Glimpses of Texas Past

Hi All!

As you may know, I live in Dallas, Texas. Well - I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. What, you may ask, is a Metroplex? Good question! When Hubby and I moved to the Dallas area we were confronted with the Metroplex concept over and over and over. We were puzzled for a bit. Finally, we figured out that a Metroplex is basically a HUGE collection of cities in and around the two big cities of Dallas and Fort Worth. So - all the suburbs around the area - we are still not so sure how far the Metroplex reaches - are included in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

Anyway - my point is that while I live in Dallas, Texas, I live in the middle of a big, urban/suburban area with an astonishing number of very long and very high highway overpasses. A lot of people think that all of Texas is rural and crawling with cattle and cowboys. That isn't true. Yes, once in a while a "country boy" will drive into the "big city" in his pickup truck with his cowboy hat and you will see him driving around. However, that isn't a real common occurrence. And there are cattle here and there on empty tracts of land (BIG tracts of land) which are future shopping center sites. In Texas, if you use the land for agriculture, you get a really big property tax break - hence the cattle. If you drive out of the area for about 45 minutes or so you can start seeing real farms and ranches. Go a bit further and there you have the iconic Texas everyone thinks of - big stretches of ranch land with a house in the center. Horses and cows and stuff like that.

I do like to imagine what life was like in our area in the past when it really WAS covered with cattle and cowboys on horses. On my way to sign language class last night I passed one of the few farm/ranches hanging on in the outskirts of Dallas. It is bisected by roads and bordered on one side by a major highway. Normally I might see some cattle hanging out and one or two calves romping around. Last night, however, I saw horses. Beautiful horses. They were in a small cluster under some trees and made such a lovely vignette. One horse actually broke away from the group for a short time and trotted around the field before returning to his group. In that moment as I was driving by I was transported back to when this entire area was filled with fields where horses ran free. I could almost see a cowboy sitting on his horse watching his herd of cattle as they slowly moved towards a new pasture. I felt like I saw history.

Then, I was back to the real world of traffic and people who really don't know how to drive!

Trisha