When I laid out the original plan for this trip I purposely carved out time so that I could swing through Quincy and visit Bob and Dorothy on their ranch outside Quincy. I have a lot of wonderful childhood memories of the place, and somehow it always has a sense of 'home' for me. Not to be an imposition, I sent a note to Bob through Don and his sister, Lisa, to say that I would book a hotel in town, but of course he was having none of that. Frankly, I was thrilled they had the space for us to stay on at the ranch for the extra time it gave all of us.
What little bit I know about ranching I learned from watching Bob and Dorothy as a child, and I'm grateful to this day for the lessons. The ranch was where I got my first exposure to the realities of raising lambs lambs for market, collecting fresh eggs, milking cows, and bringing in the hay to fill a barn in anticipation of winter. But for all the menagerie of animals from the ranch of my childhood memories, I was truly surprised by the diversity of animals now making their home there -- many of which arrived after abandonment by other people who through one misfortune or another could no longer keep them. There were emus from Lisa obtains eggs to decorate and sell, there's Shadow the 32-year old horse who arrived black with white spots and now is white with black spots, there's a goose who thinks he's a tom turkey and is completely devoted to a young turkey hen, and there's the odd-colored mixed breed mallard who keeps getting picked on by the normal colored ducks. Dorothy does a thriving business running a boarding kennel for dogs, and still finds time to make cheese using from the small goat herd. Whether it's varmints raiding and taking goslings by night or lambs accidentally separated from their mothers keeping folks awake at night with their woeful bleating, there's never a dull moment at the ranch.
This visit provided an opportunity to finally meet Lisa's children, Nick and Briana, and dinnertime brought even more family -- Robert and Ellen -- over to visit. It was a beautiful evening so we enjoyed dinner on the deck where we could look out over the valley and watch the light from a sun long since sunk below the hills reflecting off the clouds overhead.
We stayed up pretty late catching up on family and community gossip, and I was sure I was going to sleep like a rock when my head hit the pillow. Of course, there was also that lost lamb trying to cry me to sleep -- too bad it couldn't jump fences. Even the nighttime cry of of the Union Pacific freight running by up the hill in the middle of the night seemed like something from a warm and comfortable memory.
We've all gotten a lot older, but the valley and the ranch looked nearly unchanged from the images in my memory. It's be too long since my last visit and my next can't come soon enough.
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