Sod and Nelda: Many Years Gathering

The author grows up in Idaho’s Arbon Valley, earlier called Bannock, where her life story grew roots and where her grandad had homesteaded in the late 1800’s. Termed “The Greatest Generation” by Tom Brokaw, she lives through the “great depression” and WWII years, where only those who were there would bear the scars of those times. She marries Sod, her high school sweetheart and helps her dad with the farm field work, while her husband and brother are away fighting Hitler’s war in Europe. At wars end, through sweat, debt, toil and hardship, they build a ranch in the Arbon Valley. They manage some time off to compete at rodeos and Quarter Horse Performance shows, where Sod earns the reputation as one of the top all-around performance horse trainers in the intermountain west. Sod was inducted into Idaho’s Legend of Rodeo Hall of Fame, as well as the Eastern Idaho Horseman Hall of Fame. Nearing 80, she kills a cougar from her front porch and wards off a charging bull moose in her yard. She suffers the pain of seeing her husband confined to a wheelchair, after a serious accident. But now at age 94, she still lives up under the mountain, in the log home that they built together.