14/06/2026
The wood of the gatepost is dry, split into deep gray valleys by decades of wind and a sun that never knew how to be gentle. If I press my palm against it, I can still feel the ghost of the summer heat trapped in the grain, like an old engine that refuses to completely go cold.
Fifty-eight winters have come and gone. They don’t arrive with a roar anymore; they just seem to settle into the marrow of my bones a little deeper each year, a quiet reminder that the calendar only moves in one direction.
I lean against the fence line, my boots sinking into the thick June grass. Looking out across the valley, my mind drifts back to Colorado—to the high-timber trails where I spent my youth and the jagged peaks that used to frame my world. There was a time when a corral just like this was the center of everything. If I close my eyes, the silence of the valley fades beneath the familiar, rhythmic symphony of my younger days—the creak of well-oiled leather, the sharp, warm scent of horse sweat and pine, and the steady, reassuring thud of hooves against the mountain earth.
I can still feel the weight of the reins in my hands, light but loaded with intention. In the saddle, I wasn't just moving through the world; I was part of it, balanced perfectly between the sky and the dirt. I felt invincible then, a young man who looked at a horizon stretching out forever and believed I had all the time in the world to reach the edge of it.
But time isn't a horse you can break. It doesn’t answer to a bit or a spur.
It just keeps on in a steady, unbroken trot, completely indifferent to what we want to hold onto. The horses that once made this dirt shake have long since run their last miles. The cabin logs are slowly bowing back toward the earth, returning to the soil one season at a time. The world is passing me by, and my riding days have slipped into the quiet country of memory.
I open my eyes. The wide valley is still here, green and rolling under a massive canvas of shifting clouds where the sun fights through to paint the grass in brilliant streaks of light. The world hasn't stopped. It simply continues.
It's a beauty that used to carry a sharp, aching loneliness—until I think of my son.
The sting of missing the saddle doesn't cut as deep when I look at him. He doesn't have his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror; he’s looking straight ahead, his own horizon wide open and unwritten. All the strength, the wild freedom, and the absolute certainty of youth that slipped through my own fingers hasn't vanished from the world—it was just handed down to him.
I reach out and touch the top rail of the gate, where the wood was worn smooth by hands that have worked a lifetime. A quiet, fierce wave of hope washes over the old ache. I don't need to be in the saddle anymore. My job now is to be the steady ground he can launch from, the anchor in the high wind, the one who can tell him which trails are safe and which ones are worth the risk.
Looking through the empty, open frame of the old gate—leading out into that endless expanse of green and light—I feel a strange, profound peace settle over me. The gate is broken down, the fences are failing, and my own body carries the stiff, stubborn aches of fifty-eight years. As I think of my son taking on the world, I know the ride isn't over. It's just changing hands.
But God, I miss it.
I miss my youth and the romance of the cowboy. I miss riding through the day with nowhere else I had to be, surrounded by nothing but the immense, open world, the steady rhythm of hoofbeats, and the familiar creak of leather beneath me.
