The Round Up at Knutty Acres

Go ahead, make all the jokes you want about West Virginia and get it out of your system. Banjo music, moonshine, incest, poor dental hygiene, the works. I can assure you it's only partially true.

When Carl and I packed our bags for the family reunion at his folks' place in Harpers Ferry, I was under the impression that we'd be spending most of our time hanging out in the shade, floating down the Potomac River, and that maybe, just maybe, I'd find enough motivation to go running once or twice. Little did I know that we were to be dragooned into an animal-wrangling posse ruled by the iron fist of his mother Nancy. She's a lovely woman and was kind enough to lend me some clothes appropriate for such earthy endeavors.

Down on Knutty Acres (the affectionate name for the Kautz abode) there is a resident herd of some 70 hoofed beasts, a combination of goats and black bellied Barbados sheep (try saying that ten times fast). Our mission: to give the 40 new babies their tetanus shots. First, said wild beasts had to be extracted from the forests of sumac and Osage orange and herded into a small pen. From that pen they were pushed into an even smaller one, which then required one to wade in among the sheep and weed out the newbies, identified by small golden tags in their ears. Nancy was in charge of the shots because none of us wanted to get any closer to the needles than we had to; Carl, his sister Amy, and I were in charge of sheep-wrastling.
Here I am modeling the approved method of nabbing those fleecy buggers.
You'd think we were chopping off their ears instead of just cuddling them from the noises they made.
Nancy at work. You had to make sure you had the goats by the horns (even though they're not quite bulls they'll still do a number on you).
At the end of it all, Carl thought I looked so darn cute as a farm girl that he had to dress me up in the straw hat and shepherd's crook, and pose me with Lily Pearl on the porch swing. Lily thinks she's a dog and will follow you anywhere, even into a silly picture. Gee shucky darn!
By the close of the weekend we managed to catch 35 of our 40 targets, which isn't bad at all. We even got to spend plenty of time sitting in the shade, floating in the river, and yes, I even paddled my butt across the way to the C&O Canal trail for a couple jogs. The relatives were all convinced that I'd simply disappeared. Like any good family, this one loves to eat, so there was plenty of food all weekend long. Even when the electricity went out during the mother of all lightning storms and the hot sausages went cold in the crock pot, there wasn't even a glimmer of starvation as the tables groaned with 4 different pasta salads and 27 varieties of dessert. Good times were had by all.

And where was Bubba during all this, you may ask? He got to go on his very own vacation up to the beautiful San Juan Islands in Washington State, accompanied by my parents. He loved the swimming but wasn't so fond of the fireworks. Fun as it was, at the end of it all he, like us, was very glad to be home.