Gotta find another picture of my friend Susan, one where she isn’t recuperating from a bunch of broken bones after a rare rock climbing fall or hidden under whitewater in Souse Hole on the Rio Grande, although this one with her sister Cathy, right, is pretty cute. Susan, of course, has her Home Depot tool apron strapped to her walker — just to get a few things done around the house while waiting for broken pelvis and ribs to heal — even if Cathy had come to help.
Susan is a professional outdoorswoman and she tackles obstacles as they come, including walking miles under her own power to the trailhead after the rock climbing accident.
“Wild women don’t get the blues,” says the bumper sticker taped to the stove in the home she built herself, long before mine was built a couple of ridges away.
Looking healthier than ever, Susan came over for breakfast Christmas morning and I had a fine time visiting with her in front of the fire. I just hope she survived the cinnamon roll after the huevos rancheros.
Actually, we are related, in a way. We are the same age and her father and my mother married — second time for each — sometime in the 1960s. But she and I never met until my mother died in Montana in 1979. Odd start to becoming friends, but that’s the turn our parents took: unconventional all the way.
dream ranch 