THE FAMILY PORTRAITS CAME DOWN. 
Cassie was twenty-four when she decided her baby needed a horse to make him happy. Abruptly Cassie was competing with the Creighton Resort people for carpenters and tradesmen to build a barn, pens, and fenced areas for her horse, then for the vet’s attention when that one horse turned into a small herd she allowed to roam over her property. The recluse was once again the subject of speculation in her community, but to their disappointment, Cassie stayed within her thorny rosebush enclosure.
Cassie learned to ride and found she enjoyed it. Soon she used her baby’s horses to ride the fence lines, checking on her roses, making sure the pesky, enthusiastic new golfers on the other side of her roses stayed on their side, and using the time to think about Joseph, for a while picturing him growing up with some anonymous family, bizarrely wondering if he would like golf when he got older. The Creighton Resort golfers irritated the hell out of her from the first, though, what with their balls coming over her fence and their blatant use of her shade trees as a congregating place. She decided Joseph definitely would not be interested in golf.
Over time her menagerie grew. Cassie got her baby a kitten, then another dog, then a calf, and then graduated to some cows and a bull. After seeing some longhorn cattle on someone else’s ranch Cassie got some of those. And after watching “Lawrence of Arabia” one afternoon Cassie decided her baby would enjoy a camel, but she couldn’t find one. She kept looking, coming real close to signing the paperwork on some used-up circus camels, decided to think about it later and kept changing her mind.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Copyright by Gretchen Rix
Photos by Roxanne Rix
http://barnesandnoble.com/c/gretchen-rix
