Dear Reader,
Everyone has a different norm, and we tend to find other people’s norm fascinating, even though in the grand scheme of things it’s really not that interesting. Growing up, some kids thought that it was amazing that I had my own bottle calf that I raised, which is out of the norm for a lot of kids, but if you think about it, it’s not that much different than having a pet dog. But I was always amazed when they could just order pizza, and it would be delivered to their house. Or that they could just ride their bikes to the park or walk to an ice cream shop. So just like raising an orphaned calf was something that they only saw on TV or read about in books, walking to stores and pizza delivery was something that I only saw on TV or when visiting the city cousins.
Recently I started a new job in a downtown office with a window that has a street view. The town that I work in is the county seat, so there is a lot of foot traffic with the courthouse and other local government office nearby. Sometimes I feel like the town is stuck in time, in a way. People walk by my window in modern clothing, but the feeling and layout of the town haven’t changed much. Even though it has the nostalgia of a small southern town, there are still things that I notice out my window that are novelties to me.
1) Men in suits and briefcases. I don’t know why this amuses me so much when I see a man walk by my window with a black suit on and a briefcase, usually walking fast while on the phone. While people may stare at my family when we come to town in our cowboying clothes, I have the same feeling. I always envision that these men in black suites are on their way to some big court hearing where they will deliver an “A Few Good Men” defense, but depending on the time of day, I think they may just be trying to get to lunch.
2) Kids riding their bikes to school. There is a group that passes by my window every morning and it looks like they are always having so much fun. It makes me wish I could be 11 again with no worries but trying to get my book finished before the library due date and my room cleaned. It always makes me smile when they try to do little tricks on their bikes or are eating gas station snacks on their way to school. Sometimes though, they are running late and just blow by, barely watching the traffic.
3) Walking to a coffee shop or restaurant. My office is literally closer to a Mexican restaurant than my house is to our barn. But I also have a Cuban and Italian restaurant on the same block. Not to worry though, in the same amount of time that I can walk to my barn I can walk to a coffee shop, though I am not sure how great that is for my budget. But when two o’clock rolls around sometimes coffee is more important than my budget. This sure beats the seven-minute ride to the closest town to my house with only a few restaurants and no coffee shop.
4) The traffic. Now this is not something that I saw on TV that I wanted to experience. Most people probably wouldn’t describe what I experience as traffic, but when you are used to being able to count how many cars pass you on a given trip, more than 10 cars in front of you is heavy traffic. At my old job, my hours bypassed the rush hour, but now that I have to experience school zones and 5 o’clock traffic. Sometimes I am a bit dazed when I get home.
The funny thing in all of this, to me, is that I kind of feel like I am faking it and no one knows. When I go to work because of the dress code, I don’t look out of place in the downtown terrain, but my cover may be blown when I climb into my ranch truck to go back home. No one thinks that this is a foreign world to me. When I answer phones or emails, people think I know exactly what I am doing, even though sometimes my thought process is, “What is the most similar situation to this on the ranch and how would ranch kid me handle this situation.”
Sometimes ranch kids have to get off ranch jobs or even move onto off ranch lives, but you can’t quite take the ranch out of the kid. No matter how hard they try to hide it, their ranch raising is going to come out somehow. Just hopefully it comes out as something acceptable in the 9-5 world, like work ethic.
Sincerely,
The Rancher’s Daughter
From the Rancher's Daughter's Desk 