Reading Group Guide and Excerpt

Both of my parents grew up on farms in Montana and both left
farming as soon as they could. So I was curious to read this highly
acclaimed memoir by Judy Blunt, a third generation homesteader in
the eastern part of the state. Judy grew up more than an hour from
the town of Malta, population 2,500, the biggest town within a
hundred miles of any direction. When she married at age 18, she
didn't go far: fifteen miles to a neighboring ranch. Three children
and thirteen years later, she left the land she belonged to for
good.

These are the bare bones of her story, but they don't begin to do
it justice. Much of the book concerns the sacrifices and
accommodations her parents and grandparents made to the demanding
god of self-sufficiency. Clothes were sewn at home, washed against
a scrub board, fed through a wringer, worn by one kid, patched and
handed down to the next. Vegetables were grown in kitchen gardens
and canned or stored in the root cellar. Judy's parents raised
cattle and she learned not to get attached to any one of them,
because someday you might have to face your friend on the end of a
fork. "I made it through meals of fresh liver, of sweetbreads. And
heart. In the end, only once did I pull away, mute and nearly
choking on the lump in my throat. I could not, would not, eat his
tongue."

We might expect some of the challenges from our notions of ranching
life: outhouses, blizzards, prairie fires and one-room
schoolhouses. But other tales in this book are surprising and
unique, such as the one about their skinny, strange teacher, Mr.
Saxton, a Catholic who introduced Judy and her sister to both God
and Cary Grant with an all-day trip to a mission and the movies.
Judy held out against womanhood as long as she could, wearing a
ratty coat to hide her chest and hiding her bloody rags in the
outhouse. And while Ms. Blunt may be critical of the rigid sex
roles imposed on the ranch children, she doesn't spare herself when
it comes to uncomfortable stories. One in particular stays with me:
she and her sister bludgeoning a porcupine to death with sticks.
"There was a look in my sister's eyes, something bloody and profane
that was mine…It was the moment childhood became no longer
possible."

All in all, Judy and her siblings worked hard, played hard and grew
up fast. When it came time to go to high school at age 14, she
boarded in Malta in the same house as her older brother. He offered
her no leg up into this unfamiliar world and she expected none. She
narrowly escaped what we would now call "date rape." Her
willfulness caused her parents some heartache. The older neighbor
boy who continued to court her through high school provided them
all with an escape valve and, somewhat against her better
judgement, she married him the spring after she graduated.

Although several chapters deal with the hardships of being a ranch
wife, Ms. Blunt draws a respectful curtain around the most personal
details of her marriage and breakup. In the foreword, she states,
"I want to acknowledge those who might choose a different version
of the story than the one I tell…I've long since made my
peace with the variety of fiction we call truth."

In the end, I admire this book as much for its fairness and
discretion as for the evocative, graceful writing. It left me with
a great deal of respect for the author as a person, as well as a
writer.