CBR17 Bingo: Work – In this book, the author discusses her life and work on her family ranch, where she is a shepherdess, and all the highs and lows of that lifestyle.
Author, songwriter, and shepherdess Eliza Blue invites us into her life on her family ranch in South Dakota as told in the highlights from a decade of newspaper columns.
I’ve always lived in places that are hilly or places that are green or places that are both hilly and green. I think if I tried to settle down on the prairie I would be struck down with prairie madness within the year, though whether the sheer flatness of land and sky or the wailing wind would get me first I don’t know. The suburbs of Dallas where my parents live now are bad enough.
On the other hand, I love the Little House books, four of which are set in South Dakota. So when I got this book from acbug in the 2024 Cannonball Book Exchange, I was curious to learn more about modern-day ranching in this tough land.
Blue’s style of writing is beautiful – vivid, lyrical, and relatable, bringing us into the mess of farm life and somehow making it appealing without romanticizing it. Not that I’d want to be a farmer now – but I understand the appeal of it for some people. More importantly, I understand the appeal it holds for Blue, and appreciate it through her own whole-hearted appreciation. And it made me think more about the natural world around me, and the symbiotic relationship everything has – something that’s easy to lose sight of in the city.
That this book is just a selection of the original column does mean that sometimes an issue brought up in one story vanishes from view and is never resolved, or reappears with a lot of ground lost between. For example, in one column Blue discusses the hard necessity of possibly selling their milk cow Rita, but then several years later Rita pops up again, quite comfortably living on the ranch without any explanation of what changed. A clarifying note here or there would have been helpful.