The Townie

Backroads & Heartlands Edition

JUNE 26, 2026 · KNOW THE BACKROADS. USE THE FRONT DOOR.

🪶 Letter from the Editor

Dear neighbors,

There's a particular quality to late June light in the Hill Country — the way it sits heavy and gold on everything by four in the afternoon, the way the pecan trees hold as still as possible like they're trying not to use any more energy than they have to. We are at the halfway point. The calendar says so. The heat confirms it.

And yet.

Underneath the heat and the slow pace of a summer Thursday, something has been building — something I've been watching gather momentum all year, and that I want to tell you about now, with six months still ahead of us.

You may have heard: the Hill Country Venture Fest — our regional student pitch competition — was recognized as the 2025 Texas Venture Fest of the Year by the Texas Venture Alliance at the state capitol in Austin. That recognition belongs to every community that showed up: the students who walked onto a stage and trusted that what they'd built was worth saying out loud, the sponsors who wrote a check before they knew what they were getting, and the towns that said yes before they fully understood what yes would require.

Year Four is October 1. In Mason. And I want to tell you why it matters more this year than any before it.

The original promise of this event was simple: that the stage doesn't have to be somewhere else. That a student in Brady or Junction or Menard with a real idea deserves a real audience — not a virtual one, not a consolation regional, not a podcast episode about someone else's innovation economy. A room full of neighbors who drove down the road to root for them.

That promise is still the whole thing. It's just that more people believe it now.

If you know a student who has an idea — a high schooler, a 4-H member, a kid who keeps explaining something at the dinner table that nobody quite understands yet — this is their stage. If you're a business owner or a community member who wants to invest in what the Hill Country becomes next, sponsoring or mentoring is the most concrete thing you can do right now. No entry fee. Free to attend. Just show up and back your neighbors.

The form below takes two minutes. It is, I think, the best thing you'll do with this Thursday morning.

Two minutes. No commitment. A real person replies.

The light out there is still gold. The pecans are still holding still. But October is coming — and this Hill Country is not scenery. It's a place where things get built.

With love and dust on my boots,
Katie Milton Jordan, Editor
[email protected] · 325-475-4991

🌾 Fresh off the Porch — Events & Community

📅 This Weekend

🎆 July 4th Weekend

⭐ Summer Hero Event

📅 Looking Ahead

🏡 Around the Community

📡 Hill Country Briefing — What the Region Is Watching

🌡 Weather & Conditions — San Angelo set a record 110°F on June 18, breaking the prior daily record from 2011. This week: highs 99–102°F, lows around 75°F, south winds 10–20 mph with gusts to 30, isolated afternoon storms. A heat advisory remains in effect. Check on your neighbors — especially the elderly and those without reliable cooling. Carry water. Watch the low-water crossings if a storm comes through. Sources: NWS San Angelo (SJT), sanangelolive.com.

🌵 Drought & Fire Danger — About 40% of Texas is in active drought as of June 16 (U.S. Drought Monitor / NDMC), ranging from Moderate (D1) to Exceptional (D4). Burn bans are set county-by-county — check your county's current status before any outdoor burning this summer. Texas A&M Forest Service reports elevated wildfire risk with dry grasses and ongoing heat. Source: tfsweb.tamu.edu.

🏥 Rural Policy Watch — Gov. Abbott and Texas HHSC announced $44 million in Rural Health Financial Stabilization Grants for at-risk rural hospitals. Separately, TDA AgPro grant award notifications are expected mid-July 2026, with project starts August 1. Sources: gov.texas.gov; texasagriculture.gov.

🐄 Agriculture & Livestock — The heat is stressing cattle — slaughter weights are trending down — but the market is rewarding producers who hold on. Five-hundred–to–600-pound steer calves averaged $450/cwt in Texas, up from $326 at this point last year (+38%). Texas cow numbers are down ~30,000 head while producers hold back heifers for replacement — tight supply and strong prices look likely to continue. Sources: Dr. David Anderson & Dr. Jason Cleere, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension.

📊 Market Snapshot (San Angelo, June 16–24) — Kid goats: $3.00–$3.80/lb (mostly $3.03–$3.19), down $40–80/head from the prior week. Slaughter lambs: $2.20–$2.69/lb. Fed cattle: live $258–260/cwt, dressed $408. Choice beef cutout just under $400. Bred heifers reaching $4,000–$5,000 are tempting some producers to sell rather than hold. Figures are point-in-time; refresh before any trading decisions. Source: San Angelo Producers Livestock Auction.

💰 Grant Watch — Texas Rural Communities (TRC) grants — up to $10,000 for rural 501(c)(3) nonprofits — have a November 1, 2026 deadline. Apply through Texas Rural Funders (texasruralfunders.org). The USDA Rural Placemaking Innovation Challenge is also open, with up to $3 million for broadband, historic preservation, and community placemaking projects.

🛤 Tourism Pulse — The Hill Country earned a top-three national recognition in Southern Living's 2026 Best Small Towns list. Junction's river recreation corridor — the South Llano River, Schreiner Park, and South Llano River State Park — is drawing summer visitors with paddling trails and that particular quality of clear Hill Country water. If you're in the business of welcoming people, this is your season.

📖 Featured Story

Halfway Through: What This Year Has Been So Far

A mid-year accounting from the heart of the Hill Country.

There is a particular stillness that comes over the Hill Country in late June that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with heat. The cedar and the live oak hold very still. The cattle find whatever shade there is and stay there. The roads shimmer in a way that makes distances hard to judge. By nine in the morning the air has an opinion, and by noon it has made up its mind, and by four in the afternoon you understand, instinctively, that the land is not disagreeing with summer — it has simply decided to wait it out.

We are at the halfway point of 2026.

It is worth pausing here, in this particular stillness, to account for what the year has been. Not what we planned for it to be — the year never goes exactly as planned — but what it actually was, when you look at it plainly from this vantage point with six months behind us and six still ahead.

The first half of a Hill Country year has its own shape. It begins in January with cold mornings and a certain hard-edged clarity — the kind of year-beginning that feels like something is possible. By February the wildflowers are being discussed (which is its own kind of optimism, the annual certainty that the bluebonnets will come). By March they are here, and the roads are full of people looking for them, and Main Streets are briefly alive in the way they only are when strangers arrive in the spirit of celebration rather than just passing through.

Spring was good to the Hill Country this year. The wildflowers showed. The events calendar filled. Graduations came with their particular sweetness and their particular ache — the bleachers full of people feeling two things at once about a young person walking across a stage. The Folk Festival ran for eighteen days in Kerrville, which is one of those reminders that this region has always known how to hold something good for a long time.

And then June arrived. And the heat made its arguments. And the land went still.

There is a number worth knowing, out here at the halfway mark: about forty percent of Texas is in active drought right now. Not hypothetically. Not the drought of weather maps and conference calls — the actual drought, the one you can see in the pastures and feel in the way the air sits on you when you step outside in the morning. The cattle ranchers know it in the way their operations feel heavier than they did a year ago. The hay situation knows it. The burn-ban signs know it.

And yet: calf prices are near record highs. The cattle market is paying producers $450 per hundredweight for five-to-six-hundred-pound steers — up 38 percent from the same point last year. The Hill Country's economy does not move in straight lines. It never has. The same dry summer that stresses the pasture can fill a producer's operating account in ways that make the stress bearable, even worthwhile. That is a complicated kind of good news, but it is good news. The Hill Country knows how to hold complicated things.

There is something else worth naming as we sit here at the halfway point — something that happened quietly, not with the fanfare it might have received in a city, but with the particular understated pride that things get received out here when they're genuinely earned.

The Hill Country Venture Fest — the student pitch competition that has been growing in this region since 2023 — was recognized as the 2025 Texas Venture Fest of the Year by the Texas Venture Alliance at the state capitol. That recognition belongs to the students who pitched, the communities that showed up, and the belief — tested now over four years — that this place is capable of building something for its own young people rather than just watching them leave to find it somewhere else.

October 1 is when Year Four arrives. The stage will be in Mason. It will be free to attend. And it will be, as it always has been, built on the same simple premise: that the Hill Country is not scenery. It is a place where things get built.

Now: what does the second half hold?

The calendar is already full. July 4 fireworks over the Llano River. The Mason County Roundup Weekend and its pro rodeo, its parade down the courthouse square, its dance under the stars. The Junction Summer Classic in August. The World Championship BBQ Goat Cook-Off in Brady come September. The events alone make a strong case for optimism.

But the second half of a Hill Country year is more than its events. It is the slow turning toward fall — the first morning in late August when the air is five degrees cooler than expected, and you realize you've been bracing for it without knowing it, and now you can let something in your shoulders go. It is the way the hills look in October when the light changes and the colors change and the whole region remembers what it looks like when it is not trying so hard to survive.

We are halfway through. The land is holding still. The year is not over. And in this Hill Country, in this heat, with all of this behind us and all of that ahead — that is, by any reasonable accounting, enough to be grateful for.

See y'all on the other side of the halfway mark.

💼 2 Things Your Business Needs to Know — Main Street at the Halfway Mark

Insight No. 1 — The Mid-Year Gut Check

Walt says:

It's the last week of June. You know what that means: every goal you set in January is either looking smarter than you thought or smaller than you hoped. Neither one is a crisis. Both deserve five honest minutes with a legal pad and no interruptions.

Here's the question I'd put to every Hill Country business owner right now: are you where you said you'd be, and if not, is it because the plan was wrong or because you didn't work it? Those are different problems with different solutions. Don't skip the question to avoid the answer. The second half starts now, and it doesn't care about the first half's excuses.

Pull the numbers. Not your feelings about the numbers — the actual numbers. Revenue, margins, customer count, whatever your one honest metric is. Then ask: what one thing, if you did it differently in July, would change the second half of the year? Not five things. One thing. That's your July.

Nadine says:

What Walt said. And then this: the mid-year gut check is also permission to let something go. If you've been running a product line, a service, a partnership, or a habit that hasn't worked in six months, July is when you stop giving it another quarter. Sunk cost is the enemy of a good second half.

Equally: the mid-year check can reveal that something you almost stopped is actually working. A lot of Hill Country businesses almost quit the thing that eventually becomes the thing. Give the numbers a fair hearing before you decide.

Insight No. 2 — A Reader Asks: "Spring was great. Now it's quiet. What do I do with a slow July?"

Walt says:

A slow July is not a problem. A slow July you weren't ready for is a problem. Every Hill Country business that depends on spring traffic has known since March that July was coming. The question isn't why it's slow — it's what you built in April to carry you through it.

If the answer is "nothing," that's useful information. You've got three more slow months before the fall events calendar kicks back in. Use one of them to build the thing that fills the gap next year: a local loyalty program, a recurring workshop, a membership that pays you when the tourists don't. Not glamorous. Works.

Nadine says:

The quiet July is also when your best customers are most reachable. They're not competing with tourists for your attention. Send the email you've been putting off. Show up at the Chamber mixer. Have the conversation with the supplier you've been meaning to have. Slow seasons exist to do the relationship work that busy seasons crowd out — and relationship work is what Hill Country businesses run on.

And one more thing: if your July is genuinely quiet, your team has capacity. Train them. Refine something. Photograph your space when it's clean and not crowded. Slow is not wrong. Slow, used right, becomes your competitive advantage in September.

🌿 Dear Hazel Mae & Fern — Home, Garden & the Good Life

Hazel Mae says:

Hot and Discouraged, honey — you're looking at this all wrong. You don't fix up your porch for June. You fix it up for September. And October. And every August evening when there's a half-decent breeze coming through the live oaks and you have somewhere decent to sit in it.

A ceiling fan takes one afternoon and one trip to the hardware store. String lights take twenty minutes on a stepladder. You've been waiting for perfect conditions, and I'm here to tell you something that has been true in the Hill Country for as long as there have been porches: you do not wait for comfortable weather to make a comfortable place. You make the comfortable place, and then the weather has somewhere to meet you.

Start with the fan. Do it this weekend, before seven in the morning. Everything else follows in the shade of it.

Fern says:

I want to add something to what Hazel Mae said, because she's right — but there's a reason you haven't started. Sometimes we put off the beautiful things because making them beautiful takes energy, and the summer has already taken so much.

Here's what I'd suggest instead of a project: don't plan the porch tonight. Just sit on it. Take something cold to drink, find the coolest hour you can — dusk works, sometimes just past eight — and sit there for fifteen minutes with nothing to accomplish. Let yourself want the ceiling fan. Let yourself picture the lights. That wanting is where all good things begin. The doing follows when the body is ready, and the body is always more ready than we give it credit for when it's been given a reason.

Hazel Mae: "See, Fern — you give them the soul. I give them the to-do list."
Fern: "The best porches usually have both."

🧭 Hill Country Horoscope — What the Second Half Holds

Notes from the porch swing, at the halfway mark. The calendar has turned its page — what the stars have to say about the stretch still ahead.

Aries (Mar 21–Apr 19)
The ambition that felt stuck in May finds its footing this week. Something you set in motion before the heat hit is coming back with an answer. Say yes to it, even if the timing feels imperfect. The second half rewards the brave more than the careful.

Taurus (Apr 20–May 20)
You've been doing the quiet, unsexy work — and July is when it starts to show. Don't rush the harvest. The things you planted carefully tend to ripen on their own schedule, which is slower than yours and more satisfying than you expect.

Gemini (May 21–Jun 20)
You've had more conversations this month than decisions. That's about to flip. The second half belongs to follow-through. Pick the idea that won't leave you alone — the one you keep bringing up at the coffee shop — and take one real step toward it this week.

Cancer (Jun 21–Jul 22)
Your season. The halfway mark falls inside your sign, and it feels like an invitation rather than a milestone. What would it mean to stop measuring the year in what got done and start measuring it in how it felt to live it? The porch is waiting.

Leo (Jul 23–Aug 22)
Something is coming that puts you in front of people who need exactly what you have. Don't downplay it. The stage you've been building toward — quietly, steadily — is closer than it looks from the halfway point. Show up ready.

Virgo (Aug 23–Sep 22)
Rest before the good busy arrives. Fall will ask a lot of you, and the asking will be worth it. This week's gift is an unexpected afternoon off — take it without guilt and do exactly one thing that has no purpose other than being pleasant.

Libra (Sep 23–Oct 22)
You've been trying to decide between two good things. The stars have heard the deliberation. They're not going to solve it for you — but they will say this: the one you keep returning to after the conversations end is the one. You already know.

Scorpio (Oct 23–Nov 21)
What you've been grieving quietly — a plan that changed, an expectation that expired — is ready to be set down. Not forgotten. Set down. The second half has something new to offer, and it can't fit in your hands if they're still full of what didn't happen.

Sagittarius (Nov 22–Dec 21)
A road trip is overdue. The Hill Country's best roads are the ones you've driven a hundred times and haven't really looked at in years. Take a different way home this week and remember what keeps you here. It's still there.

Capricorn (Dec 22–Jan 19)
The mid-year gut check has your name on it. The goal you set in January: is it still right, or just too far along to stop? Those are different questions with different answers. Honesty is the bravest thing on the July calendar.

Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 18)
The project that keeps getting pushed back? July clears space for it — not perfectly, but enough. Give it one uninterrupted morning and see what it becomes when it's not competing for your attention. One morning can change a year.

Pisces (Feb 19–Mar 20)
You've absorbed a lot this year — other people's needs, other people's weather. The second half invites you to ask what you actually want out of it. A slower pace, a specific trip, something you've been putting off for no good reason. Start there. This week if you can.

🐾 Pet of the Week — Meet Cookie

See y'all next week. 🤠

Katie Milton Jordan, Editor · [email protected] · 325-475-4991 · thetownie.ai

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