The skull of J. Thomas rested in my palm. He was buried in the 1870s and my mother had just dug him up from the old pioneer cemetery that rests on the southern edge of our ranch. It’s a small ranch — 100 acres in northern Colorado, below the foothills — but it houses all […]
Laura Pritchett
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
Inside the fall
Flat on my back under the cottonwood, yellow leaves falling, brilliant blue above, an abandoned rake beside me. My two young children sit at my side, feeding sticks to the dog, who likes to chew them up and understands that every time he gently takes a twig and crashes it in his teeth he is […]
Posted inJune 27, 2005: Reflections on a Divided Land
Fury
When Fury finally dies, he picks a back pasture on my parents’ Colorado ranch to rest his old horse body. The neighbor across the fence calls to tell my mother this, that he can see a dead horse from his kitchen window. This neighbor is not well liked. He is new. His house is new. […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
Anti-immigration myopia
Dear HCN, Phil Cafaro’s letter “Real environmentalists don’t support immigration” and Ed Marston’s column on a similar topic (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of immigrants has a change of heart) strike me as a tad myopic. Are the lands in the West more worthy of preservation than those in Mexico; does not putting up barriers to […]