In Memory of Sari

Sari Mara Highfield
November 15, 1964 – July 1, 2016

This homestead carries her name because she is the reason it exists.

My mother was a native Las Vegan, born and raised out in Indian Springs on the family ranch — the same land she would one day inherit, and the same land I live on today. After she passed, we had to sell most of the ranch. I kept a small piece of it. That piece is where this homestead stands now, and not a day goes by out here that I don’t feel her in it.

She was taken too soon, by a brain aneurysm in 2016, at fifty-one. She was a devoted wife to my father, Russell, for twenty-seven years, and the kind of mother who shaped everything I know about how to live. The loss was sudden. The lessons she left behind were not — they’re woven into nearly everything I do on this land.

She introduced me to agriculture, to cooking, to camping and fishing, to skiing and snowboarding. In her younger years she was a barrel racer, and she never lost that ease around horses, that fearlessness, that love of being outdoors and in motion. She owned and helped run the ski lifts up at Lee Canyon, and later joined Teamsters 631. Her happiest places were simple ones — her ranch, her cabin, and a spot in Mexico where she could fish with the people she loved.

And she could cook. She had a gift I’ve never seen matched: she could taste a meal once and recreate it at home from memory, down to the smallest detail. Food, to her, was never just food — it was a way of paying attention to the world and taking care of the people in it. Part of what you’ll find on this site are her recipes, rebuilt piece by piece, some from memory and some pieced together from my grandmother’s. Keeping them alive is one of the ways I keep her close.

Everyone who met her remembers the same things — her smile, her giving heart, the way she was a friend to anyone who crossed her path. She was happy and positive in a way that was contagious. She touched a lot of lives, and she is still loved by all of them.

The name Sari Memorial Homestead uses her initials. Everything here — every skill, every field note, every recipe, every season worked on this land — is built in her memory.

Thank you, Mom. For all of it.