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Facebook and Google and email are wonderful things, but I believe we are living more fearfully because of them. Every day I receive hundreds of messages, memes, and emails. Some of them are tips from readers who would like me to pass along life altering information. Sometimes, I do try to fact check that information with sites like Snopes.com--even though I have it on good Facebook authority that Snopes is just a husband and wife from southern California who offer their liberal opinions on everything from urban legends to...
As the primary elections loom in Montana next week, I find myself not on the ballot for the first time in 16 years. I have decided to hang up my red pencil after 41 years in education at the end of my fourth term as County Superintendent of Schools this December. Having run for public office, I feel the pain of those running in contested races. It is not easy to run for office any place, but living in a small community makes it even harder! I remember well the first time I ran for my County Superintendent of Schools position...
With this column, I have completed my 27th year of writing a weekly humor/recipe column. Back when Linda Grosskopf hired me to take over writing "Cooking in the West" for the Agri-News, the only job description she gave me was," Just run some great recipes, write some funny stuff about your life, and have it in my email inbox every Monday morning." That sounded easy enough, so 324 columns later, I am sitting here on my laptop on a Sunday night trying to cheer up enough to write something funny to share this week. I should sto...
As an English teacher, I love to read. The problem is that I never have time to finish a book. In fact, since the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration back in 2004, I have been trying to read “Undaunted Courage”. My copy is dog-eared only from being drug around in my car for 18 summers. I spend the summer driving back and forth between our places near Bozeman, Big Timber, and Musselshell, Montana, and I vow every summer that I am going to actually finish the book, but I never do. I use it for weights in my suitcase, but...
The Melstone High School All-School Reunion is looming up this June, and I find it quite amazing that I have been out of high school for 45 years. Where did all that time go? The last All School Reunion I attended coincided with my thirty year reunion, which was an event that inspired me to come home and make a bucket list. At that time (fifteen years ago) I did not feel old, but I couldn't help but notice that all of my peers were looking a little more trailworn than I remembered them. In my memories they were forever 18....
Teacher Appreciation Week is this week, and there are not enough words in the English language for me to express my appreciation for not only teachers, but the paraprofessionals, administrators, school staff members, janitors, bus drivers, and lunch ladies who have survived Covid and now face another pandemic--lack of respect for educators. Just a couple years ago, we were in Covid lockdown and suddenly parents developed a new respect for teachers. Two years later, educators find themselves under seige because of national...
I received a message from Linda Story, Chance Story's grandmother, regarding the outpouring of love and support that readers have shown to Chance and the Story family following the rodeo accident that broke all of the bones in Chance's face except his lower jaw. She wrote, "Thanks so much to you and all the generous readers who have sent prayers, cards, and donations to Chance. He is recovering as well as can be hoped. It has been an unbelievably humbling experience. The notes have been a great reminder that there are a lot o...
This last week of moisture came as a blessing and a curse. There were undoubtedly large death losses of young livestock in the areas that were hit by days of blizzard conditions, but in some areas like here in our neck of the woods, the moisture was such a blessing that it outweighed the curse part. With this moisture boost, many ranchers will be trying to slip some farming in instead of sleep and between calving, feeding, branding, fencing, and all the other spring work. Farming is often a high-speed, high-stress form of div...
Many readers know the Story family and might remember that Chance Story, from Martinsdale, Montana (formerly of Big Timber and Ennis, Montana) won a $3000 Academic All-around rodeo scholarship last spring in part for his essay that I ran in this column last spring. Chance, who is a freshman rodeoing for the MSU Northern Rodeo Team in Havre realized a rodeo family's worst fear when he was kicked in the face by a bucking horse on April 1, 2022 at the Bigger Better Barn in...
One of the advantages of writing a weekly column for 27 years is that I have a scrapbook of my life saved on my computer. This week, my grandson Alex turned 12, so I thought I would type "Alex" in the search bar to see what stories came up about Alex in columns. The first one that came up was this one that I wrote right after he was born, and twelve years later I can still remember how it felt to become a grandmother for the first time. . . I have crossed another threshold in my life's journey by becoming a grandmother, and...
Spring is officially here, and that signals a shift in my world. I have to shift from physical fitness activities like power walking to the break room for a snack and lifting paperclips to doing things like lugging newborn calves into a sled from the snowbank they were born in or crawling through brush behind cows or in some cases in front of cows--depending upon their prenatal or postpartum moods. Calving season can be a painful transition into fitness that requires a lot of sweat and, therefore, deodorant. The worst part...
There is a health care crisis in America that has nothing to do with Covid. My personal health care crisis involves trying not to put myself in the position of requiring health care despite my husband's ideas. I have health insurance, but I hate to use it--especially for a case of chronic stupidity. Chronic stupidity is a malady that many people who work around cattle and horses suffer--especially during calving season. As I have grown older, I have grown more cautious. If we are driving on bad roads, I will dig my medical in...
Calving season has begun on many ranches, and although it is an exciting time bringing all those new lives into the world, it is a stressful time of trying to keep the animals and the humans alive and healthy. This year we are calving in two locations, which stretches our resources fairly thin. Consequently, there is a division of labor that was calculated by someone who flunked math. Apparently there is an unwritten rule of calving that once the calf is pulled out of the cow, it becomes the responsibility of the ranch wife...
After my column about a full brain ran, I received many priceless responses. First of all, several mathematical geniuses noticed that not only has too much information overfilled my brain, but it also made it dyslexic. It seems that I reversed the 1 and 4 in the tenths and hundredths values of pi (3.141592653589793238.. . which never repeats). Now, I realize this reversal would make a big difference in a mathematical computation of the area or circumference of a circle or the volume of a cylinder, but in case I have to...
My favorite holiday of the year was this week, which was Dr. Seuss’s birthday on March 2. It has become my tradition to do a Whoville poem to celebrate Dr. Seuss and my First Amendment right to freedom of expression. Watching the drastic erosion of freedom in the attempted takeover of Ukraine underscores the need to preserve all of our freedoms and guard against tyranny, socialism, and the complete lack of basic common sense that this country is grappling with. Last year, when I decided to run my Whoville poem, my sister warn...
One of Big Timber, Montana's most renowned residents, Gwen Petersen, closed the gate just 5 days before her 94th birthday last week. I am so thankful that my "Ode to Coveralls" poem that referenced her ran before she passed, and her beloved friend, Elaine Allestad, took it to her bedside so her sidekick in poetry and life, Sandy Sallee, could read it to her. Gwen was a great writer of the western lifestyle and a truly one of a kind character who will be sorely missed, but she will live on through her rhymes and rhetoric. The...
I just cannot resist helpful hints (now known as hacks) or tips on how to remove every stain known to man or cure anything from warts to arthritis with a home remedy. Sometimes though, I have to question the effectiveness and efficiency of the remedies and helpful hints. I have actually had less than miraculous results with many of those tips. A tomato juice bath is supposed to be the cure-all for skunk spray. Do you know how much a tomato juice bath for a small boy costs? It was $92.00 cheaper and much less stressful just...
One of the few good things about winter on the ranch is that you can wear coveralls. They are called “coveralls’’ because they hide a multitude of sins like Christmas cookies, fudge, eggnog, and winter comfort foods. You can wear your sweatpants under your coveralls and believe that you are hiding those winter pounds until the day of reckoning comes. When you see a robin and you can smell spring in the air, you realize it is time to struggle into your jeans, because you would look just plain ridiculous running around in co...
I heard on the radio the other day that children get their intelligence from their mothers. That might explain what has happened to my brain. Perhaps I drained part of it for the first child and the rest for the second. I can almost buy that theory--except for the fact that I have another theory that makes more sense to me: Susan's Full Brain Theory. I believe my brain is like a computer that has no memory left. My brain is full, and my folders cannot be compacted. In fact, my brain is so full that according to the bathroom...
Out here in the western agricultural world, there has never really been a need for the women's movement. Women have pitched in to make farms and ranches work since before barbed wire, and they didn't have to burn undergarments to gain respect. Respect came with hard work, blood, sweat, and tears. In fact, as it turns out history has proven that sometimes the best man for the job was a woman such as the legend of Charley Parkhurst. The Western stagecoach companies were big business in the latter half of the 19th century. In...
After watching four seasons of "Yellowstone", we have come to the realization that we have been ranching all wrong for our entire lives. . . or else maybe the show is not quite as authentic as co-writer Taylor Sheridan thinks it is. He is quoted as saying, "The challenge to this world is...it's not a terribly difficult plot. But if you didn't grow up with cowboys and in this world, and you don't know this world, it's a really hard world to write because you're going to fall back on the clichés of that world. People tune in...
As I get older, it becomes harder and harder to find a winter sport that I can participate in, because I don't dare risk my knees, hips, skull, etc. So when our friends, Keith and Holly Williams from Virginia, suggested a snowmobile outing, it sounded fun and harmless. We met them in Jackson, Wyoming and headed out for a three day ride through Yellowstone Park, and then one final day in the Grand Tetons along the Continental Divide. Even though it was 17 below at Flagg Ranch the first morning and 20 below the second morning i...
This morning we woke up to several inches of snow and below zero temperatures. As I drank my coffee, I perused the posts of my Facebook friends who live in Arizona. A couple of them invited me to come down to stay with them, but I doubt if they mean from Thanksgiving till Easter. As is customary on the first day of nasty weather every year, I announced that I was going to do some quick research on becoming an instant Snowbird. My husband who was struggling into his Carhartts at the time said, "Well, just do a better job...
4 and 2021 have not been easy years for anyone, but especially not for Santa Claus. I wrote this poem to underscore that despite the state of our country and our world, we can still celebrate good and love and joy and remember that Jesus is the reason for the season! Merry Christmas, everyone! Santa’s Woe, Ho, Ho —by Susan Metcalf Christmas 2020 and 2021 have not been easy on the normally jolly Santa Claus. His world has been rocked by vaccination mandates and social distancing laws. Kids cannot come sit on Santa’s lap c...
The poem I want to share this week was written by Chuck Rein, who ranches with his wife Pam on one of the most beautiful outfits on the planet in the shadow of the Crazy Mountains west of Melville, Montana. Chuck wrote this poem several years ago about riding colts with his son Charlie. He shared it at the Crazy Mountain Stockgrowers/Sweet Grass County Wool Growers Banquet several years back. This poem just says it all about those of us who are fortunate enough to call ourselves fourth or fifth or even sixth generations on...
