One thought on “[Prompt] May 31 – Best Friends and Endings”

1. I still can hardly believe I have written a story a day for 31 days. What fun it has been. I dedicated this story to my best friend:

   THE RANCH

   You don’t know Judy like I do. She’s a dynamo, all red headed 5 feet and 100 pounds of her. When she retired from her corporate job, she returned to her first love, horses. She started a 25 acre ranch in the foothills of North Georgia. Nothing and no one was going to stop her.
   Girl friends helped her build her barn, a tall metal structure framed with iron girders and covered with sheet metal. Did I say her girl friends helped her build her barn? Honey, there’s nothing those ladies can’t do. They rented posthole diggers, and cranes, bucket loaders, and concrete mixers from Lowes, and they built themselves a barn. They created stalls from old barn wood they bought at auction, and put metal flashing on the tops of the stall sides so the horses couldn’t chew the wood.
   They celebrated the barn’s completion with a cookout and with a trip to the nearest SPA. They are ladies, after all. All the gals rented stalls from Judy and moved their horses in. They took in rescue horses as much as they could afford to and acquired a yellow tom cat, Oscar, to keep away the rats.
   One day a raccoon got in the barn. As soon as Judy walked into the barn, she knew something was wrong. The horses were stomping their feet and nickering. It was just at daylight, and the barn was dark inside. She flipped on the lights and saw the problem. Oscar had cornered the coon in the back of the barn against the side of a stall. The coon had his teeth bared and was slapping at Oscar. Judy didn’t have a weapon, but she knew coons were often rabid. She took down a rake and a long-handled wrench from the tool wall and approached the two animals. When she tried to pull Oscar away from the coon, Oscar attacked it, instead. The coon bit him and scratched him.
   Judy pushed the coon away from Oscar with the rake and nudged Oscar away from the coon. She pushed the coon further back into the corner. The coon suddenly jumped up onto the rake and started climbing up the handle toward Judy. She dropped the rake and threw the wrench at him. She missed and the coon ran for the door. She ran for the wrench and threw it again. This time, she hit the coon squarely and he fell to the floor. She retrieved the rake and poked the coon. He didn’t move. She put on work gloves and gathered up the coon remains to take to the vet. She examined Oscar and decided he needed to go to the vet, also. She loaded them up in her shiny yellow pickup and took off for the vet’s office. Sure enough the raccoon was rabid. She was glad Oscar had had his rabies vaccine. When she got back to the barn, she burned her work gloves and washed down the barn floor with a bleach solution and then, fed the horses. All in a day’s work.
   Another time, there was an unusually heavy snow fall. North Georgia doesn’t get heavy snows, as a rule, but one winter they got 7 inches of wet heavy snow over night. Guess who was up on the barn roof knocking snow off. Yep, it was Judy and a couple of the girl friends who helped build the barn. To be safe, they tied ropes around the roof line poles so they wouldn’t slip off. Dressed in their parkas and tennis shoes, they shoved snow off the roof. That time, they celebrated with hot chocolate and chocolate chip cookies. One good thing about owning a ranch is that the physical work involved allows one to eat just about anything, without gaining weight.
   Is owning a ranch worth all the work and the headaches? All you have to do is to listen to Judy talk about her “babies” and you will know they are her bliss.

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