Visit to My Brother

Rusty's place

This past week, after attending a conference in Seward, Nebraska, Phillip and I drove up to Cody, Wyoming, to see my brother, Rusty, and his wife, Chris. This is my oldest sibling on my mom's side. He is 16 years older than I am, so I never got to know him well or spend much time with him growing up. But he was always this larger-than-life figure, a real live cowboy, soft-spoken and shy and sparing with words, who would drop in from time to time and make a huge impression on me.

As the story goes, when he was 12 or 13 years old, Rusty had to step in and save my mom from her first husband, who was strangling her and, my mom believed, would have killed her had Rusty not stopped him. After my mom divorced her first husband and married my dad, Rusty pretty much headed out on his own, working various odd jobs, sometimes on his own and sometimes with his dad. He was drafted at the age of 20 but because of bad feet did not get assigned to the infantry or sent to Vietnam. Instead he was sent to Europe. I still have a picture postcard he sent me from Germany when I was about 6 years old. It was a picture of a beautiful German castle of some kind, and he wrote that he thought I would like it because it looked like something out of a fairy tale. When I mentioned this during our visit, Chris was dumbfounded. She said Rusty never writes to anyone. 😉 (That's actually not true, as I know he wrote to my mom periodically over the years, having seen some of his letters among her things after she died.)

Rusty and Chris have a farm in Cody, where they have lived for over 30 years. Rusty works on a nearby ranch (still doing stuff like riding fence and branding calves even though he is 76 years old), and Chris is a semi-retired registered nurse. We got to their place late Monday and left Wednesday morning. Rusty had to work Tuesday, and being a true cowboy he is up and out for work early and returns late, so our hours together were few and I never got a picture, which makes me sad. The last time I saw him before this visit was at my mom's funeral in 2016. Will I see him again? I would like to think so, but at the ages we both are now, considering the distance that separates, and life being what it is, I don't know. But oh, how thankful I am for this brief visit.

I love you, Rusty.