Sometime in June, I wanted to re-read all the books I’d get again and again from the library as a teen. And I wanted my own copies of them, finally. So I put in a few orders at Thrift Books and spent the summer reading stories about girls with magic in space, girls with magic in the desert, girls who make friends with horses, girls who make friends with unicorns with magic, girls who go to college, girls who paint watercolors, and a couple new ones (The Summer Book, the Dodie Smith one that I’m saving for when there’s a nip in the air).

Honestly it was one of the best $20 I’d spent in a long time, just to have those old beat up covers that I remember and to be able to take my time with all of them again. I hadn’t read any fiction for a while and I’d forgotten how nice it is to get out of your own head and into the head of a girl having adventures. With magic.

I came across this writeup of Ranchlands, a Colorado land-preservation institute and model working ranch, last week. They offer working vacations and let me just say, going away for a week to ride a horse through the interior West and only worry about what’s in front of me sounds really great. (Yes, I follow them on Instagram now.)

The author of the profile (a Utah native) did a good job with it, too. I especially liked this cowboy philosophy:

Back at camp, I inarticulately tried to explain it to Bonney and Cam, but could only come up with this: As an adult, it’s easy to forget you’re capable of doing shit beyond banging on a keyboard until you do said shit and are jolted back into remembering we are meant to do more than stare at tiny screens all day. Bonney, in her button-down western shirt, brown Stetson, and faded blue Wranglers—a uniform I can only pray she wears to class—attempted to make a little more sense of what I was trying to get at. “Wallace Stegner said an American is—I’m going to get this wrong—” she pauses but then motors on. “An American is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild. I mean, the story of American wilderness has been, you know, that’s what we got. We ain’t got no kings, and we ain’t got no dukes. And we don’t have the castles with moats, but we got beautiful, beautiful wilderness. And so that’s, you know, much of our national story, and our notion of a national character is built out of that renewal that comes when you experience a place like this. The West is part of our origin story.”