We drove down a road not too far from my sister’s new home in Tyler. We were in search of a herd of longhorns she’d seen several times out that way. East Texas, even in the wintertime, turned out to be more green than I’d imagined. There was an expectation of cactus and tumbleweeds and roaming longhorn though I know this vast state is much more than all that.
When both she and her husband mentioned that they’d seen longhorns out this way I became all the more interested in this pursuit. So down the road we drove several times during my visit in hopes of spotting that herd, even a stray, but we never did find them.
Each time, though, we passed by this curious sight of a tumbledown house with it’s roof still intact lying squarely on top of it’s foundation. Was it a gradual rotting away of an abandoned little homestead? A long ago leveling earthquake perhaps? What might have caused this implosion that dropped the roof down to the ground.
You know sometimes we get the greatest satisfaction or even amazement from something we weren’t in search of. Things we weren’t even going after or pursuing in any way just appear on our way to somewhere else. The unexpected sight of them intersects with a fleeting moment in our lives and we experience an “Oh wow” or an “Ah ha.” We’re out on a metaphorical drive through a particular phase of our lives when we come upon a thing that arrests our thoughts. Others may not ever see it. We want to find it again to share with them but the moment with its “Ah ha” was ours.
As for me my takeaway from our search for the elusive longhorns is this, “Girl, keep your walls built up! Your foundation is rock solid, the roof over your head will continue to cover you but, for Pete’s sake, fortify those walls!”
The Daily Cuppa Jo 