Old Lady Ranch

Some people get their golden time when they are young and healthy, fully able to enjoy and reap the benefits of these years. We celebrate and watch them in the tabloids, waiting to hear what the newest celebrity of the moment is doing, as if our own lives are more miniscule than we secretly know they are. We want something more; we want to know there is something more than what we see every day.
  At least in this tabloid celebrity voyeurism we are able to believe that somebody out there is doing something, so totally unlike our every own lives, so very amazing and exciting,and therefore it just might be possible for us. We might just possibly win the Lotto or hit it big at the nickel machine at a small resort town somewhere, or the perfect job finds us.
As Old Ladies, we have realized that that is not to be, and taken matters into our own hands. My name is Leslie and here is the story of The Old Lady Ranch.

The Old Lady Ranch began to form as an idea of mine about eight years ago, say 1998 or some where in there. I was fed up and frustrated at my current husband and began to fantasize about what I’d do with the insurance money when I finally managed Death by Bacon.
Death by Bacon is when you give up trying to keep your man healthy and cooking him dinners that good for him because he won’t take care of his sorry ass himself anyway, and you begin to feed him copious amounts of fatty, high in cholesterol foods like bacon to just get it all over with. You can not go to jail on a Death by Bacon charge because it is very hard to prove that is actually what happened, and HE ate it anyway, so it’s home free after that.
I came up with The Old Lady Ranch concept as a way to survive the interim and give me something to look forward to because I wanted to end up in a better place, hence the Old Lady Ranch (much like heaven). It is a vsion that keeps at bay the fear that many of us have, of ending up old and alone, with our looks and bodies gone forever, at least with the amount of surgery we can not afford. I  have never seen an Old Lady on extreme makeover, have you?
  It helps to lay aside the fear of being stuck in a suburb that used be your town and ending up spending Thursday and Tuesday mornings at the seniors center to make friends or to just get out and see somebody.

Old Ladies are not necessarily old in the dictionary way, we just feel that we have reached whatever point there is when as an old lady, you can finally speak what’s on your mind and just not be worried or really give a hoo-hah what somebody might think about you. You don’t have to be old, just feel like you’ve earned the right to behave like yourself. You finally accept your post- hysterectomy or perimenopausal body and decide that the clothing manufacturers are plain nuts and only want to sell clothes to your fourteen year old daughter and her friends with your money.       
You tell said fourteen year old to get a job to pay for all of those expensive clothes and watch her gasp in horror at the thought of losing all of that time to “ hang out” with her friends to working. This becomes really fun and you discover that finding new ways to horrify your child is actually the most fun you’ve had lately. (That and death by bacon.)


But, back to The Old Lady Ranch. It does not exist yet, only in concept. You could say that the Old Lady Ranch is at this time, a virtual place in our minds. It is the place we all will be able to be when we have pooled our resources or Leslie wins the Lotto. No rest home for us, no way. It is a nice ranch in a temperate climate with a big house for the social types to live in and bunch of cozy cabins for solitary old ladies who like their privacy or visiting family members.
We will be able to cultivate those things we have always wished we had time to do and now can. It is a big ranch with lots of fun stuff for us Old Ladies to do and keep us busy and lots of room for us to move about. We can have wheelchair races if we want. We can just be lazy in the hot tub all day if we want. We should build ourselves a spa on the ranch and let other Old Ladies come visit for spa treatments and classes on how to be an Old Lady like us, or they could just hang out with us and give us money. Oops, that’s what we’ll do to the Old Gentlemen.
It is a place of peace and tranquility in a valley somewhere with rolling hills and trees to look at and listen to; the wind will whistle through those trees and tell you that this Old Lady life is the best part. When you are at the ranch there is just nothing that can get your goat unless that’s what you want, to get a goat.
There will be a Wal-Mart and a Ross Dress for Less within a reasonable distance. It is a ranch because when Leslie won the lotto ( this sounds like more fun for me and then I can be Chief Executive Old Lady ) she had always wanted a horse ranch but is now a little too scared of the big ones so she got a place and started a mini horse ranch. Those mini horses are just so darned cute, don’t you think? Plus if you have a ranch you need cowboys to help run it and the cowboys are a must have along with the Wal-Mart. Beefcake; it’s what’s for dinner.
We will be able to hold cowboy hiring job fairs and everything. Have you ever seen History of the World, Part 1? It’s a Mel Brooks film. He’s one of my favorites. Anyway, there is a part in the movie where Madeline Kahn is surveying the Roman soldiers for the orgy that was to take place that night. The men are in full Roman garb, except they are naked from the waist down. And she is going from one to the next and singing no, no, no, no…YES!!!!  (Yep, I think the official dress code at the Old Lady Ranch will consist of chaps and nothing else. Yeehaw! Although it may hurt when they actually do ride the horses.)
If we feel like the beach, one of us Old Ladies has a place in Maui where we will hold pool boy job fairs and get a tan. Hopefully the Old Lady club will expand worldwide, as we think an Old Lady vineyard in Tuscany is a must have also, and an Old Lady castle or two wouldn’t hurt anybody. We are also accepting applications for Old Ladies with yachts and New York condos next to Donald Trump because we have always wanted to ask him the hair question. Since we are cute Old Ladies we feel we can get away with it and there will be a couple of Harley girls there to keep the peace.  Starting to get the idea? Us Old Ladies rock!

Not to be confused with Queens

We might remind you of another fun group of gals, the Sweet Potato Queens and we consider them our Southern Sisters. Actually I had not heard of the Sweet Potato Queens until I began telling my internet friend Deb about the ranch and that we needed to write a book about it. She sent me the first Sweet Potato Queen book to read and it immediately bummed me out to no end, since now I figured everybody would think I was a Wannabe copycat until I realized that there are just a lot more women out there like us Old Ladies no matter what they call themselves and that Jill Conner Browne just got published before me. Well, O.K., she sat down and wrote her books before I got off my ass and did it.

I live in Washington State and there are no sweet potato farms up here, closest thing to it is Idaho where they are famous for their regular spuds but I don’t know anyone who as ever called themselves an Idaho spud except for marketing purposes. If they’re out there, I’d love to meet them. Since we’re out west, we definitely have the western thing going for us and most of us were not brought up to be ladylike.
  We at the Old Lady Ranch would just love an invitation to the famous St. Patrick’s Day parade in Jackson, Mississippi and would be happy to show up with our miniature horses, cowboys and Harleys. We will not gyrate since gyrating is sort of hard to do on a mini horse or a Harley but we are pretty damn good at putting on our own show. We think that gyrating on the cowboys in the parade might be not be allowed. Just invite us and we show you, Jill!

Yes, a couple of us ride Harleys even. They come in handy at the bars with their leathers and attitudes since I get like a Chihuahua when I am at a bar and some jerk starts to harass my friend. The Harley girls can just stand behind me with their arms crossed looking mean and tall and fierce in their leather jackets while I’ve got my finger in some guy’s face yelling “ you ass, you ass!”. I also tend to yell that at my husband sometimes, but then who doesn’t?
  Deb asked me a while ago after I sent her a book by Billie Lets to read (she wrote Where the Heart Is) why nobody ever wrote the parts of a relationship where the wife is yelling at her husband “you ass, you ass “so here it is for you Deb. We just need to realize that if you are married, you are going to yell “you ass!” at him sometime. It should be in the wedding vows that that “you ass, you ass” will come up at some point (childbirth will most certainly be one of those times) and it’s not a deal breaker.
  My husband insists that our wedding vows included a sentence saying that I would from there on out wrap every single one of the Christmas presents and that I just was too happy and excited about marrying him that I didn’t hear it. I called his friend Joe after the first year who was at the wedding to confirm that this was not true and Joe stuck with my husband and said “Oh no, I heard it. “ I said you are an ass, Joe.

The Mother Ship
Then there is the husband/ ex- husband or soon to be ex-husband. Many of us have one or more of these and if he is still a husband it is because he may still have some hope for the future or he makes really good money. We don’t have boyfriends as we are old ladies and that just sounds weird ( except in Mexico, where everytime you walk down the street there are a couple of guys yelling at you " you want a Mexican boyfriend? ).
  A couple of us have the soon to be version and are coming through that nicely and with proper old lady humor. It is fun to get a few of us together with a bottle of Jose Quervo and think up gruesome and grisly deaths for them. It might even be more fun than horrifying you child (or children). It is definitely more fun than watching a current husband take naps on the couch.
  I started a friendship on EBay with Deborah over an ongoing discussion as to whether a tube of Avon’s Anew Clinical Lift and Tuck would work on my husband and lift his butt off the couch. I swear to God there is a homing device in his butt and that couch is the Mother Ship. Life revolves around returning to the spot in that couch that is now forever molded to his shape even though it has absolutely no memory foam whatsoever in it. On weekends he will look longingly at that spot of his and you just know he’s calculating the time to safely dock his weary self. When the time finally arrives to return to the nest, he will do so with the most amazing grunts and groans that if you are not aware of this procedure you will think there might be something seriously injured on his person, but no my dear, they are the sounds of the return to the Mother ship. This will immediately be followed by loud snoring designed to keep the bears or invading aliens from ever entering our yard, much less the house.



Motherly Wisdom
I took my youngest daughter to the dentist one fine day and on the way home she begins telling me about all of the girls who she knows have already had sex. This starts THE talk and we then discuss that regular stuff about how if she thinks she is at that point in her life and that is a possibility that she should feel free to tell me so that we can put her on the pill so that I am not a grandmother.
  I'm thinking I will start the routine of make sure you feel something for the person and love him and all of that maternal blathering, but what comes out of my mouth instead is “ look honey, at your age they don't have a clue to what they're doing and you do NOT want to be one they start practicing on. You will not have fun and you will find yourself wondering what all the hoopla is about when it’s over. Better just wait a bit until they know more about it.” I think it made a much bigger impression than the other speech. I think I may be on to a new way of keeping our little girls from starting sex too soon.
  We just need to clue them in on the stuff it took us most of our twenties and thirties and a few failed marriages to figure out…… you do not want to be the one they practice on! Just look at how they drive their first cars and that should tell you a whole bunch about how they will practice on you; do you really want skid marks left on your body? Do you really want them to drive fast and show off when it is your first time? Do you really want dents and scratches on your very self? What if he crashes, will it be your fault? They can’t help it, they are hard wired to practice at every opportunity, but do you want to end up like that first car? Just LOOK at that car, honey, and you tell me! You don’t want to be the second car either, that means he ruined the first one already and isn’t even ready to begin practicing on a girl until he gets this car thing figured out.
  Of course we have all of us run into the adult male who still seems to be practice mode and may just not be a good student. No amount of practice will ever help him, although he will look at you and blink his doggy eyes at you and tell you that it will. This is because he truly believes that practicing is fun for you, too. Remember this, girls… You do not want to be one he is practicing on!

Raising Shane ( and Ceinwyn)


My own mother had her own unique way of handling certain situations with children. I remember one particular incident when my oldest daughter was in the midst of terrible two hood and happened to be having “one of those days” during a visit from Mom.
After several aborted meltdowns, she finally commenced to the real deal and was on the floor screaming her little head off for a cookie or something. I am near the screaming point myself and have no idea how to stop this fit without killing either myself or the kid, when the next thing I know Mom is on the floor throwing a stellar fit herself, thrashing and writhing and screaming like a banshee. The child was so mortified at the sight of Grandma on the floor delivering a better performance than she could ever hope to achieve that it never, ever happened again. Maybe she thought Grandma would appear at any one of these events and it might just be better to play it safe and come up with a different way of get cookies!
Here’s another good Mom story for you. I had the pleasure of a stepson’s presence in my home for a short period of time and was having a heck of a time getting him to understand that dishes do not walk themselves to the sink, forget about getting themselves in to the dishwasher! I was expressing my frustration on the phone one evening with Mom and she calmly suggested that I try not taking them to the dishwasher next time. 
I mean after all, she says, you could be having a lot more fun here with this and since you are having to take the dishes somewhere anyway, you might as well drop a hint or two and deliver those dishes to other places that might be more interesting, like his bed. Try this sometime, it works like a charm!

Eighty Cents a Day

I am lucky enough to be living in a nice neighborhood, with nice houses and nice neighbors. Our children have nice things and often want much more of these nice things than they already have. Most of us are hard working people who saved and worked to get to this nice place we are living and did not grow up with Abercrombie or Hollister or designer anything’s in our wardrobe, we thought just getting new school clothes was cool.
  One of my nicest neighbors and friends is Tammy, and she also has a daughter who is a year older than my Shayne. Tammy is one the most admirable people I have met; she is polite to everyone and actually thinks about what she has to say before saying it (something I am NOT good at).
We are over at Tammy’s house one day having a great time when we hear from the kids who are on the computer looking at pink cell phone covers. ““Oooh, Mom.” they say, “I need this pink cell phone cover, isn’t it cute? “ It is also forty dollars or something insane like that. I just looked at Tammy and out came…. “For eighty cents a day you can get a kid who doesn’t have a cell phone”.
This began a whole slew of ideas for us and we ran with it to the point that the girls backed off the cell phone cover issue and hid from us.
For eighty cents a day you can get a kid who will eat what you make for dinner. For eighty cents a day you get a kid who says thank you for a birthday present, and it doesn’t have to be a BMW. For eighty cents a day you can get a kid, who won’t crash the computer, he doesn’t have the electricity.
  We went on and on with this and cackled away thinking up all of the wonderful reasons why an eighty cents a day kid is so much better to have. Why did we not think of this before we actually had our own kids, we wondered? Well, it is too late now but could we do something with this wonderful idea of ours?
Tammy wanted to start up a whole card line like the one that somebody is doing out there where she takes old family photos and makes a million bucks turning them into cards for people to buy, and they do. We could have a picture of a kid dressed all up in Goth gear and inside it would say “for eighty cents a day you can get a kid who doesn’t want black mascara “or a picture of my daughter and inside it will say “for eighty cents a day you can get a kid who doesn’t care what store her clothes come from”.  You see where we are headed with this, don’t you?
We decided that the politics of starting a card line with this type of humor might not be something we could handle, even we were to donate all of the proceeds to the eighty cents a day kids. We also need the money from the proceeds so this might not be a good business idea. But I highly recommend getting one of these children, I did and I love to hear from Jeffrey in the Dominican Republic. It does help him and he always says thank you in every letter and genuinely is appreciative that he has a sponsor.


Todd, nobody WANTS to be here

Another Old Lady resident is Lesia, my long time childhood friend. We have known each other since we were about four years old and that means we can say anything we want to one another. I mean anything.
  Lesia has one of the best senses of humor I have ever seen and one of the slipperiest backs I have ever seen. She just lets most things roll off it and laughs about stuff that would drive me up the wall. We try to workout together about three times a week, or when we feel like it. That means never in the summer.
One of my favorite Lesia stories is one she told me one day when we did make it to Curves to work out, here it is. Lesia’s husband has recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer and she’s been extremely stressed out at work, as you can well imagine.
Her job is demanding and there is not much backup so that if she wants to take days off to be with him for treatments, she usually has to make the work on the weekend or work longer each day to finish everything. One day her boss pulled her aside and began to tell her that he needed to talk about her attitude and that it didn’t appear that she really wanted to be there and my wonderful friend looks at him and just says “ but Todd, nobody WANTS to be here, it’s a job for God’s sake! Do YOU really, really WANT to be here?” I hear Todd didn’t have an answer for that one.

Today was a good day. I was told that i am REALLy pretty by  a kid who has known me for the last 15 years or so. You have no idea how this can boost my self esttem, especially the way she did it. No man could have equalled the way  it made me feel and the delivery of this compliment, or if there is one one out there, I want to know him. This is what the man in your life usually forgets. She walked up to my teller window and just sdaid, " You look so pretty", and meant it. Kept me going for the the rest of today and I will stilll feel pretty tomorrow because of those words from the friend of my daughter, who made me feel lke a magazine cover for today. Me, who always hates the photographs I ever see of myself. Amazing how that can make you feel like now I can do anything, when the minute before there are questions in your mind as to the ability to manage a trip to the grocery store.