We run a cow-calf operation in the Sandhills of north-central Nebraska. If you don't know the Sandhills: they're grass-covered sand dunes, about 20,000 square miles of them, not much good for farming and very good for cattle, because the grass is good and there's water under it. The country looks empty on a map, and it is. Our nearest neighbor is four miles. The nearest town with a grocery store is thirty-one. The kids' school is six.

I started this page in June because Jessie's teacher had the kids do a unit on "where we live" and Jessie said, "Mom, the kids in the city don't know anything about us," and she's right, and I've noticed that most of what does get written about ranching is written by people who visited for a week and cried at the sunset. So here's a year of it from someone who lives here, without the violins. The kids have added their own lines where they wanted to. Dale says he'll add something when he has time, so don't hold your breath.

What we are: about 300 mother cows, mostly black baldies and some straight Angus, on deeded and leased grass. Two hired hands at branding and haying, otherwise us. Dale's family has been on this place since 1911. I married into it in 1983 and I'm from Kearney, which out here counts as the city.

February and March: calving. The whole year is built around this. The cows calve starting the first of February and most are done by the end of March, and for those eight weeks somebody checks the heavies (cows close to calving) every two or three hours, day and night, in whatever the weather is, which in February in Nebraska is generally awful. Most cows calve on their own and want nothing from you. Some need help: a calf coming backwards, a big calf on a first-calf heifer, a cow that's been at it too long. Then it's the calving barn, the chains and the calf puller, and the two of us. A calf that's born in a blizzard gets brought into the house and warmed up by the stove, or in the bathtub, and every ranch wife will tell you the same thing. We lose a few every year. You do everything right and you still lose a few. Cody's been doing the two a.m. check by himself since he was twelve.

April: turnout and grass. Pairs go out to the calving pastures, we fix fence, we watch the grass and pray for rain in the right amounts, which it never is. The windmills get checked and the tanks get cleaned. There's a week in April when the whole country turns green overnight and even Dale stops the pickup to look.

May: branding. The calves get branded, vaccinated, and the bull calves get castrated, all in a day or two, with neighbors helping, and then we go help the neighbors with theirs, and that goes on most weekends in May. It's hard work and it's a party, both. The women cook for thirty. The kids run the vaccine gun and wrestle calves as soon as they're big enough, which Wyatt thinks he is and isn't. If you want to see what a community looks like, come to a branding. If you're squeamish, don't. It's necessary and it's done fast and nobody enjoys the part you're thinking of.

June: bulls out, summer pasture. The bulls go in with the cows for about sixty days, so the calves come in a bunch next spring instead of all summer. Pairs move to summer range. Fence, fence, fence.

July: haying. The Sandhills have wet meadows in the low ground between the hills, and that's where the hay comes from: native grass, not planted, cut once a year in July and August and put up for winter. Dale and the hired men and Cody mow, rake and bale from sunup until the dew comes down. We put up big round bales now, about 1,500 of them in a good year; Dale's dad stacked loose hay with a sweep and a stacker, and he's still got opinions about the change. Hay is the whole winter. A short hay year means buying hay, and buying hay means losing money, and there is no third choice.

August and September: fixing, and the county fair. Machinery gets fixed, the last hay comes in, the kids show 4-H calves at the county fair, and we get about two weeks that aren't a crisis, which is when the weddings happen.

October: weaning and shipping. The calves come off the cows at around six or seven months and five to six hundred pounds. They bawl for three days and the cows bawl back and nobody sleeps. Then the steer calves and most of the heifers go on a truck to the sale barn, and that one check, in October, is most of the year's income, so what cattle are bringing that month decides what kind of year we had. We keep back some heifers to become cows, and cull the old and open (not pregnant) cows.

November through January: feeding. Every day, hay out to the cows, ice chopped on the tanks, and the cows moved to winter pasture and the meadows. It gets dark at five. There's more time to sit down than any other season, and that's when I write things like this.

Jessie and Wyatt go to a one-room country school six miles from our house, kindergarten through eighth grade, nine pupils this year from four families, one teacher, and a cook who comes at noon. Nebraska still has a good many of these little country districts and we mean to keep ours. The teacher, Mrs. Lundquist, has been there eleven years and teaches every subject to every grade, which means the third graders hear the seventh-grade history whether they want to or not, and it turns out they want to. Jessie was reading at a sixth-grade level in third grade for exactly that reason. There's a well, a flagpole, a merry-go-round older than I am, a computer the district bought last year, and a ball field with a fence on one side, which is the pasture. Recess gets called for weather, for a bull in the ball field, and once for a rattlesnake, which the teacher dealt with herself with a shovel and then went back to fractions.

When the kids finish eighth grade they go to the high school in town, which for Cody means the bus at the mailbox at 7:05 and home at 5, an hour each way, and in a blizzard he stays in town with my sister. Some families out here have a kid board in town all week. We'd rather have him home. He'd rather have his own pickup. Negotiations continue.

Jessie says: Nine kids means you are on every team and in every play. I am the whole sixth grade. It is fine. I have known everybody since I was born. When we go to town I don't know what to do with that many kids in one place.

Wyatt says: We have a snake stick. It is a shovel. I am not allowed to use it.

It's the first thing anyone says out here, and it's not small talk. Wind, always. Winter can go to twenty and thirty below with the wind chill and there are years we lose calves to it and years we lose a road for a week. Spring blizzards are the ones we dread, wet snow in March or April right in the middle of calving. Summer is hot and the thunderstorms come up in the afternoon and you watch them the way people in the city watch the news, because hail on a hay meadow is a winter's feed gone in ten minutes, and lightning starts prairie fires. Drought is the thing under everything. There's more water under the Sandhills than anyplace around, which is why the meadows stay green, but the hills themselves are sand with grass over it, and if the grass goes the sand moves. So we don't overgraze, and neither did Dale's grandfather, and that's why there's still a ranch.

Cody says: Best weather: the day after a hard rain in June. Worst: freezing fog in February at two in the morning when you can't find the cow you know is out there calving.

Cattle prices have been poor for the last several years, and everybody out here knows a family that has sold out or is thinking about it. What we hear is that this fall's calf market looks some better than 1998, which was as bad as we've seen, but we've heard that before and nobody's spending it yet. The way the arithmetic works is that we get one check in October for the calves and we spend the rest of the year trying to make it stretch over hay, fuel, vaccine, taxes, the note at the bank, a pickup that's older than Cody, and three kids who keep needing shoes. Some years it doesn't stretch. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to put our numbers on the Internet either. We do our own work, we don't owe more than we can see the end of, and we don't buy anything new that we can fix. That's the plan. It's the same plan Dale's folks had.

I've thought about this, because people ask, usually right after they've heard about the two a.m. calving checks. Here's the honest answer.

The kids know how to work, and they know why. They know where food comes from and what it costs. They can back a trailer, doctor a calf, run a swather and read the sky. They've watched things be born and watched things die and they don't fall apart at either one. They know every family within twenty miles and every family knows them, and if the Suburban goes in the ditch in January somebody will be along, because that's the rule.

Dale gets to do the one thing he ever wanted to do, on the ground his great-grandfather picked out, and I get to do it with him. I wouldn't have said that at twenty-two. I say it now.

And there's the country itself. I'm not going to write about the sunset. Come see it.

Jessie says: I would trade it for a mall about once a month. Then I get over it.

Cody says: The ranch is going to be mine and Dad knows it and I know it and nobody's said it out loud yet. That's how it works here.

Wyatt says: I like the horses and the branding and when the calves are little. I don't like the two a.m. part but I don't have to do that yet.

Dale says: Carol did fine. (There, I added something.)