Someone Broke Into My Truck The Other Night

Sometimes I get side-tracked, like the other night when I was bringing in groceries from the truck. It happens when I have a lot on my mind and am trying to get a lot done. So when my husband came home from work about 30 minutes later, he found the passenger door open and the bag of cat food still sitting on the floorboard. He grabbed the bag, shut the door, and came in, shaking his head at me. I thanked him, we laughed, and I didn’t think anymore about it, which meant I also didn’t go out and lock the truck.

The morning after forgetting to lock the truck, I was hauling my painting gear to the side of our house to get started painting it, when I noticed that the driver’s side doors of my truck were open.  “Huh!” I thought. “I wonder why Peter didn’t close those doors too?”  And then I looked inside and saw that the contents of the glove box were laying on the seat, and random fencing and farming equipment was strewn about the cab.

It took me a minute to realize that someone had been in my truck looking for valuables.

But the thing is, nothing was missing. See, the truck is still loaded up the way it was when I was setting up fencing for my cows eating weeds projects. There’s my clipboard and notepad for tracking vegetation, my fold-up shovel for digging up samples, my fence tester, maps for getting me where I was headed, the pump I can plug into the cigarette lighter to inflate flat tires, pliers, tools, ibuprofen, extra chapstick and sunscreen. They were all still there, though not in the cubbies and boxes they had been. It made me laugh to imagine this fellow digging through my truck full of things that are really valuable to me, yet he found NOTHING worth taking. “Wow!” I thought, “It’s a case of one man’s treasure is another man’s trash.”

While I painted, I thought more about what’s valuable to me and to the kinds of people I consider my community. Like On Pasture. For a couple of years now, Rachel and I have been writing articles, hunting down good authors who we think have something important to share, and sending out emails once a week to say “Hey! The new articles are up!” I think that what we’re doing is valuable because it fills a hole in the information available to graziers, combining useful, understandable science with real life experience that you can use right away.

But are we really doing something that works for you?

For the last 2 weeks we’ve been asking you to tell us that you value On Pasture by joining the On Pasture Community. We’re asking for $12. That’s just 23¢ a week, or 3¢ per article. If you haven’t had a chance to do that yet, maybe you can take the time this week. And if that’s just out of the question for your finances right now, send us a note to say you’re out there reading, and even why you’re reading.

We’d really appreciate hearing from you!

Thanks for reading!

Kathy (and Rachel too but she doesn’t have a truck to break into. :-))