EXCITING NEWS!
I am thrilled to announce that Bold Story Press is publishing my memoir A Tree With My Name On It. It is scheduled for release in early fall, 2024!
Bold Story Press is a women’s hybrid publisher dedicated to publishing women’s stories “with the potential to change someone’s life for the better.” It is an honor to have my story selected for their roster of new books.
Tree With My Name On It takes place at the turn of the 21st century when my husband and I moved to a 160 acre ranch in the Wet Mountains of Southern Colorado. Within a year, our marriage of 22 years had fallen apart, and I was left in that wild and unfamiliar land, alone, facing a kaleidoscope of trauma and grief. Guided by a rich concoction of Buddhist and horse training wisdom I embarked on a path of healing old wounds, embracing my fears, and transforming my view of life and death. This journey broke open my heart, shattered old concepts and defenses, and unlocked the door to a radically new way to be in the world.
Here is an excerpt from A Tree With My Name On It from the fall of 1999, the year I spent alone at Lookout Valley Ranch.
NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
Winter came early that year with a fierce and unrelenting blizzard that blanketed the valley for four days and stacked up four feet of snow against the house. It arrived half way into September while I was filming in Denver and I missed it. I had just rented the old cabin to a woman who was planning on spending the winter at Lookout Valley Ranch on a solitary meditation retreat. She was there alone and the storm was so sudden and so relentless that she had been trapped in the main house for three days.
When I arrived home, the sun had turned the driveway into a river and the corral into a large mud puddle. As I parked my car, I saw the cabin door was open and the renter was hauling all her belongings out to a friend’s truck. She could barely hold still long enough to say hello and I’m leaving and goodbye.
After the storm, everything settled back into full-on Indian summer. But the storm gods had worked their magic at just the right moment. I had begun questioning whether I wanted to have someone else living on the place full time, someone who might need something from me. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I saw the truck with the last candidate pull out of the driveway. I was beginning to feel how much I needed to be alone to understand what I was feeling, to be able to relax, to loosen the vice grip of trying to attend to everyone’s needs. I needed time by myself to unravel. The good news was that living on a ranch in the Wet Mountains it took some effort to connect with people.
Otis and Johanna were my closest neighbors, and they were only there on weekends. That suited me just fine. By the weekend I was ready for some company. I loved sitting in their living room amphitheater watching the Broncos and drinking beer. Or if the spirit moved me, I would cook up some pasta and invite them over. We could keep up a free-flowing conversation for hours. Sometimes Otis would tell stories of his years working in the Steel Mill. Hot, grueling work, thirty-two hours straight, week after week, coming home and sleeping and going back to work, entire childhoods of his son and daughter, missed. He had retired on disability five years before and wore a back brace, but I never heard him complain about the toll it had taken on his body. Meanwhile I saw every bump in the road of my emotions as a major earthquake, daily monitoring my intake of St. John’s Wort and vitamin B and fish oil to try to keep my system running smoothly. I couldn’t imagine living with the level of stress and exhaustion that had been Otis’s natural habitat.
The weekend after the big storm, I asked Otis and Johanna over for a dinner of burgers and potato salad. As I dished out the food, Johanna launched into politics, her favorite topic. A lifelong Democrat, she was thrilled to have Bill Clinton take over from George H. W. Bush. “I’d rather have a President like John Kennedy who can’t keep it in his pants than a fucking sanctimonious warmonger like Bush,” she pronounced. Otis sat, settled, filling up the wooden kitchen chair, beaming at everything she said.
When I told them about the renter bolting, he commented, “Life up here ain’t for the faint of heart.” I couldn’t tell if he was including Joe in that observation, but I felt a tinge of satisfaction at being the one who hadn’t bolted.
Looking in any direction, it was impossible to avoid the truth that life in the Wet Mountains was not for the faint of heart. Every story I heard was another confirmation. Dee had started working as a dog catcher in the foothills around Canon City. She told me stories of encampments of survivalist families, with ragged children, no more than four or five, roaming shoeless in the trees and packs of pit bulls chained to stakes around the camp. She would get a haunted look in her eyes as she described the rescue scenes, standoffs with armed crazies ranting as the police handcuffed them while she loaded the horses, goats, dogs and cats into trailers and drove them to the pound.
One day, Jasmine stopped by with her daughter, Jenny, and her friend, a tiny wispy blonde girl with legs so skinny I could have circled each one with my hand. I thought she was four, but Jasmine told me she was eight. Her name was Rebecca. “Her mom is not doing well,” Jasmine told me. “She needed a break.”
“Not doing well how?” I asked. The story was long and convoluted, but the gist of it was that she had fibrous cysts in her uterus and no money for treatment, which she wouldn’t have agreed to anyway as she didn’t believe in doctors. “God is my doctor and my insurance,” she told Jasmine.
Rebecca barely spoke. She flinched when I accidently dropped a cup on the floor. But by the end of the afternoon, she and Jenny were lying on their bellies in the attic drawing pictures of horses on large sheets of paper. When they left, I invited her back and next time Jasmine came to ride, Rebecca and Jenny came too. That visit, she curled up next to me on the glider and we read Where the Wild Things Are together, a favorite from my kids’ childhood. She told me she had no books at home. Then, a week later, when Jasmine and Jenny came by, she wasn’t with them. “Rebecca couldn’t come?” I asked.
Jasmine shook her head, “She can’t come anymore,” she said. “She’s not allowed.” We were standing out by the corral, watching Jenny feed the horses apples. “I don’t know what got her mom mad,” Jasmine continued. “She yelled at me that she didn’t want Rebecca to go to the house of a Satanist anymore.”
I stared at her. None of it made any sense. “A Satanist? Because of Where the Wild Things Are?” I asked.
Jasmine shrugged. “For her, that’s anyone she doesn’t agree with,” she said, and handed me a rolled-up piece of paper. “It’s from Rebecca, poor little munchkin.”
After they left, I sat down on the glider, unfurled the paper, and read the words scrawled on the top of the page: “The mos fun I am havin tis sumer is wit my fren at miz vici’s hose. i luv it here.” The rest of the page was filled with a drawing of a pale yellow house, and standing in front, a tall woman with wild hair wearing jeans and a shirt with many different colored lines, flanked by a big brown horse and two grey speckled dogs. In the bottom corner, almost falling off the page, was a tiny child with wispy yellow hair, wearing a yellow polka-dot dress.
I put the paper down next to me on the glider, my heart aching. Why did I feel such a strange kinship with this child? I had been a thin, blonde sad child, but I was never smacked, or deprived of books, and even though my parents may not have been loving, they weren’t crazy.
It felt like I was living in an incomprehensible world. A world of opinions I would never understand. A world where it was easy to see how people, pushed to the edge, made bad choices and got trapped in narrow, crazy views……
Learn more about A Tree With My Name On It on the Writing Page and sign up to receive information as we near the publication date on how to pre-order your copy.