Monthly Archives: July 2012

When you live with your parents…

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This summer seems to be slipping away into the horizon all too quickly. Since the house fire temporarily transplanted us we have been on a fast track schedule to get our new house ready for the arrival of all of the crap we don’t really need that’s currently residing in my parent’s garage. I’ve been wearing the same three shirts for the last month because I don’t have the energy to dig through the giant plastic Tupperwear bins that are currently serving as my drawers. I’ve also been feeling a bit too comfortable in the only pair of cutoff shorts I can find. I’m not sure when I officially became a rag-muffin (does anyone else say that or is that just something my Pops made up?), but apparently I don’t seem to mind that my shorts are covered in paint and grout and sweat and Lord knows what else. At the end of the week I just throw them in the wash with my pink socks and black tank top and I am ready for Monday.

It’s funny when all of your things are packed away how quickly you realize how little you actually need to get by. Apparently I’m pretty low maintenance.

And apparently, between the grouting, painting, scrubbing, sawing and cleaning I should consider bathing a little more frequently.

What I have become?!

Before my eyes I’m turning into a woman who leaves the house donning pink socks, hiking shoes, stubbly armpits, not a shred of makeup and paint in her ponytail.

A ponytail that hasn’t been washed for days.

Since the realization that I am on the verge of ‘crazy cat/bag/stinky/wilderness lady’ I have tried to pinpoint what has gotten into me. I try to blame it on being in the moment, or being frazzled with deadlines and things scattered in all corners of the ranch. I try to make excuses for myself that include little phrases like “Oh, I was laying tile and I have to do it again in twelve hours so what’s the point of scrubbing the mortar off of my legs.”

Or, “Oh, the paint will just wash right out of this shirt. But I have to paint some more in twelve hours so what’s the point of changing”

And my favorite “It’s hot. I was sweaty. Now I’m tired. I’ll shower tomorrow.”

And then I find myself alone in a room, crinkling my nose and wondering what stinks.

Now I know it’s me.

I need to get it together. So after much consideration, contemplation, analyzation, self-deprecation and meditation I have come to the conclusion.

It’s my parents’ fault.

Hear me out here as I explain myself.

See, since we have been essentially homeless, my parents have done everything they can to make us feel comfortable. They are lovely people who are very aware of their actions and very good at taking care of the people they love. They felt bad for us and didn’t want to see us living in a tent on their lawn, so they gave us a room like any parent would. Then they made us a hearty meal full of every vegetable, listened while we complained, handed us a cocktail and never once have mentioned that perhaps I should consider using their shower more frequently.

I haven’t lived with my parents since I was seventeen, and now, more than ever, I am grateful I hadn’t come back until now.

I would have never left.

Because something shifts when you find yourself as an adult living between your parents’ familiar walls. I’ve often wondered about this when hearing about those bachelors who never get married, who stay in their mom’s basement for years, whittling wood or playing computer games in their free time.

Why? Why do they stay?

Now I know.

Because your momma makes banana bread and Rice Krispy bars on Sundays and then leaves you home alone with them all week as you find the sweet tooth you have repressed since childhood.

When you go to the fridge to try to locate the ketchup or the ice cream topping, all it takes is one call out to your momma and she is at your side, showing you exactly where it is.

She also knows where you set your cell phone, keys, missing boot and sunglasses.

When you live with your parents there is always someone there to worry about you, so you don’t have to take the time to worry about yourself. If your momma walks into the kitchen to catch you with a big knife in your hand, prepped and ready to cut into a giant watermelon, she will quickly locate your father to remove that knife from your hand and take over the job himself.

See, your momma knows you, and knows that giant knives could mean a disaster.

You will protest for a moment, explaining that you are an adult and have cut up many watermelons in your life thank-you-very-much, but you will start that adult conversation with something that sounds like “Moammmaaa, geeezzzeeaa” before you hand over the knife to your father, secretly grateful that you won’t have to struggle with the task.

Apparently this man is better suited for the dangerous task of cutting watermelon…

When you live with your parents, despite your best efforts, the laundry gets done more often. You have a never-neverending stack of clean towels and, while she’s at it,  cheese and crackers on a tray waiting for you on the counter at any given moment.

Right next to those blasted Rice Krispy bars that are quickly going to your ass.

But Rice Krispy bars won’t be the only thing you have a hankering for. No, when you find yourself living with your parents you will also find yourself searching the cupboards for Honey Nut Cheerios and Lucky Charms. You will ask if they have fruit roll-ups.

Your mom will buy you popsicles and tell you you look skinny.

You will believe her.

You will have another Rice Krispy bar and curl up on the couch with her while she watches “The Real Housewives of Wherever.”

She will make you one of her signature vodka tonics and you will fall asleep under the fluffy blanket with your head on the arm rest of the couch and your mouth wide open as you drool on her throw pillow.

Your husband will see this. He will be horrified.

He will order you to go to bed.

You will oblige, wipe the drool from your mouth and wish your momma and pops good night only to crawl into a bed that you haven’t made for a month…

because you’re living in your parents house…

and the way you’ve been behaving, you might as well give up adult status.

If you need me I’ll be painting something, tiling something, taking a shower and scheduling a hair-cut.

If I don’t move out soon, I am afraid I never will.

Not because the land is mine…

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This morning a documentary film maker came to the ranch to visit with Pops and I about what makes our community special and to try to get to the root of why the people who chose to stay or come home to farms, ranches and small towns in Western North Dakota are so passionate about this lifestyle.

He asked us what it is about the landscape that inspires us.

He contemplated what it’s like to watch a community you know so well boom and bust and boom and bend and mold and grow in front of our eyes.

He wanted to know about our roots.

And in between the lighting checks, the questions about the economy, the oil boom and what it was like to be a child surrounded by all this wild space with an unspoken expectation to get gone someday, he wondered what it was that brought us back…

I have many answers to this question:

The promise of a sunrise over a landscape that grew me.

The need for the wind in my hair.

The hope that my children might be born to dig in this dirt and smell the first rain of the season.

The fact that I was planted here

That I belong nowhere else…

How do you say these things? How do you explain reasons to a stranger that you have not understood well enough to explain to yourself?

I thought about the question and kept quite as my father looked into the camera and told this story.

About his mother’s father.

His grandfather, Severin, tall and lean from the fjords of Norway.

A homesteader.

A farmer.

A husband and soft-spoken, good-natured, father of twelve who made a living with his family plowing fields and raising a few farm animals for milk and meat.

In those days when farmers like my great-grandfather were sectioning off land and turning up dirt in the more fertile landscape north of the Little Missouri River, there were major cattle operations still present that would use those acres to drive a herd of hundreds across country to the big operations in the badlands to the south.

And so the story goes, and it isn’t a long one, that Severin woke one morning to find his cattle missing.  My father is quick to point out here that the quantity of cattle raised by Severin’s large family likely consisted of only five to seven milk cows—not a large herd worthy of the drama of a Western novel and apparently not significant enough for the cowboys to take notice or any action to sort them off from the herd.

But no matter the numbers, they were Severin’s cattle and he was determined to retrieve what had mistakenly and nonchalantly been taken from him.

So the tall and soft-spoken Norwegian homesteader from the clay-packed fields of western North Dakota (the man who rode his bicycle 93 miles over North Dakota prairie from the train station to his homestead) took off that day, with a big stick in his hand, to begin the 7-mile walk over rugged buttes, under the hot sun (or maybe the relentless wind, to this story there is no season)  to find his cattle, to sort them off from the herd that tried to own them, to turn them around and bring them home.

7 miles.

To the land he laid claim to.

The home where his son raised his family.

Where his grandson has raised his.

Where his great-grandchildren are likely to return.

My father laughed as he completed painting an image of a man from another time.

A time when you gave everything inside of you not only to belong somewhere, but to survive there.

Severin’s blood pumped through the veins of my grandmother just as it moves with every heartbeat inside the body of the man who raised me.

Inside my body.

The one I can’t seem to move off of this place, not because the land is mine…

but because it is me.

Severin’s Family.
My grandmother is the young girl in the middle with the bow.

The prairie’s gift…

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The sunsets on this prairie are nothing short of a gift.

After a long day working under the hot summer sun, or inside the walls of buildings that make us feel small, we understand that if we look up towards the heavens to catch the sun sneaking away, we may be rewarded with a splash of spectacular color.

I’ve seen sunsets in other parts of the world–across the vast ocean, peeking over the mountaintops and at the edge of rolling corn fields, but there is something about the way the sun says goodbye along the outskirts of my own world, against the familiar buttes and grain bins and horses on the horizon that puts me at ease and thrills me at the same time.

I have theories about things like hail storms and tornadoes and blinding blizzards, that they’re a way of slowing us down, reminding us to surrender to an earth that spins no matter what our plans are for crops or hair-dos or making it our Christmas party on time.

The storms are unpredictable, but the sun is always there.

And it will always set and rise again.

And sometimes as we put the burgers on the grill, close the gates for the cattle or put the lawn mower in the shed we will find ourselves bathed in yellow, gold, purple, orange, pink and blue and hues we cannot find in our crayon box. We will look above the oak groves or down to the end of the pink road and we will find that sun playing and bouncing against the clouds that roll over the prairie and buttes that we know so well.

I tilt my head up and run to find the nearest hill so that I may watch how this landscape looks under the different shades of light.

Under these prairie sunsets I am a spectator on the familiar ground of home.

A tourist with my mouth agape in wonder.

And thankful for a world that’s round and a sky so vast and forgiving.

A poem for the hot summer sun…

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Summer if I could put you in the pocket of my jeans

I would take the way the sun shines through my dad’s fresh garden peas.

Then I’d grab the smell of green grass and the sky a vivid blue

I’d leave behind misquotes and I’d forget my shoes.

And oh, if I could catch you under an old mason jar lid

I’d be sure grab a baseball and the sprinklers for the kids.

Then I’d saddle up the horses and put the cattle out to graze

because I need my ponies ready at the end of long, hot days.

We’ve talked about this summer, how you come and go too fast

and I’d like to find a way to hold on tight and make it last.

So summer, I have warned you that I might just catch your light

and keep you by my bedside for those long December nights.

I could be a bird…

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My world is packed up in boxes in my parent’s garage. Stacks of important papers and photographs, hats and shoes, books I’ve never read and albums I haven’t listened to in years. We pulled these things from a home that was threatened by flames and forces we can’t control.

We did not grab one another when the wall of our home was smoking from the inside out into the night. No, we placed our arms around computer screens and television sets, guns and guitars. We threw our possessions on the earth to be saved and to save us from the need we might feel to replace them.

What it would cost us to purchase another would mean time and money, the things that take up the biggest part of us some days.

And now here it all sits waiting for us to use it. To go through the books and read the stories inside. To listen to the music, to watch others live their lives on the television screen, to step into our favorite dress or shirt and go out into the world to show it off.

Some days I don’t want all of this shit. I don’t want any of it. I don’t want a choice between red boots or black, I don’t want the papers reminding me to pay, I don’t want the movies suggesting I should stay in and watch a world that doesn’t exist for us.

I don’t want the memories waiting in boxes for me to recall what we were when we were sixteen and sun kissed and scared to death.

I don’t want it weighing on me.

Some days.

Yesterday a wise voice coming through the radio on my car spoke to me.

He told me that we do not have a soul, we have a body.

I pause to think of this today when my clothes feel heavy against the wet sticky heat of the summer and the body that houses my soul is feeling tired at the thought of moving through the tasks we’ve laid out for the day.

And I think about where my soul might live next.

Perhaps in the body of the yellow bird that returns to the feeder outside of this office window, concerned with nothing but her next bite,  spreading her wings and cooling herself in the puddles left from an early morning rain.

A bird attached to nothing but the sky.

Or maybe a long living oak with the mission to reach my branches out to the sun in the summer, to release them in the autumn chill and sleep until the spring sun asks me gently to bloom again.

I would have roots that would keep me grounded and grass and branches from the aspen or the birch to keep me company, to lean on, to protect me from the wind.

Maybe a wildflower, a thistle or a cricket screeching my song into the night.

I could be all of those things.

But today I don’t want to be attached to anything…

I have felt like this as a teenager, before I understood what I was so anxious about, what it was that was worrying me.

Why I suddenly had so many emotions pulling at my skin.

I remember walking out into the rain on a cool late summer evening. I wasn’t upset or worried or milling anything over in my mind. I just wanted to be out there, away from the four walls of a house, away from the telephone and parents who wanted to talk, things that needed to be thought through. I don’t know why, but I felt heavy that day with the business of being human and I wanted nothing more than to be a blade of grass, grounded and soaked in this rain.

I walked further into the protection of the oak groves and stepped off of my path, then slowly out of my shoes and finally out of my clothing. I stood there in the lush green of the weeds and wild fruit bushes, under a canopy of leaves dripping the rain down through their branches and onto my bare skin. There I was naked and caught in the moment of what it feels like to be so alone and so exposed and so unbelievably grateful for the silence and familiarity of nature.

I was comfortable like this for only moments before I glanced down at my pale skin and recognized that imperfect body once again as my own. But for a moment I was there, holding my breath, and I was the rain and the clouds and the dirt. I was the grass and the still, damp air.

I wasn’t my body.

I was my soul.

I know I am blessed as a human, blessed to have this soul in this body with a voice that can sing out loud, arms that I can wrap around the people I love and legs capable of  moving me to hilltops to get closer to the sky. I understand that those boxes are stacked high and filled with things that many people would love to possess. I am not taking them for granted and I am not wishing for the reminders of a good life that are held in those albums to disappear. I am not wishing them away.

Today I am just asking to not be held accountable for my possessions or a body that doesn’t do much to hide the relentless emotions of a soul that too often crinkles up my nose when it cries, bites the scar on her lip in worry, screams air out of her lungs in frustration and laughs with an enthusiasm that sometimes cannot be contained.

Today I am just taking a moment to remember that someday my soul may have wings…

Improving my home improvement attitude…

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I married a man who knows where he can get a surplus of washing machine motors in case of a clothes-washing emergency. I fell in love with a guy who has hauled a broken down three-wheeler to all five of the places we’ve moved in the last six years with the intention of making the thing run when he has a spare moment (or twenty-thousand).

I am living with a person who has seventy-five Tupperware containers full of drill bits, little pieces of wire, nails and screws of various sizes, scraps of leather, broken saw blades, old speaker cords, empty shotgun shells, half-used rolls of tape, weird shaped things made of metal, something that looks like an electrical box, loose change from years of emptying pockets and a partridge in a pear tree because he might need it someday.

He’s a handyman, a carpenter, a Jack of all trades.

He’s a man who once spent the summer of his sixteenth birthday helping his father build a garage so that the next summer they could use it as a space to rebuild a tiny wooden boat from when Jesus was born into sleek and shiny yellow watercraft complete with a motor made to propel them around the big lake at speeds safe for a boat of a much bigger size.

He’s ambitious, a visionary, a guy with a tool for everything and a “why pay someone else to do it when you can do it yourself…and do a much better job…” attitude.


I am none of those things.

In fact one could argue that I’m the exact opposite. Where Husband has the impressive ability to breathe life into objects that belong on the bottom of a junk pile, I am the culprit who sent that thing to its grave in the first place.

I break things.

But it’s not my fault. Like Husband inherited his skills and interest in nailing things together, I was born to find a way to break them apart.

See, we’re neck-deep in working on the finishing touches it’s going to take to get us living in our new house. It’s an exciting time for a man who has been planning this home in the blueprints of his mind for years.

It’s a frightening time for a woman who once saw her life flash before her eyes when she got her head stuck in a ladder in her attempt at house painting.

But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around and make sandwiches while my husband is measuring and cutting and making sawdust fly.

Nope.

I’m gonna help.

But before I could strap on my tool belt and suspenders that look like rulers,  I was sent with Pops to go get supplies.

And when I say supplies, I mean, hook up the giant trailer, grab your coffee and be ready to set up camp in the store for a good  five to six hours…because the man’s got a list…

And he wrote on both sides.

Shit.

Fast forward through the part where Pops and I  got a flat tire and had to pull over on the highway to change it only to discover that the spare was a little skimpy on air as well.

Then skip the next part where I had a mental breakdown in the plumbing section trying to explain Husband’s hand-drawn diagram of a small piece he needed with a male end that connects to another piece with a female end that needs to be threaded and bedazzled with rhinestones and copper and is a 1/2 inch wide (or is that 1/3?) with metal studs while Pops mastered the art of sleeping while standing up.

Then zip on through the fourteen hours it took the two of us to load 750 square feet of hardwood flooring, 300 slate tiles, three bags of mortar, two bags of grout, a nailer, 20 pieces of sheet rock, six oak doors, a bag of painting supplies, electrical boxes, a roll of wire for something,  thirty-seven thousand plumbing parts and a bag of licorice onto the trailer, covering it with a giant tarp while the wind blew the thunderheads in.

I don’t want to talk about the monsoon that tore through that tarp on the way home in the dark or the fact that Pops may or may not have hit a small tree with a trailer full of soggy supplies as he slid sideways in the sticky mud outside the garage and proceeded to get stuck up to the floorboards.

I won’t mention the words he used to explain his emotions or the fact that we had to get the tractor to lift the trailer away from the tree and then hook it up to the front of the pickup to pull it out of the mud.

We don’t want to talk about it.

And I don’t want to talk about the grumbling that occurred the next day when I was sent to town again because there was a missing piece in the bag of 3,000 plumbing supplies we picked up in our life-altering journey.

Nope.

I won’t go there.

But I do want to tell you that when our supplies were accounted for and we got line out, after I painted the ceiling and the walls, organized our area and brought over some beer and snacks, someone did give me a tool.

A hammer.

And I was elated to be thought capable enough to help lay the wood floor.

So excited that in approximately 3.4 minutes of weilding that hammer, I forgot about moving my thumb out of the way.

And I do want to tell you that even though my thumb print is forever altered, Husband gave me a second chance and trusted me to learn the art of tiling.

And I thought I was doing ok, really. I mean, after two full days of being left alone to mix mud, haul and cut heavy tiles, space them out and skip the parts where I actually had to use math skills to measure, I still had a few places on my body that weren’t completely crusted in mortar.

I was focused, I was sweaty, I was becoming a tiling expert intent on getting the project complete in a timely manner. There was no time for breaks, no rest for wicked and apparently no room for manners, which I quickly learned was something that remains important in my handyman’s world no matter the time constraints and focus placed on the project.

Because when he came to check on my progress at the end of two days of laying tile he took one look at this woman with sweat dripping down her back, wild hair escaping from her two-day pony tail and arms and legs covered in mortar only to be greeted with an order to go get her a rag.

Apparently there was something about my request that didn’t sit well with my husband. Perhaps it was the tone of voice, or the fact that I didn’t look him in the eye or use the words or any form of synonym for “please” or “thank you”. Whatever it was, Husband couldn’t contain his disdain for this version of his wife morphed into some kind of intense and ragged construction obsessed animal.  He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t the calm, cool and collected species he becomes in this sawdust and testosterone infused environment.

He was confused.

He had to express himself.

I glared up at him from my place among the tiles and wet mortar.

“Where’s my rag? I need my rag? I’m almost done!!! Did you hear me?!!!”

He took two steps backwards, looked down and pointed at me, wagging his finger up and down to emphasize his disappointment as he said…

“Look at you. You’re bossy, you’re a mess and I don’t know if I like working with you…”

He took two more steps backward and stood still for a moment waiting for my reaction.

I looked down at my jeans, unrecognizable at this point as anything but pants made out of mortar. I ran my dirty hand through my hair and pulled out a glob of crusted mud.

Sweat trickled down my back and into my butt crack as I took in the words this kind and patient man has never before uttered to me.

I took a deep breath as the stress and worry of the past two weeks came unglued from my insides and out of my lungs in a fit of laughter that I couldn’t contain.

Husband stared at me as I worked to apologize through my giggles and belly laugh.

He shook his head and lifted his cap up to run his fingers through his hair, his lips curled up in a reassuring smile as he turned on his boot heel and left the crumpled, ornery and unnecessarily intense version of his wife to consider improving her home improvement attitude.


And I was left with the conclusion that I’d better shape up, because for the next few weeks while we finish this house I’m living in this man’s world, and if I ever want to cook a meal in this kitchen in our lifetime, I’d better whistle while I try to avoid hammering my arm to the wall and do what I can to keep him around…

Because I break things.

And he fixes them…


Summer heat

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When summer sets in out here among the clay buttes and tall grasses it’s like nothing else.

It’s like our world could not be further away from the one we know in the middle of January when the windswept snow drifts outside our door and the cold is so cold it actually hurts.

But in mid July the air swelters. It settles on the top of the water in our stock dams and grows creatures we haven’t seen for months. It pools up under our cowboy hats, drips down the back of our work shirts and moves with us in the slow motion effort we use to make it through the day.

The people and animals of the north were not meant for 90+ degree weather. We see it coming and run for a canopy of trees, find refuge inside the ice cold of a sparkling drink and on the other end of our lawn hoses. We watch our garden grow and wait for the sun to retreat to do the weeding or to check how the radishes are coming along.

We swat horseflies and search in our houses for the summer cutoffs we wear five times a year to sit by the fan and say “Geesh, it’s a hot one.”

Our skin turns from white to red to brown as the wild sunflowers growing in road ditches reach their petals toward the sky.

We know who we are here inside the smells, sounds and sites of a season we wait all year to indulge in. We know what it looks like and what it means.

It means foxtails sweeping and bending in the draws, horseflies biting at our necks, hard cracked earth and tall wild grass that scratches our bare legs.

It means sweaty brows and an alfalfa crop, a sky with no clouds in site and dust hanging in the air kicked up by neighbors and big trucks heading out somewhere.

Summer means rain puddles left in the sun to dry, dragonflies and pink sunsets and a sky twinkling so bright you can’t tell the difference between fireflies and stars.

And we hold this under our skin, the pieces of the hard dirt, the swish of a horse’s tail, the sweet smell of cattle and summer grass and the trails we wore down to dust, we keep this with  us as we move through the season, grow tired of the heat and welcome the cool down.

And come January when the ground is white we will say to one another “Can you believe it was ever green out here?”

Then we will close our eyes and dream of a summer that held heat under our hats and sent it trickling down our backs.

Songs for home

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I want to thank all of you for your support and words of encouragement regarding the loss of the old farmhouse last week. We are very fortunate to have been able to save most of our things and even more fortunate that we have another house in the works over the hill that we will be able to move into very soon thanks to the help of our wonderful friends and family.

In life we are given little nudges and reminders to slow down, breathe and re-evaluate. I truly believe this was one of those times and I am so glad we stayed quiet enough to listen.

Today I am thankful that my knees are sore from tiling the floor in the new house all weekend and that I’ve been wearing the same two tank tops and three pairs of pants for the last five days because my momma’s been washing all of our clothes. I am thankful for my father-in-law’s plumbing skills and for running water, for the forgiveness of summer weather and for the fact that my sister and brother-in-law spent their anniversary laying hard wood floor in our house.

I am thankful for the rice-krispie bars the neighbor made, for my Pop’s patience with the world as he spent an entire ten-hour day with me running around to home improvement stores and for the fact that he only used a few cuss words when we got home at midnight in the pouring rain only to get a huge trailer full of house supplies stuck in the muddy driveway.

I’m thankful that one of my biggest annoyances is that I can’t find my left riding boot.

I am thankful that I have memories that can never be destroyed and new ones waiting for us over the hill.

I’m thankful that I have a moment today to catch up on work and share with you a little glimpse into one of the most exciting things happening in my world these days–the creation of my new album, scheduled for release before summer comes to a close.

Take a sneak peek at the recording process and hear me talk about why I think this work is so timely.

Jessie Veeder talks about recording her new album with Makoche Studios 

Because if I’ve learned anything in the past few years of making plans and moving around between the walls in that little old house on the ranch it’s that this place inspires me, feeds my soul and encourages me to share my story.

And as long as I can exist out here among the oak trees, barbed wire fences, pink gravel roads and clay buttes, no matter the walls that hold me, I will be forever grateful and forever inspired.

And I will always have a song for home.

Prairie Musicians Series: Jessie Veeder & Lonesome Willy
Prairie Public Television  

Check out my new music website: www.jessieveedermusic.com to keep updated on the latest on the release and the performances.

Irreplaceable Things…

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Sometimes in the middle of an ordinarily beautiful summer night, below a nearly full moon and among crickets singing their song into the darkness the world takes a moment to remind you that you are not in control.

We were reminded of this in the early morning hours of an ordinary Tuesday as we stood on the edge of the barnyard and watched our neighbors work to control the flames that were threatening to destroy a house that has been a fixture of memories on this landscape for well over 50 years.

As the smoke rolled from the walls and out the windows I kneeled among the things I was able to grab while we still had time–my guitar, my books of writing, my camera and photographs chronicling years of blessed living, pieces of me I could not bear to  see dissolve in the heat of a disaster we were powerless to stop–and I knew this was that last night I would spend under that roof.

We weren’t ready to let go. We had plans for this house, plans that I have shared here to ensure many more years of popsicles on the front porch, canning wild berries in the tiny kitchen,  waking to the sound of horses grazing in the pasture below us, windows open to the prairie breeze and watching the sunrise from the window above the kitchen sink.

But we’ve been reminded, once again, that nothing’s forever. That house where my father was raised, where my grandmother lived and died, where I put on Christmas performances with my cousins, fell in love, grew up and sighed a breath of relief when my new husband carried me over its threshold, held us close and reminded me that I can come home again.

That no matter how lost I might be, I can be found, out here among the wild grasses, red barn and sweet smell of horse hair.

And so I have been found. And thanks to the quick response of the rural volunteer fire department–our neighbors, local bankers, truck drivers, farmers and ranchers that transformed into heroes in the night–we did not have to watch that house burn to the ground. We were able to walk through its doors once again and bury our noses in the smoke-laced fabric of our world and make decisions on what to keep– our favorite sweater, our dining room table, a forgotten photograph–and most importantly, what to let go.

 We are thankful for that.

And thankful for our community of friends and family who helped us sort through the rubble, made us dinner, poured us a strong drink, encouraged us to salvage the irreplaceable things (like the rocking horse that has been in our family for as long as that house has stood ) and told us everything was going to be alright…told us they’d be right over to help with paint the new house, put in the floors and get us ready to move in.

We are blessed. Unbelievably blessed.

So today I am thankful to kick through the rubble, to sort my clothes on the lawn, to make plans with my husband, take a trip to the lumberyard with my pops, curl up on my momma’s couch rest easy knowing that we can never lose everything.

Because we are worry and love, community and friends, sentiment and replaceable things.

We are us, we are exhausted and summer’s only so long.

We have a life to build out here.

We’re moving on.

I will leave the light on
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
August 17, 2011 

To come down from the buttes after staying out a little too far past sundown only to see the lights of the barnyard illuminating the grass and the kitchen of the house glowing warmly through the windows, waiting for my return…

it means more to me than I can describe here.

I imagine the same sight greeting my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and my father. I imagine them feeling the same deep breath, the same overwhelming calm as they drove in from the fields, rode up to unsaddle a horse or strip off the layers from a hunt in the hills in the still of a late summer or autumn evening.

I imagine the smell of baked bread reaching them from the open windows or the smoke from a grilled steak waiting for them to sit down around the table, the door swinging open and the warmth of this old house whispering “this is home this is home this is home this is home…”

No matter how far you find yourself.

No matter the distance between you and these buttes.

No matter the time that has passed, the mistakes that you’ve made, the words you can’t take back, the pain you might hold onto, the life you might have found down the road or the love you might have lost here…

No matter.

Don’t worry.

This is home…

And I will leave the light on.