You're listening to an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of Cutting the Distance podcast. I'm Dirk Durham, and I hope all of you moms that are listening out there had a great Mother's Day weekend.

Both of my folks have long since passed away, but watching my wife and our daughter and her daughter-in-law on Mother's Day set my mind spinning about my mom.

So today, I thought I'd share a little tribute to her. My mom was born Pauline Hafer.

Her relatives homesteaded in rural New Mexico.

And after her folks were married, she was raised in Southern Colorado.

Her dad was a sheep herder, and her mom was a housewife raising four kids.

She told stories of growing up poor in Colorado, living off what wild game my grandfather could secure,

and whatever other food they could scare up, as a sheep herder didn't pay well.

Grandpa was a crack shot, she said.

With money being tight when he bought ammunition for his hunting rifle,

he could only afford two or three rounds at a time.

And with such limited supply of ammunition,

Grandpa needed to make every shot count. So he would get super close to his prey and not miss. In fact, he would never miss and made every shot count putting down wild game on the table whenever needed.

Herner brothers would have to walk a couple miles from their house to the bus stop.

It kind of seemed like one of those old stories parents always tell about walking up hills both ways and 10 feet of snow.

Something like that.

But many times they would see fresh cougar tracks in their own tracks as they walked

home from school. So they lived in a pretty wild place. When she was about eight years old,

she found something that looked like a spent rifle cartridge that was filled with something. So she

found a horseshoe nail and went to work digging out the contents so she can make a little whistle out of it.

Then tragedy struck, it exploded.

...