When I was thirty-three, I took a summer job with my new boyfriend on his family’s ranch in Montana. I was recently divorced and emerging from a stormy period in my life.

There was something about the purity of the prairie and the nearness of the sky that brought me closer to my own feelings. We spent every day outside on an endless expanse of grass dotted by black cows. I’d come from a concrete-covered Southern California landscape of strip malls and freeways, where I’d been working as a college instructor. Now, instead of dresses and tights, I wore men’s jeans, cowboy shirts, and work boots. I felt free and rooted to the earth.