Riding the White Horse Home

I’ve always loved books. And so, there are some of you who’ve requested that I list some of my favorite books. I’ll honor this request from time to time, but with this caveat: just because I love a book, doesn’t mean that you will. I like most books. I find something interesting and enlightening in almost everything I read. I seldom hate a book. But to love one, that is a trickier thing.

So here goes:

A book I LOVE:

“Riding the White Horse Home” by Teresa Jordan

I adore a good memoir. For me, there is none more haunting and beautiful than Teresa Jordan’s, “Riding the White Horse Home.” I can honestly say that this book changed everything for me. I read it in college as a part of a Western American Literature class. To this day, I can’t pick it up without a lump rising in my throat. I’m not sure why. It might not appeal to everyone. It hasn’t sold millions of copies or even, for that matter, received much recognition (which I believe it deserves), but I found it life-changing. If I were only allowed one book to read over and over again for the rest of my life, this would be it.

Teresa Jordan was raised on a ranch in Southeast Wyoming. I grew up on a dairy farm in Southeast Idaho. I knew some of the same things she did: “that it’s easier to be a rancher’s daughter than a rancher’s son (pg 36), that “I feared my grandfather, but I also loved him” (pg 22) and that “I had some direct connection to both the land and the events that transpired upon it” (pg 12). What I was still navigating was the way that our family’s way of life and the land I’d grown up on had shaped me and where I was going now that I was away from it, on my own. In the book, Jordan says that “less than 2 percent of Americans live on farms and ranches.” I was startled in college as I talked to my friends: their fathers were bankers and doctors and lawyers and salesman and computer programmers. I never met another farmer’s daughter. Most of my friends viewed my way of life as charming and quaint. Teresa Jordan knows it and tells it for what it is and was. I loved her honesty of it, her perspective:

Another excerpt:

My family left the land because for four generations we had yearned to leave. We had lived in a culture that taught us that a professional life is more respectable than one tied to the land. This attitude shaped the decisions my family made, and it continues to shape the larger political and economic decisions, made by educators and policymakers far removed from the land, that affect the few who still hold on.

My sadness over the loss of the homeplace is my dark side, my grief, but it is also the source of my deepest knowledge. Perhaps it is only through this experience of loss that I can value a sense of place, that I can question how thoughtlessly—even contemptuously—we are taught to cast it aside. (pg. 88)

At this time in my life (when I first read this book), I was at a crossroads. I was ready to divorce myself from the place and land and way of life that I’d loved, mostly because I did not believe that I could be the person I wanted to be if I held on to it too tightly. “Riding the White Horse Home” allowed me to both hold on and let go. It was more than that, though. It is so beautifully written, so rich in emotion. I loved everything about this book. Secretly, I wanted to be a writer. Up to this point I’d only read books by people so different than me: people with money, from cities, who’d traveled the world. Here was a book, printed, published, and in my hands by someone I could relate to: someone who wrote of the smell of her mother’s bread baking and of the steam that rises from afterbirth when a new calf is born. It gave me hope and a sense that maybe I, too, could write something that someone else would want to read. It was a great, great gift. But aside from that, it’s a beautiful book. A must read.

At least I think so.

My Bucket List on You Tube

So after missing the below mentioned dramatic eruption of Old Faithful, I did went any modern American with Internet access would do: I went to You Tube and watched a closer and more impressive version of the geyser's explosion than the one I'd witnessed. And then it got me thinking. I could probably experience almost everything via You Tube. I don't like the term "bucket list" but that's what everybody calls it. So I thought about mine and what I haven't done that I still want to do.

Hmmm. I've never seen a firefly.

It is definitely high on my bucket list. Has been for ages. So I looked up "catching fireflies" on You Tube. Here's what I found:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYuEzROg-MQ

Pretty cool, eh? Then it occurred to me: I could probably experience everything this way--except for someday having a pedicure and eating lobster. But other than that, I probably don't even need to leave my house. And you all know how much I really like to just stay home.

Still Old Faithful

It was a dark and stormy night

It was a frantic and crazy summer.

It really was.

One thing we did this summer was go to Yellowstone. We didn’t go to Yellowstone to go to Yellowstone. We went because it was the shortest way between where we live in Wyoming and where our kids had a track meet—in Bozeman, Montana. But we did decide that if we were there, we might as well see the sights.

I went to Yellowstone exactly once as kid. I was ten or eleven and it was one of only 2 vacations we ever took. Since my Dad was a dairy farmer, we had to be back home in time to milk the cows that night. Old Faithful was our last planned stop. We couldn’t wait for the next eruption, so when we pulled into the parking lot my Dad said, “Everybody run!” The famous geyser was already erupting over the heads of spectators huddled around it. We were still what seemed like miles away in the parking lot. We ran, but by the time we got there Old Faithful was drizzling. It was only slightly more impressive than an exploding can of Sprite.

These days Old Faithful is less faithful. They no longer post schedules of its eruption times and I hear that the geyser is smaller. Still. It’s Old Faithful. The one on people’s bucket list. So we stopped. We were walking towards the geyser when sure enough, I told my kids and my husband, “Run!” There was the familiar spray of water obstructed by the backs of people’s heads.

After it was over I heard a man tell his friend, “Seeing that--that's a once-in-a-life-time thing, man.”

Or in my case, two.

Memorial Day

My name is etched on the back of my mother's headstone.

It feels strange to have it there, staring back at me, the A in the middle capitalized like it's supposed to be.

What I hate more, though, is her name on the front. The fact that she is gone.

I miss her.

Today I miss that I am not there to cut lilacs from the lilac bush or arrange peonies in the tin cans my grandfather has saved for today. I miss that I'm not there, filling a bucket with water, carrying it to the gravesides of my grandmother, my great-aunt Donna, my Mom, and watering the pots of mums we bought in every color. I always put the white ones on my mother's grave, because she loved daisies. Dad takes a scrub brush and washes the bird droppings from the headstones. He starts with my mother's and then moves to his mother's and then down the row to relatives I don't know, the ones without flowers--without loved ones nearby enough to come and remember. He washes the big family marker that my kids like to climb on. We stare off into the distance at the mountains. We don't say much. No one does.

I know just how it will be there, at the cemetery, without me. What will be said and what unsaid. I know my mother is not there. That it's a long way to go and an impossible weekend to have gone. Still, though, I'm caught off guard today by the way my heart is tugged West--away from here. I'm caught off guard by the heaviness of the air here, how much missing hurts, and the tight lump rising in my throat.

My Pre-Summer Reading

What I've read lately:

Living Dead Girl: Disturbing tale of a girl who was abducted by a sexual predator 5 years earlier while on a school field trip. This book was haunting, disturbing and unnerving. I thought about it for weeks. Its marketed as a YA book, but (and I never say this) I wouldn't want my teen reading it unless I knew they were and could discuss it with them. If you're interested in this one, read the descriptions and reviews on amazon so you know what you're getting into.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth: Krista Marino was the editor for this book and she talked about it at last year's Writing & Illustration for Young Readers Conference. I thought to myself: Oh, I'll never publish a book if that's what they're looking for. So maybe I won't, because I'd never write a book like this. Still, the opening scene/description about the ocean is beautifully written and it sort of pulled me through the book. I liked it, didn't love it, but liked it. It's a dystopian novel about a girl who longs for a world beyond The Forest of Hands and Teeth where the Unconsecrated (a sort of zombie world of former humans) feed on the living. It was a bit too hopeless for my liking, with the main character losing . . . well that would give it away. . . but it will probably make for a movie that my husband will like. Maybe there's hope in part 2. Maybe.

hold still: I LOVED this book. I thought it was beautifully written. It's about a girl trying to cope with her best friend's suicide. It's about her hanging on and letting go. Coping and crying. Moving on and mourning. I really did love it. I loved the writing. I loved that sometimes the chapters were only one line. They were just the length they needed to be. (Just learning that one thing from this book freed me as a writer). I'd love to write a book like this, or even something close. This is the author's debut novel and I think she's someone to watch.

Really, Wyoming, Really?

Because I do watch Saturday Night Live, I give you my own version of a segment I like to call: Really?!! Wyoming, Really??. Except that there is no Seth, or Amy, or Tina Fey, or even Jerry Seinfeld. It's just me. And my rant. I'd even upload a picture, but its late. (And depressing, did I mention depressing?) So Here You Go:

Is it because “Wyoming in Winter” sounds so alliterative that you have to be snowing, again. I mean, really?

Or was the color “spring green” just too much for your comfort zone pallet of brown, tans, and sagebrush? Was that it? Really?

Maybe the state highway budget for clearing and plowing roads still has a major surplus. Or perhaps, being the 2^nd least densely populated state, you thought that no one would notice. Or care? Was that it, Wyoming? Really?

Or were you just playing a cruel trick on the bears who’ve already come out of hibernation? It could be that, since you’re the last state alphabetically, you’ve not yet received the memo that spring began on March 20^th! I mean, really, Wyoming. Snow again? Really?!!

Eye of the Beholder

Before we left Utah, I took my kids to the BYU Museum of Art. They were having an exhibit of work by Walter Wick, the photographer for the “I Spy” books. I thought they’d be fascinated. One was. My oldest daughter studied the photos and the displays carefully, looking at all the details and creativity. My younger daughter, however, kept looking down the other hallway. It had black walls and a pile of black garbage bags in a room at the end.
“Can we go down there?” she asked.

“Not now,” I said.

We had limited time. I’d learned, from experience, that tackling an entire gallery could be overwhelming. I wanted to stick to one exhibit.

We went back to Walter Wick.

My youngest daughter looked. She ran around. She needed to go to the bathroom.

The bathroom was outside the other exhibit. I saw her eyeing it, being drawn to it. Walking close enough to peer down the hallway and then walking away, to the bathroom. We left the bathroom. Her eyes skirted down the hallway. Again. To the garbage bags. She looked at me.

I nodded.

Off she ran. Down the hallway to piles of garbage bags and a huge canvas of colored balloons. There was a sculpture of plastic chairs and a roomful of packing peanuts that were blown by a fan into an impromtu dance.

She ran from room to room. Excited. Giddy.

I thought about her personality. Spontaneous. Energetic. Impatient. Brave.

My oldest was still with Walter Wick. She was quiet. Disciplined. Detailed.

Both daughters found the same thing: something that intrigued them. They were just in different rooms.

And me? I loved them both.