A good load of wood (thanks Tyler Chavez!) and a new roof (for the first time in over five years, no leaks– thanks Simon and Della Armijo!) make for at least a sense of modest security– and wood makes a better photo.
Tag: Country Life
And Cat’s Sheep!
Also just out: Cat Urbigkit’s Shepherds of Coyote Rocks, her first adult book, a distillation and amplification of what you have come to love here and a leap forward for her. This is the most nuanced and intelligent defense of the traditional pastoral life in print, by a writer who lives it and has heard …
Another dumb quote
From a review in the New Yorker for 27 August: “Buying a car, Grescoe writes “is the beginning of a spiral through selfishness, road rage, and anomie, one whose ultimate goal is the mall or the gated community”. Unless you, you know, live in the country. Do our coastal elites even “get” Upstate New York? …
Our culture…
As demonstrated in our social center, the Golden Spur Saloon (I have for the moment ignored ranchers and cowboys, though the Spur’s site doesn’t). Click or double to enlarge either photo. Below, my late mentor Floyd Mansell in our front yard in 1986, with son Brandon, who now has his own kids, and a morning’s …
House Band
Regular readers know that Querencia’s home bar is the Golden Spur Saloon, and has been for thirty some years, since Betsy Huntington was alive, first under Steve Grayson’s management (see Q- the- book, which has scenes set there). Montana Pettis (who is not thirty yet!) is the son of present owner Darryl, also bartender and …
Priorities
Reacting to Kathy’s good comment below, I thought I would post some pix of Casa Q, to remind readers that while we live well we do NOT live in a palace… Recently half of the dying cottonwood in the yard cracked and fell into it, luckily missing the hawk house. Omar, neighbor, bird hunting partner, …
Addresses
Two of the strangest showcases of human society I know are the zoo, any zoo (I have written more than a bit on this) and the Post Office. I could go in a lot of directions with the PO (many of you know that Lib works in a rural PO) but I only want to …
Wild East
Here are a few irresistible photos from Lib’s friend Jeff Foott, who we saw in Wyoming and who just returned from our old haunts in Western Mongolia. The third is just nice and speaks for itself. What I love about the other two is the way the Wild East partakes of all technologies from the …
The provincialism of sophisticates
I was reading an article in Slightly Foxed, an excellent English quarterly devoted to neglected writing, and I came upon this quote from Marghanita Laski’s 1949 Little Boy Lost that both amused and chilled me because it is still so true: “To him it was inconceivable that an intelligent man should be happy to live …
Gallos de Floyd and Other Memories
Getting the “Gallo de Cielo” painting below from Tom Russell jogged my memory and made me dig up some photos from the early 80’s of my late mentor Floyd Mansell, his proud roosters, and one of him hunting with me and his then teen- aged son Phil (whose daughter is older today than he was …