The scene is vivid in my memory.

I’m 5 years old, riding in a light blue 1972 GMC pickup while Mom is driving. We’re towing a stock trailer loaded with cows.

“You watch that way and see if there’s any cars coming,” she tells me.

The gravel road we’re traveling on meets the highway at the bottom of a hill. She explains that if we come to a stop, the truck won’t be able to pull all that weight up the hill.

I sit up on my knees, look out on the ribbon of highway stretching between fields, and tell her the road is clear.

“Here we go,” Mom says.

She grips the steering wheel, blows right past that stop sign and doesn’t let her foot off the gas til we crest the hill.

Mom could do a lot of things. She taught Sunday school, canned green beans, read story books and stretched $10 a long way in the grocery store.

Deep down, though, she was always a cowgirl.

I’ve been thinking about Mom this week. I wondered what she’d say when I complained that people who didn’t get my attempt at satire told me I have no idea what it’s like to be a farmer.

She’d probably say they were partially right. After all, I’ve had indoor plumbing my whole life and never, ever wrung the neck of a chicken.

It was Mom who taught me how to make elderberry jelly and coax a newborn calf to nurse from a bottle. It was Mom who showed me how to grow tomatoes and make hand-me-downs seem almost as good as new.

She woke us up early on Saturday mornings and asked, “Do you want to hoe, chop wood or work?”

Life on the farm was tough, but Mom taught us we did it because we loved the life it provided, not because it paid well or brought accolades.

She showed us there are a lot more important things in life than money.

It was Mom, the cowgirl, who encouraged me to become an FFA state officer. When I majored in agriculture science in college, Mom told me that was fine, but I needed to take some journalism courses, too. She knew better than anybody where my skills would be best used.

There are still days I get discouraged, though. That’s probably why I’ve been thinking about Mom at the wheel.

She was a small red-head at age 50 — she was 45 when she gave birth to me, the youngest of eight children — running full throttle down the highway towing several tons of cattle.

She’d say you can do more than you think you can and sometimes, you have to “cowgirl up.”

Just ignore the stop signs and keep on truckin’.

Business editor Susan Mires can be reached

at susanm@npgco.com.