Last week, I turned in the manuscript for my next book. It will be a compilation of columns spanning the decade I’ve spent writing these weekly missives to you all. In some ways it will be the easiest book I’ll ever write seeing as it was already written before I even began. On the other hand, it did take ten years.
Reading through and deciding which columns to include in the book was also an interesting and by no means effortless endeavor. With approximately 650 words per weekly column, and 52 weeks in a year, in the 10 years since I started writing ‘Little Pasture on the Prairie,’ I’ve generated about 338,000 words worth of stories about our life here on the Northern Plains. That’s a lot of words, my friends!
For the book’s introduction, I wrote the following: “I imagine not many people have the opportunity to review a weekly snapshot of their lives from an entire decade… I was amazed to re-meet the tender but surprisingly wise younger version of myself.” Reading those missives from younger me has been a gift, but it’s also been a bittersweet experience. For one thing, though I love having big kids, I miss having babies. And it’s a lot easier to be optimistic about your parenting skills when you haven’t made any mistakes yet.
The other glaring reality of writing about life on a ranch is that almost all the beloved animals whose stories I chronicle from those early years are dead now. When I started out living and working on the ranch, I couldn’t yet fathom the implications of falling deeply in love with animals whose lifespans are so much shorter than humans. I wrote about some of the early losses of sickly lambs, wayward barn cats, and my elderly dog, Micah, and I said that the pain and grief was helping my heart grow bigger. I believed that to be true, but what I never wrote is that it also got harder and harder to bear. There was a youthful (and, to be honest, slightly delusional) part of me that subconsciously believed if I could grow wise enough and expansive enough, I would become immune to the ravages of grief. As it turns out, at least for me, the opposite has been true. Loving that big has had consequences, and not all of them have been beautiful. Sometimes pain is just painful.
From the beginning, I’ve seen my work as a writer as that of an alchemist. It’s my job to transmute suffering into healing, to acknowledge the pain of endings while also bearing witness to that pain’s transformation into new growth. So here I am, newly 46 years old, firmly entrenched in what can only be described as a full-fledged midlife crisis as I daily bump up against my own mortality in new and overwhelming ways, and it’s gotten a lot harder to believe in my ability to do the job of writing as I’ve described it.
My last column was about our first-ever family vacation. We spent a whirlwind 3.5 days in NYC, a city I lived in, and deeply loved, just after college. The trip was pretty much sheer joy from start to finish, and, much like reading all those old columns, reminded me of who I was, who I am and who I hope to become. For a whole decade I wrote ‘Little Pasture on the Prairie,’ hoping it would be a gift to you all, but somewhere along the way I realized that you reading my columns — and encouraging me to keep writing — was just as much, if not more so, a gift to me.
Writing these columns every week has given me a glimpse of my best self. And re-reading them, especially after such a difficult year, was like discovering a roadmap back to my truth. So thank you all, each and every one of you, for taking the time out of your busy lives to read my words!
