Kevin has always been my closest sibling. He is two and a half years younger than I, and comprised one half of the "little boys", as he and Kristopher were affectionately dubbed. I remember him as a barefoot little guy, long skinny legs and a belly we loved to tease him about. He was always smiling, always being funny, and pretty much the life of any party we were having as kids.

I remember playing dress up with him. Kellie and I wore long "hoop skirts" and bonnets left from Mom's teaching days and school play costumes she had made. We put dresses on Kevin and declared him to be the cutest girl we'd ever seen. When Dad found out about it, he was pretty upset and told us to never dress him as a girl again.


Kevin has loved machines from the minute he was old enough to toddle around and investigate them. He got his own bicycle at age four and could ride it without training wheels down our thick-sand roads. At about seven he loved running the tiller in Mom's garden. He also worked on sewing a quilt for quite awhile, simply because it allowed him to run yet another machine! At about age eleven, he took over the pivot irrigation on Dad's ranch and basically ran it himself, with a little help here and there. He knew how to drive a pickup to haul fuel for the pivots, change out motors that had gone bad, and everything else that was involved in their repair and maintenance.

Kevin liked ranch work and was a good hand with his favorite horse, Gunner. But it was never about work, for Kevin. He was always goofing off and being silly, making Gunner attack our horses on command--the dun gelding would actually dive at our horse's heads with his ears pinned back and teeth bared when Kevin said, "Git 'im, Gunner!" It would make our horses shy back and run, to Kevin's delight. He also had Gunner trained to play horseback "bumper cars"...which was frightening also because Gunner would kick without warning. But it was all in good fun.

One of Kevin's best talents is singing. We all grew up singing together, but in about tenth grade, his voice got really good and we had so much fun singing in groups together. Kellie often brought home a new song for us to learn on her college breaks, and the four of us (Kellie, Kevin, Kris, and myself) would sing four part acapella songs that were a challenge and really fun to sing. At my wedding, I asked Kevin to sing "God Bless the Broken Road", a Rascal Flatts song that is so pretty. It's still one of my favorite songs.

Kevin and I got really close while we were in college together. I had not had a car of my own up to that point, and Dad bought an old Buick for us to share. We worked for a cleaning company and would do most jobs together, cleaning business offices after hours and vacant apartments and such. I enjoyed cleaning and Kevin enjoyed keeping the atmosphere light, so we were a good team. He continued to work for Dad a year or so after college, and when I changed jobs, we ended up rooming together for awhile. I'm glad we got to share those years together, before marrying and moving apart. Of all the siblings, we probably know each other the best.

He's still pretty goofy, even after marrying the girl of his dreams and having a son now and all. There are so many silly stories I could tell, but I'll save them for later posts and hope I never forget them. Each one of these threads is the bond of our family, and I hope to have a beautiful tapestry of memories to look back on someday.

My sister Kellie was closest to me in age and we were pretty much inseparable when we were children. Older than I by two years, she was the leader of every activity. My earliest recollections are of Kellie and I sitting on the roosts in the chicken house, singing. We would spend entire days at the chicken house! I think a large part of who I am was formed by our dreaming, scheming, pretending, and growing up with the chickens. We did a lot of singing there, and at age three or four, I told my mom, "If the chickens won't lay an egg, you just throw cobs at them!"

Kellie and I had stick horse rodeos. Her horse, Brownie, was homemade from a slat board and brown fabric stuffed with old panty-hose. His eyes had been drawn on in black paint, and he was a wonderful horse. I got my stick horse for Christmas one year, made of formed styrofoam and painted brown. I named it Jasmine. And my brother Kevin's horse was a plastic white one with a black halter with a star on the side of it...he named it Charolais Star. Our stick horses could enter any event...bronc riding, barrel racing, jumping, you name it.

I remember my sister Kandra as a tough tomboy. People who know her today would be confused by that, as she is now a sweet Christian school teacher with a wonderful family and has adopted some gentle southern ways. She lives in Tennessee, teaches English and music lessons, sews clothing for herself and her children, and is a fabulous cook, wife, and mother. But it was not always so....

Kandra was a horse crazy girl, first and foremost. When she was nine, our neighbor Francis Wescott gave her a foal, a brown and white paint. Dad purchased the mare it was born to, named Patches, and she mothered two more foals in subsequent years, Kokomo and Peppy. Kandra named her foal Apache.

Kandra began training Apache when he turned two and she was eleven. I know she got thrown off him and broke her arm when she was training him, but if I remember her story, "it wasn't the horse's fault." She was tough. She did a really nice job of breaking him in and went on to train him for barrel racing. She soaked up every bit of horse knowledge she could gain from books, neighbors, and trainers. She even went to a Ray Hunt clinic and came home and tried all his tricks on our ranch horses. Dad was starting to breed horses about then, and she started training all of the colts.

Kandra wore Wranglers and spurs and loved Country music...she was a real cowgirl. She even spoke with kind of a tough drawl when she was talking about horses and such. When she was a senior in high school, a crazy mare threw her off and broke both of her ankles, and it really changed Kandra's direction and plans as far as being a horse trainer the rest of her life. She quit wearing Wranglers and threw away her Country music cassette tapes. She ended up going to Bible College the next year, and eventually graduating with a teaching degree and getting married.

I remember Kandra as the leader of Kellie and I. We wanted to be old enough to do the things she got to do. She was left to babysit us four younger kids sometimes, and we would often get into fights and minor spats. She would usually read a book, yell at us, and try to ignore the things we did to get her attention. Sometimes she would play games with us, like our favorite one she made up called "Fall Down!" We would beg her to come out in the yard and chase us around...if she caught us, she would give us a push and yell, "Fall Down!" and we would go rolling on the ground, convulsed in giggles and getting itchy from the grass. We loved it!

We also liked to go for walks down the road or out through the pastures with Kandra. The "little boys", Kevin and Kris, would often follow us on their bikes and they would be goofing around and not paying attention, so we would quickly veer off the road and hide from them and see how long it took them to notice we weren't up ahead of them walking along. It was so much fun to listen to them wondering aloud, "Where did they go?" We would hide in the standing corn fields or woods, or take another route back home without them knowing. Kandra was good at leading us in orneriness.

Kandra was really good at cooking and sewing and reading, and we all followed in her footsteps, but probably never quite reached her level of expertise in each. She has won baking contests, sewed her own wedding dress and many other dresses, and is a Literature teacher today. She also started us off in learning music, and we younger girls started taking piano lessons because she was taking lessons and it made sense for us to take them as well.

I think I owe quite a bit to who I am because of the big sister in our family. I think in some ways we younger ones are still emulating her examples. She was the first to go to the college that most of us attended, the first of the siblings to marry and have kids, and many of her decisions have shaped our own lives. Kandra may have lost that tough cowboy drawl she used to use as a teenager, but I think she's still a tomboy horse trainer at heart.

My brother Kollin was ten when I was born. Being the firstborn of seven, he was basically an adult already when the rest of us got to know him. Kollin has always been a hard worker, and was Dad's right hand man on the ranch.

When I was little, Kollin would call me "Bear Cub", a nickname that I hated fiercely. Not until much later did I recognize the affection behind it. He sat across from me at the supper table, and I would get so mad at him for slouching in his chair and putting his feet on my chair under the table. He was a typical big brother, very annoying but always respected.

Some of my best memories of Kollin from childhood...

We all attended a one-room church school in Brewster, and one day we had a substitute teacher, Glen, who was also our hired man on the ranch and a deacon in our church. The UPS man came to the front door of the church with a delivery, and Glen stepped out of the classroom to accept it. Kollin turned around from his desk and hissed, "Okay, everybody! Come on." And we all left our desks and went outside, around the corner of the building and hid. I was probably in first grade, and I thought it was so funny. Glen came chuckling around the corner and told us we had better get back to our school work.



Kollin got this motorcycle when he was a kid, and it was his pride and joy. The date on this photo says September 1982, so he was thirteen years old. I remember him giving us rides on it, and trying to "pop a wheelie". He would also take all of us little kids out flying kites. He always had the neatest kite, and added miles of string to it, which he marked off the feet in hundreds with black tape so he would know how high his kite was. Battery-operated cars and trucks were very popular then, and they were called "Stompers". We kids would gather around to watch him drive his trucks and crash into other cars with them. He also built things with tinker toys and rubber bands and used small motors and connected them to batteries, like a small windmill that actually turned, for instance.

Kollin drove us to school when I was little, in our old 1978 Ford Purple Pickup. I had to watch my knees when he shifted, because it was stick shift and packed in that old pickup, with Kollin, Kandra, Kellie, and me. I have a vivid memory of coming up over George's big hill with the sun in our faces on the way to school. Mom had made pizza for our supper the night before, and we were taking a leftover one for our lunch that day. Kellie was never quite awake that early in the morning, plus with the blinding morning sun, she was hanging her head down in her lap, sitting beside me. Kollin yelled at her to sit up because he thought her hair would get in the pizza.

At school during recess, Kollin and Mickey Hunt would go outside and talk to truckers on the CB radio that was in the purple pickup. And I also remember Kollin calling the operator on the school telephone, and then giggling and saying nothing when she answered. To me, anything Kollin said or did was the funniest and the greatest. We all looked up to him.



Kollin wouldn't claim to be a horseman, but he did know a lot about ranching, horses, and cattle. In this photograph, he is riding Spider, an AQHA gelding that was generally considered to be Dad's horse. Kollin was mainly in charge of the feeder cattle operation of Dad's ranch. He mixed and weighed their feed, spent mornings and evenings hauling feed to each of the cattle lots. In between feedings, he would check for sick calves and doctor them. A horse was merely a tool for gathering or sorting cattle, and Kollin would never make a fuss over them. He did love cats, and usually had one particular favorite that he would pet and talk to. He also had a baby lamb that a neighbor gave him one spring. It grew up with the cattle and truly believed it was one of them. Dad had a hard time sorting it off when he went to sell its pasturemates one year.

Kollin was usually the one telling us younger kids what not to do...we knew not to lay a finger on one of his vehicles in the shop. He was always fixing up old pickups, or buying and selling them. He started out with an old white pickup that he drove to college. It was called "The White Knight", which was boldly proclaimed on its bugshield. Then he painted it black and decked it all out, with red interior and dark tinted windows. He put a lift kit on it, a chrome roll-bar, and ton of money into it. The popular slogan for Ford in those days was, "Have you driven a Ford lately?" and so Kollin had: "Have you driven UNDER a Ford lately?" lettered on the back tailgate of his truck. After that he had a really nice maroon and gray Ford pickup, then a blue and white four-door pickup, a burgundy Camaro-Z28, and then a black Trans-AM.

Kollin lived at home and worked for Dad until he was twenty-eight years old. Then he started writing to a girl in Oklahoma, went to meet her for Thanksgiving, and brought her home to meet us for Christmas. Julie was the perfect girl for him, and we were so happy and excited for Kollin. They were married in May, and now have two boys and live in Oklahoma where he is in business for himself painting interiors.

Kollin is wise, strong, a great leader, and a wonderful older brother.

This photo is my mother's family. Left to right are: Bonnie, Ethel (holding Dan), my mom Juanna Beth, Dick, and Jimmy.

I don't know very much about my grandfather Dick Carson, because he died in an accident at age forty. I know that my grandma Ethel was teaching school and she saw him ride up on his horse and get a drink at the old pump. She told a friend, "I'm going to marry that man." She had never met him, but she did end up marrying him.

My grandma was one of 12 kids, and grew up in the Great Depression. The whole family left Nebraska and traveled on an old truck with a house built on the back of it, out to Oregon. After a time of not finding work, my grandma hitch-hiked back to Nebraska, because she had a teacher's certificate from the state of Nebraska, and knew she could get a job there. Without that decision, I would never have been born in Nebraska, if at all.

Grandma lived in her own house on the ranch until age 88. She would drive her Plymouth Belvidere the thirty miles or so down to our place on Saturday evening. My mom would set her hair in rollers and she'd stay for church on Sunday and enjoy the afternoon with us. Grandma was a singer and a song-writer. She wrote over 80 original songs and would sing them in church for specials occasionally.

When she could no longer remember how to get to our house (she ended up in Burwell one time, and a guy called mom to come get her), she moved in with us. It was fun to have her help us with things like cutting up beans from the garden for canning. She would have liked to fold the laundry, but I remember she always folded the underwear in quarters instead of halves. My little sister Karmen proclaimed herself the laundry-folder and would not let Grandma help, because she put the clothes on the wrong stacks and folded them funny.

Some of her frequent sayings were: "Ooh, what are we havin'?" when it was time for a meal. She would ask if there were anything she could help with in the kitchen, and then say, "Oh, well. I'll just set the table." She liked to drawl, "Well, I'll be horn-swoggled!", she called our couch the "davenport", and our vacuum cleaner was the "sweeper". She loved to eat, and loved church dinners. She would always bring tuna-salad sandwiches and Chips Ahoy cookies and crunchy Cheetos. She would take some of everything, especially the desserts, but she always stayed trim and very healthy. In later years, she started to hunch forward a little bit, but she always got around pretty well, and never complained about much. I think she had worked so hard her entire life, she was all grit and muscle.

Grandma's favorite color was blue. Our hired hand wore a baseball shirt that was white with blue sleeves and a blue number on the front and back. Grandma was eyeing him across the table one night at supper and said, "Glen, when you don't want that shirt anymore, you give it to me. I just love that color." We all laughed, but the next day he showed up with that shirt all washed and neatly folded in a bag for her. Mom was chagrined, but he insisted that Grandma should have it.

Grandma loved to cut up and have fun, and never got past the age of flirting. She would make faces and say funny things just to get everyone to laughing, and was always the life of the party. In church, she always sang alto and never missed a note. In her eighties, she could pick out the melody of any song on the piano, playing all by ear.

Grandma was wonderful and I miss her very much.

My dad is the biggest hero of my life. When I say that he is the most wise, compassionate, truthful, honest, and sincere rancher in the world, it is not based solely on my "daughter's-point-of-view". The hundreds of people who know him, from mere acquaintances to close family members, would agree.


My dad is so much more than a likable guy. He's the perfect husband, the wisest father, the best rancher, and the most interesting conversationalist. He can also be ornery, overly strict, late to important functions, and a wandering talker where topics either stray to historical Old West battles or the Rapture as explained in the Book of Revelation.


If I were to think of words or phrases to describe my dad, there are many. If you ask my little girl what "Grandpa Lewis" is, she says, "Cowboy!" He is a rancher. Sunday School teacher. A fixer-upper. A thinker. Great at math. Loves a good ROOK card game. Avid reader who perseveres even though glaucoma has left him nearly blind. He's a neighbor in the Biblical sense of the word, because like the good Samaritan man, he will care even if he owes nothing to the problem at hand. He is strong but sensitive. Wholeheartedly a servant of God, willing to go to great lengths to share the Bible with anyone who may be receptive to it.


I have many short "films" in my memory, of my dad in action. I remember one spring day we were trying to get cow-calf pairs brought in from the field. These were newly-born calves with mothers that could be feisty and downright stubborn. Dad usually slid a loop of twine around one of the calf's hind legs, lifted it into the back of the old purple pickup, and tied it there. It would lie or stand near the tailgate, tied short enough it couldn't fall out, and the cow could walk up close and sniff it and know it was her calf, and follow as the pickup drove slowly up to the corral. Well, one wicked old cow was fighting mad and protective of her new baby. She wouldn't follow the pickup and wouldn't turn when you tried to drive her, she was mean and was just going to trample over anyone in her path. Dad got the pitchfork, rolled down the pickup windows, and drove up beside her and jabbed her in the neck with the pitchfork to get her to turn and move off towards the corral. I was in the passenger seat, ducking each time he had to switch the pitchfork over to my window to head the cow off again, and hanging on for dear life as he switched gears, forward and reverse to push and drive that cow with the pickup. He was running into her with the grill guard, jabbing out the window with the pitchfork, and throwing the pickup in reverse each time she stopped to duck behind us and go the way she wanted to go...and my dad was humming the whole time! Many a man would have been cussing up a storm. I have never heard my dad use even a slang word. But my dad always has a song to sing or hum.

I haven't always lived up to my dad's ideas for me. We've had a few differences of opinion, and one or two big arguments in the past. But I owe my dad a lot, and he'll always have my love, admiration, and respect. They just don't make men like him anymore.

This is my mother, with her daddy and pony Mickey. She was a horse lover from day one, and passed that heritage on to all of us. She says Mickey was the best pony a child could ever have, but when an adult got on him, he would buck them off immediately. In high school she had a horse called Old Paint, and kept him until he passed away on the ranch long after she married my dad. She said Old Paint's only flaw was that he loved to race, and if another horse passed him he would buck. My mom must have been some cowgirl! She taught my sisters how to leap on a horse bareback, Indian style. I could never do it, both my legs and confidence level being too short.

My mom was a dreamer in high school. She wrote poems about wild horses and drew fantastic drawings of beautiful girls and their horses. Her dream was to have a horse ranch when she got older. She got her wish, but was often too busy with the housekeeping and children to really enjoy spending time with the horses. She did ride occasionally, especially if we kids were in school and Dad needed her help with moving cattle or getting a sick one in the corral to treat.

Today, my mom lives in a beautiful valley in the mountains. She and dad bought a buckskin quarter horse stallion a few years ago, and are breeding a handful of well-bred mares. My youngest sister, Karmen, still lives at home with them, and she trains and cares for the horses. Here is a photo of one of their foals from last spring.I inherited all of my mother's horse-craziness. I have never been without a horse for very long. When I was about nine, the ache in me from not having a horse of my own was becoming overwhelming. I wrote a silly little note that said something like, "What's the use of living if you ain't got a horse?" I quickly regretted it when Dad and Mom laughed about it and showed it to the neighbor, Francis Wescott, who was drinking coffee with them the next morning. But I got my wish. Dad gave me my pick of the colts, and I chose a two year old buckskin gelding named Sunday in Savannah. He had a blue eye, and we figured he probably couldn't see out of it. That was my first horse, and I started riding him. He was so laid back we never got into a fracas, but his health was poorly, and Dad sold him before long.