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Chapter 27 The Future of the Sense of Place brother’s daily occupations after World War II were centered on the ranch and in Bay City, mine stretched from the family center—to college, working in a Houston bank, graduate school and teaching, and then to sharing the life of my husband and our four children in places that work prescribed. Holidays brought our family together again and to the Ranch House. Aunt Sister told me that she never once, in all her life, spent Christmas away from home and family. After college when I showed signs of wanting to work eighty miles away in Houston, she sighed in deep disappointment. How could there be a satisfaction elsewhere greater than the satisfaction of home? The ties with one another that threaded through the same beloved place knitted together the generations and connected scattered cousins of the same generation. For several years the operations of the Hawkins Ranch edged toward the perimeter of my attention. After undergraduate years at the University of Texas, I moved to Houston and found myself in a swirl of young professionals. I met Austen Furse. “Furse,” he explained (and the explanation charmed me), “is that thorny bush in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, but Hardy spells it with a z or ‘zed,’ as the English say.” He was a young lawyer, Yale English major, football player, and Air Force veteran of World War II; and he had grown up in a small Texas town, as I had. We married in . In an early venture, when our first-born daughter Janie was a toddler, we went to graduate school at Columbia University, where he earned a master of laws degree, and I began work toward a PhD in philosophy of religion. I had the delicious experience of being able to study under scholars I had known only through books—Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, 188 the instruction of town and country and John Herman Randall. At the end of the decade, I had my degree and four lovely children—Janie, Austen III, John, and Mary. My husband and I, thus outfitted with advanced degrees, illogically moved from Houston to Bay City, where he practiced law and where such degrees were of little use and sometimes prompted a comment about why we would have bothered. The red-tile-roofed house on Avenue G, vacant since Aunt Janie’s death in , became the home of our young family. Our move to Bay City about  meant that our four children grew up closely involved with my brother’s children—Frank Jr., Janet, Meta, and Jim. They were close in age and often shared pleasant weekends together at the ranch. Their fondness for one another as well as their energy and intelligence would be a great benefit to the operations of the Hawkins Ranch. They would all become ranch partners and, together with my brother and me, would function as a kind of board of directors in regularly scheduled partnership meetings that began in . Living with my family in Bay City, I was surprised, in the spring of , to receive a telephone call from Rice University asking if I would consider commuting to Houston to teach an already announced course— the professor who was to have taught it had left to teach at Princeton. I began a fifteen-year part-time career as a university lecturer. In , after some thirteen years in Bay City and three years of my commuting to Rice, we moved to Austin, where my husband became an assistant attorney general of Texas, and I taught in the Program of American Studies at the University of Texas until we both retired in the s. Ritually for holidays my husband and I returned with our children to Bay City and to the Ranch House. Much more often than holidays afforded, I also returned to join in Hawkins Ranch business discussions as they arose. I was and am a partner in the Hawkins Ranch and also a trustee of ranch-owning trusts. Ranch business often called me to sessions with my brother and with Frank Jr., Janet, and Jim—those of his children who first became active in our ranching business and through many years made significant contributions to it. My part-time teaching schedule meant I could usually participate, and I also had time to write several books in my field of study. My ranching world and my academic world were so opaque to...

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