A Mother's Day Letter

Dear Mama,

The women in our family have always been letter writers, though we got out of the habit of writing once I returned "home" from Spain after my first marriage. I was still 60 miles from the ranch but you had phone service by then so we talked often. I find it comforts me now to write letters to you again.

It comes as a shock sometimes to realize I'm unconsciously saving things up to tell you. Years ago, when I was raising show dogs and sold a puppy for $1000, the first thing you said was "Oh, I wish Papa were here and he could hear that." He'd been gone nearly 20 years but I understand that so well now. So many things have happened since you've been gone and my reaction was the same as yours ... I wish you were here so I could tell you that.

You taught me so much, and it's helped me get through some bad times. You said when things are difficult, you don't give up, you don't give in and you don't complain. You simply face the direction you have to go, take a step forward, then the next step and the step after that. Keep doing that and you will eventually come out on the other side and find you have survived. You rebuilt your own life after catastrophies twice that I know of, so it wasn't just words. This is how you lived your life.

Once I was mature myself, I not only loved you because you were my mother, but you became my best friend as well. When I had time, my first thought was to ask if you wanted to go somewhere with me. Now I am getting to the age you were then, I tire more easily and enjoy "going" less and I wonder if you accompanied me when you would have preferred to stay home and relax, because you knew I wanted your company.

Did I ever thank you for instilling in me a love of books and reading? I don't remember a time when I was not read bedtime stories, starting with nursery rhymes and going on to Greek mythology. I was reading myself before I ever went to school. That love of reading has stayed with me all of my life and provided hours of enjoyment.

And one of my very earliest memories is of being held in your lap while you sang this song to me:

You Are My Sunshine
My only sunshine.
You make me happy
When skies are grey.

The memories are comforting ... Happy Mother's Day ... from your loving daughter.

After most of a lifetime in Montana, May is spring for me, even though in Kentucky it arrives much earlier. For a Montana native, March, even with green grass or April, with daytime temperatures that can get into the 80s isn't spring. Spring comes in May.

There are other things that seem "wrong" about spring in Kentucky. The first springtime flowers you notice here along the rural roadsides are daffodils. Daffodils are supposed to be flower garden flowers, though here they are garden flowers simply gone wild.

Then there are the flowering trees, beginning with the redbuds. They can be incredibly georgous, a bank of soft raspberry parfait color banked against dark treetrunks with trees and underbrush just starting to leaf out.


The first of the true wildflowers are the woods violets. They hug the ground along fencerows and creeks and in the forested hills, deep purple against the glossy green leaves, sometimes difficult to see against the dark ground of fall leaves. They are lovely and delicate, a flower that could not survive the harsh winters of Montana.

But I miss the early harbingers of spring in Montana. First, the brilliant yellow of the first buttercups, sometimes even edging a late snowbank. As a child, the buttercups arrived on the hill behind the cabin, announcing that winter would not, in fact, last forever and the overshoes, heavy coats, gloves and scarves could soon be put away.

The buttercups were followed soon by the "shooting stars" that needed warmer weather and drier ground, brilliant sparks against still nearly barren ground.

There were no wild flowering trees. Occasionally you would see apple or crabapple trees in someone’s back yard but in the hills, while plum thickets and chokecherry bushes could get as high as 12 to 15 feet, they were not trees. They flowered only briefly, white drifts of blossoms looking like late snow along the branches.

A hard frost or late spring snowstorm could wipe out a season’s berry crop as well as any garden planted by enthusiastic but overly optimistic gardeners. Early June was considered "usually safe" by most long time residents. A 3-day blizzard with 6-foot snowdrifts in late May were not uncommon and in my 30-plus years of living there, I have been snowed on in every month except August.

Spring in Kentucky is earlier and a much gentler season, with lush greenery following closely after the enthusiastic flushes of flowers and blossoming trees, covering rounded hills and obscuring the landscape. Rain and fog softens the colors and the landscape even into the heat of summer, the brilliant greens you see only in early spring in the west continuing into the fall in Kentucky.

Kentucky Derby 2009 ... Dad would have loved it.

Dad was a rancher and a cowboy most of his life. He viewed horses as a useful and necessary tool, a necessity on a western ranch.

The posted photo was taken when he was in his 60s, while he and Mom were still running the ranch themselves, without regular outside help.

He was a small man, wiry and athletic and in a different time might well have become a jockey himself. He rode horses for his uncle in "brush track" races in South Dakota until he was in his teens and never lost his interest in race horses.

For a rancher, one full day away from home in the summer was a "vacation" and some of my earliest memories of "vacations" are of a day at the county fair ... and the horse races.

The relay races and the wild horse races at the Sheridan County Wyoming rodeo were always fun, but my father's favorites were the "real" Thoroughbred races at the Billings Fair in August. At a time when driving 130 miles to spend a day just for fun was an effort, we always spent one day there and the horse races were the big attraction for my father.

I loved them as well, growing up on horseback. Race horse books, starting with C. W. Anderson's books, graduating to the "Black Stallion" books by Walter Farley contributed to my early ambitions were to be a jockey, not a career for females at the time, though horses have always been a big part of my life.

For Dad, one of the big attractions of retirement and winters in Phoenix, AZ was the winter racing. He went often, studied the race forms and enjoyed his $2.00 bets. He studied the riding of particular jockeys and had his favorites with both horses and jockeys. He always said he would really like to go see the Kentucky Derby "someday".

He would have had a bet on the little Thoroughbred that came from "out west" ... with a cowboy trainer and owners ... to win. I can imagine his response to the question of "What makes you think this horse belongs in the Derby?" ... and he would have agreed with Bob Baffert's comment "I think the cowboys brought a pretty good horse to the Derby."

He always talked about wanting to see the "real thing" just once ... the "big race". My relocation from Montana to Kentucky came years after my father's death and one of my ongoing regrets is that he was not alive to come here and see the Kentucky Derby.

I'd have loved to be with him and see his enjoyment of finally getting to see "the big race". It is, in fact, one of the reasons I've never gone to the Derby myself since I've lived here. I still miss my father acutely, even now, when he's been gone now nearly 20 years.

One of the first thoughts I had, when I saw this year's Derby, with the little horse from New Mexico winning, was "I wish Dad was here and could see this." He would have truly enjoyed watching that race and seeing the little horse from "out West" win the "Big One" ...