One of my earliest memories is running barefoot through soft green pastures, searching for pastel-dyed eggs in between cow patties, not caring if the grass and mud coated the hem of my light pink Sunday best. The warm, Oklahoma wind whipped through my hair as my tiny, toddler feet padded and prowled, on the hunt for the eggs I’d colored with my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother the evening before.
Twin Ranches was a little-known ranch in a little-known town in Northeastern Oklahoma. But to me, it was my favorite destination of the summer. It was warm lakes and cold pools. It was soft grass and big houses. It was riding horses, and four-wheelers and tractors. It was hunting deer in the acres behind my nana’s house. It was picking wild blackberries and staining our mouths with the bright purple juice. It was the dinner bell on the porch that my nana rang to signal to the ranchers that it was time to take supper.
Twin Ranches, which friends and family lovingly referred to as “Nana’s ranch” or just “The ranch” was located off of Route 66, but by the time I was spending my summers there the route had been desolate for a decade. My nana’s second-husband’s papa built it with his own two hands at the turn of the century. The nearly 2,000 acres sprawled across the Northeastern corner of Oklahoma and the lush land was never lacking in beef cattle or lilac bushes. The Estate consisted of five buildings: a large house, two smaller “museums” where Nana and her husband displayed their trophies from their big game hunting adventures of the 1930s and 40s, a storm cellar built into the ground, and an outhouse. On the far edge of the property was a smaller home where Nana housed her head rancher.
When it was too windy or rainy to play outside, my cousins and I would venture into the big house to play make believe. The grand entrance of the house was just that, grand. Every square inch of the grand entrance walls were covered in mounts of deer, elk, moose and duck that had taken their last breath staring down the barrel of my nana’s hunting rifle. Rugs of bear fur covered the beaten-up black walnut floors. A baby grand piano sat in the corner of the entrance, out of tune but well loved. A piano of that size had somehow been dwarfed by the great, strong animals surrounding it.
To the left of the grand entrance was the kitchen. It was outdated and shabby but clean and always smelled like whatever cobbler Nana had cooking. To the right of the grand entrance was the family room. The family room was large, and cozy and nearly always had a Christmas tree in the corner, even in the boiling heat of July. At the back of the family room was Nana’s gun range, which she always kept locked, for there were little grandchildren toddling around. The one time I was allowed into the gun range was with my dad, many summers ago. The range stretched 1,000 yards back and had shelves and shelves of clays for practice shooting. The walls were lined with gun racks, stocked with every model of Marlin and Winchester you can think of. Above a gun rack was a large safe, only reached by a ladder. Inside the safe, my dad told me, were thousands of rounds of every kind of ammo.
Up the large oak staircase in the center of the house was what Nana called the “living space.” Each bedroom followed a certain color scheme of my nana’s preference. My grandma’s childhood bedroom, the “red room,” was red from floor to ceiling. Every pillow, every inch of carpet, every patch of wallpaper, every doll, and every stuffed animal was red. My Great Aunt’s “pink room” was the same. Nana’s master suite was called the “teal room” and this same pattern was carried out, bedroom to bedroom, bathroom to bathroom. In the back of the second storey was a sleeping porch, the highest fashion of the time. The walls that weren’t screened-in windows were orange, as was the carpet and the bedding.
So many family Christmases, dinners and parties took place within the walls of this ranch. Hundreds of classes of schoolchildren were marched over the cattle grate to the big game museums to learn about the wild animals that lived in far away countries like South Africa and Thailand.
But eventually Nana fell sick and closed the doors of the museums permanently; a hospital bed took the place of the Christmas tree in the family room and a ‘round-the-clock nurse moved into the home the head-rancher had once occupied. Nana finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer and Parkinson’s in an especially cold winter in ‘05. The family debated over what to do with Twin Ranches for months before finally auctioning the property off.
Two summers ago, Momma and I were traveling through Oklahoma and stopped to see what had become of the property. The overgrown pastures were dying to be weeded, and the cow patties were past their expiration date for being used as fertilizer. The once-proud estate had turned into rotting wood and peeling paint. It was a bittersweet reminder of the grandiose events of summers’ past, and the many summers in the future where the memories of my childhood will slowly decay.
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