quarter mile back up to my driveway.  They each walked a mile and a quarter, but I get an extra half mile more.

As I walk in my driveway I break off a bunch of green table grapes to put in my bowl of oatmeal for breakfast.  Then I slip through the grape trellis and pick a handful of red Heritage raspberries and some yellow Annes.

“I need to record this for posterity’s sake,” I think, “picking grapes and raspberries on October 6th!  These berries would just keep on producing if it didn’t frost.  What a great place.  What a great world.  What a great life.”