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I grabbed onto my saddle horn with my left hand and pulled back on the reins with my right. “Whoa, Reba, whoa.” She broke her lope into a fast trot, and the change of pattern caused my left foot to come out of the stirrup.

The rodeo really started when Odie grabbed that rattlesnake by the tail. But that’s starting in the middle of the story, so let me try this from the top.

It has occurred to me that we humans seem very attached to catch phrases, something short, snappy and easily repeatable. I remember when the Tyson fire happened last August, one news article called it a “black swan” and pretty soon, everyone was calling it a black swan which, personally, I think is too suave a name for something that shook up the beef industry so much. Better to call it a “black buzzard” or something equally unsavory.

The cow went down in the pasture.
I took it as a sign.
Like lightning striking my saddle
horn or guppies in the wine.

I had a free weekend, and I’d worked it out so I could help my dad move cows from one unit of the forest allotment to another.  My folks had just bought the ranch in southern Idaho’s Oakley Valley a year or two earlier while I was in college, and it would be several years before I would make that same ranch my permanent home.

Leaving a legacy.

I’ve been pondering this statement lately. I’m in my 40s, and my children are beginning to leave the nest. When our oldest left for college last fall, my husband and I started reminiscing about our lives at that age.