Look at the way you live. You've sold out. Next thing I know you'll become a Republican." She shook her head. "Where are the values I raised you with?

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.

Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," she'd ask us, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?

In this world, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.

But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.

As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart--and at the ranch, I could see, we have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.

Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life.