A couple of weeks back in Sharp and the memories haven’t gotten easier.
I don’t think they’re going to.
Earl’s ranch sits on eighty acres of rolling limestone and scrub oak about four miles outside of town.
It’s not much by Texas standards—not a working cattle operation, not a showplace, just a piece of land that one family has held for three generations through stubbornness and will.
Earl ran horses here for decades.
Bred some, trained some, shod all of them.
He was the best farrier in this part of the state before his back started going, and even after that, he kept working until the arthritis in his hands made it impossible to hold a rasp steady.
That’s when he taught us.
Rose and me, sixteen years old, standing in this same barn while Earl demonstrated how to position yourself under a horse’s belly without getting killed.
Rose was terrified.
I was thrilled.
She had the gentle hands—could calm any animal, could coax a hoof up with a whisper.
I had the strength and the stubbornness.
Together we made one decent farrier.
Separately, Rose went on to teach elementary school and I went on to make it my life.
The barn is the first stop every morning.
Five horses left on the property—Earl’s old string, none of them young, all of them fat and spoiled and used to a man who can’t take care of them anymore.
I feed, water, and muck stalls.
Check the paint mare’s left front where she’s been favoring it.
Make a mental note to trim her next week.
The work is automatic—my body knows the choreography even when my brain is still sitting at Earl’s kitchen table trying to understand words like “staging” and “metastasis” and “treatment protocol.”
By the time I’m back inside, Earl’s at the table with coffee and the paper.
He looks like a thinner version of the man I remember—same sharp blue eyes, same jaw, same way of holding himself like the ground underneath him is his and always will be.
But the flesh is going.
The chemo is eating him from the inside out, stripping away the bulk that used to make him look like a man who could wrestle a steer to the ground one-handed.
His wrists are too thin.
His cheekbones are too visible.
He’s wearing a flannel that used to fit tight across his shoulders and now hangs off him like a flag on a still day.
“Morning, girl.”
“Morning.” I pour coffee. Sit across from him. Try not to stare at the way the light catches the new hollows under his eyes. “How’d you sleep?”
