Nancy Barlow is an American housewife.
She smiles as she talks, cutting bananas into slices as she stands over the kitchen counter in her modest four-bedroom home.
She has pinned up flashcards for preschool lessons the next morning. Dinner will come soon, but first the piles of blackening bananas must be peeled and cut so they can be turned into dried fruit snacks.
"They're like candy," says her husband, Bob, grinning.
The couple's four children split time between helping their mother and doing homework. The youngest, 3-year-old Gloria, sits on her daddy's lap while he reads a story to her.
Just another afternoon on the most infamous ranch in America.
"My sister was on Larry King," Nancy Barlow says as the knife glides through the fruit. "I hope they notice we're people, and glad to be alive and glad to be home."
After all, Nancy Barlow is no ordinary housewife -- her blue-gray prairie dress and intricately braided brown hair tell you that.
They are the outward signs of a deep adherence to the faith of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
That faith has led her from local curiosity to media celebrity. Her daughter LaNan, 7, was on the cover of People magazine this month.
Nancy and Bob Barlow tease the girl. She's the most famous student in school, they say.
She smiles wide and blushes a little.
"I don't know if you ever get used to it," Bob Barlow says of his family's newfound celebrity, sipping a homemade apple-tea slushee while he talks at the dining room table. "If some of it weren't so serious, it would be different."
Of course, it has been serious. And remains so.
One year after state authorities removed 439 children from the YFZ Ranch, located near Eldorado, Texas, the reclusive polygamous sect has been forcibly opened to the eyes of the outside world. Twelve of its members, including the ranch's leader, Merril Jessop, and the sect's self-styled prophet, Warren Jeffs, face 26 criminal indictments regarding their alleged roles in the marriage of underage girls to adult men.
For its part, the state says it has no regrets.
"Given the exact fact situation, we would" go in again and remove the children, said Child Protective Services spokesman Patrick Crimmins. "We responded to a report that we believed to be authentic. ... We were obligated under Texas law to investigate."
Although many sect members have trickled back to the ranch, members here say their lives -- and those of their children -- will never be the same. The very atmosphere of the place has changed, they say.
The YFZ Ranch was their safe haven from what they considered the persecutions of authorities in Arizona and Utah.
It feels safe no longer.
Although no one died in the controversial and traumatic raid that sparked the largest child-custody case in American history, a few cows weren't so fortunate.
They had been sick before the raid. With no one there to care for them, they succumbed.
Such was the non-human toll across the various segments of the ranch as it lay mostly vacant from April to June: The 1,700-acre property designed to be self-sustaining had no one to plant crops, care for animals or maintain its equipment.
Meanwhile, its residents spent much of their time in court or traveling to visit their children in shelters across the state.
The costs have mounted.
"It cost (Texas) $1 million to bus the children away," said Merril Jessop, the 73-year-old FLDS bishop who heads the ranch in Jeffs' absence. "How much do you think it cost to gather them up? They didn't do it."
Jessop leans over a large desk in the corner of his office. It's a clean desk, although to one side sits a printout of a recent newspaper article written about some of the ongoing court action in Texas. He has a genial manner, an easy smile and an ever-chirruping cell phone that he checks frequently.
He agreed to be interviewed, but on advice of his attorneys said he would not answer questions related to the criminal case against him.
"You can imagine we've suffered a little disappointment," Jessop said. "It's really difficult to know exactly how to deal with it, but we have it to deal with."
The sect moved to West Texas seeking privacy for its members' controversial lifestyle and a shelter from the efforts by Utah and Arizona authorities to prosecute alleged crimes in the border communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
The most devout followers were assigned by Jeffs to the ranch, which was to be a self-sustaining shelter from the persecution of the world. Instead, its single gated entrance became the argument used by authorities to justify removing all the children from what they call a compound.
Courts will likely settle that dispute years from now.
Meanwhile, the financial concerns -- attorneys' fees, travel costs when the children were in state care, buying food that would have been grown on the ranch -- have forced the sect to begin exporting its construction regionally. That's something its officials said they had no intention of doing before the raid.
A pair of state appellate courts ruled last May the state must return the children to their parents. Since then, about half the pre-raid population of the ranch has returned, Jessop said.
He chuckles at talk of returning to normal.
"We'd term it like this," Jessop said: "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?"
(Contact Paul A. Anthony of the Standard Times in San Angelo, Texas, at anthonyp(at)sastandardtimes.com.)
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