4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why Be A Ranch Wife?, May 1, 2008
This review is from: Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles (Paperback)
" 'I can't do it anymore,' he [Buyer's then husband] says. 'Not the physical work. I could still cripple by with that. It's just the mental work, the worry, and the stress. I just can't do it anymore.'
" 'I know' is all I can think to say. When he adds nothing further, I say, 'I'll help you. Whatever you need to do.'
"I do not try to hug him or touch him or console him. I know better. He prefers being alone with his own suffering."
Ranch life is dirt, labor, wind, drought, deaths, births, wants, sacrifices, uncertainty, exhaustion. Why choose it? Because it is also stars, peace, calves, kittens, satisfaction, love, spring--"a meadowlark trills notes as sweet and soft as homemade ice cream. The song breaks my heart and then mends it back."
Read SPRING'S EDGE. Experience the poetry of ranch existence.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable Story, April 15, 2008
This review is from: Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles (Paperback)
Sometimes a story wraps itself around you and won't let you go. For me, Laurie Wagner Buyer's memoir, Spring's Edge, is one of those stories. Her book offers a rare insight into her life as a rancher's wife, a way of living that is at once remarkably sturdy and frighteningly fragile.
Buyer and her husband Mick--he in his mid-sixties, she some twenty years younger--raised cattle on six hundred acres in the mountains of Colorado. It's a tough life, made more difficult for Buyer by the realization that her husband is fast reaching the point where he can no longer manage the physical work. Since he intends to leave the ranch to the children of his first marriage, she has essentially no stake in the ranch to which she has contributed so much. What will she do--what will they do--when her husband can no longer live the life on the land that keeps him going? What will happen to their marriage if their work on the ranch no longer holds it together? On top of this, Buyer's father develops cancer. It is a situation that would bring most of us--those used to more comfortable, more predictable circumstances--to the brink.
But the Buyers soldier on, doing every day what must be done to keep the ranch going, the new calves alive, their fragile relationship in one piece. Buyer's journal of four difficult months in 1997 is a quietly compelling story of a doomed marriage and a ranch life under pressure from rising land taxes and encroaching developments. "We're on top of the mountain looking down at the wreckage of the times," she writes. "Age, inability, financial impossibilities, an anti-ag attitude in the community..." As local ranchers sell out, hay prices rise, and local agricultural businesses fail, the people who stay on the land demonstrate a tenacious heroism, although they pay a very high personal price.
Through all these challenges, it is the land itself that sustains and endures. Buyer's lyrical descriptions of the earth's coming alive with spring are full of hope and promise. "More snow, some rain, lots of sun, and our world will dance a greening jig," she writes. Later: "Snipe song ripples through the sky. Spring comes again fresh-faced and welcoming." Still later: "I sense the atmosphere hanging on life's balanced scale, ready to tip into full spring with the weight of one more robin, one more blooming pasqueflower."
But while winter is long ("A remember-winter wind cartwheels off the peaks with chilled intent"), the people are strong, and Buyer revels in their strengths. Her husband is "a man born to the land, bonded to earth by his birthright and by his stubborn, even zealous, dedication to a way of life." Her friend Gail loses her front teeth when she's helping check cows for pregnancy: "The fiftieth cow flung her massive head and hit Gail smack in the face. Teeth and hat went flying...[S]he grabbed her hat, stuffed a couple of tissues in her mouth, and went back to work because there were still ten cows to go." It is as if these men and women both draw their strength from the land and develop it in opposition to the land's brutal hardships.
A prizewinning poet, Buyer tells her story skillfully, working from journal notes (sixteen legal tablets) gathered, assembled, and polished. She focuses on the present, but also gives us intriguing glimpses of a puzzling past, enough to give us a sense of the development of this marriage but not enough to answer all our questions. (A remark on her website, that she "came west from Chicago as a mail order bride," compounds the mystery.) The book's epilogue, written some ten years after the events documented in the journal, brings the reader up to date with events in the Buyers' lives.
Spring's Edge tells a remarkable story. I won't forget it, and I don't think you will, either.
by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect book club selection, March 3, 2008
This review is from: Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles (Paperback)
Laurie Wagner Buyer's memoir about one key spring when her life and marriage were on a precipice and yet the calves kept being born and the snow kept falling is beautiful and affecting. Her powerful feel for the legacy of the past, her keen observation about the color of the sky or the dimension of the stars, and even her desire to create art by keeping notebooks full of the details of days that seem never to change, yet must; all this adds up to a book you won't want to put down. This would be a perfect book club selection--plenty of material to discuss, cry over, and rejoice in. University of New Mexico Press should be commended for bringing this book to life.
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