Vegetarian Ranchwife

In the weeks leading up to the Solstice, the world has felt to me like a ball tossed in the air, hovering just for a moment before it falls back down. Something about these long days, when the sun wakes me before my alarm and the kids keep playing outside on their bikes when they really should be getting ready for bed, feels like time has stopped. It’s my favorite time of year.

In early spring, the smell of green grass about to break through the soil’s surface drives the sheep crazy. We’re still giving them supplemental feed everyday, but the flock scatters in their desperate search for something fresh. But now, the pastures are as green as they will ever be, and you can almost hear their contented sighs as they graze. This is the good life.

I’m tempted to call this moment “heaven,” except that I grew up Seventh-day Adventist, and have heard too many sermons on the subject. While I grant there are good philosophical reasons to believe in an afterlife–the idea that our actions, good and bad, matter, for example–the over-sermonizing trivializes the whole idea.

In these sermons, heaven is imagined as a stasis, a ball tossed into the air, hovering forever at its apex. The idyllic summer days that stretch unchanging into eternity horrified me as a child. We were encouraged to imagine the most perfect world, how good the fruit was going to taste, all the outrageously fun things we might do, like slide down a giraffe’s neck. It all sounded great, but wouldn’t at some point, it all get boring?

I thought there must be something wrong with me. Teachers and pastors talked about people who just wouldn’t be happy in heaven. Only the sinful riffraff would find the idea boring; the righteous would be perfectly content in the heaven of their imagination.

From the distance of adulthood, I see that I was reacting to the underlying anxiety, of trying to hold onto this bit of sweetness and forever avoid anything that might be bitter or unpalatable. I understand the impulse. As a parent, I hate seeing my children get hurt. If I could wave a magic wand so they never fell from their bikes and skinned their knees, I absolutely would.

But of course, skinned knees are a part of life, and, in fact, that’s how we learn and grow. As a writer, I know a story without conflict is boring. In the opening pages, I need to introduce a disruption in my main character’s life. It needs to be difficult, but it’s through the struggle that the character grows.

Growing up, I got the feeling that if my pastors and teachers wrote the bible, Eve would have just said, “No thanks” when the snake offered her the fruit, and we could have skipped over all the painful parts, stayed in the garden with its delicious fruit and unusual slides. How boring would that book have been? How flat and undeveloped would that humanity be?

Of course, I’m not going to tell a person mired in grief or living in a war zone, This pain is all for the best. Just think of how much you’ll grow. Conflict can be devastating rather than constructive and sometimes, it’s useful to talk about the sweet, easy life that will never end. There’s no single answer for every occasion. But for me, in a life of mostly mundane conflict, I don’t have any use for that narrative.

My father-in-law used to say that in Wyoming, green grass was like sugar, all the sweeter because we get so little of it. Without winter’s bitterness, these sweet green pastures would be bland, and knowing that it’s just about to end makes it all the more poignant.

We are crossing the zenith, after which, the days will start shrinking back towards winter’s abysmal darkness. I can sense a change in the pastures as the warm days have introduced a tinge of yellow. Our near daily thunderstorms are doing their part to keep the green holding on for as long as it can, but it won’t be long before the grass succumbs to hot dry weather.

Soon we’ll have to worry about fire danger, and Kem’s attention will turn to ensuring the livestock have water. But right now, in this moment of pause, life is as good as it gets.