“Oh Jesus, give me strength to clean this floor,” she muttered, for what may well have been the millionth time in her seemingly miserable life.

The first job I ever held, when I was in my teens, was feeding cattle at the neighbors ranch.  The place was owned by two spinsters, a mother and daughter, and though the ranch had once thrived, by the time I was hired, the twenty odd head of cattle that lingered there had become more pets than livestock.

So, for a few dollars a day, I was more then happy to make the daily quarter-mile trek from our property to their feed barn.  There, I would climb up into the dark loft, break up bales of hay, and kick them down into the feed-trough below.  When the noise of impatient bellows was replaced by the steady crunch of contented chewing, I would slip down the…