At 25, Sharlet Brown loved Chicago. She was young and “still incredibly immortal.” Getting mugged once and hit by a cab didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for Lake Michigan, skyscrapers, elevated trains and crowds of people downtown. And why not? As a girl growing up on an isolated ranch in northwestern South Dakota, Sharlet heard her mother say: “get an education and see the world.” Chicago was the world and what an education it gave her.

She didn’t intend to move home. But then her father contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the mid-1990s she made the roundtrip from O’Hare Airport to Rapid City once a month. The two-hour drive north gave her a chance to think about the pace of life in Chicago and the importance of her family.

On one of these trips home, she met John Teigen. He was a rancher with a place south of Camp Crook just across the Little Missouri River and into Montana. He was older than Sharlet with children from a previous marriage. She liked him. On her trips home they began to date.

John was serious enough about the relationship that he visited Chicago and “got a sore neck” from looking up at the buildings. She introduced him to her former colleagues and current clients at the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, and he got a better understanding of her work as a freelance marketeer. But she knew he would never leave the ranch. “This is what he was born to do,” she says.

When they talked about getting married, Sharlet explained that she couldn’t be the traditional ranch wife. She had grown up around animals, riding and showing horses. She understood the life, but she loved the writing, strategizing, and designing that she did for a living. She struggled to imagine how she could put these two worlds together.

Sharlet had a couple of clients she could count on, even if she moved a thousand miles away. In August 1996, she had her belongings packed when she got a call and learned that her father had died. She came home to grieve and to start a new life with John.

As a communicator, Sharlet depended on the telephone and the fax. Located more than 30 miles from paved road, John’s place received telephone service from West River Telephone Cooperative based in Bison, South Dakota. When the technicians installed the fax line for Sharlet, they couldn’t get enough power running through the attenuated line to make the machine ring. After they solved the problem, she still struggled with dial-up, paying long distance rates to reach her internet service provider and leaving the computer on “send” all night to get documents to her clients.

For the first eight months Sharlet kept her apartment in Chicago. Once a month, she drove the gravel roads and highways under big skies to Rapid City to catch a flight. For a week she met with clients and collaborated with graphic designers, scheduled back-to-back meetings to stay connected and got her “big city fix.” “I realized that you had to keep your face out there,” she says. “You can’t rely on doing everything remotely.”

But after awhile the face time for its own sake didn’t matter as much. She was getting the work done. There were always conventions and conferences that brought people together. In the meantime, her clients trusted her. When satellite brought broadband to the ranch in 2003, the stresses of communicating diminished.

Often Sharlet took a break from her work to help John in the corral or the barn. Saddling horses, they rode out to check animals or for the pleasure of the open air. If deadlines were hanging over her head, she worked in the evenings to make up for the time outdoors. She talked to John about her work. He listened graciously, but the issues of strategy, language, and client relationships didn’t belong to his world. Despite the technological improvements, Sharlet sometimes felt incredibly isolated.

Sharlet knew other women from her days in Chicago who were freelancing. Several were mothers trying to work from home and raise children. Although none lived as far from the city as she did, they faced similar issues of isolation. “Individually, we had no backup, ” she says. “We couldn’t do big stuff, and we couldn’t take a vacation.” In 2004, the group came together in Champaign, Illinois. They talked about forming a virtual company. After a two-year experiment with the concept, the women incorporated in 2006 as Demeter Communications.

Working long distance underscores the relationshp between Sharlet’s work, her marriage and her way of life. “It’s hard to shut off the office,” she says. “I love what I do.” In that regard, she says, she is like the man she married. “A rancher’s hours never quit. It’s a way to live rather than a job.”

You can learn more about the work that Sharlet and her partners do at: www.demetercommunications.com.