Sleeping Sheep

Spanish Fork Canyon, is steep, a place where conquistadors many centuries before and come down, into the valley, hiding their stolen, native gold in red-rock caves along the way.

Grandpa Bud seemed a nice enough man, straight teeth and nose, eyes that twinkled when he laughed, but my first mother-in-law, Marsha, was his daughter and her hair was crazy on end even after she paid a couple hundred at the high-end salon’s, she spoke Russian, programmed MSDOS, and never in the many years I knew her, settled or contented a single moment and it was Bud she blamed, pinching her eyes and pointing her finger.

You waved your arm in impossible braggart fashion, or so a poor kid of ten like me thought, when you drove me around in Marsha’s black Thunderbird, red interior, Marlboro’s in the console despite her freaked out warnings of not smoking in her car. You pointed out swaths, enormous tracks of land, speeding by acreage with your brushing arm, pointing out the white dots that were grazing sheep, the occasional lonely tin camper where a skinny, native, also of Spanish ancestry, Mexican herder, just barely taller than my midsection, cooked a pot on a scanty fire.

You told me the animals were nasty, their supposed downy fleece was rough and full of dust, and the pink skin underneath a constant crawling of lice, ticks burrowing their way into all of the softest spots where skin works its way around boned-bends, warming pockets for the parasitic symbiosis.

Upon the announcement of our dating, there were those who chimed in about your mother, your grandfather, and how they were the blue blood of Spanish Fork, their towering mud brick pioneer homes, red as the canyon trails taking up the best tree-lined block of town, wealth because of sheep, left to graze the sage and sand which hid the golden armored wrist bands and helmet of Cortez himself!

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Photo Credits: Me, Gleb Lukomets, Ksenia Kudelkina & Jamie Morris of unsplash.