A lot of my childhood was spent outside. I used to live right next to Mexico on the Rio Grande, and me and the neighborhood kids used to like to play around that area. We'd fly makeshift kites and hit each other with wiffle ball bats see who could throw their rocks into Mexico, all that sort of stuff. My grandparents had a huge backyard with tons of animals (goats, chickens, peacocks, quail, dogs, ducks, geese, and they used to own horses). I'd spend a lot of my time there, feeding the animals and trying as hard as I could to run away from that fucking mallard. It'd always try to shred my face off for some reason. I hated it. Then there was the ranch where there were even more goats and more dogs. I had so many things I would do there. There was a pond for fishing, the land was coated with arrowheads, there were some abandoned vehicles and structures I'd make my way into, and then, of course, there was actual work that I could do like helping my grandfather castrate the ill-behaved goats build structures like barbecue pits and sheds, seriously, I helped my grandfather castrate a goat or two branding the goats and marking the ones that were too young to be branded, and other stuff that real ranchers do with their ranches unlike the kinds that just buy a strip of land to party and do drugs on (like the ranch I went to yesterday). Every time my grandfather would take us to the ranch, it was daytime and me and my brother would gaze at the crops and fields on the way there, and at night, we'd usually fall asleep in the truck back when it was a brand new model (I have only a few memories of being driven home in the brown Suburban I've posted here a few times), so it felt absolutely luxurious. When my dad would take us back from the ranch, we'd take off in the afternoon, and sometimes we'd go to a Dairy Queen in Zapata for ice cream (in case you were wondering why I love that chain so much, there's your answer). Since I spent all my time out there as a kid, I wanted to some day move out to a small town in the middle of nowhere, or on a ranch or something. The highways around here tend to be dead silent for some reason. And for some reason, hearing the sound of dirt and rocks being pushed around by tires or seeing a huge cloud of dust as someone arrives makes it a lot more exciting when company comes over. I wish we still had that ranch. Now that I can drive, I'd explore as much of that land as I could, even if there were bear and bobcat sightings there.
And before you start saying, "Red, I thought you were a lower middle class slob! How could you afford a big fat Texan ranch," the land was 1/6th of an area that was granted to my grandmother's parents by the King of Spain. When my great grandparents finished raising their kids, they divided the land so their 4 children would get a piece, and 2/6ths of the land would be sold. We lost the ranch when my grandfather put up my grandmother's land as collateral, and the bank took it without as much as giving him a warning (it's a very attractive piece of property, and the bank really couldn't wait to get their MANOS on it). There's apparently going to be a huge case over it because my grandfather wants it back, and he's going to sue the shit out of them when he gets the money (it's kind of sort of illegal to take someone's land without warning, even if that's how America was made).
Good times. :mrgreen:
