Well, party people, look what the weekend drug in.
Snow and rain and not a green thing in site. Thanks to everyone who’s been sharing thier spring photos on the Facebook page and email. Every pretty flower cheers me and every snow flurry makes me feel less alone in this arctic tundra!
It’s not too late to get in on the game! Whether the birds are chirping in the warm sunshine or retreating back to the southern climates, abandoning the whole migration idea all together, show us how spring is shaping up in your neck of the woods and I will post them all on the website Monday. Our favorite photo will win a copy of my new album “Nothing’s Forever” and a print of a warmer and prettier spring day at the Veeder Ranch.
This is what it looks like when you put a house cat out in the snow for the first time in its life.
Coincidently this is also the face that was staring back at her after I peeled her out of my arms like a piece of velcro with really strong legs ..and then again off my head…and then again off of my boots.
We’re in a fight, but don’t feel bad for her, the weather is warming up and I think it’s time she gets acclimated to this wild place.
Yes, tomorrow it will be March and my longing for green grass, crocuses and creek beds overflowing with melted snow will summon me to pull on my muck boots and go exploring for the slightest change in scenery.
It will be March tomorrow, and I feel the chilled surrender that January brings start to break up and separate inside of me, even as I stand under a gray sky that blends into the horizon as if it weren’t a sky at all but a continuation of the snowy landscape…below us, above us…surrounding us.
Flakes fell from that sky yesterday afternoon, big and soft and gentle they drifted down to the icy earth and summoned me from behind my windows to come outside and stick out my tongue.
When the snow falls like this, not sideways or blowing or whipping at our faces, but peaceful and steady and quiet, it’s a small gift. I feel like I’m tucked into the mountains instead of exposed and vulnerable on the prairie. I feel like, even in the final days before March, that someone has shaken the snow globe just the right amount to calm me down and get me out of my head.
When the snow falls like this I go look for the horses. I want to see what those flakes look like as they settle on their warm backs, on their soft muzzles and furry ears. I trudge to the barnyard or to the fields and wait for them to spot me, watching as they move toward that figure in a knit cap and boots to her knees, an irregular dot on a landscape they know by heart.
I know what they want as they stick their noses in my pockets, sniff at my camera and fight for the first spot in line next to me. I know they want a scratch between their ears.
I know they want a bite of grain.
They know I can get it for them.
Our horses in the winter take on a completely different persona. The extra layer of fur they grow to protect them from the weather makes them appear less regal and more approachable.
Softer.
I like to take off my mitten and run my fingers through that wool, rubbing them down to the skin underneath where they keep the smell of clover and the warmth of the afternoon sun. I like to put my face up to their velvet noses and look into those eyes and wonder if they miss the green grass as much as I do.
On this snowy, gray, almost March afternoon the horses are my closest link to an inevitable summer that doesn’t seem so inevitable under this knit hat, under this colorless sky.
I lead them to the grain bin and open the door, shoveling out scoops of grain onto the frozen ground. They argue over whose pile is whose, nipping a bit and moving from spot to spot like a living carrousel. I talk to the them, “whoah boys, easy” and walk away from the herd with an extra scoop for the new bay, his head bobbing and snorting behind me.
In a month or so the ground will thaw and the fur on the back of these animals will let loose and shake off, revealing the slick and silky coat of chestnut, white, deep brown, gold and black underneath. We will brush them off, untangle their manes, check their feet and climb on their backs and those four legs will carry us over the hills and down in the draws and to the fields where we will watch for elk or deer or stray cattle as the sun sinks below the horizon.
I move my hand across the bay’s back, clearing away the snowflakes that have settled in his long hair and I rest my cheek there, breathing in the scent of hay and dust and warmer days.
He’s settled into chewing now, his head low and hovering above the pile of grain I placed before him. He’s calm and steady so I can linger there for a moment and wonder if he tastes summer in the grain the same way I smell it in his skin.
My farewell to winter is long, lingering and ceremonious.
So you watched the Super Bowl. You saw the game, you saw Beyonce shake it, you saw the lights go out and, among the flashy messages, the advertisements for M&Ms and beer and phones and underwear and cologne, you saw this:
Another ad for another product, yes. But one that had a message attached to it that has sent my world into a humming since it aired.
Now it’s possible you missed it. It’s possible you didn’t hear it tucked in there among the baby Clydesdale and the elderly escaping the nursing home for a night at Taco Bell. It didn’t make the top ten commercials and didn’t get nearly as much buzz in other parts of the country, but it sure is buzzing here.
I don’t usually comment on pop culture or what ‘s happening on T.V. or in sports here because I’ve made it my mission to talk about different things: the way the sun shines on the back of a horse, how the wind blows snow across the prairie and what it’s like to be a woman connected to a place, but as a girl who grew up feeding cattle alongside her father in the coldest winter nights, someone who watched him doctor horses, bring new-born and frozen calves into the basement of the house and nurse them back to life, as a former FFA president and the 4th generation on my family’s ranch, I have to talk about this.
I have to tell you why people like me have been so inclined to share this advertisement, to watch it over and over again, to shout its praises from the rooftops and, well, post it on every social media networking site they can link up to out here in the boonies.
Because finally, among the hype of sports, the glitzy glam of pop culture, the humor and the ruckus and the fight to be the winner, right there in the most prime real-estate of prime-time television someone out there felt it might be important enough to slow it down and tell our story.
Now, I wasn’t at every Super Bowl party in middle America during the 2.5 minutes Paul Harvey’s message was pumped into millions of homes across the country, but I was at one, and as soon as that familiar voice spoke the first word, the room fell silent.
We held our breath in that moment we were certain we were looking at an image from our backyards: a black baldie cow near a barbed wire fence in a barren, snow-covered prairie.
We were quiet because we saw our church standing tall and worn beside a country road,
we saw our grandfather with callused hands and a face wrinkled and weathered from the long days spent in the elements.
We shushed our voices and choked back a tear for the colt our father couldn’t save, laughed a little because we’ve ridden a horse using a head stall made out of hay wire and smiled at the memory of our father’s stopping the tractor to move a nest of newborn rabbits out of harm’s way.
We saw ourselves standing in those fields, our grandmother’s eyes under that hat, our mother holding our hand, our father holding on hope.
We saw our children in the steady cadence of comforting words and a familiar voice that we’ve heard coming through the static on our old tractor radio for years.
The rest of the story.
Our story.
Some days I feel like we’re moving further and further from our connection to the land and the understanding of the dirt from which that potato was plowed. Farmers, ranchers and agriculturalists are not known to stand at the pulpit and tell their stories to the masses. No. Many spend long days working alone in the combine, on the back of a horse checking cattle or working fencing pliers in the deep brush.We share our stories by living them alongside our elders, hoping to learn something, dreaming that one day we might be fortunate enough to try our hand at tending the land.
I know my grandfather’s story. I see the old equipment that couldn’t be repaired breaking the wind from the hilltops on this place. I find little pieces of wire, old engines, scraps of leather, worn coveralls and other little pieces of a life spent scraping and saving and getting by in the old out buildings, in the 100 year old barn, in the fences that need to be repaired. My father keeps the same collection, adding to it at will in case he might need to patch something up.
I know my father’ s story. I know that on Sunday mornings he will knock on the door of my house like he does every weekend for a cup of coffee and a chat between chores. I know he will take off his boots, un-do his silk scarf and leave his wool cap on his head. I know he will keep his Carhart jacket on because he won’t stay long, just long enough to wonder out loud what might be wrong with the old tractor this time and discuss some plans about buying cattle, fixing the corrals in the spring and making things work better out here.
I know that tractor’s story. It’s been on this place for decades, bought used when my father left for college in the 70s. I know the only thing wrong with that tractor is that you can’t stop time, and we could not afford to buy a new one.
Each day my father has been the caretaker of the family’s ranch it has been an adventure to get that tractor up and running.
Every day it has been worth it.
Somewhere along the line a company like Dodge took notice of the kinds of people buying those trucks they were selling, not for the paint job or the heated seat, but for the horsepower and the muscle that it takes to haul a trailer full of bulls to the sale barn, a couple of priceless horses and a teenage daughter to her first high school rodeo, or through a snowy trail as your grandfather scoops grain for the cattle in the winter.
Somewhere in their marketing plan Dodge thought it might be a good idea to mention those farmers and ranchers out there throwing bales and feeding the country, because quite frankly, they have helped keep them in business.
So they declared it the “Year of the Farmer” and are working their marketing plan so that spreading the word means supporting the FFA.
That moment a company like Dodge took to tell our story while they had the world’s attention gave us–the farmers, the ranchers, the corn growers, bottle feeders, chicken-coop cleaners, post-hole-diggers, pig-sloppers, 5 a.m. cow milkers, –a little reminder that ours might not be a glamorous story, but it is one worth living.
Click here to watch an interview with the Montana ranchers featured in the commercial.
We’re finding our way to the end of January, and around these parts that’s a huge relief. I’ve been keeping busy playing music, writing and eating carbohydrates, and after a Friday evening spent singing to a full house, I was thawing out and happy with the way life gives you gifts, like 40 degrees on a January weekend.
Funny how a little warm up can turn an attitude around. Suddenly I was in love with winter again and while Husband worked on hammering and nailing and putting up walls in our master bedroom, I worked on ways I could sneak out the door unnoticed.
Because I decided it was of utmost importance that I load up little Juno and give her a tour of her new home turf.
Because we needed to check on things, ensure the gears were grinding right, the snowbanks weren’t too deep and the view was still as beautiful.
We needed to make sure those weird clouds weren’t storm clouds above us.
We needed to introduce her to the horses.
We needed to play…
and run…
And do whatever Tucker was doing here…
That looked like fun.
See, around here, if we chose to look, we can see things like this every day.
And although winter gets long, it’s one of those seasons that changes the landscape constantly. And so I suppose I’ve made it my mission here to keep tabs on the way the horses grow beards to ward off the chill…
The way the clouds roll and shift and change directions and colors…
How the light hits the grass and makes it sparkle…
How the horses settle lethargically into a pile of grain…
and how their noses feel under our hands.
I watch it all because I don’t want to miss it.
Because I like the way a puppy kiss looks.
And the sound of snow melting under a blue sky.
And the tree rows planted all those years ago? I like that they’re scraggly but standing still under a slow to rise winter sun.
I like the idea that this all will be green again, but first it has to be blue and white and brown.
I like that I’m here for all of that changing.
And I like the feeling, that like Juno, I’m hearing it all, seeing it all, discovering it all for the first time…on a 40 degree weekend at the end of January.
I miss my summer horses. I miss the way their coats lather up under the saddle after an evening ride to the east pasture.
I miss the way that smells and the way it feels to see them grazing on the green grass of the season–admiration and beauty and peace and home all wrapped up in their breathing and munching, snorting and fly swatting.
I even miss those damn burs I pull out of their mangled manes every evening.
I miss my summer horses because they have turned into winter horses, wild and free in the big pastures chewing on hay bales and hiding from the wind in the coulees at night.
We don’t ride much in the winters, the ground’s too hard, the wind too bitter, the hills too slick, so we give our working animals a much needed break during the coldest months and in no time they turn into a sort of wild and wooly that always amazes me.
On the coldest days they find their way to the barnyard and I bury my face in their thick coats where they keep the summer,
feed them grain from the buckets in the tack room and watch as they argue over the first and last bites.
You have to have respect for the animals that bear the burden of this extreme weather on their backs. I know the white tale deer that bed down on frozen hillsides or in a bull berry patch, the grouse roosting in tree tops and the wild elk competing for the same domestic feed as our horses are built for endurance with instincts that save them, but I still wonder if their noses get cold.
On frozen days like this I go looking for them, as if catching a glimpse of how they’re surviving this season might help shed some light on how I might do the same.
There are bison that live on the land next ours. I catch a glimpse of them when I’m on the highway, stopping to watch as the young ones run and the old ones nuzzle the ground for grass. Frost forms on their muzzles where they breathe in the cold air and on days the ice settles in on our world those creatures wear it, unassuming, as just one more layer of their being.
I wear my sweaters like the bison wear the weather. I cannot grow a wooly coat, so I wrap a scarf around my neck and lean into the cold.
I wonder if those bison miss the summer grass.
I wonder if those deer bedded down in the oaks behind this house notice the lights in the bedroom and dream of coming in from the cold.
I wonder if they know I would let them if I could. I would let them all in to warm by the fire if animals were meant for houses.
But I’ve said it before. Houses are for people and this big wide world is meant for deer in the bull berry brush, grouse in the tree tops, elk in the hay bales and horses in their wool coats waiting for a girl who’s waiting on summer to come and drop them some grain.
Aren’t you just dying. She’s so fllllufffffaaaayyyyaaaa!!!
Ahem.
Ok, look beyond her absolute cuteness and you will see one of the most important elements in our ranching operation when spring comes. Every rancher has to have a good dog made to help get cattle out of a brush patch, move them through a gate or push them along to different pastures and Juno is a little mix of some of the best cattle breeds out there.
Take a look at the white markings around her neck and you will see a bit of border collie. Her little brown eyebrows and fluffy fur is the Australian Shepherd in her. Mix that with the speckled feet she got from blue heeler blood and it looks like Juno has all the makings of a great ranch hand.
Errrr, she’s so darn cute!
When I was growing up we always had a female border collie ranch dog. Usually we would have that female bred and keep one of her pups to learn from her momma so that when the momma was too old to work, the pup was at her prime.
Pops’ current working dog, Pudge, was a hand-me-down dog looking for a good home. She is one of the best dogs we’ve ever had on the place; loyal, sweet and always willing to go along on the longest and most grueling of rides. Her only weakness is a thunderstorm.
And time.
See, we’re not sure how old this lady is, but she’s definitely slowing down. We needed to bring Juno home so that Pudge had a chance to teach her some things about life on the Veeder Ranch come spring.
I’m a little concerned that Pudge may not make it that long, but she’s got a lot of spirit and a heated bed, so the chances are good.
In the meantime we will just love on them this winter, feed them up, scratch their bellies and let them know that this ranch is a good place for a dog.
Even worthless pugs who pee on your Uggs.
Yeah, that’s right, I know what you did…
Ah, Juno, you don’t know what you’ve got ahead of you little girl. It’s a good thing you have big paws and a fluffy coat, because there are going to be adventures, cows for you to chase, mud to slop in, grass to roll in and poop to sniff.
It looks a little cold out there now, but trust me, you were made for this stuff.
Here she is pretending to sleep right before she woke up and flung her body toward my nose.
And here she is doing something else she’s not supposed to be doing.
I’d shoo her away but she just turns on me, ears back ready to attack my hand….wait…oh, yeah, here she is on my desk.
She’s not supposed to be doing this either. I mean I don’t want her wafting her stinky butt all over my paperwork.
Yeah, this cat farts. Like a lot.
Loud, squeaky ones.
I didn’t even know cats could fart.
I mean, I’ve never met an animal like this. She wakes up in the morning on a mission to annoy the hell out me. The first stop? Hiding under my bed while I get dressed so she can attack my feet.
Man that pisses me off.
But it’s not just the feet. I walk into the kitchen and she follows me like a blur, leaping up toward my body in an attempt to dangle from my bellybutton. I know it’s only a matter of time before it’s my ear.
I sit at my computer and she tries to murder my mouse in cold blood.
I fall asleep on the couch and she goes for my eyes.
I open a piece of candy and she snatches it out of my hands like a thief in the night.
I wear a hooded sweatshirt and she tries to strangle me with the strings.
I move and she’s lurking in the corner somewhere waiting to leap.
She terrifies me.
And she steals my socks. She grabs them out of the laundry and attacks them with a hot fury before dragging them off somewhere in the house to murder them and bury their remains. She’s got a taste for cotton, the fabric of our lives, she salivates for wool and has an insatiable hunger for nylon.
And I am left bare-footed.
In addition, I cannot find the string to my robe, which I’ve witnessed this animal harassing hundreds of times. I imagine she’s gone and buried it with the socks, leaving me to walk around all morning exposing parts of my pasty winter flesh to a world not quite ready for things like that.
Oh, it’s not just me who’s fed up. Big Brown Dog and his Big Brown Tail have suffered ninja-like assaults for months without the permission or the heart to fight back.
Even the pug, the world’s only canine cat whisperer, has expressed his frustrations at the surprise and unapproved cat piggyback rides with an eye roll and what I thought sounded a little like a growl.
The only two creatures in this house who seem to be satisfied with this little feline terrorist situation are the damn cat and the damn husband.
Because the damn cat was the damn husband’s idea.
And I think she knows it. I mean, I swear I saw her smirk at me while she was snuggling up next to him on the couch last night, so innocent and fluffy, full of purrs and kitten goodness.
“See,” said my damn husband. “She’s nice.”
But she’s not nice.
She farts.
She claws at my walls.
She climbs on the table.
She bites my favorite dog’s tail and is working really hard to take care of the pug’s only remaining eye.
And if that happens, well, we have a situation.
Oh, and you know what else is weird? The cat’s litter box is by the door. Every time someone enters through that door the wierdo races to her litter box and proceeds to take a shit, a sort of “look what I can do move” while she makes these really weird pushing noises.
I don’t understand? Does she save these shit’s for company? Can she shit on cue?
Seriously. That’s a real thing.
I would videotape it but I already feel awkward enough having just written that sentence.
I convinced Husband to accompany me on a ride after work on Tuesday. The weatherman warned me it might be one of the last nice autumn days for a while and I felt the need to take advantage of it.
Plus, I dreamed the night before that I was riding a fast horse like the wind through the tall grasses in endless pastures and I suddenly felt the urge to make that dream come true.
An evening ride wasn’t a hard thing to convince my dearly beloved to participate in. Especially if it meant he could pretend he was looking for cows and actually getting work done. So off we went, the two of us, seeking the only kind of marriage therapy that works for us–a little ride together through our world.
The breeze and the light were perfect and my horse was just the right amount of lazy.
Suddenly I felt a wave of creativity as the sun crept down toward the edge of the earth.
So I asked Husband if he would be opposed to a little “sunset photo shoot” along the horizon, you know, because he has always made such a nice silhouette.
As usual, he humored me and I quickly planned out a method of capturing the romantic vision I had of my husband riding his bay horse at full speed across the landscape.
I got off my horse and crouched down among the grass as my husband followed my directions to “run your horse back and forth in front of me for a while until I say stop.”
So he did.
Thrilled with the results of that handsome man and his handsome horse romantically frozen in a moment of speed and power inside of my camera, I hollered at him “Go faster!”
So he went faster, back and forth, working on his horse, going nowhere in particular, just back and forth across the sky.
But from behind my camera they could be going anywhere, that man and that horse.
I felt like an artist with the power to freeze time, the gift of my camera allowing me to catch that horse’s mane as it reached toward the sky and his feet as they gathered beneath him.
“Go faster!” I hollered from my spot behind the camera.
So Husband made that horse go faster.
Watching them move across that landscape was beautiful and romantic and rugged and western and kind of like a John Wayne movie scene…all of the things Husband can be to me sometimes.
“Stop. Come back. Come here!” I yelled, suddenly struck with another idea.
The idea that if my husband could be all those things as a silhouette, I wanted a shot at what I could be as a dark, mysterious woman on a horse against the backdrop of a setting sun.
Husband stopped his horse in front of me and I handed him my camera.
“Can you take some pictures of me now?” I asked as I climbed up on my horse who was lazily munching on the tall yellow grass. ”I’m going to go really fast. See if you can get my hair blowing in the wind as I ride off into the sunset.”
Husband took my camera and snapped away as I worked to channel the dream from the night before, the one where I leaned into the neck of my horse and kicked him gently as his hooves moved faster and faster across the landscape, gaining speed, pushing forward, becoming one fast blur as our hair whipped together in the wind.
Only, it seemed my horse didn’t have the same dream.
Nope.
His dream involved less running through endless pastures and more grazing through them.
And about half-way through our second pass across the photo shoot area, Husband yelled “Faster!” and the horse between my legs, the one I envisioned behaving like Black Beauty as I channeled my inner rodeo queen, began to behave more like the mule in that John Wayne movie with the nun.
And in one swift jump and kick, that horse demonstrated the major, glaring difference between me and my dearly beloved:
To be content at the end of the day. As the sun goes down and the world goes dark, to know that it was yours for the taking, and so you took.
This is my prayer for you and wild women everywhere.
To know you’ve tamed some wild things, and let the others run free. To have ridden hard and fallen harder.
To have found your way back to your feet.
This I hope for you.
To have loved a good man, a good horse and a good dog, but not necessarily in that order.
To have been loved. I know you have been loved.
To have mud on your boots, on your face and under your fingernails and still call it a good day. To know the smell of a well-worked horse and call it sweet. To stand in the rain because it’s raining.
To find a soft place to land, wild women, I pray for a soft place to land.
To climb a hill to be closer to the moon.
To do it yourself because you can do it better.
To work. To work. To work. And to love it as much as you can possibly love it.
Yeah, I know. I thought he lost his damn mind too when he presented me with the idea last week. I asked him how many figures I was holding up, what day it was and if John Wayne was still alive.
But if I thought he had suffered a severe head injury then, I picked up the phone to dial 911 when he told me he was going to town that evening to pick her up.
“Oh, and by the way, my dear, sweet, understanding, animal loving wife. This is no no ordinary cat,” Husband nonchalantly declared as he reached in the fridge for a beer.
Surprise! But not really. If I thought for a second that the man I married, the man who hunts deer with a Robin Hood bow,
deconstructs houses only to build them up again, makes knives out of antlers and steel files, mixes his own dough for the noodles in his noodle soup and, and catches fish with his bare hands
was about to bring home a straight-up calico or one of those felines that looks like he’s wearing a tuxedo, I might as well forget Christmas.
Not a chance. My mountain man cowboy of a husband was set on a cat with wild blood. And he was bringing her here. To our new house, the one with new carpet and hardwood floors.
And he was serious.
As he explained the animal to me…half bob cat, half mountain lion, half leopard, half liger…wait…
Image from ligers.org. Yeah, there’s a ligers.org. Napoleon Dynamite anyone? Anyone?
I flashed to visions of a wild cat the size of the 105 pound lab dangling from my recently purchased curtains, making a snack out of the insides of my leather couch, swinging from the fancy chandelier and licking her lips as while sneaking up on the pug…
I was not sold.
But it was happening.
See, that’s the thing about this relationship I’m in. There are times we talk things over, like what we should have for supper or what color to paint the walls, and then there are times we make decisions for ourselves.
The pug was one of my rogue decisions, and, well, look how that turned out…
So what could I say about a cat who, according to my recently insane husband, is sure to be the best mouser in the county?
A cat who I learned after I snapped out of my furniture nightmare, happens to be part bangle and part Pixie Bob?
I don’t know.
And I don’t know what that means really, except that here she is, all 12 oz of her.
In my new house.
With her giant ears, weird back legs and missing tail.
Here she is with her soft spotty belly, her wild, curious eyes, and unhealthy interest in the pug’s curly tail.
Here she is attacking my shoelaces with a passion I’ve never seen in something so small, spinning out as she takes the corner in the kitchen at fifty-miles-per hour and following husband around like he’s her mother.
Here she is before she took a flying leap toward my face.
And here she is snuggled down in the blankets after she, indeed, used her razor sharp claws to climb my leather couch.
I am apprehensive, but then, I’ve never had a cat figure out the litter box situation so quickly.
I’m not sold, but I like the way she sits on my shoulder as I work.
It will take some time, but look at how cute she is laying in that sunbeam.
I’m not sure, but…wait… how the hell?
…I think I might have accidentally locked her in the pantry…
