Before the Storm Clouds, Nothing but 'Blue Skies'

As for herself, though, she says her primary goals are to continue to write -- she has a children's book about the Constitution almost finished -- and to finally get to spend another fall in Wyoming.

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Cheney is so attached to the particular history and landscape of her home state that she cringed when she first saw the publisher's book jacket photograph -- the grass made it clear to her it had been taken in Nebraska. She went out and shot the cover picture herself, with a Canon Sure Shot, during one of her research trips home. It is of the Wyoming prairie, the green grass meeting the brilliant vista of the wide blue sky.

And the book, she says, was a "labor of love" that actually started six or seven years ago, when she dug into family genealogy and compiled a history of her great-great-grandmother, Katurah Vaughan, as a Christmas gift for her daughters. She later researched and wrote about the life of Dick's great-grandfather as a birthday present for him. Those two projects grew into "Blue Skies," which is as much a memoir of her husband's family as her own.

She stopped at 1959, she says, because, as a historian, she found the time frame after World War II up to the end of the '50s to be "an interesting historical period" that provided a "pretty natural" time to capture not only in her life but in American life -- at least, in the part of America where she was raised.

"One of the things that I hope I did in this book is talk about a time when we were less cynical," Cheney says. "And I do worry about cynicism now, the sort of corrosive effect of always looking at something, and being completely skeptical about it, and never finding sort of that core of what is important to hold on to and believe in."

Some of its best little details, though, come from her anecdotes about Dick Cheney as the young man she fell hard for. "Of course, I thought he was adorable," she writes, going on to gush a bit about how nice and thoughtful he is.

Then again, there was the time he ran afoul of Lynne and the strong women on her side of the family -- mother, aunt, grandmother -- by announcing, senior year, that he wanted to "play the field."

She responded by getting a date with the guy who had the hottest car in town, a '59 gold Pontiac Catalina convertible with great fins and a split grill in front.

"That kind of helped the situation," she says.

Dick came back after 11 days, married her five years later, and the Cheneys celebrated their 43rd anniversary in August.