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Product Description
In the true stories, essays, and poems of Leaning into the Wind we meet the real women of the High Plains today - women far more interesting than the shiny cowgirls of Madison Avenue. Here are reflections on cowboys real and fake, tractor-driving lessons, outhouses, and the uses of baling wire; here are ranch marriages, enduring and not; family legacies; loss and renewal. Westerners will find their friends and neighbors in these pages; others will find a vivid portrait of the women of a region all too often mythologized.
Amazon.com Review
Hearts of the West are unburdened in Leaning into the Wind, an anthology encompassing a wealth of experiences from farmers, ranchers, rangers, and other women who live and work in America's ofttimes harsh, sometimes beautiful high plains states shoehorned between the Mississippi and the Rockies. A New York newspaper writer transplanted to a hog farm on the "baking brown plains" sees a sagging trailer, rubbish, and waist-high weeds where her exuberant husband sees only promise. Waking on a bed of sweet straw after sobbing hysterically, she finds "dozens of piglets curled around me, nestled against my hips, tucked under my outspread arms, piled like a halo around my head." Other contributors wax poetic, describing an old pickup truck that "wanders down the road like a drunken goose" or steam coming off a newborn lamb in the chill night air. The selections tend toward rough-edged and gritty, but all are heartfelt.
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