An Introduction to Almosta Ranch and Me.

Though I have written in the blog format since ’04, today is my first time to blog here on Medium. Now it is only polite that, when meeting new folks either in the real world or in the Cyber-world, a man should introduce himself and tell enough of his back-story to interest others but not so much as you end up boring them to death. This then is a little of my back-story.

Way back in ’02 I met and married the love of my life, Melinda. We were both older and had raised families and it came clear to me as soon as we met that she, to paraphrase the great Martin Luther King, had a dream. Her dream was to one day own a little piece of land where she could spend her life raising animals and rescuing animals, both domestic and wild who needed help. Her dream became my dream and together, we finally accomplished this.

We moved from Texas to Missouri and bought a little ten acre tract of land on which sat a ramshackle old farm house and “Almosta Ranch” was born. For the next ten years we lived the dream…laughing, loving, and working out butts off caring for an eclectic and ever changing group of animals, great and small.

What I will be writing about in this blog space is that ten year span; the animals we tended and loved, the lessons they taught us, and the love the two of us shared. I will also, from time to time put in excerpts from my second book: Booker, Barn Dog of Almosta Ranch and maybe even some from my first book Keeper of the Word that is a collection of my fictional short stories.

My reason for doing my blog this way is simple: My dear wife is gone now having died of a massive heart attack at home and I am faced with the possibility of either staying on the land and struggling to keep our dream alive, or selling it and going back to be closer to family.

I feel for all the world, like there is a great battle looming in the near future and I don’t know what the outcome will be but I do know that I want to tell people about Almosta and the animals that made it special so that each of you who read this will know that there was once a place, a safe haven for all animals, a home where loved ruled for them as well as their human caretakers. This, then, is our collective story.