ranch.

I used to live and work at the edge of the mountains.

The ranch that employed me for nearly ten years, ever since I quit school at sixteen and had muscles enough to lift a bale of straw, was the last farm to the west of a hundred thousand near identical farms, identical except that next along west from us were the Rockies. Rolling foothills were not a terrible place to graze cattle, and an excellent place to spend days driving over dirt roads in a battered up pickup truck, drinking coffee and smoking tobacco as we worked and slugging beers and smoking weed when we played.

My quarters back there were downright spacious compared to my bunk on the Fukuyama, and laying in my old cot I could sometimes catch a glimpse through the window of the sun setting behind the big purple mountains to the west, or the moonlight reflecting off their snowcapped peaks on some of the deepest winter days.