Roses and Locoweed

Waylon Jennings sings that cowboy’s aint easy to love. He might have used the words: A cowboy’s life aint easy to love. Freia Hooper-Bradford chronicles a life few wives are privileged to share. She couldn’t have guessed what life would be like with a cowboy when she was a young woman, starry eyed and in love with a cowboy who looked like he just walked off the page in coffee table book about the Wild West. Being the wife a cowboy was everything she had dreamed about when she was a horse-crazy teenager. But life wasn’t all roses, there was lots of locoweed. Along with the romantic west, the good horses, thrilling rides and living on God’s most beautiful acres, there were the tough times. The vagabond life moving from ranch to ranch, always in search of greener pastures, better ridin’, more ropin’ and maybe an extra hundred dollars for the paycheck. There were the bad bosses, working in forty below and living in sagging old ranch houses. Freia chronicles the years following her cowboy with a sense of humor and poignancy. She accurately recounts the bad, tough times as well as the good life and the romantic west.