A Home on the Range :: Personal Narrative West Papers

A Home on the Range I swear that I spent my entire childhood delay for shaft and Mary-Beth Garson. I would rock back and forth on the plush sumptuous chair to the right of my Grandpas and look out towards the golden Wyoming hills and the hay stack, waiting for their trailer 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, but they perpetually brought April and that was all that mattered. She was my horse. When my mother would tell Ray how much I deal April, he would just look down at his feet, smile and say, Shes a good horse. This time, however, I was non waiting for Ray and Mary-Beth by the window. I actually was busy in the yard, preparing a barbeque on our smart grill from Kmart. In summers long past, we would have gone up to the shot grounds to have dinner , but this time because it was just my mother and I we decided to stay at the house. There were no cousins, aunts, uncles, or siblings mill about about, making trips to and from the house with the food and friends. There were no horses in the at one time terribly overgrown and rundown corral and there were no cow in the meadow behind the house. An elaborate meal was not on deck 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, mayhap not wanting to embark into the 21st century, after living with three open-heart surgeries, and the loss of a child and two husbands. Her one authorized source of joy came from Roger, my mothers half brother, the product of her first marriage which end when her husbands plane was shot down during World War II. Roger was her prince and she showered him with more love than my grandfather, Thomas Dodd s, would ever experience. Tensions had always run high between Roger and the shack of the family, but they came to a climax after my grandmothers death.