When my husband and I were making plans to build a house out here on the ranch where I was raised, we had a few criteria for where we would place it. Access to rural water helped us check off the first box, and protection from the wind was the second. And the views out here can’t be beat, but we were building a house for the rest of our lives at the height of an oil boom that was changing the landscape pretty rapidly. And so, when we were narrowing down our choices, I remember my husband climbing a tree to get an accurate view of what it would look like outside our front windows.
“Can you see the road?” I hollered at him, safe and sound from the ground where I belong.
“Nope,” he hollered back.
“Can you see that oil rig?” I asked then.
“Nope, not when it starts pumping you won’t,” he answered and so I was satisfied. We would build our house here, where, for years, old cars came to die and cows come for feed and protection in the winter. My sister called it “Cow Pie Heaven” when we were growing up and now that it’s our yard, I really can’t say much has changed in that department. We really need to fix our fence…
Anyway, from where I sit now twelve years later, I like to look out the windows in the morning to catch the pink of the sunset spreading out from behind the hill we call Pots and Pans and across the stock dam my grandpa put in all those years ago. You don’t even have to be lucky to catch a glimpse of deer meandering down from the hill to water or to watch the wild turkeys wander or a coyote trot across the ledge of that little body of water. Sometimes the herd of elk find themselves there, and when the horses are out in the hot summer sun, if you’re on the back deck you can hear the obnoxious ones paw and pound the water to splash their bodies and get a good drink.
When we were first imagining our life here in this house in Cow Pie Heaven, the stock dam was always part of the narrative. I thought I was going to lead a life here where I would be the kind of woman who would put a bench by that little dam and sit to watch the turtles pop up and the muskrat swim.
Turns out I didn’t become the kind of woman that builds benches for wildlife viewing when the big rock and tree stumps do just fine. But that little dam has certainly been a part of our lives as we raise daughters who get as much joy as I do out of watching the water bugs glide along the surface as the hot summer days turn slowly into the reflection of autumn leaves on the mossy water.
There’s nothing like a stock dam to help you keep track of the changing seasons. When we first moved into this house, before we even had proper steps to get from the ground to the door, we hosted a sledding party that turned into a nighttime skating a curling party on the dam with our neighborhood friends, complete with a big fire to keep us warm. It was the kind of thing we did with our neighbors when I was a kid. Sledding of course, but my favorite was when the ice was good for skating and we would meet at someone’s good stock dam, build a fire on the edge and skate in our snow pants and facemasks, pretending to be Nancy Kerrigan winning the gold medal. For a kid, what could be better than that? We would skate until our fingers and toes went numb and then join the grownups by the fire to warm up. We would practice tricks and see how fast we could go, making a ruckus about it all out in the middle of nowhere under the calm, black, cold sky.
Anyway, it seems it’s more natural to acknowledge a dream when we are the beginning of something, the way we did that day when my husband climbed a tree to try to see our future. We could declare it there on that unbroken ground as anything we wanted it to be because we were just beginning. We didn’t know much about how all the tree-climbing dreaming gets replaced with the day to day during the middle part. And so, it’s not as often that we let ourselves acknowledge some of these little things in the day to day are piling up quietly to make the big dream come true.
Last weekend I watched my daughters and their cousins wobble and fall and crash and screech on ice skates, bundled up in snow pants and big hats and mittens on the ice of our stock dam as the afternoon light faded to dark. My dad, little sister and I stood in our snow boots watching and laughing as our bodies were flooded with our own ice-skating memories, so much so that we couldn’t seem to speak them fast enough, our words overlapping, and recollections expounded upon. Remember the fires? Remember the way your cheeks froze white? Remember walking together to that creek with a shovel and broom after school? Remember this is all we wanted to do?
Remember how you wanted this for your own kids?
Remember what he saw, up there, that day, in that tree?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 