Robin Boies

For right now, I am standing in a different time. My mother died last week after a thirty-five month illness that left her in a wheel chair and later bedridden. Recently, as I was going through a pile of recipe cards, many in my mother and grandmother’s handwriting, I realized how little I had listened to my mom. Tomboy to the core, my memories are of the time spent outdoors, and time with my dad. Growing up, little did I think about my mother’s life in the house. It took getting married, raising a family, and being expected to cook for a ranch crew when needed that brought an appreciation for her role. Becoming the ranch cook almost the day after my wedding I realized that through osmosis I must have absorbed more of my mother’s skills than I realized.

She taught me how to do things right, not fast. That is one of Bud William’s messages that when working with cattle, an extra half an hour on the front end can save you hours in the end. Mom was like that. She wasn’t big on short cuts. She could work me into the ground up until her life’s work caught up with her.

Over the past few years as we traveled through the labyrinth of hospitals, rehab facilities, and care centers, her physically demanding life became more and more apparent. The knotty knuckled liver spotted hands that struggled to hold a coffee cup steadily became a symbol of her life. They were not the hands of idleness, manicured and pristine in their old age, they told a story of outdoors, hard work and activity.

As I look at my own hands I see Mom. I see a long strong line with the beginnings of knots and spots and old scars that tell of my life. Seeing, I know it is not just a genetic code that I pass on, but the choice to watch baby calves being born renewing us after a long winter sojourn, and the privilege to listen for the blue herons return to the meadows in spring. It is a gift to pass on to my children, her grandchildren, a way of life and work that she lived and loved.

As the cold dreariness of winter passes with the teasing and ticklish pleasure of sunshine, the ranch New Year begins with a new calf crop that starts to drop with the lengthening days. A hint of green grass, and the growing strength in the afternoon sun heralds the beginning of a newness and freshness. It is a cycle of endings and beginnings, of rebirth and death as old as time itself: a mysterious drama at the center of man’s creativity that is reassuring.

Betty Johnson and grandson, Nathan Boies