How did a young cattle ranching girl from the Arizona-New Mexico border grow up to become the first woman nominated as Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court? What does that background tell us about the basis for her judicial thinking?

Sandra Day O’Connor wrote Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest (Random House: 2002), with her brother H. Alan Day, as a tribute to their parents, the men who worked the ranch with them and the rustic hardscrabble ethos of the desert ranch life.

Through Sandra and Alan’s eyes, you meet three generations of Days, with a glimpse at the fourth. You meet their parents, MO (Ada Mae) and DA (Harry) Day, Alan’s twin sister (Ann), Sandra’s friends and the ranch hands whose mores match those of DA and who passed those values onto Sandra.

The people whose lives most guided her perspective on the world were rough and tough gentlemen: Rafael Estrada, Jim Brister, Claude Tippets, Ira Johnson, Lehoy McCarty, Cole Webb and Ralph (Bug) Quinn. “There was never a day without things that needed doing,” said Sandra. And the chapters are filled with the manner and style with which they accomplished every task.

The most memorable chapter, to me, was when she, just home from her junior high school year at El Paso, TX, volunteered to be “Bug’s Stand-In” as Cook. She offered to take the lunches prepared by her mother out to the crew at the cattle branding and roundup site: a trek of two and a half hours by truck over the hot desert terrain on unpaved road -– “more a track than a road,” actually. Her introduction to that chapter reads: “A job doesn’t get done when it’s started with a promise and finished with an alibi.” (B. Lewis Bowman, Bumfuzzled Too.)

Maybe an hour after starting out, the truck began wobbling, and she realized it had a flat tire. There was no AAA to call for a tow; nobody to text message for help; not even an instruction manual in the glove compartment. “If the tire was to be changed, I had to do it.”

She must have watched her father change numerous flat tires and methodically followed what she’d seen him do. Place some rocks under the other set of wheels to keep the truck from rolling. Find the spare tire, the jack and the lug-wrench. Place the jack under the axle near the flat tire, pump the jack until the tire is off the ground. But, here she encountered challenges her father probably had not faced. He was physically much stronger than she and capable of leveraging the lug nuts loose. She was just a teenager, not conditioned by decades on the range. “I could get no purchase on the nut.” She had no leverage: the tire just spun around as she struggled to loosen the heavily rusted lug-nuts.

She decided she needed to lower the jack until the weight of the tire on the ground provided the necessary resistance. Even with that, she had to stand on the lug-wrench and ply it with her entire weight to accomplish the goal. “Joy! It worked!”

After removing all five rusted-tight nuts in the same manner, she re-elevated the truck axle, removed and replaced the spent tire, tightened the nuts by hand, then lowered the axle to attain the resistance of the ground, again, where she could secure the nuts with the wrench, and finally lower the truck axle back down. She packed all the equipment away and proceeded to meet the crew.

She had started at 7:00 AM and arrived at the work site at 11:00 AM after an hour’s delay fixing the flat. She made the cook fire, the coffee, and unloaded the lunch for the crew -– just as Bug Quinn would have done had he been there.

“I had expected a word of praise for changing the tire. But, to the contrary, I realized that only one thing was expected: an on-time lunch. No excuses accepted.”

She remembers the day of the flat tire, vividly, because much later that same evening, the family watched from their porch what turned out to be the first atomic bomb test, 180 miles away at Alamogordo, NM (July 16, 1945).

“The world we knew was changed forever.”

She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in economics and from Stanford Law School at the top of her class. Private law firms would not hire her, so she turned to a career in public law, then state government where she served in all three branches. Thirty-six years later, in the summer of 1981, President Ronald Reagan named this “ranch girl” as a justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S. In Lazy B, she doesn’t even mention the fact that she was the first woman on the bench. She served on the top federal bench for 24 years.

Justice O’Connor’s life is an affirmation of personal responsibility and accountability. Once a person takes a step in any direction, one must be prepared to take full and complete ownership of all the possible consequences of that step -– the good news and the bad news. No one but yourself is responsible for your choices. “No excuses accepted.”

The story of her young life certainly shines a different light upon the woman in the dark robe, upon all of the choices that every woman must make and upon all of the consequences of choices made by this nation since that day in the south-central part of New Mexico, now fifty-three years ago.