For My Cowboy Cousins

One of the blogs I like to follow is "Ray's Cowboys".  Cowboys have always been a fantasy of mine -- wide open plains, riding horses, skies full of stars -- all the things a city boy doesn't get to experience first hand.  Usually.

Just before my first semester at college, Grandma and I took a trip to visit her younger sister in Frederick, OK.  They hadn't seen each other in several years and it was a great opportunity for me to meet some cousins I had never met before.  I was 18 and Grandma and I drove all the way with me doing most of the driving.  We took it slow, taking nearly a week to travel to the bottom of Oklahoma.

Great-Aunt Sarah made sure all the family was there at the homestead when Grandma and I arrived for a great reunion barbecue She had four sons and a daughter, my first cousins, Bart, David, Frank, Jim and Kate, and twenty-three grand kids and four great-grand kids!  It was a lot to take in!  I still write to most of them and keep in contact through Facebook.

A couple of days after Grandma and I got there, some of my male cousins took me to the local swimming hole. While I was there and I will never forget how much they laughed when I told them I didn't have my trunks with me. "Well, cuz," my cousin Chad, Bart's oldest said with a handsome grin, "it's just us guys. Don't tell us you ain't never been skinny dippin' before!"

  

To tell the truth, I was a little embarrassed. I wasn’t sure how they would react when they say my pierced nipple or my metal cockring; but before you know it, the seven of us were naked and splashing around in the warm water. I had honestly never seen that many hot, naked men in one place before that! I swear, they sure grow handsome in Oklahoma!

Anyway, Grandma and I stayed with Great-Aunt Sarah for nearly a month and in that time, I learned a bit about wheat farming, rode my first horse, and helped with the morning chores -- feeding the milk cows and the chickens. 

I went back only twice since; when my cousin Phil got married, just before he went into the army, and two years later after he was brought home from Afghanistan to be buried.