Laura's Cattle

My Great-Aunt Laura often terrified me as a child. Everything about her seemed tough, from the tone of her voice to the years of callouses seen on her hands, to her 3 or 4 poodles that were always snippy and not for petting. Laura's second-hand shoes that were rarely the right size and her habits of keeping odds and ends around "just in case" often hid the successes she achieved over the course of her lifetime as a real estate broker. Never having any children of her own, my family helped to settle her estate after her death. Her storage unit revealed a surprising blend of dainty objects from her own childhood and photo albums filled with polaroids of almost every calf, cow, steer, and bull she ever owned or bred. Hunting trips and trophies also were catalogued in these annals, documenting her ranches in Van Horn and Uvalde County, Texas. Spanning over twenty years, from the 1960's to the late 1980's,  the photos were scrawled with dates, weights, and other notes for remembering.  This is an ongoing work in progress.