Out by the barn, in a big quiet pen, lives an old pony.

He’s not flashy. He’s not fast. He has no job to speak of. No children come by to throw a saddle on him. He doesn’t pull a cart or accompany another retired horse for comfort. He just is. A fixture. A presence.

He came into our lives not through planning or sentiment, but by circumstance. There’s no sweet backstory—no childhood memory, no rescued-from-the-rain moment. He simply… arrived. And yet every morning, as I step out the door with my coffee in hand, he greets me with a soft nicker. A little sound, gentle and polite, that somehow lands squarely in the part of me that still believes in quiet grace.

He eats better than most horses I know. A princely ration of specialty feed, custom-tailored for his old bones and aging teeth. He has his own premium round bale of irrigated grass hay—the kind the rest of the herd can only dream about. In winter, his water is warmed. At night, I’ve trudged through snow just to be sure he has enough food before I can sleep. And in the morning, before I check my messages, before I step into the day, I check on him.

And sometimes I ask myself—Why?

Why not sell him at auction? He’s worth maybe 40 cents a pound. That’s a decent steak dinner in town, maybe even drinks if you’re frugal. Why not let someone else take him off our hands?

Because I know what that road looks like.

He’ll be loaded into a truck with thirty other old, broken ponies. Jostled. Scared. Standing for hours on stiff legs, maybe falling on that bad knee of his. And then somewhere down the line—whether it’s today or next week—he’ll end up processed into something unrecognizable. Dog food, maybe.

So no. He stays.

And he’s not alone in that.

There’s a bum calf in the scale house tonight. Not much to look at—scrawny, with a messy backside and a runny nose. It’s cold outside, frost clinging to the windows. But inside, the heater keeps the space just above freezing. Tomorrow morning, I’ll warm up a bottle of milk replacer and try coaxing him into nibbling at the pony’s fancy feed. Bob will lay down fresh bedding and clean the space like we’re preparing for royalty.

Could we have left that calf in the field, with the 500 stronger ones? Sure. Maybe he would have stolen milk from a patient cow. Maybe he would’ve made it. But maybe not. More likely, he’d have curled up in a low spot, shivering, until the coyotes found him.

And then there’s the wild kitten in the barn. Skinny thing, probably jumped off a passing utility truck weeks ago. We haven’t tried to catch him. He’s not ready. But every night, we leave food in the same quiet spot. Every morning, we refill the heated water bowl so he doesn’t have to teeter on the edge of a trough just to drink. He’s still here, so I guess that counts for something.

I suppose if someone looked at us from the outside—me and the old cowboy I live beside—they’d say we’re soft. Sentimental. Not very “ranch-like.” And maybe we are.

But you get to a certain age, and the hard edges wear off.

You stop measuring worth in weight or profit. You start noticing how everything fragile looks at you. You realize that love doesn’t always come with fanfare, and purpose doesn’t always arrive wearing boots. Sometimes, it comes as an old pony who nickers when he sees you, or a bum calf who starts to trust, or a wild kitten who learns you are not a threat.

We didn’t go looking for these lives. They found us. Landed here without asking.

And maybe that’s the whole point.

Maybe our job, while we’re still upright and able, is to choose kindness. Not just when it’s easy. Not just when it pays. But when it asks something of us.

Kindness, in the quietest corners. Care, given freely. Not just to the strong, the profitable, the healthy—but to the old, the sick, the wild, and the ones who simply landed in our laps.

Tomorrow, I’ll go into town and work at the business that helps pay for milk replacer, for special feed, for warm water bowls. Maybe none of it changes the world. Maybe it won’t be remembered.

But in this little part of the world we tend to, they’ll remember. The pony. The calf. The kitten.

And in the end, that’s enough for us.

Because we’ll know that when it mattered, we didn’t look away.
We stayed. We cared.
We chose mercy.

Peace. Really—I mean it.

Credit to the rightful owner.