Customer Reviews

Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles

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" '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.

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

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.

Reader review by Jim Stoneking of Austin, Texas:

First of all, as a birder, I love this book's cover.

Spring's Edge is a compelling read--a book that would not let me go.

It provides worthwhile insight into the ranch lifestyle, stewardship of the land and its animals, i.e. cattle sheep, goats and horses.

You have to be a special person to endure the extreme weather, loneliness and challenges inherent in this way of life and Laurie is that special person.

I enjoyed meeting Laurie at the ReadWest Conference in Waco earlier this year and was pleased to receive my autographed copy of her memoir, which I highly recommend.

Every so often a book comes along that is so rich and complex, that so vividly captures the essence of place, that seamlessly blends the cerebral with the actual, even a jaded reader like me can't put it down. "Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicle" is just such a book.

In February of 1997, Laurie Wagner Buyer began writing a journal. A poet whose work has won critical accolades, Buyer called it a "fallow time," the dead of winter. Unable to write poetry, she decided to make notes she intended to share only with a friend. Her life was in turmoil: Her father had been diagnosed with cancer. The 650-acre ranch she and her husband Mick owned outside of Fairplay, Colorado was about to go under. Her fifteen-year marriage teetered on the brink of collapse. It was a long, bitter season. The words in her journal leap out with all of her raw exposed emotion.

The sheer quantity of work involved in a small ranching operation is exhausting simply to read. Dawn to dusk they work, sometimes at midnight, too, during the weeks of calving, and often in extreme blizzard conditions. Buyer finds pleasant time in her household chores, which by comparison are restful: vacuuming, baking bread, preparing meals, chopping wood, cracking through ice in the barn troughs for the animals. All this is done before she ventures out into subzero weather to help Mick with fences, with pulling calves from new mothers, or waging war on the beavers who constantly build dams that keep the mountain snowmelt from irrigating the hay fields. It's an unforgiving life, and the mood between Buyer and her husband waxes and wanes with the level of difficulty they encounter.

Buyer's writing of the landscape and the weather, the livestock and wildlife, loneliness and contentment, all capture the innate rhythms of life on the land:

"The sun battles clouds in the east. Gray sky skirmishes with blue. Unsettled and restless, the weather doesn't know what it wants to do. An army of robins hops across bare patches in the yard. A couple of killdeer scream out in the meadow. Mick tells me the backhoe has a main-seal oil leak. I see $3,000 to $5,000 disappear before my eyes."

Yet as winter reluctantly gives way to spring, there is an uplifting, a feeling of renewal in the journal entries. The reader begins to believe that maybe all will work out well for this hardworking pair. Buyer's father has a short respite from his cancer. Mick's taciturn moods begin to lighten. Even the animals have their moments of frolic. Yet the undercurrent of doom remains as Buyer watches the agricultural life she so loves give way to the encroachment of urban sprawl.

The author's feel for the past, her powerful observations of the present -- the color of the sky or the dimension of the stars, even her desire to create art by keeping notebooks full of the details of days that seem never to change, yet inevitably must -- all adds up to a book you won't want to stop reading either, not until the final page has been turned.

Through Laurie Wagner Buyer's vivid writing, I could join her in smelling the "cow manure, cat piss, wet hay and wood smoke".(p.58) Her story left me somewhat melancholy and wondering if it had a happy ending, or not.

In short, the author beckoned me to get in step with her as though on one of her walks down the valley, along the river or through the aspens, telling her tale with an easy rhythm of a hardscrabble life in sync with nature's cycles.

Her simple descriptions of daily chores, like her focus on preparing breakfast, dinner and supper, provide a metronome-like tempo while bringing attention to both the demands and joys of rural life.
My senses were heightened as though I shared the rural life style with her.
She describes her relationship with remarkable honesty, exposing the highs and lows, resentment and isolation she feels.
This is a story about courage through a long, hard winter and the hope that the signs of Spring will bring change.

In Spring's Edge, Laurie Buyer does the impossible. She meshes succinct detail about the hardships of family ranching with a poet's appreciation for the wonder and beauty of everyday experience. The result is a unique voice that will make you appreciate what's going on outside your kitchen window AND be happy with the comforts that you home and job afford.