She knew that her husband, though still very young of heart, was physically incapable of maintaining the family ranch. So she did much of the work herself as he watched from their kitchen window.
Neighbors came to help during branding season and again come birthing time. And she let him offer up advice and as much as he wanted, because she could see that his masculine spirit often ebbed into the place that looked like an invalid to him.
“Get some cold water in case that calf don’t breath right away,” or “Find someone to restring that fence on the back stretch to the east,” and “Move those forty to the lower quarter today,” he briskly call out to her, lovely his ‘El Segundo,’ turned the ranches ‘Numero Uno.’
Her favorite was “You’re such a hardworking beauty,” of course, a comment he reserved only for her. How in the last years of her life, she wished she could hear his voice say those words once again.
He passed on during their 43rd year of marriage and is buried under the large oak tree beyond the barn. She lived another 15-years mourning her husband and now lays peacefully beside him.
People still recall how she loved him even after death did they part.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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