Katrina of Heove Ranch

Her family moved to Goshen County
From Kansas 100 years ago.
She was there.
She has no memory of their log cabin being built
Out of sparce trees
Dotting the rawhide creek.
Unforgiving bows of cottonwood trees
Even thicker than Mama's plump waist.

Papa named their ranch
"Yellow" in Cheyenne
Because when he first looked down over the ridge
Into the valley where they would live
It was all gold colored.
Not the green of life.
But that was what and where the homesteader's act had allotted them.
Their lives here would be harder than others.
But they were tough.
They would make it.

Katrina only remembers
Playing in the creek,
Fixing fence with Papa,
Tending the chickens, the geese, the turkeys,
Playing with dolls made of scraps of cloth,
Shredding bails of hay with a pitchfork,
Making soap,
Sharing a bath with her two younger siblings.

She doesn't remember
The hail storm that wiped out the wheat field,
Or Mama looking at a Sear's catolog
Wishing they could afford a kit for a house.
Like a giant doll house.
Oh how Mama wanted to leave that Cabin behind.
Papa cried when coyotes ate every single sheep they bought
The family ate like vultures.
Ate the scraps left by the carnivorious monsters
Because it was better than nothing.

Katrina remembers
Hauling water to the apple tree her parents brought from Kansas
And tasting its fruit for the first time at 17.
She remembers taking off for rides
On the horse
Like modern kids slip off on their bikes.
Katrina remembers
The pride everyone felt
When they bought their first tractor.
The family photo they shot
Sat on her nightstand
Until she died.

Yes,
Eventually Katrtna grew up and got married.
Maybe it was at a dance
Out in Jay Em
On a Saturday night
That she met her husband.
Maybe it was Sunday morning in church.
There's so many gaps in her history.

All's that we know is that
Katrina's brother and sister left Goshen County
And if they didn't their children's children did.
Somewhere on those dirt roads
A tumbling down house
Has residiual memories of a branch of her family tree.
But Katrina stayed.
So did her children
And her children's children
So now her children's children's children
And children's children's children's children
Get to call themselves Goshen County natives.
A hundred years
Passes by so quickly
And then a descendant presses their fingers to your photograph
Just like this one
And wonders who you were
And what you were like
So it starts with "Grandma, what was your grandma like?"
And you hear the story of Katrina of Heove Ranch.