Barren Landscapes Are an Illusion

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Gayle
barren landscapes are an illusion
barren landscapes are an illusion

 

 “….the rush forward to the end, the leap that you take into the middle of danger when all you can do is look straight at it, because whatever is coming will come.”  — from The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

I found it because of a sudden chill.  I was chatting on the phone when a draft floated by, making me step closer to the hot wood stove and tuck my right hand into my left armpit for warmth.  The swollen lymph node, the size of a pigeon’s egg, floated into my cupped fingers and rested there.

In that instant, I knew.  I knew that my steady plod through a life I was trying to rebuild was about to come to a screeching halt, that once again I was going to be pummeled with the simple fact that life is not predictable or controllable.

Lina says I’m the unluckiest person she knows.  I tell her no, really, I’m the luckiest person in the world.  We’re both right.  And we each know what the other means.

In the months just before I found the cancer, I was deep into the clean-it-up, patch-it-up, make-sure-it-isn’t-going to cave in phase of refurbishing the barns at my new place in North Park.  They are actually four separate buildings, strung together into one long row of shelters.  A couple of the sections were built 40 or more years ago, on site.  One was moved in from a homesteading ranch on the west side of the Park.  I’m not sure where the shed on the end originated.

Right from the start, in spite of precariously sagging roofs and cockeyed doors, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine these weather beaten buildings coming back to life to house the horse, sheep, goats, geese and llamas who needed to live there.  Beneath the floor to ceiling  jumble of rusting motorcycles, broken furniture, discarded boxes of books-turned-mouse nests, shattered glass, and an ancient Coca-Cola machine, there was a whiff of the spirit of survival I knew could shelter the animals I love with a passion beyond reason.

It took me weeks to clear out the debris and haul it to the landfill and rudimentary recycling center 18 miles away.  It took two hydraulic lifts I found rusting in the sinking junkyard on the eastern end of the small ranch, and several hours of coerced help from Don, to jack up the one shed roof most at risk of imminent collapse.

By the time I’d made my way to the northern end of the string of barns, Don was offering advice on what could and couldn’t be done to salvage them.  Of the small section that originally sat on homesteading land, he said it couldn’t be saved.  Shouldn’t be saved.  That one piece of history had to be torn down.

Which is what was decided about my left breast and all the lymph nodes in my left armpit.  The cancer in them had gotten too large and spread too far for repair work or rebuilding.

And so, after stumbling across it, after painstakingly assessing it, treatment for my cancer began with the demolition of a big chunk of my body.  Throughout it all, there would be dozens of people to cook for me, send me sympathy, pour love on all my hurting places.  But in the beginning, when the demolition began, three people bore witness and carried me across the threshold from whole to diminished.  Barbara, Lina and Don paced the hospital hallways, monitored my pain, helped drain blood from my body.  They guarded my passage into a less certain life, doing so with comfort, admonishment and humor.

Two days after surgery, I was engulfed in a kind of pain I didn’t know how to describe.  It felt as if my heart was hurting — stretching, burning, skipping beats over what had been torn away from it.  As if it was realizing greater vulnerability because the breast above it was gone.  Who knew that a woman’s breast is also the heart’s shield?

As Barbara looked in on me before going to bed, I drank in her familiar expression of sweet concern.  She showered me with love, but all I could think was that I hadn’t stayed ahead of the pain, hadn’t judged the right quantity, type, or time spacing for pain medication.  When Don called to check in one last time for the day, I told him it was my fault I felt so awful — I didn’t deserve any sympathy.  He told me he felt sorry for me, even if it was my fault.

Settling into the long, nightmare journey of treatment, I stubbornly resisted adopting a cancer identity for myself.  It’s a club, after all, against which I’d sworn becoming a member.  I tried to immediately squash a well meaning friend’s  suggestion that perhaps “you’ll write a book about this!”  No, no, I assured her.  This won’t become another one of my causes.  I can’t possibly create an entire life composed of personal crisis-induced career paths.  “Well,” she said, “you never know.”

The conversation left me in a hyper on-guard state.  The journey through cancer proceeded in spite of myself.

When I pushed strands of hair behind my left ear, the sensation radiated down the side of my face and neck, into my armpit, on to the muscles, nerves and skin where my left breast used to be.  What connection was that?  What reminder?  Of the missing lymph nodes now marked like a grave by tightly puckered ridges of skin that in the beginning screamed in protest when, daily, I forced them to stretch a little more than the day before?  My determined grab for range of motion.  What connection was that?  The physical and emotional struggle, casting around for evidence of spiritual purpose?

After a while, it wasn’t quite pain that tugged against the muscles connected to the breast bone that no longer supported a breast.  It was more like memory.  Years of pleasure and purpose, identity, aesthetics and objectification, all rolled up together and peeled away to carry off the enormous tumor that had set up housekeeping there.

I don’t understand cancer.  It’s something about unchecked cell growth, but really, how many people with cancer understand what the hell that means?  I don’t even understand cells.  Have no desire to.

For a long time after surgery, when I pushed strands of hair behind my left ear, I felt it in my left armpit.  It was a tug of memory that traveled through every nerve and muscle traumatized by the demolition that dug into and around them.  Every once in a while, the pull reached far enough to remind me how my son’s cry used to tug on the same region, in a demand for milk that flowed willingly, pleasantly, in a life giving response to that connection.

some barns are not worth repairing
some barns are not worth repairing

 

 

Posted in Animals, Cancer, Life, Llamas, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Caliente on My Mind (the unusual and wondrous task of writing the book, Saving Elizabeth)

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Gayle
Caliente on My Mind
Caliente on My Mind

If you can’t tolerate being alone with yourself in silence for hours on end, don’t contemplate taking up writing as a career.  There’s a possibility that the deliciously documented insanity of an impressively large number of literary greats might simply revolve around the extended isolation required by the craft of putting word into print.  Or rather, putting hundreds of thousands of words into print.  (It’s conceivable that one can be saved from this occupational hazard by writing only short pieces.  Like blog entries, for instance.)

The older I get, the more astonished I am not just by my tolerance for solitude, but my utter craving for it.  Which makes me a great candidate for my chosen (albeit poorly paid) profession, as well as for bouts of insanity.

However, because I’m now in my late 50s, and because I’ve written a lot of books (adding up to over a million words to date), I know a little too much about what’s ahead of me when I start a new one.  Or at least I thought I did before starting Saving Elizabeth.

This is a book about the time I spent in Nirada, Montana, trying to help save over 600 llamas who were starving to death on the beautiful hillsides of a sanctuary created for large animals.  It’s a complicated story of human indifference, failure, cruelty, naïveté, innocence, determination, courage, love.  It’s also a complicated story of animal dependence, welfare, rights, wisdom and magic.

Even before I left the ice and mud covered corrals of the defunct Montana Large Animal Sanctuary, I knew I would be compelled to write the tale of its rise and fall — the story of the animals there and of the dozens of people across the country who moved heaven and earth to rescue them.  Within weeks of my return home, I drafted several chapters, created an outline, began to circulate them to a few agents I thought might be interested in representing Saving Elizabeth.  It turned out they were interested.  And would talk more seriously once I finished the entire book.

Another major work on spec.  Sigh.  Immediately after getting this green light demand, a year lost to cancer treatment.  Gulp.  Coming out the other side, I found the same first page staring me in the face, waiting for me to get over the fear and dread of fully committing to writing my next hundred thousand words.

Never before in 50 years of writing, have I talked so openly and widely about a book I hadn’t yet begun to write.  Having done so might turn out to be a huge tactical error.  It also might be the primary reason I was able to get over my fear of taking the leap into actually starting to write it.

My first surprise came after completing what would turn out to be a new rough draft for Chapter One.  While tidying up the closing paragraph, an odd feeling swept over me.  It took a while for me to identify it, but then I realized it was hope.  I’d been writing about one of the first llamas I got to know in Montana — an old, collapsing,  light wool gelding who ended up coming home with me.  In the act of writing a few pages about him, I was reeled in.  To him.  To the days of the rescue.  To Karyn Moltzen, Animeals, and her Fab 4 who went where angels feared to go.  To Patty Finch who got the first call, then became the United Nations of animal rescue.  And then to all the llama rescue people who moved mountains and state transport restrictions and empty money coffers to find new homes, new lives so the llamas of the Montana 600 could have another chance.

Writing a long story always carries me away, gets me deeply involved.  But not quite like this, the way it’s happening as I write Saving Elizabeth.  It has something to do with the way the story continues to live all around me, even as I try to make art out of an event that occurred two years ago.

Recently, I’ve heard again from Susi (Safari) Sinay, one of the first volunteers to show up and get to work; Olin Allen who set the stage for so many foster homes; Deborah Logan of Southeast Llama Rescue, Wes Laraway of Northeast Llama Rescue.  They sent notes to touch base, report in.  Not because they know I’m writing a book, but because they’ve been looking at their llamas and thinking about saving their lives and want to know how the Montana Blues are doing at my place.  We all stay in touch with each other like war buddies.  We also stay in touch because the refugees of that war continue to breathe, eat and play all around us.

Just the other day, Joanne Beckmann was thinking of those things, and sent me an article by Chris Stull and Ann Bodnyk about llamas adopted from the rescue, and about Montana’s Rebound – a cria born after the rescue.  They call him Bounder.  Theirs is a story of sorrow, survival, hard work and resilience.  It’s all part of the story of Saving Elizabeth I’m trying to write.  One that’s ongoing and alive even as it rolls into the past.

Which is what makes writing this book different from any writing experience I’ve ever had.  It’s living all around me, not just in my head or in my memory.  Like when early in the morning, as I type, Oscar rattles the dormant branches of the bush outside my bedroom window, happily grooming the rough overcoat of his ancient fiber.   Or when Sergio breaks the pre-dawn silence with a strange sound that comes out almost like a half-strangle as he yawns.  Or like yesterday, when I finished writing a chapter about Caliente’s own llama journey that mirrored my own, went to the kitchen to get tea, and saw him lying comfortably alone in the field, surrounded by six inches of freshly fallen snow.

In the April Snow
In the April Snow

 

 

 

 

Posted in Animals, Life, Llamas, Montana Llama Rescue, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Finding Balance in Human Empathy

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Gayle
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between the individual and the collective

 

Is there such a thing as collective human experience?  Can a moment in time really bind us together with threads of shared emotion, reaction, resolution in such a way as to transcend the individual?  We certainly seem to design our world in a way that at least tries to make this be so.  We gather to play, celebrate, honor, mourn and pray.  We, more often than not, build the essence of our lives around couple, family, neighborhood, community and tradition.

To what effect?  Social empathy makes us cry for the heartbreak of others, spurs us to small and great acts of generosity, courage, hard work and simple kindness.  Yet at the center of it all remains the brightly burning self that can’t help but call the shots.  Genuine sorrow on behalf of suffering that barely brushes the hem of our own lived lives, flows through the murky river of “there but for the grace of damned good luck go I, and what a relief that is.”

When tragedy explodes in the face of our collective consciousness, like it did in Boston a couple of days ago, it’s hard to understand precisely what it is that moves those of us who are far away from the bloodied finish line.  It’s even harder to know how best to cradle or offer our response.  How can we deal with our feelings, or help, or even talk about emerging news without stomping all over the brutally private individual experiences of the people who were actually there?

Perhaps it’s walking the tightrope of that particular balancing act that is the collective human experience — learning to recognize the difference between personal empathy that gives birth to selfless acts, and narcissism so powerful we turn every event into an opportunity to stand center stage with our own emotions on display.

Human beings aren’t herd animals.  Not like the enormous herds of antelope I see charging across the high Wyoming plains, or the hundreds of elk amassed early this spring on North Park’s basin floor.  Humans don’t navigate life the way the herd of 50 or so llamas do in the barns and fields behind my home.  These animal herds have a much more finely tuned sense of each other when it comes to raw survival.  Threatened by danger, they respond in one thoughtless, instinctive move guaranteed to keep the largest number of them alive.  They don’t scatter in different directions or trample one another in self-interest.  Regardless of what actually drives them, true herd behaviors are predicated on the understanding that survival of the individual depends on survival of the entire herd.

Although humans seem to continually evolve in the direction of greater and greater autonomy, gifts of sympathy and support offered up on a global scale when tragedy strikes us, are deeply reassuring.  It also serves us well to witness the actual process of the human balancing act between other and self — shared with us this week in the conversation of Bostonians talking about coping by doing everything from clinging to life, donating blood, providing investigation tips, to the brazen act of getting back on public transportation in order to enter the busy city center and complete one more day of work.

In my own simplistic way, I watch the llamas outside my window for clues on how to navigate my particular dance of balance between the struggle for self actualization and contribution to the collective whole of my own species.  I see those stoic creatures huddle together for warmth as a spring snowstorm blows around them for days.  I see family units bed down together at night.  And when moments of calm descend during the storm that waxes and wanes even as it goes on, I see many of the llamas venture out on their own — settling far from the herd, quietly alone, for a moment of private and individual contemplation.

From here to Boston, to Sandy Hook, to hurricane Sandy, to a Denver theater last summer, and a thousand and one horrors in between just this year alone, human individuals as well as the human collective are tumbled against one another.  Herd animals or not, I guess the best we can do is find enough individual strength and wisdom to know when it’s time to hold each other tight, and when it’s time to graciously step out of the way to help clear the path for someone else’s journey.

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Writing the Dream

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Gayle

Four pages, four paragraphs, four sentences, four words.

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Thumper — living the dream with me here in North Park, at Coral Dawn Ranch

 

Jewel sings about there being a difference between dreaming and pretending.  I think in most cases, the difference ends up being hard work.  And if you want to harbor any hope of stretching all the way from dreaming to victory, the simple truth is it’s a devil of a difficult slog.  The bigger, more complex the dream, the messier and more taxing the slog.

I’ve always been pretty good at dreaming, imagining, envisioning.   Hallmarks, I like to think, of being a writer.  Not bad at hard work either, if the amassed production of novels and nonfiction manuscripts are any indication.  But it wasn’t until I was well into my 50s, staring down a substantial body of fictional work more rejected than published, that Jewel’s lyrics about dreaming and pretending hit me like an admonition.

Is there a chance that what I’ve been doing since starting my first novel at the age of 15 is pretending to be a writer?  If all I can hone is the starving artist bit, how long can I really hold onto the identity?  The dream?

I finished my first novel, The Cause, at the age of 19.  It didn’t take long to realize I wasn’t going to be a teenaged bestseller.  By the age of 25, I had four more novel manuscripts under my belt, and they were all yellowing in ream-size boxes on the top shelf of my home office closet (wherever that was at the time – I was moving a lot in those days).

The process of completing a novel slowed down after that.  A baby came along.  Tristan.  He got sick, was dealt profound disabilities and pain, then died at the age of six.  I took on meaningful grassroots organizing work that eventually paid a little (unlike the novels), put me on the international speaking stage, and included massive amounts of nonfiction writing.   It would be over 15 years before the next novel joined the previous five on the shelf in my closet.  Twelve more years before novel number seven, now awaiting a third rewrite, reached the end of its first draft.

When I forget how much I’ll regret it, and read little “how to” articles on perfecting the query letter, choosing the right agent, refining a manuscript for submission, I inevitably run across two basic asserted truisms doled out by the author.  1.  It’s incredibly difficult to get a novel published.  2.  Novels that offer excellent writing and page-turning storytelling will always, eventually, find a publisher.

My responses to these statements are as follows:

1.  Duh.

2.  Is this really true?  And if it is, what does it mean for me?  Am I lacking in excellent writing and page-turning storytelling skills?  Or have I just not reached “eventually,” yet?

In the meantime, of course, life goes on.  I wrack up a seemingly never-ending series of dramatic experiences, adventures and tragedies, which keep the “where do you get your ideas?” question off my list of things to ponder.

The clock is ticking.  In a couple of weeks, I’ll turn 57.  With a history of Stage III breast cancer added to my resume, my goal of becoming a centenarian might be in jeopardy.  Still poverty stricken.  Ongoing interesting, exciting, but for the most part disastrous relationship history.  Novel #8 still in mere good-idea and working title stage.  All of which leads me back to the hard work, difficult slog part of the writing dream.  The writing life.

On good days, I know better than I know most anything else, that I’m a writer to the core of my soul.  I simply can’t not write.  I’ve been doing it steadily, better with each passing year, since I was seven years old.  Although the novels haven’t seen the light of day, plenty of nonfiction has been successfully published and appreciated, if not overly financially lucrative.

On bad days — well, they really aren’t that bad.  I write every single day.  A long time ago, I created for myself a means of getting through the slog days.  Generally speaking, I shoot for being able to write for four hours every day.  When life makes a joke out of that goal, I try to write at least four pages.  If that’s out of reach, I go for four paragraphs.  Four sentences.

On days that feel like it’s all falling apart and worries of being nothing but a pretender begin to take over, I fight back with my barest of bare minimums:  four words.

That’s my secret to living the writing life — to hanging onto the writing dream.  However little, however poor, put words to print every day.  Every.  Single.  Day.  Make writing an inescapable demand.  As much a required daily chore as feeding the dog, brushing your teeth, washing the dishes.

Isaac Asimov once said that if he was told he had only six minutes to live, he wouldn’t brood, he would only write faster.  Considering the mountains of work produced by Mr. Asimov, I have no reason to doubt the truth of this statement.  (Prolific, we say.)  But was he taking into consideration the physical drain, the terror of confronting mortality once and for all, the cloying needs of his loved ones that would also lay claim to their rightful portion of those last six minutes of life?  Did he realize that maybe in the end, if he was lucky, he would be left with less than one minute of clarity, strength and purpose all to himself during which he could actually write?  Yes, he probably understood this.

Six minutes, six lines, six thoughts, six seconds — it doesn’t matter — just write.  That’s what it takes to keep the dream real. To keep the dream alive.  Just write.

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In Pursuit of the Happy Ending

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Gayle
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The Snowy Mountains of Wyoming

 

A good friend of mine who lives on the Wind River Indian Reservation, doesn’t like my blog.  He says it’s sad.  This is from an Arapaho man who grieves over the new Wyoming hunting season on wolves, who carries his respect and love for them in his very name, who speaks with passion and frustration over the short life span of the people in his challenged nation.  He doesn’t want my blog to make him sad.  I guess he gets enough of that emotion elsewhere in his life.

Happiness and happy endings are such flighty things.  We think we have a clear eye on them, only to discover they can slip away the moment we claim ownership of them.  Happy anything is such a personal construct, not to mention downright mysterious at times.

My son, Tristan, spent the last three years of his six-year life in a wheelchair, experiencing excruciating pain from a systemic disease.  Yet when he completed what would be his final year of school, he came home wearing a badge declaring him the winner of the “Happiest Student” award.  There was no doubt in my mind as to how much he deserved the honor.

When I was in the seventh grade, I rounded a hallway corner one day and ran into a large girl who had made it clear for a very long time that she didn’t like me.  On that particular day, she pushed me up against the wall and stared into my eyes.

“I just want you to know why I’ve always hated you,” she said.  I said nothing.  “I’ve hated you for years, because you walk around looking so happy all the time.”  I didn’t really know what she meant by the strange confession, but there was something about it that made me feel good.  And sad.

During the most debilitating and frightening days of cancer treatment, nothing made me grumpier than running into people who told me to be positive, be grateful.    Don’t worry, be happy.  Some said my life depended on it — which really pissed me off.

Actually, throughout some of the darkest times in my life, I’ve been keenly aware of my capacity for joy.  In fact, I’ve counted on it.  But because of that impressive collection of dark times, I generally see sweetness through a veil — almost as if the very path to a happy ending requires shadowed passage.

I don’t like the idea of making anyone sad.  But I do like the idea of sharing an uncertain expedition, pointing out the pinpricks of light I spy along the way.  Often, it’s when I’m crawling through dimness that I stumble across the edge of happy — in a quiet, subtle, sometimes slightly sad way.

For example, in deciding where to place my bed when I first moved back to North Park, I recognized the bedroom was designed with a long wall that, if the bed were set there, offered a beautiful view out toward the Never Summer mountains.  Unfortunately, there’s the long stretch of junkyard to gaze at between the windows and those mountains.  Especially in the early days of trying to imagine this as my new home, I couldn’t bear to start each morning looking at rusted machines, unusable tires and mountains of discarded cans, buckets and twisted fencing.  So, ignoring a vague understanding that the window above my head would be cold and would go against what little I knew about how to properly Feng Shue a bedroom, I pushed the used queen-sized mattress, boxspring and folding metal frame that had been given to me, up against the windows.  After securing the storm windows with added screws to keep them from falling on my head, I threw an old sheet up over the curtain rod and settled in.

Two and a half years later, a couple of pairs of cream colored panel drapes still in their packages, sit on my nightstand waiting to be ironed and hung.  But a few mornings ago, just before my 4:00 alarm went off and long before the sun began to climb up over the peaks behind my head, it was the old sheet I grabbed in my hands while still snuggled down into my pile of pillows.  I tipped my head back and simultaneously pulled the sheet forward.  There, as I looked straight up into the pre-dawn blackness, was North Park’s display of stars so bright and so vast, for at least a moment or two it wasn’t possible to be aware of anything else.  Except perhaps the round robin of coyote song between packs to the north, west and south of where I lay, no longer needing an alarm to start my day.

I can’t help but hope that the wolf packs of my Arapaho friend’s backyard and the coyote packs of my own backyard will find a way to sing us both a little closer to a real and eternal happy ending.  One that doesn’t feel too sad along the way.

 

 

Posted in Cancer, Life | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Then the Frackers Came

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Gayle
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Fracking Derrick in North Park, Colorado – September, 2010

 

When I returned to North Park in August of 2010, little had changed since I last lived here twelve years earlier.  The mountain ranges, the wildlife, the way the Park fans out in reality-defying magnificence when you top Peterson’s ridge heading south — they all looked the same.

When I returned to North Park in August of 2010, there was profound change that tapped lightly on the door of my consciousness at first, then moved in to take up residence as my closest neighbor.

August 15, 2010

Sunday evenings haunt me.  They always have.  The struggle is an ancient inheritance from a long ago unhappy childhood, from which remain visceral responses to certain perpetual cues.  Like the arrival of Sunday night.

I’ve learned to be strategic in managing it.  Here and now, in this midlife starting over, in this scattered junkyard surrounded by mountains, I make sure I’m outside as the sun sets on Sunday, to gather up peace as if it’s nourishment.  The quiet here is heavy with a density I remember well.  It’s rich and comforting.  It’s a simple, perfect blanket of comfort without being absolute.  It’s framed by coyote song and something that wasn’t here 20 years ago — the soft thup, thup, thup of oil wells pumping their way into the veins of the Park.

August 16, 2010

For weeks, I’ve been ignoring the grid of orange flags fluttering in the wind like plastic flowers blossoming in the hay field to the east.  When they first appeared halfway between my new home and the road a mile in the distance, I was panic struck by the possibility someone might actually build a house there and I’d have to cope with neighbors.  It was Gene who set me straight.  “It looks like you’re getting yourself an oil well,” he said.

Today the flags are gone.  So is a ten-acre swath of the hay field, bulldozed into a flat slick of dirt surrounded by gleaming strands of barbed wire stretched tight and sharp to keep out the cows.  And my llamas.

August 17, 2010

Heading out early for a day in town, my truck rattles by the scraped-bare patch of ground awaiting its fate.  Sharon, Gene and Rick are standing in the middle of it.  I stop to visit.  It turns out they’re waiting for a check to be delivered by the oil men who are on their way.  Apparently, during the enthusiastic efforts to flatten the hay field, the bulldozer and fencers have crossed a land boundary by a few yards, encroaching on Rick’s junkyard.  Rather than demand the new fence be moved, the family is accepting a check in payment.  It will be an amount large enough to replace the rusting, leaking, tire-topped roof of the trailer I now live in.

August 18, 2010

Trucks, backhoes, more bulldozers, modular living quarters, portable outhouses and a dozen or more men move onto the newly cleared land.  The workers work until midnight, while the bouncing lights of their vehicles dance their way through my bedroom windows.

August 19, 2010

The rig, the derrick, comes with sunrise.  Engine roar, clanking, and deep throated shouts fill the air.  After the sun goes down, flood lights are erected and lit.  The noise goes on all night long.  A lighted tower, four stories high, creates a throbbing nightlight that pierces the sky, dims the stars, stops the coyote song.  No one can tell me how long it will be like this.  Not in hours or days or months.  “Until they find oil,” I’m told.  Then the tower and the lights and the grinding noise will go away.  The men will leave us with a well and one more source of “thup, thup, thup” that is closer than it was before.

I don’t know how to write about my sorrow.  It reaches far, spreads wide, becomes so quickly complicated.  Sorrow over oil wells in this country of North Park of great poverty, where the long time people of this place celebrate a sign of economic hope; in this country of the United States of America where there is so much oil dependent self indulgence; in this state of my being when a Ford F250 super cab truck is my only mode of transportation taking me hundreds of miles, burning many gallons of high cost diesel fuel every week.

August 20, 2010

I visit with friends in Laramie.  I say the words out loud, hoping to ease my pain by voicing it:  “An oil well is being drilled a half mile from where I live.”  They look at me, stunned.  Blaming.  “What are you going to do?  Where will you go now?”  They would never dream of living next to an oil well.  I’m now part of the picture of something they hate, don’t believe in, fight against with all their might.

August 21, 2010

Oil drilling pulses in my dreams all night long, when I’m able to sleep at all.

I write with distraction.  I write with fear, unhappiness.

Hercules the puppy isn’t afraid of the night any more.  The oil rig lights comfort him, make him brave.

August 22, 2010

Hercules and I walk past the oil drilling encampment of buildings, equipment, men, all caged in by barbed wire, chain link fencing, a massive new double gate.  A neighboring rancher has parked his truck on the side of the road.  He’s sitting in the driver’s seat, watching.

“What do you think of all that?” he asks as I pass.

“There’s a lot going on,” I answer.

“Some of the ranchers are saying the money they got for mineral rights isn’t really as much as they thought it was when it was first offered to them,” he tells me.

I nod and pull Hercules away from the truck door he’s jumping at in enthusiastic greeting of the rancher.

August 26, 2010

The rig is gone.  The coyotes are back, porcupines are on the move, hawks perch on fence posts eating their prey, and the cows still don’t seem to notice any of it.

A man named Dale climbs up the side of the trailer, knocks several dozen tires to the ground, and starts to replace the old roof with a slick, solid green, sheet metal one.

September 4, 2010

The nights have been sharp, and I’ve made sure I’ve stepped into them before going to bed each night.  I know that the silence and darkness from the oil field is just a temporary break, and I’ve been determined to be active in my gratitude.  The nighttime temperatures drop quickly into the 20s, which always seems to add to the brightness of the stars.  For over a week now, the coyote song is back as the loudest sound after dark, and the Milky Way has returned without interference.

September 7, 2010

The drilling of the oil well was just the warmup act.  Now a small city is being built; enormous truckbeds carrying pieces of rigging rumble in one after another for hours on end.  This is it.  The big one.  The one that will bring dozens of men from far away, to work for months in my backyard.  It’s the frackers who are coming now.

September 10, 2010

This tower dwarfs the one that came before.  It soars with alarming speed to a height of 11 stories of platforms.  This one sends noise and artificial light across the junkyard and on out into the meadows, onto the willows, over the backs of the coyotes, all the way to the western peaks.  There are two wells in one place.  Apparently, this spot in North Park is not only fertile ground for meadow grass, but for fossil fuel as well.

September 12, 2010

The frackers have come.  With a grinding, screeching shudder, they go thousands of feet deep and a mile each across to the north and south, forcing water and secret chemicals into the widening cracks in the rocks they pummel.

I know nothing about this process, other than it comes with political and environmental controversy, and sounds painful to the earth.  Rape.  I can’t help but think the word as I lie awake listening to it night after night.  Or am I projecting my own pain, my own resistance to change onto everything happening around me?

October 20, 2010

Men are imported from all over the country to do the work required of digging and setting up a productive oil well here.  As far as I know, no local people are hired for these jobs.  The only economic benefit to the town comes from temporary motel room rentals, restaurant meals, and increased business to the liquor stores and bars.  The laundromat is also used more heavily.  The distinct smell of grease, oil and sweat fill its tiny space when I go in to do my weekly washing.

I don’t want to visit with these laborers.  I avoid talking to them, looking at them.  But today, after several of them left with their clothes stuffed back into pillow cases, the remaining one won’t accept my increasingly pointed rebuffs to his conversational overtures.

“You live here in town?”

“No.”

“Where do you live?”

“About 18 miles out .”

“Whereabouts?”

“South.”

“On a ranch?”

“Yes.”

“I’m working out that way.”

My hands instinctively grip the pair of jeans I’m folding.   Suddenly, the smell of petroleum radiating from him and the clothes he’s pulling out of a dryer, smell like the air around my home.

“We’re out there fracking — I’m sure you’ve seen the rig.”

“I’ve seen it.”  I take a deep breath.  “How long will you be there?”

“A couple more weeks.  Unless this cold keeps up.  Whoever heard of below zero weather in October?  The bosses are talking about calling it quits, like maybe we’ve ground up enough rock.  It’s fine with me.  The only thing I like about working on that rig is the view I have of a big herd of llamas that come up to the fence and watch us every day.  They sure are curious things.”

October 28, 2010

Just like that, the tower and the city are gone.  In the snow, after chores and before bed, I realize there are no towering lights to dim the stars.  No grinding screech screaming out at me.  Instead, a single flame flares into the night, burning off excess gas, marking one of the largest, most productive oil wells in North Park.

 

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It Takes a Small Town

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Gayle

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The local farrier showed up at 9:00 in the morning the other day, while I was still out feeding.  Once again, I had to try and explain to him that the llamas who greeted him were being curious, not trying to warn him away from where Destiny the horse was eating her breakfast.  He never quite believes me.  While he pulled tools out of the back of his truck, he kept talking about the disgruntled look on their faces and how they flattened their ears back when he reached out to them.

He eased his way through the herd and trimmed up Destiny’s hooves.  I finished my chores.  We met back at his truck so I could pay him and he could fill me on the busy couple of days he’d had with death in North Park.  My farrier is also the county coroner.

This is how I found out that Gene’s brother Bob had died.

“He’s in a better place,” my farrier/coroner assured me.  “I barely recognized him.”

Gene and Sharon own the property I live on, the ranch cabin I lived in when I first came to North Park 20+ years ago, the mountain pasture my llamas graze in the summer.  We visit on the phone regularly and see each other several times a week when the weather is good.  Sharon had called the day before to talk about our shared electric bill.  She didn’t mention that Bob had died.  Not because I didn’t know Bob, I did — spent many cattle drives, branding day lunches and haying time visits with him over the years.  I also know that Bob and Gene had shared more than 80 years of deep connection.  Sharon didn’t mention Bob’s passing because fresh pain and loss are really difficult to bring up.

I was so grateful to the farrier that day, carrying important news I might not have learned for several more days until I went into town and saw the notice of Bob’s memorial service tacked on the post office bulletin board.  The moment the farrier left, I ran inside to call Gene and Sharon.

This is one of the things I love about small towns.  News still travels faster in person than by any other means — even in North Park where only about 600 people live in town and the other 600 are spread out over 2400 square miles.

Small town living has always suited me best.  I like being where individual life moments are marked with little spontaneous celebrations.  Like last Thursday when several of us ended up hanging out in the post office lobby talking about retirement and life with the postmaster on his last day of work after 25 years of being the guy we handed our packages to and bought our stamps from.  He’s taking up sheet rocking next.

There’s more flexibility in small towns.  Last December, a truck was parked outside the North Park Visitors Bureau with a For Sale sign on it.  It was precisely what was needed for some community food project work I’m connected to 80 miles away in Laramie, Wyoming.  I made a few calls, did some test driving, and through the woman who was selling it for him, convinced 86-year-old Jimmy who owned the truck, to hold onto it for almost three months until we could raise enough money to buy it.

There’s more trust in small towns, fewer locked doors.  All this balanced with practical realism, of course.  On the day I finally brought a check and picked up the truck from Jimmy, I saw him again ten minutes later.  He was riding his tricycle down Main Street, his canister of oxygen in the giant basket behind him, heading straight for the bank to deposit that check.

The problem with small towns is that you feel rigidity and intolerance more when they do raise their ugly heads.  When a married woman in town fell in love with one of my closest friends, and the two women moved in together, scandalous gossip turned to spitting on sidewalks when they passed.  It all grew into the kind of shunning a small town knows how to hone to a high art, eventually forcing the couple to leave a home they once loved.

When I travel in big cities, I protect myself by walking tall, sticking to the outside of the sidewalk, and by not making eye contact.  Living 15 miles outside a very small town, I protect myself by offering up juicy bits of gossip about my life before someone else makes it up.

Because everyone in town knows where I live, what I do, and how much I love being part of this unusual part of the world, they keep an eye on me.  When I spent a year in cancer treatment, I got cards every day from people I know only because we share a small grocery store, the same three restaurants, and vote on paper ballots at the library every November.  If I had died in the process, the coroner would have let everyone know, there would have been an announcement on the post office bulletin board, and it’s quite possible a few businesses would have shut down for my memorial service.

But the truth is that all the bad things happening in big communities are also happening here in my small town — poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, domestic violence, gun violence, sexual abuse, bullying, racism, sexism, environmental poisoning and destruction.  In some ways it hits us harder when it does come along, because we don’t have enough people to provide emotional distance from it.

What we do have, is heart.  Hearts that have been raised on and nurtured by the breathtaking beauty of our mountains, rivers and lakes, and a long history of survival made possible by human perseverance and kindness.

A lot of us will show up for Bob’s memorial service this Saturday.  It will be the only event happening in town that day.  We’ll spend time together talking about how he spent his life on the Wamsley ranch, got his schooling in a one-room schoolhouse, rode his old gray mare in a halter rather than a bridle and bit, was one of the sweetest people we’ve ever known.  We’ll have lunch together.  We’ll mourn the loss of one of our own, just like people everywhere do.  And not at all like any place else, because this is our small town, and we know how special that makes us.

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Having the Ability to Let Go Without Doing It Too Soon

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Gayle
Oscar Oscar

Oscar stands at the door, peering through the window.  His nearly toothless mouth makes his cheeks cave in, giving him a permanently bewildered, less than sharp look.  But he’s not as dimwitted as he appears.  I let him into the back porch for an unscheduled, additional helping of grain soaked in warm water until it puffs into a fluffy mid-morning snack perfect for a llama who has only a few tiny tooth nubs and tough gums with which to chew food.

Two years after being rescued from a Montana animal sanctuary that was progressively neglecting and starving the animals in its care, Oscar still bears the pale traces of the blue mark we made along his shoulder to indicate he should be moved to the temporary hospice ward erected for the llamas we knew were unable to survive one of the major rescue transports.  We called them the Blues.  The llamas least likely to leave the sanctuary alive.

It doesn’t take witnessing the effects of mass starvation to understand that life is fragile.  Most of us learn some form of this lesson pretty early on.   And generally speaking, it gets worse from there.  Which makes developing good strategies for handling loss essential — each of us managing to do so with varying degrees of aplomb.

When it comes to caregiving, the fragility of life begins to shine through the lens of responsibility.  Rarely is the loss of a cherished family member or friend, human or otherwise, unmuddied by wondering if we could have or should have done more to stave off death.

Of the 11 Montana Blues who did hang on long enough to leave their nightmare in Montana and come home with me to northern Colorado, nine are still here.  Three young ones, four of some undeterminable middle age, and two elders.  It took a while, but the youngsters have recovered enough to live their days as if there was never any doubt they would have the chance.

It’s the other six I have to dance the hang-on-or-let-go dance with — love them, give them special care, but always be prepared to say goodbye when they can no longer hang onto something good on earth.

Oscar is one of the elders — his perpetual thinness and dental challenges a result of both long term starvation and advanced age.  He wears a blanket for at least six months out of the year.  In addition to water soaked feed, I chop his hay in a wood chipper.  His hearing is beginning to go.  I watch and listen carefully for him to signal readiness for his final departure — wanting desperately for it to be his decision and not mine.

When he went lame recently, limping badly on his left rear leg and not responding to medication or rest, I tried not to think about the implications.  Unsuccessfully.  Oscar’s time is coming to a close, I told myself.  How I wish I could mark it by remembering a long trail of wonderful life stories with him, but of course I can’t.  Instead, I begin to let go.  Something I’ve become inordinately good at over the years.  On bad days life seems to be nothing more than a series of cumulating losses.  No one gets through unscathed.  Accepting loss without being terrified of it or drowning in it is the best I can hope for.

Until the latest and fiercest of the season’s snowstorms arrives.

Storm days are always extra challenging.  None of the animals want to leave the barns, which makes feeding difficult with everyone crowded into their self-generated warmth, spitting and jostling for their own bowl of feed or section of hay.

I eventually get the chores done and head back to my own shelter, stopping at the stack of firewood to bring in my day’s supply of heating fuel.  The wind tears the hood off my head and stinging pellets of snow are driven down the back of my neck.  Scrunching my eyes against the poor visibility, I load a few pieces of wood into my arms and begin to stumble toward the door.

Something big and dark bumps up against me, tossing the wood from my arms to the ground, and nearly kocking me off my feet.  A little shaken and much confused, I regain my bearings to see Oscar’s zebra-patterned blanket slide by.  He’s running through the wind and blowing snow to land at the door I’m headed for, begging —insisting — on an extra bowl of feed.

What else can I do but accommodate this request for more?  He eats happily while I finish bringing in firewood, stands for me to straighten his blanket, then heads back out into the storm.  The only llama willing to brave it.

He pauses to prepare for his return trip, then makes a flying charge back to the barn, lowering his neck and shaking his head like a two-year-old.  No limp.  Not a care in the world.  Reminding me that what ultimately saves us all from the specter of inevitable loss is the equally frequent surprise of determined survival.

Oscar in hospice care during the sanctuary rescue. Oscar in hospice care during the sanctuary rescue.

 

 

 

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Gardens and the Gift of Grace

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Gayle

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In late June of last year, I was on call for daily radiation treatments.  Having suffered through the claustrophobia of the preparatory CAT scans and the bizarre fashioning around my body of what the technicians creepily called a “cradle,” I just wanted to get the next two months over with.  I kept putting dates on my calendar and the cancer center people kept calling to delay them by a day or two.

Those days, my head was beginning to clear and my ability to do anything for more than 15 minutes at a time was gradually coming back.  Having made it through eight months of diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, I was waiting for ethereal transformation of my very being to wash over me in reward.  Instead, what seemed to be returning was the very worst of who I’d ever been.  Demanding, snippy, disappointed.

Pain and sweats raged to a higher pitch at night, leaving me in battle with the pillows, the bed itself.  I thrashed against it all as if the duel was happening on the edge of a cliff.  I could see myself careening off the narrow trail, finally and forever hopeless.  I couldn’t even imagine what it was I should reach for, grasp for, pray for, anything at all for.  What the hell was I looking for anymore?

Grace, said the whisper at the back of my addled mind.  I was seeking grace.  The message was enough to let me sleep for an hour or so.  When I woke to the twitter of bluebirds, the trill of redwinged blackbirds, the whoosh of hawks’ wings and the rasp of the crow triplets arguing with each other, the whisper had become a gentle hum.  I will seek grace, I decided.  Just as soon as I figure out what it is.

I began by searching for references to grace in writing.  It was everywhere:  people needing grace, people receiving grace, people saying grace — amazing, amazing, amazing grace.  Even in my own writing I found at least a half dozen references to the idea of grace (usually the lack thereof).  But I couldn’t find anything that told me what these lovely literary, musical, artistic or spiritual allusions to grace actually meant.  Something more than peace but less than revolutionary change.  More than calming but less than inspiring.

Grace is apparently as hard to define as it is to embody.  So I let go of trying to assign it meaning, and instead worked on imagining the simplest possible setting where I might find a sense of grace.

Gardens, said the same whisper that had suggested grace to begin with.  Gardens?  I live in a junkyard where the growing season is somewhere between 28 and 40 days long, and 20-mile-an-hour winds constitute a light breeze.  Oh, right.  I was searching for something not immediately apparent or at my fingertips.

Fine.  Gardens.  Like the Maine garden of my childhood that taught me how delicious asparagus really is.  Or the community garden in Wyoming I helped create, where the gardeners say they come in the evenings after work just to nibble at beans and strawberries and smell the dirt.  And the wild gardens of the high Rocky Mountains that burst with overwhelming color and perfume in the few short weeks they’re able to grow each year.

Then it occurred to me that many of the books I’m drawn to are fashioned around a theme of gardens.  Like most recently in the light and sweet garden-based memoir series by Dominique Browning, beginning with Around the House and In the Garden; and in Molly Peacock’s extraordinary The Paper Garden.

But this isn’t a new reading interest for me.  In the late 80s after my son Tristan died, I was sustained by works that brought me to women’s gardens.  I lost myself in pages of leisurely descriptions of the order of blooms, of the painting of colors on blossoms I’d never heard of.  I walked with the writers and their characters across lawns and fields and craggy shorelines that took them to their gardens and underscored their searches for meaning in life, for efforts to sort out matters of love and heartbreak.

Back then I was happy to slow to the daily crawl of May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude.  I was grateful for the length of Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, for the time it allowed me to be lost in that richly wrought world of gardening, art, family struggle and the changing definitions of home.

Last week, it was real life gardening that brought me to Ithaca, New York, although its hills were ironically covered with snow at the time.  For eight to ten hours a day every day, I sat and listened to women and men who are pouring enormous amounts of energy and passion into the seeds, ground, harvesting, and political war zone of trying to create food justice in one of America’s many unjust landscapes.  Born locally or finding their way to Ithaca from places like Bermuda and Peru and the housing projects of New York City, they inspired and humbled me as they railed against the barriers before them and burst with great ideas for how to make them crumble.  They stunned me with their willingness and ability to break bread with the researchers and academics who shuttled up and down the hill of immense privilege on top of which sits Cornell University.

The voices of these great activists, and their view from the bottom of the hill, crammed into my head and replaced my own dreams when I slipped into bed late every night. Their battles and mine threatened to become one jumbled mass of meaningless chaos.  I could barely keep up with the mix of quests happening in the gardens of Ithaca Village and the greenhouses of Cornell, let alone hang onto my own journey’s goals.  Without a single break in each day’s extraordinary agenda of interviews, conversations, meetings and seminars, my personal work slipped from my grasp and I missed my self-imposed deadline for publishing something in my blog once a week, every Wednesday.  Poor me.  Lazy me.  Incapable me.

The meetings continued to blossom with hope from what people were talking about and accomplishing.  I felt simultaneously embraced by and unmoored from what they were growing in their gardens and their lives.

At the end of the week, it took me an hour to repack the large suitcase I’d needed for such a long stay.  My body was buzzing — satisfied and spent.  I was still smarting from having missed my own writing deadline, wondering if inner peace and balance were to be permanently elusive myths for me.

I checked my phone and logged into my email, collecting final messages from the people who had been so generous in sharing pieces of their lives with me during my visit to their home.  Against the shameful edge of resentment for taking yet more time away from myself, I began to thank people for everything they’d given.

Thank you for your time, your good work, your gardens and the beautiful food they bring to people in need, I wrote. Thank you for your courage to say what’s true and your willingness to forgo popularity for justice. Thank you for teaching me and reminding me of what’s important.

As I wrote, my exhaustion eased.  The grating concerns of my personal domain smoothed out, and I remembered one of the conversations I had with the young woman from Peru who was changing the look and feel of every project she took on in Ithaca.  We’d been talking about the loneliness and pain of leadership — me more than 30 years out, she at the youthful starting line.  She leaned in to explain how there was something those of us on down the road in life were forgetting.

“We look up to the leaders before us who teach us,” she told me of herself and her fellow young gardeners of all kinds.   She went on to tell me that they, the emerging leaders, are learning their lessons well.  “And so,” she said, “we have power, too.  We’re all around, and we all have the power to help make change.”

Her earnest eyes and soft voice were proof.  I really could feel it all around me, just like she said.  The power of many.  And there it was.  Grace.  Warm, quiet, ever changing.  Grace.  I missed a deadline in exchange for it.  It came once again in a way I hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t really define.  Yet as always, it came in the form of a whisper.  It came in the form of a gift.

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New Life When It’s Least Expected and Most Needed

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Gayle

Sammy the KittenIt was hard when the cows left Wade’s Ranch.  For all the fundamental difference between my vegetarian heart and Gene and Sharon’s cattle ranching heritage, never once had I questioned their love for those cows, the land, the wildlife they shared it with, the life that had begun for them when their parents were homesteading ranchers of North Park.

It was Sharon who taught me how to cook on a wood stove, do laundry in a wringer washer, to save plate scrapings for her sister’s pig.  It was Sharon who would call from down below to let me know when a herd of elk or a pair of moose were headed my way to be sure I got up from my desk to see them.  It was Gene who taught me how to ride into the gullies to find a lost cow and calf, who explained that a cow bawling for days on end was grieving the death of her baby, who would stop on the spring cattle drive to pick up tired calves and carry them the rest of the way to summer pasture slung over the front of his saddle.

But advancing age was moving in with a great deal of unwelcome baggage.  Gene’s eyesight and hearing were becoming a dim memory.  It was time to figure out how to rewrite 80 years of daily scheduling that began before dawn and ended after sunset with unrelenting chores determined by the season.  From tending the irrigation ditch to midnight calls to calving; from branding and castrating to moving the herd on horseback 12 miles to summer grazing and back again two months later with putting up tons of hay in between; from weaning and shipping to feeding through eight months of snow by horse drawn sleigh and snowmobile, in temperatures commonly well below -20°F.

No one could imagine what it was going to be like for the cows to be gone, but we all silently dreaded it.  Once my llama herd took up summer residency on the eastern slope of the ranch, and a neighboring rancher leased the hay fields and the west slope for his own cows, it seemed possible that summer chores of checking on the new tenants and repairing fences would fill in some of the gaps.  It was winter that we all worried about.  A few horses, a couple of little donkeys and a barn cat were not going to fill the days.  During that first cowless winter, Gene and Sharon experienced boredom for the first time in their lives.

As promised, summer was better.  There were still pelicans to be chased from the fishing ponds, and irrigation headgates requiring maintenance.  But as August rolled around, the nights became bitter cold with the announcement that winter was on its way home.  I began to worry about the quiet stretch ahead again for Gene and Sharon.

Then came the call from Sharon asking me what to feed a newborn kitten.  I knew she didn’t mean what kind of formula should she buy at the local pet store.  First of all, the nearest pet store was 60 miles away.  Secondly, it was unlikely she had a commercial product in mind.

And then there was that other issue.  Cats are not enormously popular among ranchers in North Park.  Don’t get me wrong – the value of a barn cat or two for controlling the mouse population is recognized.  But cats as pets or companions or something worth saving from death is not typically part of the ranching mentality.

“A newborn kitten?” I asked.

“Maybe a couple of weeks old,” she said.  “It’s eyes are open, but it’s just skin and bones.  Gene was helping out with haying down in Coalmont, and they were complaining about some dying cats.  We went looking for them.  When we found them, the mother was gone and the entire litter was dead except one, which is barely alive.”

Sharon had that tone in her voice.  The one that disapproved of whatever had happened at the Coalmont ranch that left a litter of kittens for dead.

“Gene and I were not about to leave it there to die along with the rest.”

Her disgust at cat mistreatment delighted me, but my heart sank.  It isn’t easy to save the life of a pre-weaned kitten under the best of circumstances.  To do so with homegrown remedies makes it harder.  But I loved the steely resolve coming through the phone.  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that chances were high the kitten wouldn’t make it.

Thank goodness for the electronic booster that gives me Internet access, and for the breadth of knowledge floating around in cyberspace to supplement my own personal experience with being a kitten nursemaid.  Without ever getting off the phone, I was able to find Sharon a kitten formula that could be made with ingredients any self-respecting rancher would have in her pantry.  And while I was searching it out, I gave her a list of things she needed to do for this feline orphan that included frequent feedings clock round and genital stimulation with a warm wet cloth after every one of those feedings, to prevent constipation that would prove fatal.

That was it.  I called the next day and the day after that to learn that the kitten was still alive.  My own schedule was tight, so even trips up to the mountain to check on llamas didn’t give me time to actually see the kitten for almost a week.  Finally, after one of those checks, I made it off the mountain as the sun finished setting.

A bitter breeze pushed me through Gene and Sharon’s back door.  The small house was warm and quiet, the television humming softly from the main room.  I called out, took off my boots, and headed inside.  Gene said hi and Sharon got up immediately to make me a cup of tea.  I sighed at the stillness of the room.  I didn’t want to hear about how the kitten had succumbed to its fate, so I didn’t ask.  I took a seat at the kitchen table and summoned up some conversation.

Just as I began to talk about the cold and the shrinking daylight, up popped a tiny gray head over the sill of the sunken bedroom beside me.  All head and ears and eyes, his body still working on catching up, the kitten scrambled through the doorway and charged across the room.

“He’s alive!”  I was stunned.

“Oh yes,” Sharon said, as if there had never been any doubt he would be.  “We named him Sammy.”

Sammy careened around the cook stove, crash landed in the sitting area, then clawed his way up Gene’s pant leg to land in his lap and begin chewing on his shirt buttons.  Gene laughed, Sharon scolded, I sipped my tea in wonder.  Just a week after being plucked from death, the kitten’s belly was round and taut, he could drink and eat on his own, and faced everything around him with big cat importance.

That’s how everything changed.  Gene and Sharon’s quiet home of retirement exploded with new, unexpected life uncommon to a common ranch house in North Park.  Flying to the door to greet every guest, racing around the house and attacking every shoelace, Sammy the kitten loves people unabashedly, having no concept of the human race’s culpability in his near-death experience or his orphaned status.

But of course, he’s not orphaned.  He has Gene and Sharon.  And they have him.  And while he isn’t a herd of cows, he brought enough energy back to Wade’s Ranch to almost feel like a full time job.  Young and old, fast and slowing down, it’s all so unlikely — and utterly meant to be.

 

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