Writers Workshop

A childhood memory that has lived with me forever and I’m sure subconsciously had a part in shaping my life.

When I was three years old, our family lived in a rented house on the outskirts of Curlew, Washington. That is a little cattle and logging community up near the Canadian border. Our house sat out from town where it met the open prairie. I can remember a covered front porch and a uard surrounded by a white picket fence.

It was open range country. There was a herd of cows and calves that grazed close to our place. A couple of times a day they strolled past the picket fence going down to w...