rock, ice wood and snow
There seems to be an odd correlation between good luck and hard work, a direct relationship between the amount of risk ones takes and the amount of luck one receives. This is noted by many, except, perhaps, those who attribute good luck strictly to chance, and are still sitting around waiting for fortune to be handed to them.
Bad luck, well that is something different. But good luck, I think it’s something we create. The harder we try, the greater our chances of creating it. Seems to me luck is on par with effort. The greater the effort, the greater the likelihood of good fortune. We build our own fortunes as we build our own futures.
A friend writes to share the news of the ranch her and her husband bought after years of hard work. She has called it the Lucky Girl Ranch. She knows. She has worked for this, is still working for it, and will always work in one way or another to make her dream a reality. She made her own good luck.
When I moved to Colorado, funny how no one told me I was lucky then. Only crazy to leave the comfort of the good life I built for myself in California. And funny once again as no one mentioned how lucky I was when I arrived in California years earlier. I drove from Indiana in a 20 year old Dodge van with my baby and two dogs and a small Christmas cactus growing in a coffee cup. Not much else. The dash board caught on fire on the drive there, minor electrical problems, and the windshield wipers actually fell off when severely tested during a downpour in Kansas. But we made it. I think we must have been lucky.
Oh, I could tell you stories about how lucky I was… In my younger days, I think the risk far outweighed the logic. But I never believed I couldn’t. I always figured with enough hard work, determination, and a bunch of wild ideas, I could. I could be lucky. And I suppose I was.
Though no one told me I was lucky during the cold wet winters where it could rain and rain and rain, over sixty inches in four months time. No one told me I was lucky trudging in knee deep muck to feed the horses and milk the cow each morning. What do “they” know, I would tell myself. I felt lucky.
I learned to love the rain. That is lucky. I remember one year when it rained every day for thirty days. I watched the river rise, a crazy wild brown torrent carrying giant trees of the Pacific Northwest in a bubbling twisting gushing fury over rocks and down this untamed course to the ocean. I would walk down to the mossy silver green banks with my child on my back, and sit, and we could hear nothing else. The enormous sound would wash over even the deepest of thoughts. The most feral beauty I have ever seen. We were lucky to be there.
No one told me I was lucky when I first moved here. We lived the three of us, three dogs and two cats in a little one room cabin with a nearby outhouse, and decided to stay. We would call it our home, and make it so. It had never been a home before. We were lucky… we could make it happen together.
And we did. Now it is easy for folks to look at our almost luxurious sense of comfort and tell me I am lucky. Yes, we are lucky. Lucky we took the chance to try what no one had done before. Lucky we could put up with the trials and tribulations along the way of building this home and life and world. Lucky we could see what was not there and make it happen. Lucky we could laugh.
Our first winter we stayed in a guest cabin with a small wood stove and hauled water down from our storage tanks up hill. The septic froze sometime in the middle of winter so we could not even use the drains, but could unhook the p-traps and set a bucket below.
Throughout the years of building this comfort we now have, we could laugh. Oh yes, and cry. But always return to a smile when the tears dried. Always. We made it the adventure we wanted it to be. It was fun. That may not be the word of choice when it’s the middle of the night and nature calls though it’s twenty below out there. Yet you return to a warm bed and snuggle down under the blankets and are surrounded by good love. And you feel very, very lucky.
Yesterday I helped Forrest put together a listing of morning temperatures I recorded over the past years. A school project for him, finally a use for all those mornings noting and recording for me. We spent hours flipping through my journals. I quickly read out the temperature number. He presses the number into the calculator, and sums up an average for each month, each year, thousands of numbers, thousands of days. For each day my finger points to the number. But my eyes see more. Glimpses of the years here, passing before me in a matter of hours. My stomach tightens as I turn the pages. Yes, I see the good times – the hard work, things we built and made and created together, making this our home, our life, our world. But too often I read of incidents of pain, anger, insult, injury, an unfortunate relationship with a very toxic family. I do not have the ability to tolerate such things as they have learned to or been taught to do. I was not given the history of understanding, accepting, enabling what I was taught is wrong. I am glad. I never will. There are times we are comforted in knowing we are the outsider. Acceptance would be a terrible compromise of character. I see this now. It has been a raw journey.
I read of horses dying, how many in all have we lost? Too many.
I did not feel lucky to loose lives I tried to bring into this world.
I did not feel lucky to have endured the problems of my husband’s family that have tangled themselves to this property and each other like a poisoned thorny vine.
I close the books. I look around. I could be anywhere. Somewhere better. A beautiful home on a beautiful mountain with fresh air and open waters, where the soil won’t kill my horses and the people won’t try to kill our dreams.
I return to where I am, here and now, with my boys, the sky, the mountain around me, and my luck returns. We are lucky to be here now, lucky to be moving onto a new mountain tomorrow. Starting a new. Taking with us our dreams, our laughter, our luck.
Into the sharp night air, we step outside together last night before the moon rises. The sky is black, so black and deep and vast and limitless. Stars seem to whirl around us as we stand still and look up into a world so far, far away. The longer we look the farther we see and we know we will never see it all. There are no limitations. It is before us for as far as we choose to see. It is beautiful. And once I again, I know we are lucky to be standing there, seeing that, together.
And I remember wherever we are, those stars will be overhead. We can take the time to stand in the cold mountain air and stare up at that big wide unknown in awe and remember how lucky we are.
I am one lucky girl.
