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?

My life is not just about the past.

Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.

Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. Isn't that a sin?" I asked Mom. Not exactly," Mom said. "God doesn't mind you bending the rules a little if you have a good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

Once you'd resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all.