No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life

Who's Driving the Subdivision

Who’s Driving the Subdivision? In July 2007, I celebrated my sixty-fourth birthday at the ranch with Jerry, contemplating our move back to my home when he retired in 2008. We decided to live in Windbreak House, and to move the writing retreats to my parents’ ranch home, tidied up and renamed Homestead House. We’d brought along a trailer load of possessions: his blacksmith and woodworking tools, furniture, some of my books and writing files. For a week, we cleaned the ranch outbuildings, picked up trash, hauled hundreds of canning jars to the recycling bins in town, installed new locks, and generally got reacquainted with the place. We speculated about how our lives might change once he becomes a woodworker and blacksmith instead of an engineer . I’ll still be a writer, but I can walk to work at the retreat house. Looking at the old bunkhouse, we visualized a garden shed and rustic writing room. I told Jerry how I first met John and Anna Lindsay when my dad took me to their ranch house east of the tracks. Anna told me they’d started with a one-room cabin. First they built a cattle shed and a cellar for food storage. Then when they had enough money, they added on a little room that became her kitchen. John wasn’t a very energetic rancher, so Anna worked at the telephone exchange in Hermosa. Unable to resist the temptation of gossip, she became part of my education in how to use a telephone: never say anything you don’t want the whole town to know. After my father bought their ranch, he tore down the rest of the house and dragged the kitchen to our place behind his team of horses. He built an end wall, and installed a woodstove and a narrow bed for our hired man, and called it the bunkhouse. After the hired man got drunk and Who’s Driving the Subdivision? Nn 185 drove through some fences, my father decided we could no longer afford to hire help, so the building became a storage area until I moved back to the ranch with my first husband. We built a two-room apartment on my parents’ house, and I used the little building for a writing room and office for my Lame Johnny Press. When my husband’s three children visited, we put sleeping bags in the bunkhouse. Both my mother and the tenants who lived in the ranch house after she moved to the nursing home had kept cats inside it without providing a litter box, so my first job was scrubbing the floor with ammonia. Because I’d heard Anna’s voice every time I made a call on the party-line phone—“Central!”—I wasn’t surprised to hear it behind my left shoulder as I scrubbed the floor. “Land’s sakes, I’ve never seen the beat of this filth!” Or was that my grandmother? Leaning out the door for fresh air, I could see the wide willow tree to the east where the ranch cats once took refuge during a flood following a bad hail. I rode my mare through the knee-deep water to grab felines out of the branches, stuffing them inside my jacket. Then I had to convince the mare to tippytoe back through the water, ignoring the screeching, squirming , scratching cargo. All week, cleaning the ranch house and yard, I kept seeing reminders of my past life. I found a wastebasket I remembered from the room I had when I was five. Sometimes scenes shifted so quickly I wasn’t sure whether I was fourteen, forty, or sixty-four. The yellow stool in the utility room still held the shoe polish I’d last used on my saddle oxfords in high school; still good, too. We worked coughing on smoke from what turned out to be the worst local fire of the summer. Started by lightning in a tree-filled canyon subdivision near Hot Springs, our closest town to the south, the fire eventually covered more than fifteen square miles. It burned thirty-three homes, the most ever lost in a Black Hills fire; killed a resident, and injured two firefighters . We read newspaper accounts of confusion as volunteer firemen tried to evacuate residents in the dark from homes on twisty, unmarked dirt roads among burning trees. National newscasters used the fire as an occasion to warn of the dangers of building in such high...