The 'Conagher' tumbleweeds and tussles

By Dr. Andy and Renie Bowman
Coffeetimecolumn.com
andybowman839@gmail.com

If you have ever watched the old movie “Conagher,” a Western based on a rough 'n' tough cowboy with a gigantic sense of right and wrong, then you might well remember the story line’s leading lady.

An attractive young widow with two children, left in a lonely shack out in the boonies after the supposed death of her husband. 

To put food on the table, she finally agreed to make her small home the way station for the stagecoach that came through once a week. Her new job meant that she was paid to provide a hot meal for the stagecoach passengers and also water, feed and a change of horses, before it left for another way station farther down the trail. 

This arrangement caused her to meet quite a few passengers, coming from quite a few different walks of life. One afternoon a specific passenger alighted from the stagecoach, a lady with, shall I say, a less than a stellar background. Earlier in life, she had evidently come from back East to find her fortune, and instead found heartache, broken dreams, and poverty. 

Obviously all alone in the world, she had finally decided that the only path left for her to was keep moving West. To whatever awaited her. 

Given her own unfortunate current station in life, bells went off in that lady’s head and heart to the tune of “YOU GOT IT ALL, AND I AIN’T GOT NOTHIN’ when she climbed out of that stagecoach and met the young widow. 

All she could see was a beautiful woman living in her own home on her own land, who also had two beautiful children at her side.

But the widow had a completely different perspective of her own life. She lived with a heart aching from losing the love of her life. And a back that ached from being the only adult planting the gardens, chopping wood, cleaning the shack, hand-washing their clothes, cooking their meals and caring for the animals. 

The abject loneliness, and the fear that came with it, plus not knowing what had really happened to her husband, ate at her constantly.

The actual truth was far different than the female passenger’s view of her life on that prairie.
So typical of us. We look over the fence between us and our neighbor and only see their bright green grass. 

We immediately begin feeling, “That cow who lives behind that fence has it made, and I have nothing.” 

Never stopping ourselves in mid-thought long enough to realize a few things. 

Things like, ‘Where there’s grass, there’s usually weeds, I just can’t see them from this angle.’ 
Things like, ‘I need to take a good look around my own life and recognize the grass, not just the weeds.’

If you aren’t careful, you can be duped into living in envy, always comparing your patch of grass and weeds to your neighbor’s.

Not a great way to live the only life you have been given.