Mule History

I'm sure there is/are several histories of the mule in America, but I don't have one, and I was thinking about mules today (Emily's mom was riding a mule on Mackletree, when I came in on Friday), for no good reason. The mare/jack cross is the most common, if a male jack-ass smells a female, of any species, they'll fuck the door off the barn. The other cross, both of them sterile hybrids, a stallion with a jinny, is much harder to arrange. I tried for years in Mississippi and failed completely. I have a somewhat vested interest in mules generally, because my maternal grandfather and namesake was a very successful mule-trader in a fairly rough region on the border between Tennessee and Mississippi. He'd make the trek over to Arkansas or Missouri every year, and bring back a dozen young, completely green mules. He had a corral and holding pens, and he broke them to the plow, or traded them green. He was a shrewd businessman, and a dealer in mules just before the tractor revolution. After WWII, when Ford, and everyone else, started producing cheap, durable, mechanical mules, the landscape changed. I've plowed with a mule, many times, and I have to say, if you have a mule that's plowed a particular piece of bottom for twenty years (mules live a long time) then it pretty much knows what it's doing, all you have to do is hang on to the traces. Tomorrow I need to collect kindling. It's been dry for several days and any small branch held up off the ground will be brittle, I break them across my knee, and need to fill a thirty-five gallon trash can. It's supposed to get cold again. I yelled at the frogs, but they were deep into their orgy and I merely walked away. Yes, yes, I know, but sometimes it's better to just walk away. Paradigms differ, depending on where you fall in the food chain. No where more apparent than three guys sitting on a dry patch of curb in the middle of melting snow piles, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking about opera. Focus on the details.