Somewhere Between a Saddle
and a Typewriter,
I Found My Story
Ondi Laure
Author • Storyteller • Modern Cowgirl
Busted-Up Cowgirl to Author
The storyteller’s journey from cowgirl to bestselling author begins, of course, with stories.
Stories about cooking. Cooking for cowboys.
Stories born around open campfires, on mountain trails, and somewhere between the saddle and the written word.
I, like maybe you, dreamed of being a cowgirl as a kid—roping calves out on the open range and riding like the wind.
I did spend my young life in the saddle, chasing someone else’s cows. But mostly, I rode the high country, dragging a string of pack mules through the Wind River Mountains, cooking over an open campfire, and living as free a life as I could imagine.
My childhood was surrounded by cowboys and sheepherders alike. Their ways were woven into the fabric of my life, even if I didn’t always appreciate them at the time.
Like many young people, college persuaded me that perhaps the new was better than the old. I found myself striving to distance myself from my Granddaddy’s sheepherder ways, convinced there was something better waiting ahead.
Only later did I realize I was being drawn back to what I knew all along.
What my Granddaddy knew.
What the mountains taught me.
What the old ways had been trying to tell me.
New isn’t always better.
Sometimes, the stories we spend our lives trying to leave behind are the very stories that lead us home.
The Stories Can Feel Literary.
The Cowgirl Can Have Dust on Her Boots.
“There is no book journey too small to your purpose within it.”
Not Really the Beginning
I don’t remember what happened next—only what the eyewitness told me. The horse struck me in the head, knocking me unconscious before I hit the ground.
In an instant, I went from healthcare provider to patient.
Doctors placed me in a medically induced coma for seventeen days.
My family faced an uncertain prognosis, while I drifted through fragments of dreams.
What I regret most isn’t what happened to me. It’s what I missed: my small boy growing up, and moments of his childhood I could never get back.
The road to recovery would be long. Rehabilitation would be extensive.
And then, after seventeen days in a coma—
I woke up.
Kinda.
Not Really the Beginning
I don’t remember what happened next—only what the eyewitness told me. The horse struck me in the head, knocking me unconscious before I hit the ground.
In an instant, I went from healthcare provider to patient.
Doctors placed me in a medically induced coma for seventeen days.
My family faced an uncertain prognosis, while I drifted through fragments of dreams.
What I regret most isn’t what happened to me. It’s what I missed: my small boy growing up, and moments of his childhood I could never get back.
The road to recovery would be long. Rehabilitation would be extensive.
And then, after seventeen days in a coma—
I woke up.
Kinda.
A Life Shaped by Story, Courage, and Creation
Life’s endeavors are challenging for us all. What matters is how we embrace those challenges—or sometimes, how we let go and move forward.
While snatching every free moment I could, I began gathering family stories, recipes, and years of my own memories. Somewhere along the way, they became Cooking for Cowboys.
My research began, naturally, with recipes: the ones in my own collection, my mother’s, her mother’s, and the generations before them.
The recipes I discovered were grand. The stories behind them were entertaining, and the characters were divine. But the tales that unraveled as I researched and wrote became much more than recipes. They became stories about people, family, love, work, and living.
The people who cook, who share their stories and their recipes, give us so much more than food. More work, love, and life go into those stories than the cooking itself. So I chose to write them down—for my children, my family, my friends, and for you.
The Life I Didn't Plan
I have been cattle-ranched across nine Wyoming counties since 1997, owning seven different ranches.
I do know a thing or two about cooking for cowboys—and cowgirls, too.
Ranching was never my dream. It was my family’s dream, and then my spouse’s. Cattle paid the bills, let me stay home with my kids, and gave me the opportunity to live in a beautiful place.
I learned to love ranching, don’t get me wrong. I got to work with my kids, ride my horse, and revel in nature’s physical connection every day.
Ranching is hard work. Agriculture is built on the old adage that hard work pays.
Well… mostly it does.
Needing to work hard is ingrained deep in my DNA.
Sitting at my desk writing, building sales funnels, and doing my inspired work—which doesn’t feel like work at all—I can still feel unproductive and like I’m slacking.
My late ex-husband would say, “You’re playing on your computer again and NOT getting anything done!”
Whenever he’d pull up to the house, I’d quickly hide my pens and paper, shut my laptop, jump up, grab the broom, and appear to be sweeping the kitchen.
Another adage of the witch archetype, no doubt.
But somewhere beneath all that hard work, I began to recognize another calling.
I’ve spent much of my life feeling caught beneath the weight of the belief systems in which I was raised. Decades spent seeking approval from a broken system.
For nearly two decades, I’ve been writing a story that remembers the repression of the sacred feminine. And still, I found myself seeking approval.
Right?
Now I’m learning to embrace something different:
My story is divinely sourced.
I didn’t know I possessed such grace—or that I could be worthy of being entrusted with such wisdom.
Sitting in that realization, I find courage.
And I pray for Grace.
Be Good to the Cook
My grandmother’s words were simple:
“I’ll do the dishes; you kids go play. You have your entire lives to cook and clean.”
I presume those were her grandmother’s words before her. Truthfully, though, her grandmother did not know how to cook. She had been raised in elite beginnings as the granddaughter of the French ambassador to the Bahamian Islands. The photographs I’ve seen and the stories I’ve heard speak of a tropical world unsurpassed.
Yet this adventurous, hardworking, loving woman eventually spent the latter part of her life living and teaching with her husband on the Wind River Indian Reservation.
She didn’t cook.
Instead, she would tell her granddaughters, “Bring in chopped wood. Fetch more water. Keep the stove lit. Be good to the cook.” Because without her, we’re sunk.
My grandmother’s grandmother could not have been more right. The cook is the hub of the home—the axle and the grease, the pivotal point around which life turns. All things, events, and activities revolve around and through the kitchen.
The cook brings us together, then sends us back out to take on life. Through good, wholesome food, cooks have nourished and armed us against countless unseen enemies.
And isn’t the kitchen table where all stories begin?
With full and happy tummies, we can conquer the universe.
So perhaps we ought to take heed of my great-great-grandmother’s wisdom: Be good to the cook.
I began with my grandmother’s grandmother’s stories to preserve a heritage—a legacy of her life married to a rancher in early Wyoming. And then there was my great-great-grandmother, Bessey Stacy, whose saga preserved the graces and grit of being a single mother on the wild frontier.
Words and stories have a way of perfecting us.
And this became my own journey: waking up to find myself a single mother running a cattle ranch in northern Wyoming.
Cooking. Fixing fences. Writing about cooking. Writing about fixing fences.
This is the journey of happenstance—or perhaps the circumstances that bring us back to purpose.
We thrive oftentimes. Sometimes, we only survive.
“Her piano top needs dusting, and her cooking pot from dinner is still soaking in the kitchen sink, but late at night, a small light can be seen from her study. If you listen, you can hear the rapid scratching of a pencil, pouring out words of some fantastic tale.”
— Mom
Story. Land. Table. Wisdom. Legacy.
Through fiction, non-fiction, and mentorship, Ondi Laure enriches the lives of her readers and clients by revealing the transformative power of story—reminding us of the savagery of the past, the challenges of the present, and the hope that can be created for the future.
Because when stories change people, people change the world.
We remember the wisdom, embody it, and pass it forward through story, creativity, family, food and love.
Because we are remothering a culture—one story, one truth, and one table at a time.
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