Last year about this time, I wrote a post entitled "Frost and Frost" -- a reflection following a walk in icy frostiness, about my choices and the life I'm leading here at the Allison.
This last week has provided me ample opportunity to review the choice to live at this remote ranch: icy roads this time have increased my daily commute substantially, giving me time to think about why I am choosing to live 40 miles from town and work. As my normal 45-minute drive has nearly doubled this week, my subconscious mind has chewed over the five-year-old decision to make my life and home on the ranch, and the implications of that decision.
I am not a cowgirl, so living on a ranch does not have the typical perks that attract my neighbors: I don't need the extra pasture for my barrel-racing horses, don't relish the thought of feeding cows and pulling calves for a livelihood. To borrow a phrase from my friend, writer Pat Frolander, I'm "married into it" -- married into this lifestyle, this home, this place. If my husband wasn't a ranch manager, I would not be living on a ranch; it's that simple. I don't have the skills to hold a ranch job on my own; therefore, the provided house wouldn't be something I could attain. My own mother still lives on the farm where I grew up, and my brother is slowly buying that from her -- so the prospect of returning to my childhood country home doesn't exist for me. And financially, I could no more manage to purchase a ranch than I could feed all the hungry children in South America.
Being married into it, however, doesn't limit me the way it might have limited a woman of an earlier generation. I work hard to free myself from preconcieved notions of what I should be as a ranch wife, as the woman who now lives on this place. It's been an uphill battle to convince some people -- most especially myself --- that this ranch is big enough to accomodate all different types of ranch women. I don't have to fit into a box.
Having that freedom has allowed me to really think about the daily choice I make to live here. I live on this isolated ranch, this place so long neglected and forlorn, because:
* The silence I experience on my morning walks envelopes me, making the rest of the world seem like it exists in a parallel galaxy. A cold winter morning, with little traffic on the highway and little sign of another human, reveals a peace and perfection that no human creation can mimic.
* My closest companions on my "ranch" days are dogs, cats and occasionally horses -- and none of them demands anything more from me than a caress and some food.
* My children are safe here. Sure, there exist a multitude of dangers on a ranch; but they are safe in another sense. My children are safe here from the materialistic, media-inundated, me-centered lifestyle that so many other children succumb to. They understand that they are part of something here that is greater than they are, and that their part in the whole is, paradoxically, both insignificant and important. They may be just feeding a cat; BUT, they are feeding a cat.
* My powers of observation sharpen here. I see birds I'm learning to identify; weeds I'm working to eradicate; land formations I'm hoping to memorize.
* This lifestyle forces me to develop the qualities I most need to work on : resourcefulness, creativity, patience and gratitude.
* My morning and evening commutes have become times to pray, to listen, to learn: I have, on a daily basis, nearly two private hours for enlightenment.
* The work my husband does here is important; he is feeding the world. Despite the incovenience of our distance from town and the incessant work that ranching requires, there is a pride to be part of this place that supplants the discomforts of it.
Probably there are many more reasons I choose to live here, but today, on this windy, brilliant January day, those are the ones that touch my spirit. On another day, there will be other reasons. That's how it is with choice: while you think you make them only one time, the important ones are ones you make over and over, every day.
