A Home on the Range :: Personal Narrative West Papers

A Home on the Range I roam that I spent my entire childhood waiting for Ray and Mary-Beth Garson. I would rock back and forth on the plush golden soften to the right of my Grandpas and look out towards the golden Wyoming hills and the hay stack, waiting for their bourdon to come bouncing down into the yard of the Dodds Family Gatecreek ranch. Once they were in sight, I would dash outside and pretend to be busying myself with the saddles or sprucing up the area around the barn. It was never clear how many horses they would bring, just now they always brought April and that was tout ensemble that mattered. She was my horse. When my mother would tell Ray how much I loved April, he would just look down at his feet, smile and say, Shes a mature horse. This time, however, I was non waiting for Ray and Mary-Beth by the window. I rattling was busy in the yard, preparing a barbeque on our new grille from Kmart. In summers long past, we would have gone up to the picnic cubic ya rd to have dinner, but this time because it was just my mother and I we mulish to stay at the house. There were no cousins, aunts, uncles, or siblings milling about, devising trips to and from the house with the food and friends. There were no horses in the now awfully overgrown and rundown corral and there were no cows in the meadow behind the house. An elaborate meal was not on embroider it was just burgers, salad, and a Dominos pizza that Mary-Beth brought from town. I had not been to the Ranch since the death of my grandmother, four years earlier. She died on the eve of the millennium, perhaps not wanting to embark into the 21st century, after living through triple open-heart surgeries, and the loss of a child and two husbands. Her one true inauguration of joy came from Roger, my mothers half brother, the product of her first marriage which ended when her husbands compressed was shot down during World War II. Roger was her prince and she showered him with more love than m y grandfather, doubting Thomas Dodds, would ever experience. Tensions had always run high between Roger and the rest of the family, but they came to a climax after my grandmothers death.