Home, home on the subdivided lot

While living quite contentedly on my little city lot, couple of trees in front, couple in back, I was recently reminded by my children that I am most definitely NOT Pioneer Woman.

Which is a little bit sad really, because I come, at least on my mother's side, from cowboy folk.  Mom was raised on a farm.  She plucked chickens and rode bareback on a horse named Sugar, but left me to clean up the piddles of a poodle named Sophie in our basement.

Granted, we lived on a wooded, but food-producing-free half acre in the mountains.  I didn't grow up in the city, but I didn't necessarily hike in snowshoes uphill both ways to get to school.  We had buses for that.  And movie theaters.  And a 7-11 convenience store.  So I might as well have been a suburban kid, just with a 45 minute drive to the city and a sort of romanticized idea of rural life, because I believed that I kinda lived it.  Because of the trees, mostly.

But then I married a city boy and fell in love with things like take-out Thai food and well manicured city parks with domed glass green houses and paths adorned with old fashioned rose varieties.  So now we live miles away from fields of amber waves of grain and the farmers who tend to those fields.  We can't even relate to people like my actual cousins, who keep cattle alive for a career and wrangle wild horses for fun at rodeos on the weekend.

I am assured of this and my dorkdom because of a breakfast conversation I recently overheard between Dee and T.  Dee said, with authority, that "a unicorn is a horse with a horn.  And a pink horse is a pony."  A pretty one, I bet.

Later, T presented me with his cowboy-themed lunchbox and pointed to the saddle depicted on the side.  "This is a carousel," he said.  Then he pointed to the saddle horn and added, "that used to be the horse's head, but now it's gone."

So much for authenticity.  Or honoring your mother.  I guess we'll have to hunt for culture elsewhere.  Maybe it's on sale at the mall.