keeping up to date

Seems like Westinspect.blog has been put on hold for now. Not that there’s nothing to say, actually there’s plenty to say, plenty of thoughts about inspections and life out West. These days I pay a bit more attention to Facebook, so you might check out the Westinspect Page there

Takin’ a short break

I’ll be taking a short break from Westinspect.blog.  See the Philippines Mission link on the right side of this page.  Westinspect.blog will be back with new posts and new comments, starting February 12.  Any comments that are made between now and then won’t show up right away, since comments are moderated.  See you in February!

Ridin’ Fence ~~ Community (the cat & the hen)

One of my half-bantam hens decided she was going to incubate her eggs in the milk barn but the milk barn is dedicated cat territory. I moved her to the brood house.

She abandoned the nest and returned to the milk barn and started another clutch. I moved her to a corner of the chicken house. She abandoned that nest and started another clutch. I shifted her to a kidding shed. She left that nest too and returned to the barn. I gathered her eggs for a couple weeks, hoping to encourage her to find a better place to set. Nothing doing. She was going to incubate her eggs right there in the corner of the milk barn under the edge of a roll of used carpet destined to be next winter’s door coverings.

“You loony hen, the cats are going to eat all your chicks,” I told her.

She wasn‘t listening. Her wings and beak had educated many a cat and she figured the barn was the best place for her nest. After the raccoon raid, I decided maybe I was the loony one. That rotten raccoon killed several of my setting hens and ate all their eggs, but it never did find her tucked away under a corner of used carpet that will be next winter’s barn insulation.

One day when I was checking on the grumpy little hen, I discovered that one of the young barn cats had delivered five kittens within eighteen inches of the hen’s nest.

“That was dumb,” I told the cat. “That hen will kill your kittens and eat them. I‘ve seen her kill and eat mice and your kittens are about that size.”

Momma cat wasn‘t listening. She was purring away, feeding her brood of black-and-white carnivores under the edge of the same piece of carpet hiding the hen.

Ah, it’ll be okay, I decided. She’ll move them in a few days. Long before the chicks hatch and that hungry hen comes off her nest.

I was partially right. When the kittens started opening their eyes, momma cat moved them three feet to the west – to the other end of the carpet.

Now that it was close to time for the chicks to be hatching, I was developing another concern. How to keep the cat from eating the chicks. A fluffy day-old chick is about two bites for a barn cat and ideal hunting practice for the now ambulatory kittens.

I checked on the hen every day, hoping to catch her with her chicks before they left the nest. I fixed a spot in the brood house with water and feed and she was going in there – like it or not.

One day it was mid afternoon before I peered through the barn window to check on the hen. Momma cat was on her side at the end of the carpet feeding her kittens, purring and kneading the air as only a happy cat can.

Momma hen had left the nest and was calling her fuzzy, fluffy, newly-hatched chicks toward the back of the barn where she was scratching in the straw.

In shocked surprise I watched as twelve chicks tumbled and bumbled their way out of the nest, across the carpet, over momma cat and her kittens, through the panel and over to momma hen.

Momma cat never moved. Not even when one of those bite-sized morsels stopped to rest on top of her, and another tumbled into the kitten pile.

Momma hen attacked me when I tried to move her chicks, so I left them. Three weeks later, they were still there. I checked daily, sometimes several times a day, just to remind myself that the world is full of wonders.

I have now seen kittens and chicks huddled together in a pile when an afternoon thunderstorm cooled the air unexpectedly. I’ve seen a lost chick follow momma cat around until momma hen came back for it. I’ve seen momma hen wade through a pile of five playful kittens and never peck a one.

I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, but if a cat and a hen can raise their broods together, why can’t humans teach their children not to eat one another?

All rights reserved © 2008

Water-Tight Promises for All Kinds of Weather

watertight promises

Ridin’ Fence ~~ The great grease zirk hunt

I hate grease guns. They are a tool invented by some sadistic deity to remind me just how mechanically challenged I am.

To the males in my world, greasing equipment bearings is a chore anyone outside of diapers can do. Except me.

It is time to cut hay, and that means there is a whole line of equipment that needs field prepped. My husband handed me a grease gun and told me to use it while he and my brother slid the freshly resectioned sickle back into the swather header and timed it. I had managed to resection both cutter bars without making a blood sacrifice. I hadn’t even barked a knuckle. I guess I was feeling a little cocky because the sight of that grease gun didn’t send the usual shiver of apprehension up my spine.

I found the first three zirks on the end of the header and pumped grease in them. So far, so good. Those three bearings wouldn’t be seizing up from lack of lubrication. I had to use my hip to hold the barrel of the gun while I held the tip on the zirk with one hand and pumped with the other, but there wasn’t much grease on the barrel yet, so that went okay.

On the fourth zirk, the gun ran out of grease, so I hauled the gun into the shop and found another tube. I had the gun dismantled before I discovered it was airlocked, not greaseless. I managed to keep the majority of the grease inside. Anything over 50 percent is a majority, right?

I returned to the swather a little less confident. I was determined that this was not going to turn into some grease-based beauty treatment, but my hands were already ominously black and the gun barrel was slippery.

The next few zirks went okay; if I ignored the spreading black patches of grease on my shirt and jeans from bracing the barrel so I could pump the handle.

The header drive shafts had to be moved several times before everything lined up. All that digging round out of sight in old grease and dirt resulted in black hand prints not just on the header, but on my jeans. I also had a big smudge across my cheek and around one eye where the gnats were biting.

The zirk down next to the wheel refused grease. Not just once but repeatedly. I couldn’t actually see it refusing grease, but I could feel it every time it squished up around my fingers. I shook it off in disgust and a blob landed on my glasses. I scrubbed it off with the shoulder of my shirt.

I worked out a couple more airlocks and approached the engine compartment with trepidation.

I ducked under the frame and stood hunched under the engine looking for the zirks on the drive line. The first one was fairly cooperative. It only spit a little grease back at me, which landed on my shoe.

The second one required some impressive gymnastics to reach. The yokes were in just the right position to make me stretch my arm up into the engine and back down at an awkward angle to plug the tip in to the zirk. I couldn’t actually see the zirk, but I was right below it. I jiggled the tip to make sure it was firmly sealed on the zirk and pumped. It wasn’t firmly sealed.

My first indication that the zirk was refusing grease came in the form of a large wad landing on my forehead. I howled and tried to shake it off, but with my arm wound around the internal organs of the swather, there wasn’t much I could do. I gritted my teeth, worked the tip on, put my fingers down next to it and jiggled it around until, at last, two pumps made it into the bearing. The rest stayed on my fingers. I unwound myself and tried to flick the grease off my forehead with a finger. A grease-covered finger.

Only the crimper to go, I cajoled myself, kneeling down and digging through last year’s dust-caked grease in search of those elusive zirks.

The gnats attacked my ears and I scrubbed against the shoulders of my shirt. I knew better than to go digging after them with my fingers.

I found a couple of zirks and managed to work grease into them and, with a huge sigh of relief, crawled out from under the swather – assignment accomplished.

“I’m done!” I yelled in triumph.

“Did you get the ones on the ends of the header?” my husband asked from somewhere in the shop.

“Yeah!”

“Did you get the drive shaft?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get the pivot on the back?” His voice was getting closer.

“Yeah.”

He came out of the shop, wiping his hands on a rag.

“Did you get the . . .” He choked, his expression a combination of shock, disgust and glee.

I frowned at him through the grease.

He tried again, “Did you get the crimper?”

“Yeah,” I growled. “But I couldn’t get the one by the tire on the other side.”

He looked at the well-smeared grease gun.

“Is there any grease left?”

I thrust the nasty thing at him. “I’m sure there is, just crawl under there and try the rear zirk on the drive shaft.”

He took it gingerly, trying to keep his hands clean.

That did it. I grabbed him in a big hug and, before he could wrench away, gave his bristly cheeks a big rub with my forehead.

“Arugh!” he squalled.

“I told you not to give her a grease gun!” my brother yelled from the depths of the shop. “She only gets about half the grease in the zirks!”

I started for the shop. I still had some grease on my hands that would contrast nicely with his clean shirt.

All rights reserved © 2008

Ridin’ Fence ~~ That, my friend, is a skunk

Lynn’s Ridin’ Fence articles just keep gettin’ better . . .

Skunks. There is just something morally reprehensible about a critter that fights with its behind. But I have to admit, it is effective.

I was rediscovering just how effective while trying to scrub enough skunk stench off the dog that we could both live with her. It really wasn’t her fault she was covered in that nasty yellow oil. She had been helping me chase a big boar skunk out of the chicken house so I could shoot it without flavoring the eggs for a month. We killed the skunk, but poor Sparky had been fired upon in the line of duty and we were both regretting it.

“You ought to bottle some of that stuff and send it to Roland,” my husband said holding his nose as he waded by my scrubbing project.

“Even if the postal service would take it, I don’t think Roland would open it,” I replied. My sinuses had shut completely down in self defense, so my voice was a bit warped.

“Ah, I bet he’d love offering people a sniff!”

I wasn’t too sure about that.

I’d met Roland when I was in Australia as an exchange student. He was 28, I was 16, and like all good Australian outdoorsmen, he wanted to know what a skunk smelled like. That request struck me dumb.

How do you describe the smell of a skunk to someone who lives on a continent where nothing defends itself with stink? Someone who has never seen that yellow mist or been forced to ride in a pickup with a dog soaked in it?

Finally, after several start-stop attempts, I said, “Mix rotten eggs and gasoline till you puke. That’s pretty close.”

From the height of his superior years, he rolled his eyes, laughed indulgently and informed me that “there’s no smell in the world that will make you puke.”

Now there was a comment I could respond to. I promptly informed him that he had never smelled a skunk and had no clue what he was talking about, so I would file that comment exactly where it belonged – in the uneducated idiot file. He chuckled politely. I offered to find one of those gag gift places that offer skunk scent in a perfume bottle, complete with atomizer on top. A mist of that and he would be heaving out his toenails, I told him. He just laughed and wandered off in search of a beer.

A few years later, he decided to pay us a visit in the United States. Being an outdoor sort, he wanted to see rural America. We arranged for him to spend a few days at my parents’ hunting and fishing and a few days with us. While we couldn’t offer him any big game, we could offer rabbits, coyotes and various varmints.

The first question he asked upon arrival at my parents’ house was “What does a skunk smell like?”

I was able to see the dumbfounded look from the other end as my brothers and father struggled to find a good answer to that question. Mom was smarter, she avoided the conversation.

My brother had hit a skunk with his pickup a few weeks before and there was still a faint, lingering aroma hovering about the right front corner.

“That’s a skunk,” my brother informed him.

Roland bent over and made sniffing noises around the bumper. “That smells like a boar fox, only a little stronger,” he said. There was a slightly superior tone in his voice.

“That’s just a whiff,” I told him.

He rolled his eyes at me, “There’s no smell in the world that will make you puke.”

The whole family chimed in with a chorus of “You ain’t never smelled a skunk,” but he wasn’t fazed.

A few days later, we drove by a dead skunk on the side of the road and Roland hurried to crank his window down. “Boy, that’s bad,” he said.

“That’s just a whiff,” I assured him.

He rolled his eyes at me.

A few days after that, the guys were out hunting rabbits after dark. As luck, fortune, or whatever would have it, they ran across a skunk. Any skunk within a mile of a chicken house is fair game, so my brother launched a .270 round that hit it in the behind.

My brother, being the sort of guy he is, wanted to make absolutely sure it wouldn’t be eating any more chickens. He drove up to it, cranked his window open, looked almost straight down at the carcass and said, “Yup, it’s dead.”

. . . . . . . . .

When the hunting crew arrived back at the house, my brother walked in grinning like a Cheshire cat and breathing out of his mouth. He has shot so many skunks that when his nose catches the merest whiff, it shuts down immediately. My husband followed him in, looking a bit green around the gills, but there was a triumphant gleam in his eye.

Poor Roland staggered in behind them, his skin the color of split-pea soup. He weaved his way across the living room and down the hall to the bathroom without a word.

I turned wide eyes on my brother.

“We found a skunk,” he said.

“He shot it,” my husband added.

“Had to make sure it was dead,” my brother continued.

My husband reopened the outside door and positioned the fan to circulate untainted air. “Blew it apart. Didn’t know if I was going to get out of the truck fast enough to let Roland out of the middle,” he finished.

An hour or so later, Roland reemerged from the bathroom, still green and still weaving. There was desperation in his voice. “I took a shower. I brushed my teeth. I snorted water. I can still smell it!” he wailed.

“That, Roland, was a skunk,” I told him.

Despite my offer to dispose of his clothes, or at least wash them for him, he carefully sealed them in a plastic bag and packed them in the bottom of his suitcase. Upon arrival back in Australia, he discovered just how vicious skunk spray is. The insidious chemical cocktail had contaminated his entire suitcase. He didn’t even offer his curious younger brother a whiff. He just tossed the whole thing. Store-bought souvenirs and all.

His baffled younger brother has informed me that Roland lives in chronic fear of a perfume bottle arriving from America. Maybe some day I’ll send him one.

All rights reserved © 2008

Inspecto-photos

Just seems like time to post a few photos.  Most of them were taken during inspections.  All are my originals except for one.  I’m not a great photographer, don’t really have the eye for it, but it’s fun when every once in a while a photo op jumps out at me.  Ok, here we go . . .

This first one was just taken yesterday, where winter is just beginning here in southern Colorado.  The aspen leaves are dead, black, but not all fallen off.  The leaves contrast with the stucco wall and decor behind the tree.

Little bird mouths, species unknown, yelled up at me when I opened the lid on a propane tank back in the summer.  Mom or Dad had built a nest on top of the tank’s gauge.  No, I didn’t have any worms for them, so sorry.  Just closed it back up and wished them well.

When you travel on Colorado Highway 10, between Walsenburg and La Junta, there’s a great panoramic view about 20 miles east of Walsenburg.  In fact, it’s my favorite highway scene in all of Colorado.  You’re heading west up a hill, when all of a sudden you crest the hill and there it is!  Such a wide-open view of Greenhorn Mountain to the right and Spanish Peaks to the left, with a good dose of Mt. Blanca in the distance.

Sheep are not as common in Colorado as they used to be.  Seems like cattle are more profitable.  But for the rancher who is willing to make the effort, sheep can be an unexpected source of pride, beauty, and yes, even income.  These sheep were finishing off a field of wheat, before heading for a field of turnips.  Yes, that’s right, turnips!

Lew Sterritt can train horses like no other man.  He took a horse that had basically never been “broken,” and taught it to trust him in the matter of about an hour.  You can see the horse sitting down here.  As you can imagine, the horse did not want to sit down like a dog.  But he eventually trusted Lew’s instructions, and sat peacefully for a few minutes.  It’s a convincing picture of how our creator leads and teaches us.

Walking along the Arkansas River always turns up something unexpected.  This simple spider was fairly large, and was totally unconcerned as I moved around him trying to get a decent photo.  He was waiting for lunch, no doubt, and he was just as patient as can be.  Ah, that I would be so patient . . .

I suppose I should throw in a photo of an inspector.  And not just any inspector, but me, inspecting under a deck.  Just in case you’re curious about deck inspections . . .

That’s all the photos for now.  Hope you enjoy.

Ridin’ Fence ~~ Ten pounds of cowdog

Another classic Ridin’ Fence by Lynn Allen

Jesse was always the fastidious type. Very concerned about his cowboy image, he trimmed his mustache one whisker at a time to make sure it was just right.

He carried an extra pressed shirt hanging in the back window of his pickup so that if he had to make an emergency trip to town, he had a clean, wrinkle-free western shirt and matching gladrag to put on. He only drove pickups and only wore boots.

He had several different western hats but no caps. Caps were for farmers and he was a rancher. I think he even got married in Levi’s. He didn’t want to risk anyone thinking he wasn’t a real cowboy.

His cowboy image wasn’t quite as important to his wife. In fact, revenge from the female side of the household always seemed to include a poke at Jesse’s image.

She inherited a Cadillac from her aunt.

Cowboys don’t drive Cadillacs.

That was okay, he could ride in the passenger seat.

It was three years before he rode in that car – and only then because his pickup broke down and she came to get him in the car. I think it was the air conditioner that won him over. Bonnie always insisted it was the leather seats designed to be sat in by humans.

Then one day she came home with a poodle – a fluffy little white one that weighed about ten pounds.

To go with the car, she said.

Absolutely NOT! he said.

I would have loved to hear that conversation, but all I got to witness were the glowers Jesse shot at that fluffy little dog.

Just to twist the knife, she kept the little dog groomed. Not with a standard poodle clip, but she did have red toe nails and ribbons in her ears.

Candi was a rescue from a puppy mill. Surprisingly intelligent, and excited by her new rural world, she tagged along behind Jesse’s blue heeler, much to Jesse’s disgust. With her short legs, she couldn’t travel across the big pastures so she rode in a saddlebag on the back of Bonnie’s horse. If the heeler yapped or she heard Jesse whistle a command, that perfectly groomed little white head crowned with red ribbons, popped out of the saddlebag. If the situation looked interesting, she would yip for Bonnie to put her down so she could streak off after the heeler.

If the cows didn’t pay much attention to her, it wasn’t because she didn’t try. Her teeth just weren’t big enough to go through cowhide. She couldn’t move cows, so she started concentrating on the calves.

She learned to slip in and move the calf while the heeler moved the cow.

Poor Jesse. His heeler’s working partner was a poodle and they made a surprising effective team. Despite the ribbons.

Candi loved her new life, all but Jesse. His disapproval kept her head and tail down.

I hadn’t seen Jesse and Bonnie for awhile, then one day I ran into Jesse on the road between headquarters and the calving pasture. He was obviously headed to feed, and there on the seat was Candi. Complete with bows and painted toenails.

I kinda grinned and commented on his well-dressed passenger.

He looked a bit sheepish, but his voice was firm.

“Yeah, Bonnie had to go be with her dad for a couple weeks, and I had to keep Candi. Took her with me a couple days, and you won’t believe what she does!”

“What?” I asked “Keep the seat warm?”

“You just get in here and see!” he defended, calling Candi over beside him with a hand gesture.

This I had to see. Jesse defending a poodle?

I parked my pickup on a pasture access trail and climbed in.

When I opened the gate to the calving pasture, Candi bounced out of the pickup and before I could grab her, disappeared into the chollo.

As I opened my mouth to call her back, Jesse interrupted me. “Get in here, she’ll be all right.”

We bounced across the pasture to the feed grounds and he scattered cake. We counted cows and looked for sick calves. Then we unloaded a round bale of hay on the hillside where it would roll down and come apart. He didn’t seem too worried about the cow missing from the bunch, or the one that had obviously calved within the last day or so but had come to feed alone.

When the cows were fed, he parked the pickup on the hillside, shut it off and rolled down his window. The March wind whistled through the cab. He talked a bit about the quality of the calves the new bull was producing while I clamped my teeth shut so they wouldn’t chatter and quietly turned blue.

Then from the distance came a YAP! It was tiny and a long way off, but it was Candi’s yap. A few seconds later I heard it again. A dog calling for help. Alarmed I whipped my head around to look at Jesse who was calmly surveying the pasture. Finally, he started the engine and headed in the direction of the yap.

We finally found her. She was standing about fifty feet from a bunch of scruffy little trees clogged with river trash. She saw the pickup, yapped again and turned to stare intently at the trees. She turned her head back toward the pickup, then back to the trees, ribbons fluttering as her ears swung out.

Jesse stopped and climbed out. Candi ran to meet him, made sure he got the message that something important was in the trees and then took off down the draw. Jesse walked over to the trees and carefully worked his way through the deadfall.

“Bring me that 216 tag and the tagger!” he called.

Among the trees, huddled down out of the wind and carefully hidden from predators and humans, was a new calf.

As we checked the calf over, again I heard Candi yap. Just a single bark. A few seconds later, I heard it again.

“She’s found another one,” he said returning to the pickup.

And she had. The missing cow was standing over a new calf that wasn’t in any hurry to get up. Candi, standing far enough away she didn’t disturb the cow, was sending up the signal to Jesse.

“She do this all the time?” I asked, eyebrows arched.

“Every morning and every evening.” He looked at me smugly. “I used to spend hours out here trying to find stashed calves. She finds them in minutes. And she never even gets them up, just barks to let me know where they are.”

He stepped out of the pickup and called her. She came bounding out from behind the chollo separating her from the cow and ran up his coveralls into his arms. She washed his face and he tossed her through the window onto the seat. She was shivering with cold, but so obviously happy I had to smile with her.

Jesse didn’t even notice the fuzzy hair, ribbons and painted toenails any more. And that was obviously the way Candi liked it.

“You know, poodles were originally bred for stock guardians and hunting dogs,” I said as we rattled back across the pasture.

“That’s not a poodle,” he said, reaching over and ruffling Candi’s ears. “That’s a cowdog.”

Candi squirmed with joy and snuggled under his arm, eyes fixed adoringly on his face.

After that, I never saw the feed pickup without Candi. Jesse went so far as to carry her around rodeos occasionally, even if her red ribbons clashed with his shirt.

All rights reserved © 2008

Go with compassion

Sometimes an idea so completely grabs our hearts and our minds that we can’t ignore it.

The idea moves front and center in our thinking and dreaming, until we have to take action.  That is what happened recently to our family.  One family member is volunteering at a children’s home in the Philippines.  And as the rest of us heard what was going on there, we caught the vision, too.

God is at work all around the world, of course.  But sometimes he gives us a tender heart for one particular spot where he is working.  In this Manila neighborhood, the volunteers care for homeless children, operate a community center, church, and school, and provide fresh water and medical care.  They are constructing a camp and a second children’s home on the southern island of Mindanao.

Our family is planning to go for a short mission in January.  We’ll volunteer however we are needed there.  There’s plenty to do, of course, and it already seems like too short of a time.  You can see a video of the children’s home at www.kidsim.org.

In Mark 6:34, “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.  So he began teaching them many things.”  Would you like to help with this short mission in the Philippines?  Right now we need prayer for God’s provision.  It’s an expensive project to take a whole family halfway around the world.  We’re working and saving for plane tickets.

You can buy a copy of Life Out Here, The Best of Ridin’ Fence.  100% of profits go to support this mission to the Philippines.  The cost is $20, with free media mail shipping.  To order your copy, click on this link for my business payments.  Enter a Unit Price of $20, and I’ll know it’s for a copy of Life Out Here.  Be sure to enter your contact info, too, so I’ll know where to send it or how to contact you.

Thanks so much for your prayers and support.  Sometimes a little project like this can have a big impact in someone’s life.

Want more information?  You can e-mail James at jke_co@hotmail.com.

Ridin’ Fence ~~ Selling community

“I can’t believe this place,” she said for about the 20th time.

By now. I’d begun to understand what she was using the phrase for, and I was learning a whole lot in a hurry about why I failed so abysmally at urban marketing. She had been invited down from the metro area to give a talk on marketing, and it was apparent after only a few minutes, that our form of “networking” was a lot different from hers. But she’s game, and she did her best to help us understand marketing from her perspective. Her mantra the evening before had been “You have thirty seconds to convince me to listen to you” and “network.”

But this morning it had changed to “I can’t believe this place.” And it wasn’t a phrase she had practiced for seminars and speaking engagements.

I heard it the first time as we walked through the Copper Kitchen toward the far back table. I’d either been hailed by, or stopped to talk to, a dozen people. She listened politely as I talked about cows and the cow market, horses and the horse market, hay and the hay market, mules, dogs, pickups, kids both two and four legged, and what this week’s column might be about. (I like I knew at that time!)

As we sat down, yet another person came up to say “Hi” and tell me they liked Life Out Here and how glad she was that I had put it together. It’s easier to store a book than a file of clippings.

“Have you read it yet?” she asked my guest.

“No,” she answered politely. “What’s it about?”

“Us!” the woman said, pressing her hands over her heart. “It’s about our community.” Then she corrected herself. “It’s really about any small town, I suppose, but it’s about us. Our community.”

As the lady returned to her table, my guest said, “I don’t believe this place,” and asked me if I knew everyone.

“Oh, no,” I replied. “We talked to most of the people I really know, but there’s not too many folks in here we couldn’t talk to.” I pointed out some of our local dignitaries and told her what I knew about them – who owns which businesses, who’s kid earned a basketball scholarship, and that sort of thing. That solved the breakfast conversation problem. On the way out, we walked the gauntlet again and talked to another half-dozen folks who’d come in since we had.

“I can’t believe you know all this about all these people!” she said.

“Well, they’re my friends and neighbors, and some of them are relatives. Of course, I know about them.”

As we started up Colorado, a friend from Kim backed away from her bank, saw me and waved merrily in the back window. I waved back.

“Who’s that?” my passenger asked.

“Neighbor,” I said.

“She lives next to you then.”

“Oh no. She lives about 75 miles from here, but if I need a hand, she comes running, and I repay the favor every chance I get.”

“Oh.”

She liked architecture, so we trundled around La Junta, looking at the older and most unique homes, and stopped to visit Sally Hibbs. Sally was a gracious host and sent us on to the Finney House. Again a warm reception and tour that included the stunning woodwork accents, light fixtures and wonderful details salvaged from the days when the Railroad sent a doctor out from New York to see to their employees.

“I can’t believe this place,” she kept repeating, but I was beginning to understand it had little to do with the house, regardless of its charm.

I pointed out other homes, and told her a little about the ones owned by people I knew. Then we looped around to look at the cobblestone house on Sixth street. That’s when she spotted the Weddell and Reed sign.

“You have a Weddell and Reed? Here?”

“Oh, yeah. Remember when all of us were talking last night and you asked how often we examined our portfolios and we said we let Karen worry about that? Well, that’s Karen, and she worries about that. If she fiddles with somebody’s investments, or people lose too much money, they talk to each other, and believe me, Karen can’t afford that, so she worries for us.”

“I can’t believe this place.”

We stopped at the Kiva and she listened as Susie talked about Buck and his dream, and the boyscouts, and the current museum collection, and the expansion plans. As we went downstairs to look at the pieces in storage, I heard it again, “I can’t believe this place.”

Back outside the Kiva, Susie was kind enough to buy a book and promise to find out if my title would fit into their bookstore. As we pulled away, headed back to her vehicle, I heard it again.

“I can’t believe this place.”

This time I called her on it. “What can’t you believe?” I asked.

“I can’t believe the people. You’ve talked to everyone from the Mayor to the janitor, and they’re all friendly. You’ve waved at business people, trucks, kids on the sidewalk, and they’ve all waved back. Nobody has honked at us, even if we’re going two miles an hour down the center of the street. People have just let us walk into their houses! I’ve never seen the private side of a museum before. And I’ve been invited back so many times I can’t remember them all. I’ve watch you sell books without even mentioning them. I just can’t believe this place!”

“Well, if they want a book, they ask. I just let them know it’s there if they want it.”

She shook her head.

“How’s that different from what you do? I know there’s got to be a difference because I can’t sell a thing in a city.”

She looked at me a bit and finally answered, “I don’t want to know you. Just tell me why I should want what you’re offering and leave me alone.”

“What? How can you sell something to somebody that you don’t know? How do I know if you’re going to like my book if I don’t visit with you long enough to know you a little bit?”

She looked back through the windshield. “You don’t. You’re selling something, not making lifelong friends. I don’t want another person in my circle, so when you come up and ask who my grandfather is (I’d asked that question in the course of our day) you’re invading my privacy and that turns me off. Keep it professional, not personal.”

My mind was in overdrive trying to figure out how I could convince urban people to buy the “community” in my book if they didn’t know what it was. Small town is all about “personal.”

Absently I waved at Mike in his patrol car while I waited to turn. He waved back.

“I can’t believe this place!” she said.

We arrived back at her vehicle, and she stepped out.

“So, are you coming back?” I asked as she opened the door of her SUV.

“Absolutely! We’ll bring the bikes down this summer. My husband has got to see this town. He’s never going to believe it. What a great place to retire!”

“Well,” I said, “Call me if you do. There’s some really neat houses out in the country you might like to see.”

She grinned and waved, but I could see her mouthing “I can’t believe this place” as she closed her door.

Well, she might not be able to believe it, and she might think things here are too personal, and that we spend too much time building bridges and not enough time minding our own business, but she sure bought it.

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