Two Little Cowboys

When I look at this picture of Cade and me, I always feel a wave of affection that is hard to explain.

It is one of those pictures that seems to hold a whole piece of childhood inside it.

I do not remember the exact day the photo was taken, but I know where we were. It was taken in the ranch house, standing in front of the hutch where Mom kept her china. I remember that piece of furniture well. Mom and Dad sold it when we were still young, maybe during one of the times when money was tight. 

My guess is that Mom took the photo. Back then, most of our family pictures were taken with a Polaroid camera. Those instant photos seemed a little magical to us kids. You would take the picture, pull it out of the camera, wait a bit, and then peel the photograph apart to see the image.

SIDE NOTE: The camera we used for our family photos during those years was a Polaroid Automatic Land Camera 210. Dad also used that same camera when we registered the thoroughbred colts each year. The registration paperwork required photographs of the colt's markings, so the Polaroid camera was the fastest way to get pictures ready to mail with the forms. If you are curious about the camera itself, you can read more about it here: Polaroid Automatic Land Camera 210.

Cade and I were probably about three and four years old here. My best guess is that it was sometime during the summer of 1971, just before I turned four in September. 

Cade and me playing cowboy in the ranch house, around 1971.
I have the vest this time. Cade is enjoying the moment.

What I remember most about that time is how much we loved playing cowboy.

We did not have fancy toys. Most of the time, our horses were just sticks we picked up around the yard or around the ranch. A few times, we even used a broken shovel or pitchfork handle. That was good enough for us. If you had a stick and a little imagination, you had a horse.

Dad made us lariats out of sisal rope. They were not real cowboy-quality ropes, but to us they were perfect. I still remember how he made them. He doubled one end of the rope back on itself and wove the loose end into the rope to make the loop. On the other end, he braided the strands back into the rope so it would not fray or come untwisted.

Once we had those ropes, everything became something to rope.

We roped bushes, fence posts, and sometimes the dogs. Penny, our boxer, was usually a willing playmate. The other dogs (Australian Shepherds) were not nearly as cooperative.

The best part of the cowboy outfit was the cowhide vest and the matching chaps. Grandpa Jasperson bought them for my dad when he was a boy. Cade and I took turns wearing them. Sometimes one of us wore the vest while the other wore the chaps. Other times, like in this picture, one of us ended up wearing the vest while the other was just as happy wearing the hat.

I still remember how cool it felt to run your hand over the cowhair on the hide. To a little kid, it felt like wearing a real piece of the Wild Wild West.

Cade is just a little more than a year younger than me, and growing up, we were almost always together. When siblings are that close in age, you end up sharing a lot of the same world at the same time.

I have great memories growing up with all of my brothers and sisters, but Cade and I had a slightly different kind of companionship simply because we were so close in age. We were often asked by others if we were twins. We were not, of course, but at times it almost felt that way.

Some of my favorite memories of Cade are from when we were a little older.

Dad had a small bobsled replica with runners that were only a couple of feet long. One year, he fixed up a little hayrack for it and replaced the tongue. Cade and I used to hook ourselves up to that sled and pull it all over the yard like a team of horses. We were a pretty well-matched team. This was one of the many ways we played as if we were horses while growing up. 

We used it for chores like pulling the grain buckets to grain the steers. But we also used it just for pretend. We liked to pretend we were feeding the cows. We had a sleigh trail around the yard by the house that led to a pretend haystack. We also had a pretend feed ground in the stock yard behind the house.

As teenagers in the winter, we spent a lot of time tubing. We were supposed to do our chores first, but sometimes the snow was too tempting, and we would go tubing before the chores were done. That occasionally got us in trouble, especially if milking the cow or feeding the steers had been postponed a little too long.

The best tubing run was the hill in the buck pasture. When the snow and ice were just right, you could ride all the way down the hill, across the canal, and up the other side of the canal bank. When conditions were just right, we could even go airborne as we came out of the canal. Another good run was the hill above the loafing shed.

Eventually, Cade and I outgrew the cowboy gear. For a while, I remember the vest and chaps hanging in the tack room or on the coat hooks along the stairs going down to the basement.

Recently, I asked my siblings if anyone knew what had happened to them.

Kent said he remembers wearing them a lot when he rode with Grandpa Jasperson.

Kerianna told me she still has the vest. She took it home at one point to sew it back together, and it has been sitting in her sewing room ever since. 

While a couple of my siblings remember the chaps being left out in the weather and getting ruined. Kelly says he has them. 

The fact that they still exists somehow makes me happy.

Every time I see this picture, I am reminded of how much Cade and I enjoyed growing up together. We had a lot of fun on the ranch. Playing cowboy was just one small part of it.

But it was a good part.

Whenever I see this picture, I feel that same sense of closeness again. Cade and I were just two little cowboys on the ranch, wearing a piece of our dad’s childhood.

And I would not trade those days for anything.