Product Description

Linda Hasselstrom is a rare combination: rancher, poet, environmentalist, and feminist. Her day-to-day account of a year on her family's South Dakota cattle ranch offers a vivid look at a rugged way of life rarely pictured from inside.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #914554 in Books
• Published on: 1987-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 233 pages

From School Library Journal
YA In diary form, Hasselstrom presents one year on a South Dakota cattle ranch. The book highlights the rancher's struggle with natural elements and affords a look at the forces that shape a poet. Hasselstrom, rancher, poet, wife, and environmentalist, blends the practical with the poetic in her well-crafted book. Haying, fence mending, and cattle branding are described, along with the more dramatic occurences of ranch lifeblizzards, prairie fires, cattle births, and deaths. In between are reflective moments when the poet pauses at the sight of a meteor shower or laughs over the irony of making garden mulch out of old love letters. Readers will not have to be nature smitten, or even particularly interested in ranching, to relate to Hasselstrom's warm, intelligent voice. This is the kind of book that is so authentically well written that readers will find themselves reading straight through the appending glossary of ranching terms because they don't want the book to end. They will also want to leaf back through the 16 poems that are included in the text. A uniquely uplifting and informative slice of life. Keddy Outlaw, Harris County Public Library, Houston
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
South Dakota is a land where the only rule is "you can never tell what a bobtail cow will do." In the winter, the temperature can drop to minus fifty-six - if the wind only blows twenty-five miles an hour. Spring means getting up at ten p.m., midnight, and two a.m. to check on pregnant cows. Snow storms at the end of April can decimate a vegetable garden. In the summer, you can spend fourteen hours a day haying and the rest of the time watching for fires. Then there's canning, drying, and freezing to get ready for winter again. So why would anyone want to be a rancher in South Dakota? Not for money - Linda Hasselstrom's neighbors say they could make more selling their farms and living off the interest. Yet as she takes us, day by day, through one year, we become immersed in the details and moments that make up one rancher's life. Interspersed throughout the journal entries are Linda Hasselstrom's poems that come from this rural life. One describes using old love letters to create mulch: "So I mulched them:/ gave undying love to the tomatoes,/ the memory of your gentle hands to the squash./ It seemed to do them good,/ and it taught me a whole new style/ of gardening...Strange plants push up among the corn,/ leaves heavy with dark water,/ but there are/ no weeds." -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister

About the Author
Linda Hasselstrom was born in Texas and raised on the plains of southwestern South Dakota. Her poems, short stories and articles have appeared in over 70 magazines and anthologies; she has published 2 volumes of poetry and 3 non-fiction books about her life.

Customer Reviews

A poet's daily log of life on a family ranch in South Dakota
This book is about people living strenuous lives in an environment of extremes -- drought and prairie fires in summer and fierce cold and blizzards in the winter. And there seem to be no moderating seasons in between.

The author, a writer, poet and environmentalist, has returned in mid-life to the South Dakota ranch where she grew up. Here she lives with her husband, a Hodgkin's-survivor, helping her parents make a living by raising cattle. The year is 1987.

Forget the Cartwrights. This is a book about real ranch life -- the endless hard work, the human and financial cost, the losses and disappointments that become almost routine.

Only a stoic acceptance of forces far beyond one's control seems to keep these people facing one day after the next. There is also the redemptive power of work itself, whether fence mending, working cattle, or putting up food supplies for winter.

Add to this an appreciation for the beauty of one's surroundings. Hasselstrom often stops to record the stark pleasures of life observed on the plains -- carpets of wildflowers on the pasture slopes, migrations of birds, the appearance of deer and coyotes.

And there are the starker observations of weather. Each day's high and low temperatures are noted, and brief descriptions of cloud cover, the many varieties of snowfall, wind, rain, and the unrelenting sun and heat. There are sub-zero winter days with wind chills below -50, and one summer morning that dawns with a low of 90 degrees.

Although she denies feeling isolated (a highway passes by the ranch, and they are only miles from a small town), there is a sense of lives lived without much contact with other people. Horses, pets, and even wildlife provide the social environment. You understand the appreciation she articulates when her rural community gathers for the end-of-summer county fair.

And to know people is to know adversity and vulnerability -- there are frequent brushes with death. An uncle on a nearby ranch suffers a heart attack. The members of a family from another ranch are seriously injured in a car accident.

The author herself is trampled by her horse. Her husband undergoes tests for cancer and is hospitalized for surgery. Her husband's spirited teenage son, from a previous marriage, spends a few summer weeks with them and then is gone again, the house suddenly filled with an unwelcome quiet.

It is a compelling book that leaves you in wonder, with feelings welling up at the end that make you reluctant to part from these very real people whose daily lives you have come to know so intimately. Far from the farm I grew up on, I relived something of that demanding life as I read this book and was also helped to see it with new eyes.

The Elegant Words of a Woman Rancher
Although I grew up in the city and have had no exposure to ranchers, I read this on a recommendation from a fellow nature/animal lover. The author describes her daily life with crisp and matter-of-fact - yet warm and insightful - prose that is difficult to put down. I agree with the previous poster in that I, too, read through the glossary at the end just because I didn't want the book to finish. By the end, I felt that I knew the author, her family and friends well enough to want to know what's happened to them since. This book made me think about what the future holds for the author and the dwindling number of privately-owned ranches and farms that continue to persevere in the face of Corporate America.

The Thrills of a Year of Ranching
As I approached the end I thought, "If I have to read about feeding cattle or fixing fences one more time, I'm going to scream!" But these are major elements in ranching and, and this is a diary of one year in a rancher's life, so they must be included.

Hasselstrom keeps a candid diary of a year in her life as a woman rancher and spares nothing from castrating steers and the dead pile to doctor visits and a fur-trader rendezvous re-enactment vacation.

This is a family ranch owned by her father who lives just down the hill, but by now he sees his daughter as an equal partner. During the winter, her father heads to Arizona. She and her husband wonder if they will have enough feed for the winter, they struggle through snow to feed the cattle, they worry about the cattle not on the home farm, and are saddened to see the toll that a winter takes. In spring, calving dominates their lives which is complicated when a late April snowstorm catches them without cattle feed. During the spring they mend fences, sort cattle, and watch coyotes play with mice.

However, her life is not all ranching. She is constantly writing about her struggle to maintain her writing work which flares and sputters but never completely stops. She also gives writing workshops and campaigns for environmental causes. Hasselstrom is also very open about her past, a failed marriage, her step-children, her decision not to have children, and her relationship with her husband. She allows us to follow the ebb and flow of her marital relationship from the claustrophobia of back to back snowstorms and the fears of a looming surgery, to planting the garden together and the anxiety she experiences when she can't help her husband outside.

Although it contains many crises, this is not a compilation of the best and worst of a ranch life, but the honest daily activities of a ranch year involving cattle, humans, and nature. This will strike a chord of authenticity for anyone who has ever cared for cattle.