The Desperate Ranchwife

I call myself the Desperate Ranchwife, not because I am desperate, but because it dresses up the term. Sort of like housewife and "Domestic Engineer". I take pride in the fact that for the most part, I desperately steer clear of ranch chores, hot icky climate, dusty, smelly horses, and those oh, so cute, sad eyed little calves, who outweigh me by 100 lbs and have the attitude of a 14 year old on a Mt. Dew rush.

Most days find me sitting at my laptop, happily working away while staring out the window at the 11,000 acre ranch that lies before me. Unfortunately, that is the neighbors place across the road. Our land sits on the other side of my house and is paltry in comparison, a meager slice of a once 20,000 acre spread. Note I said meager. All the rest of the neighbors live on small parcels of the original piece, all broken up into a few acres here and a few acres there.

Yes, most of the kids I teach drop jaw when they find out I moved here "DELIBERATELY" three years ago. They are desperately trying to get outa this neck of the woods, and I don't blame them. There is no industry here, and not much in the way of real jobs. Even technology is somewhat sparce. We don't have landline telephone, cause it would have cost too much to lay a line to us. So we opted to use cell phones, which, since we located our house on the highest hill, have service! Yippee! But no one else around here does.

Some mornings I find the neighbors sitting in my patio chairs chatting away, just being neighborly, stopping by to say hello and make a call. It's all part of being neighbors, afterall, when we had the first ice storm here, they all came running to help us out. I reminded them we were from "up north" where an ice storm lasts all winter. But they were helpful all the same. Now the tornados down here is something else.

Now my plastic chairs are tied to the patio, so they don't end up in the river 10 miles away. Especially with a neighor sitting in it. OOPS!