Looking back a good way to appreciate the future

July and the cattle are sleek shiny black as patent leather shoes. Ranchers are cutting hay. You can smell it. Riding around with a car window down, listening to old rock-and-roll, or walking through swaying grasses changing irrigation boxes, you can smell the sweet of summer. Red and white clover, green grasses mixing with wafting fragrance of pink wild roses and mountain peach blossoms. It just plain old smells good out here, except for the dog, he stinks.

Our aging German shepherd losing his hearing and vision, has turned to smells, the ranker the better. If an old hide or fresh offal is cooking in the summer sun, potent enough to turn your stomach, our deaf blind dog takes a full belly up roll in it, covering his back, sides, tail and head in good stench.

He does this because he is a good dog. If you are irresponsible enough to get out of his range of sight or hearing he wants you to know where he is, so you don't get lost. Since the dog stinks, the cattle are good, grass growing and irrigation water flowing I took some days off from the shovel and boots to visit an old college friend in Kansas.

I am not a country western fan even though I live in the country out West. But in the days I lived in a college dorm I listened to a lot of Jerry Jeff Walker. First day freshman year a song, inappropriate to print, was blaring from speakers out my dorm window. This helped me meet the two girls next door, who were wondering who played this kind of music,

Those two girls became dear friends. We traveled Europe together, attended each others weddings, baby namings and now helping with life health issues. Carol, the brains of our trio, has been informed she has stage four uterine cancer. She has been helping her husband, over the last two years, cope with brain cancer, plus raising two great teens. I went to see Carol's smile.

Carol offered plenty of smiles, and some life lessons. Displaying a strength of heart and the value of waking up pain-free. A blessing.

I learned not to heat food in plastic. Heated plastics emit toxic escape gases. Think glass when storing, heating and serving food or drink. And Carol's hospital's integrated health services encouraged her, my organic vegetarian friend, to eat organic, grass fed beef, at least through chemotherapy, to keep her strength up.

Research is being done on the omega-3 values in grass fed beef to see if it reduce cancer tumors. Yet inconclusive, but it made me happy to see a red roast in Carol's fridge the day I left.

The most important thing I brought back home, besides Carol's pink coral necklace she gave me from her high-school days, is to really, and this is no cliche, really appreciate every single day. Really.

Sure, sometimes life stinks. Bad things happen, oil flows into the gulf, war, economic hardship. Your husband gets considered an extraordinary brain cancer statistic, but he is not a statistic, he is your husband.

You have stage four uterine sarcoma; but find love in friends and family giving you extreme pleasure while enjoying a small glass of crisp red wine with your organic, grass fed, beef dinner. And tiny white flashing fireflies grace your dinner table as you sit outside on a heavy humid Kansas night, smelling all the sweet of summer.

Marie Johnson is a Carson Valley rancher.