The Real Thing

While in Montana, my grandparents regaled us with stories of living in the rural west. My grandfather was a cattle rancher for the majority of his life, and my grandmother a rancher's wife. They drove straight to Montana following their honeymoon, a move my grandmother had not anticipated. She thought she would be much closer to her family in Utah, much closer. It must have seemed a daunting change, to go off into the lone and dreary world together, to carve beauty out of an empty stretch of brush, to make the desert bloom. I miss the ranch: my grandmother's rose gardens, the piles of muddy cowboy boots in the foyer, the white shag carpet, crystal lamps and light blue couches in the "pretty room" that epitomized finery to me, the narrow, bumpy, dusty roads and the sudden appearance of the big white house and green, fenced yard of the ranch on the horizon, the cows roaming and mooing, the coyote calls at night. I love thinking about how my grandmother used to fend off the cows with two by fours while my grandfather administered medicine to the calves. Or how she used to have to reach up into the cows' uterusi (the plural of uterus?) to get the calves out because her hands were the only ones small enough to get up there and unhook their legs. Or how my grandfather worked from dusk til dawn working the land, solitary work, every day. I miss the ranch. Very much.