Chapter One:  dis minibus sacrum  (sacred to the departed spirits)

"To us, our house was not unsentient matter.  It had a heart, and soul, and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies.  It was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace, and in the peace of its benediction.  We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome.  We could not enter it unmoved." 

--Mark Twain

There are times…when I am standing at the kitchen sink looking out over the valley, watching a hawk dangle in the silent blue…or when I have opened up the doors and windows on a mild day and a soft breeze plays a merry melody on the wind chimes that hang by the front door…or when the house is filled with family and friends and rings with laughter…there are times that I can feel the spirits of the women who made this house a home many years before me.

I feel a peacefulness, a sense of quiet joy, and I know that they are pleased that their home once again radiates love.  I know they are at peace because their loving legacy has been respected and honored once again within these solid rock walls.

And it's not just me.  People have told me that they feel a sense of sanctuary here, of solace and serenity.  Family members who have been bruised and battered by life, their souls practically torn asunder from their bodies, have come here to stay awhile and to heal.  They tell me, again and again, that they have not slept so well in many years.  You can watch the healing take place, on their faces, as the shock and turmoil and anxiety gradually gives way to relaxed smiles.  They always leave stronger than when they came.

I would like to be able to take credit for this miracle, like some sort of country shaman, but that wouldn't be fair, since my home has been a place of healing for me, too.

I can step outside at night and gaze up at a sky unbleached by city lights and sugar-frosted with stars while listening to the song of the dancing coyotes drift in the measured murmur of the west Texas wind, and feel the cold nose of my dog pressed into the palm of my hand, the gentle stropping of a cat against my leg--and I can know the truth of it, myself.

Sometimes a snow-white owl will glide softly over my head silent as a ghost, and my soul is filled with a sense of magic.

"A thousand miles from the middle of nowhere."

No less an authority than former CBS news anchor Dan Rather uttered those words, when he traveled to the tiny town of Roby, Texas (population 600), to interview 26 cotton-gin employees who had won millions in a lottery.

Since Roby is about 18 miles from here--then I guess that describes pretty much where we live: a thousand miles from the middle of nowhere.

Of course, it's not really a thousand miles from the middle of nowhere, but it is  a hundred miles from the nearest mall, and about twenty miles from, say, a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk you might pick up at a convenience store.   We measure distance out here by minutes or hours rather than miles.  For instance, the nearest small airport is a two-hour drive through remote west Texas ranching country, the kind of country where you don't want to get a flat tire while returning home after dark from a late flight.

Once, while returning from a research trip, my flight didn't land until nearly midnight.  I had checked a box of books I'd bought on the trip with the luggage, and it was the last thing to come down the chute from that flight.  The entire airport had literally locked down for the night and turned out most of the lights.  A security guard let me out and I dragged those books and my bags across a deserted parking lot, then drove home down winding empty isolated roads at two in the morning, fighting sleep and the anxiety that all women feel when traveling, alone and vulnerable. 

I must add--this was before cell phones or even car phones.

I decided to write this book because I'd grown tired of reading memoirs written by women who claimed to have moved their families into the country--and the country always turned out to be a fifteen-minute hop down the freeway or on the train from a major metropolitan area, the kind of "country" where your nearest neighbor is a quarter-mile down the road.  They often wrote about fixing up an old house, but then you find out that they had a big fat divorce settlement or sale from an upscale home to finance major renovations.

That just doesn’t count.  Not in my book.

Try living so far out in the country that it's three miles to the mailbox; that a snowstorm can utterly strand you for days; that when a tornado passes through the area and your husband is out of town and can't reach you by phone, he has to call an area farmer and send him over to check and make sure you're not dead or buried in rubble; that when your own burning trash starts a grass fire, you don't call the fire department because there isn't time to give lengthy directions to where you live, and because there is no water for them out in the boonies, and so you have to fight it yourself with wet burlap sacks, like pioneers, while your two-year old stands alone in the doorway and watches.

All these things happened to us.

When you live this far out in the country, you learn to do many things by yourself that your city cousins never dreamed of, like reach down into a septic tank to clear out a clog (keeping your mouth shut in case anything splashes), perform veterinary medicine on large animals, make butterfly stitches for your child's latest mishap; walk out into the pasture with all available hands to collect the barn roof that went sailing off like a ship's mast during a wind storm...You do what ya gotta do, because since these things nearly always happen after five p.m. on a Friday, you are not likely to find anyone within a hundred miles who will make the trip out to fix it for you, and if you do, you will be paying that bill for months.

Since my husband and I both grew up in a major metropolitan area, both our families thought we were mad when we bought this place.  For many years, my mother was convinced that my husband had kidnapped me and was holding me hostage out here in this ramshackle old house, a solitary prisoner 500 miles from mama.   They all felt very sorry for our children and were always giving them expensive gifts like video games because they were convinced the kids must have been dying of boredom.

And there have been times, like when lightning struck the well-house and killed the pump, rendering us without water for nearly a week in the heat of a Texas summer, that I've wondered if maybe they were right.

And then a single sacred shaft of sunlight slants through the stained-glass clouds, backlighting the grass emerald-green; gilding the very air gold and stretching a rainbow from one end of the world to another, and the spirits come to me in a hush of wind and caress my cheek and whisper Everything is going to be all right, and I know this is home.

Times like that, it's not just the spirits of the women who lived in this old house whose presence I feel, it's the spirits who came before.  In the 1800's, the Comanche roamed free with thundering herds of buffalo over this country.  The springs and streams that feed this land--many of which now lie dormant--provided perfect camping grounds for Native Americans as they followed the migrating herds--and for the brash young Army lieutenant named Robert E. Lee who hunted the Indians down.  Later, another officer who gained fame in the Civil War, named McClellan, also came through here chasing Indians, pushing them further and further west, until there was no more room for them.

But it was a white profiteer by the name of J. Wright Moore, who saw a market in buffalo hides, who put the place on the map.  He and his kind killed so many thousands of the slow lumbering gentle beasts--sometimes picking them off from railroad cars--that their skinless carcasses were left out to rot in the hot sun, littering the prairie in stinking ruins hundreds at a time. 

As a final insult, Mr. Moore shot dead a rare white buffalo, sacred to Native American people.  It is said that in all of history, there have only been six white buffalo counted among the millions of bison who once roamed North America--which is why the Native Americans considered it sacred.  (To this day, Moore's family heirs keep the white buffalo hide mounted on their wall.  Each year there is a festival in town to mark "White Buffalo Days.")

Finally, in the 1880's, when the hide-market was glutted and the last remaining Comanche food source was removed, the land was turned over at last to the white conquerors.

By that time, cattlemen had discovered that the same conditions which had been ideal for buffalo were perfect for giant herds of cattle, and ranchers settled here with herds numbering in the thousands.  Farmers, from such lush places as Tennessee and Kentucky moved out here, with their scraggledy families and all their worldly possessions piled up in conostoga wagons, in vain hope of growing crops. 

Feuds soon broke out with the cowboys, and if that wasn't bad enough, the hapless farmers figured out pretty quickly that stuff doesn't grow in the west quite like it does in the east.  After one particularly barren drought cycle, starving farmers gathered up the leftover buffalo bones from the prairie by the wagonful and sold them to be ground up for fertilizer.  They say that the stacks of buffalo bones made towering, bleached-white mountains near the rail-heads.

Eventually, the transplanted farmers learned how to dry-land farm or irrigate, and the ranchers learned to live with barbed wire and the farmers, and people stopped living in dug-outs and began to haul lumber out here from the east in wagons drawn by oxen, and to build homes and schools and churches.

J. Wright Moore was one of this area's most prosperous settlers.  He had nine kids by one wife, and when she died, pretty much the same number with the second.  To this day, he is regarded as a local hero.

I often wonder if I'm the only one out here who is horrified by the killing of the white buffalo.  I do not consider it a measure of pride that the buffalo was killed here, or that greedy men annihilated the animals and the Native settlers that came with them.

But then, my great-grandmother was full-blood Cherokee; Cherokee blood runs thick on both sides of the family tree.  Consequently, I tend to think that all living things are sacred, including the land.

Once, when I had finished a book and was anxious about its fate, I went out to the furthest southeast corner and the highest hill on our land that overlooks the valley.  There I climbed up on a large flat rock, and I performed an ancient Cherokee ceremony, the Blessing of the Four Winds, and I burned sweet grass and sage and the first three pages of a copy of the manuscript and prayed to the Great Spirit of holy God that those pages would go where they were meant.

I stand there sometimes, in that windy sun-swept spot, and lift my arms to the sky, and invoke the spirits of those who once stood there before me, gazing out over hundreds of shaggy buffalo as they moved slowly through the country, and I wonder what they were thinking, before the white man came.

I wrote about many of the trials and tribulations of raising kids and animals, (some of whom were interchangeable at times), waaaay out in the country in an old house while, at the same time, trying to break into New York publishing virtually alone and trying in vain to cling to my few remaining vestiges of sanity, in a local weekly newspaper column called "Country Life." 

I started writing the column when my kids were four and seven years old, and continued writing it until they were in college.  So this book is, in part, a love story for my fans who, years later, still stop me when they see me in town to tell me about how they would clip out the columns and put them up on the refrigerator, or paste them into scrapbooks, or send them to friends and relatives.  I was never permitted to say good-bye to these dearhearts, and thank-you.

And it is, in part, a love story for my family in appreciation for grounding me and supporting me and putting up with reading about themselves every week in the paper with good humor and patient resignation.

Anyone raising kids in this day and age is ridiculously busy, and just because you work out of a home office doesn't make it any less so--moreso, in fact, because you never get to leave work.  When cleaning house, the computer glares in silent accusation; when working at the computer, the housework piles up around your ears.

So for years I just stuck the Sunday papers aside in a huge stack, periodically going through and cutting out the columns and tossing them into a cardboard box without so much as writing the date on them or even attempting to protect them from the mice that often plague old country houses.

They're growing yellow now, and fragile, and if I don't do something to preserve them, they will be lost forever, along with journals I kept periodically and sporadically, some typed up on onion-skin paper during stolen hours when I worked office jobs and had access to typewriters, some scrawled or scribbled in longhand in pretty bound books during snatched moments late at night.

Most women are the soul of the family, and its historians.  We are the keeper of the scrapbooks, the logger of the videos, the putter-together of Christmas letters and photo-cards, and I was no different, although over the years, I think the column was a handy stand-in for personal journals.  I always believed that taking things that happened to us specifically, in our own family, would translate well in general terms to what everybody who was raising a family and working long hours and trying to make a marriage work could understand and relate to.

A friend of mine once said, "I used to think my kid was the weirdest kid in the world, and then the Sunday paper would come out and I'd read your column and you'd be going through the same thing, and it would make me feel so much better!"

Still, you would think that, as a writer accustomed to telling stories for a living, it would have occurred to me to tell my own.  But it was my daughter, Jessica, who actually brought up the idea of writing about how a city girl wound up married to a cowboy and living, well, a thousand miles from the middle of nowhere, moving into a hundred-year old house with all the spirits, raising two kids so strong-minded and independent that they've managed to travel all over the world since becoming adults.  One even fought in a war.  More than once.

I thought it would be easy.  After all, this is what I do.

That was three years ago, before I got trapped in the killzone.

Recently, I read a blogpost in the New York Times written by a veteran of the Iraq war.  He spoke about an army training exercise he took part in not long after boot camp when he was still a raw young recruit.  The soldiers were using paintball guns in a combat scenario, and as he was running up a hill, he got shot in the leg.

He says that, at that moment, unlike all the movie heroes--he froze.  He simply did not know what to do, and neither did the men on his team.  They all got stuck in that moment, which, if you know anything about real combat, can be a very bad thing.

After that exercise, this soldier got the ass-chewing of his life.  His platoon leader explained that, in the middle of a combat situation, you are in what is called the killzone.  Bullets are flying.  The one thing you do not need to do--no matter what happens--is freeze.

You have to keep moving.  If you don't, you will surely die.

When I started this book, I wrote the first chapter and thought everything was going great.  Then I wrote the second chapter.

After that, I did something I have never done in my entire career.

I blacked out the entire chapter, and deleted it.

Just made it disappear.

Then, I wrote a new chapter two.

I set the book aside to think about it some more.

The book has sat, since then, in the corner of my office, literally gathering dust, for three years.

Three full years.

Every time anyone asked me what I was writing on, I'd say a memoir, a collection of my Country Life columns, and so on.  I kept saying that month after month.  It wasn't hard to keep saying that as long as I was talking to different people, but then, when asked by somebody who'd already been told, I didn’t know what to say.

Usually, it takes me about a year to write a novel.  My work of non-fiction took two years, but I was working with someone else, and the nature of the work required a great deal of documentation which was time-consuming.

For two chapters of a book manuscript to languish on my desk for three years is unheard of in my career.

My family has long since lost patience with me over this book, but my husband has understood better than the kids what has held me up.

The other day, I told him that I was stuck in the killzone.

"How do I get out of it?" I asked.

He said, "You have to just keep on going--or stay, and fight your way out of it."

So that is what I'm doing.  I'm fighting my way out of the killzone.

Because the truth is that, in many ways, my life has been a battle, and I have not won every skirmish.  At times, I have lost a great deal.

When we are out in public, we can often hide our battle scars from others, pretend that we are not even wounded.  We can be dying inside and nobody knows.  Or we can be feeling cocky and triumphant but unwilling to fly our own banners.  Or scared and lonely and uncertain what to do next, but when someone says, "How are you?"  we always say, "Fine."

When I think about growing up, I do not have any childhood memories that are not either sad, or at least, bittersweet--happy for a time and then fraught with tension, or happy on the surface but still sad just underneath.   And some things break my heart just in the memory.

Everything was always a struggle in my family when I was growing up, fraught with complexity and complication--a certain kind of madness--and it wasn't until I raised children of my own that I realized how, most of the time, it did not have to be.   

How exquisite sweet simplicity can be.

I did not marry my husband in order to escape from my family.  But marrying him, moving to the country around cowboys and horses and animals and good country people with uncomplicated outlooks on life, automatically shielded me from my family in ways that took me many years to completely appreciate.

Country living is necessarily grounded.  Every day forces you outside yourself and into the world of caring for large animals, weather, and the challenges of rural living. 

It's not just that, though.  There are plenty of country homes in as much turmoil as city ones.  But the cowboy mindset is a whole other aspect.  

The emotional perspective of most true cowboys--those who live, not just on the land, but of it--is one based on a solid foundation of common sense, and that common sense comes from living in and close observation of the natural world. 

They take care of livestock not just because it makes good commercial sense, but because they don't like to see animals suffer, and this gives them a compassion and kindness.  They pay close attention to wildlife and this teaches them patience and a real sense of the natural rhythms of life.  They rely on the women in their lives as equal partners, and this makes them fair-minded.  They train their horses and their dogs, and this teaches them discipline and more patience as well as gentleness, all of which they bring home to their children.

And of course, there is the obvious masculine sensibility and sexuality, as witnessed by scores of Hollywood movies and television programs.  Most real cowboys behave as if they are completely unaware of their own sex appeal, which of course, makes them that much more attractive.

I knew none of these things when I married my husband, but I saw all of those qualities in him, and my soul responded like a drought-wilted plant to a gentle spring rain.

The years of living with the cowboy mindset helped me realize how bad things had been for me and my siblings growing up, and for a long time, I resented this.  But by the time I had children of my own, I had figured out that unless I intended to cut my family completely out of my life, I was going to have to do a great deal of forgiving and a great deal of moving on.

I did forgive and I did move on.  I did not, however, forget.

Why did I leave the city to marry a cowboy?  Sometimes we leave all that we know, all that makes us who we are, and all who we love, in order to start a new life, because we are drawn to adventure.

As I write these words, it is my 37th wedding anniversary.  I asked my husband one time why it was that I wasn't crazy.  Craziness of one kind or another ran all through my family--how was it that I managed to come out of it relatively sane?

I mean, after all, you've got the whole genetics thing going.  Then there's the upbringing, in a house full of secrets and lies, manipulation and madness from both my mother and my adopted father, a sort of shared psychosis where each one's neurosis fed off the other and caught us kids in the middle. 

I was joking.  At least, I thought I was.

But the look on his face when he answered me was tender, and his voice was serious and steady.

"Easy," he said.  "Because I rescued you."

And so maybe, in the long run, that is what my story is:  a great, sweeping romance.  A big tall cowboy took me away and we rode off into the sunset together.

I have yet to read a fictional romance that comes close to capturing the adventure and the pain and the heartbreaking joy of living an actual, real-life romance. Of course, you don't see it that way at the time.  It slowly dawns on you though, as you look back, or when friends like best-selling author Ann Rule says to you, "You're married to every woman's fantasy."

It doesn't feel much like it, of course, when you are folding your husband's underwear or listening to him hawk and spit, but there are times, when he comes in the door--all six-feet, four inches of him, made even taller by his cowboy boots and cowboy hat, his Levi jacket mirroring the blue of his eyes, and his cheeks are rugged with cold, and he grins that crooked grin at you, and you think, How could there be anyone else?

The idea of being rescued by a tall sexy cowboy and taken away from all the craziness does have a certain cachet when it comes to plotting a book.

It's not, of course, that simple.

But the great romances never are.