Sharkie

 

(a stellar cowgirl in her day. Forgot the name- sorrry!)

 

 

Sharkie was a horse.

 

My Great Great Gpa earned rights to him for breaking him in.

 

In some town, in some corral a horse was onery as hell and no one could break him.

 

 Doesn't this sound like John Wayne, or something? The horse ran around the fenced corral like he was on prednisone. Circling it like a mad man.

 

The offer was made, Gpa somehow jumped on him as he circled past and then proceeded to break Sharkie in.

 

He took that thing they use with tassels--- why do I have to pull a word memory loss right now in a story??-- put it over the horse's nose, to stop him from breathing and then bit down on his ear.

 

Yes. Bit his ear.

Hard.

 

It brought Sharkie to his knees.

 

But I think Sharkie wasn't named such until later because sometimes, the horse would bite Gpa.

Gpa would chuckle and say: "Sometimes he gets the Devil in him." Because Sharkie was a good horse, respected my gpa and did what he was supposed to do.

Most of the time. 

 

I have heard this story many times. Padre tells it like Uncle David tells stories in winter time in the winter room from the book of the same title that Jaden and I are reading.

 

There, in the Winter Room, which would be like a living room to us but they only use it when it is winter; when all the work is done, that is where Uncle David and Nels sit with the family and tell the SAME stories

. About where they were from, how Uncle David married the beautiful Alida, she became pregnant and then the two die in childbirth.

And he dies with with them.

Except he comes to America to become a Woodcutter. 

 

The same stories.  Every winter. Told the same way. The same pauses. As the two boys sit in front of a snapping fireplace while their father whittles and their mother knits socks and mittens.

 

 The same way that I listen to the stories that my parents and grandparents tell and have told over the years. 

Does this happen in your homes?

 

The same stories told as if on a recording? Has technology replaced the time that today's kids have to stop and listen to stories from before? The stories that are part of their history? Their story? To they feel a connection to a line that went before them?

I wonder.