Between City and Farm

My parents came from southeastern Idaho families whose lives were tied to land, church, and one another. The names and exact relationships could take pages, but what mattered to me as a child was that there were grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who already knew where we belonged. Family history was not an abstract chart. It was a farmhouse, a table, a field, and stories repeated until they became part of us.^[1]

We lived in Denver, but summers returned us to the farm. For a city boy, it was magical. We rode horses, discovered the scale of farm work, and had freedoms that did not exist on a city block. The adults had chores and worries we only partly understood. We had cousins, animals, dirt, and the sense that the day could go on indefinitely.^[2]

Those visits helped me understand my father. Even after he became a respected engineer, part of him remained a cowboy from Idaho. Years later he invested in acreage outside Denver and raised quarter horses. His life joined technical expertise with an affection for land, and I inherited at least some of both: respect for practical knowledge and a recurring hope that the right piece of property might become an opportunity.^[3]