Monthly Archives: December 2020

Christmas in the wild

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I swear there are things that happen out here on the ranch that don’t happen to normal women or men who are married to dentists or chiropractors and living in perfectly lit houses alongside a groomed sidewalk, clean cars parked on garage floors spick-and-span enough that I wouldn’t hesitate finishing the cupcake I dropped, five second rule or not.

Those people? Their garages are nice enough to have parties in. My people? Well, give me five days and a pressure washer and I’ll do the job good enough to invite you over to help work cattle. By the time you’re done, you’ll be so worn out, dirty and hungry that my garage full of scrap wood shoved in the corner with the tools, barn cats and miscellaneous broken machinery parts is pretty dang nice, you know, compared to how you smell.

That’s our tactic anyway. That and make sure we have plenty of food to distract you. And beer.

These days, as true rural North Dakotans do, I’m using that garage and my back deck as extra cooling space for the piles of holiday goodies that don’t fit with the boxed wine in the fridge or full beef and two deer worth of venison in the deep freeze. It’s a perk to have the great outdoors serve as your personal, endless walk-in freezer — that is until a raccoon gets away with a bag of your homemade fudge, ribbon and all. True story.

And I bet my chiropractor doesn’t have one epic tale that involves his wife letting a wounded chickadee into their house to have to call him for backup to help get the fully recovered (and quick) little thing out of her Christmas tree… and then off of the curtain rod… and then out of the Christmas tree again, and so on and so forth until her husband finally finds his fishing net, thick gloves and motorcycle helmet.

Me and my people? Well, you could replace the chickadee with a bat, a chipmunk, a mouse, a barn swallow and another couple stray birds and you would have about the same story across the board, at least a few times a year.

Yes, the day to day looks a little different out here in the wild, but it doesn’t stop us from trying our hardest to keep as civilized as possible, even if that looks like mowing over cow pies, making the robin’s nest in the front dormer part of the decor and kicking the deer carcass the dogs drug home off the driveway on our way to help our holiday guests with the pies.

The fact that we have more mud than concrete and that the UPS man has been stuck in our yard multiple times this year is overshadowed by the whole beautiful wide-open spaces thing. And the fact that we have plenty of it to keep all our ponies.

And this time of year, if we get a fresh dusting of snow, it does make the holidays seem romantic. Couple that with the fact that we hoofed it across the winter prairie to cut our own cedar Christmas tree to stand tall and sparkly in the corner of our ranch house and, well, we might have a chance at making that chiropractor/dentist jealous.

At least that’s what I was thinking last week while dressing my young daughters up in their holiday best. The floor was swept, the garland was hung, the elf was on a shelf somewhere and I was feeling like I was in a freakin’ Hallmark movie.

Fully prepared to find myself under some magical mistletoe somewhere, overwhelmed by the sweet voices of my daughters singing “O Christmas Tree,” we all stopped in our Christmas socks when we heard a giant crash.

Glass shattering. Whoosh. Smash.

And timber. Down it went.

“Oh Christmas $*#^.”

Our Christmas spirit was too much for the tree. Again.

“Shoulda tied it to the wall!” I called out to my husband from upstairs, fully aware that phrase has likely never been uttered by the dentist’s wife.

And neither has “The raccoon got my fudge.”

Or, “There’s a chipmunk on the curtain rod!”

Merry Christmas. I hope you got some nice things, because we sure can’t have them around here.

Live Christmas Eve Eve Concert

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We’re excited to go LIVE from the ranch on Christmas Eve Eve, to sing some of our favorite Christmas tunes with you.

Tune in here https://www.facebook.com/veederranch/live/ at 7 PM Central Time today, December 23rd~

If you can’t get it here, find us on facebook.com/veederranch.

Merry Christmas!

The injury tally

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Family injury tally

“How many bones have you broken?”

“That I went to the hospital for?” my husband asked, sitting on the edge of the bed pulling off his socks for the day. “Hmm, let’s see…,” he replied, counting quietly to himself, going through the Rolodex of close calls and yelps, jump-backs and limp-aways.

“Three, four, five, six, seven… eight… at least eight… nine…”

“Nine is the number?” I try to confirm.

“Nine for sure. But that’s not counting when I think I broke a toe, or all of my fingers. I broke three ribs and a shoulder blade, both thumbs, at least once… pretty sure I broke this thumb twice,” he examines his body, feeling around for the aftereffects of 38 years of a life spent about as rough and tumble as you can get without serious consequences.

“What about your nose? I think I’ve broken my nose,” I declare rubbing the bump incurred from a heavy sled catching a famous North Dakota wind gust when I was 10 or 11.

“Yeah. Pretty sure I broke my nose too, but I never went to the hospital or anything official. Unofficially? I think I’ve broken something on me 15 or 16 times…”

That’s my husband, currently nearly recovered from his latest injury incurred when a cow kicked him right below the chest, sending him and his head flying into a metal panel fence, ringing his bell just long enough for him to scramble to the top of it, wake up and wonder how long he’d been dreaming.

It wasn’t pretty, and we don’t bounce back the same way we used to, the two of us accident-prone and together long enough to measure time based on our injuries.

Like when we took turns sitting out for gym class during our eighth grade year, dangling our legs off the stage — him with his arm in a sling from taking a three-wheeler through a giant anthill, then me in boot from misjudging my landing off a small cliff to the lake on my birthday.

Then there was the broken finger from a run-in with a bull in a chute that had me flipping off the world while getting out of typing class and piano lessons. Add that to the broken foot in sixth grade and the broken arm in seventh grade and, you know, the recent cancer thing, and I take the title for more time spent in a cast. And more surgeries.

Not that it’s a contest or anything…

Anyway, we got to counting because we had our first experience taking one of our offspring to the emergency room last week. And while we’ve both been hurt pretty bad in our lives, none of that compared hearing our firstborn scream the scream and cry the cry. And nothing cuts a Zoom meeting short quite as quickly as rushing upstairs to find your husband with one hand digging in the first aid kit and the other holding a tiny chin together.

“We need to go to the hospital,” he said calmly while I ran through a quick cost estimate on what it would take to bubble wrap every corner in the house, leaving enough left for both daughters’ entire wardrobes.

And so off we went, dropping 3-year-old Rosie off at my sister’s along the way, much to her dismay. She wanted some blood and a trip to the ER, too (competitive in every way — another story for another day).

Yes, I guess it was about time we hit that parenting milestone. And little Edie came out of her chindive into the sharp corner of the stairs with a few chipped teeth and glued together like one of her art projects left on the kitchen table. Life’s good. Thank goodness.

And if scars don’t make us stronger, at least they give us a story or two. Judging by their genetic makeup and the fearless way our daughters fly through this world, they won’t be short on broken bone tallies and battle tales.

As for their father and me? Well, we’ll just be over here praying that they bounce better than us.

Yeah, that’s lipstick…not blood. Keeping it glamorous as usual.

The comfort of Christmas Rituals

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The birthdays are over and the Christmas season has officially arrived at the ranch. I’m currently writing this under the boughs of a giant cedar tree that is taking up the entirety of my living room, lit up and sparkling in the dark and quiet of an early morning, where not a creature is stirring — yet.

Give it 20 minutes…

And there are things that have been ugly about this year, but this tree isn’t one of them. It’s one of the best we’ve found on our annual tradition of scoping out the prairies and buttes of this ranch to bring home the merry. And when I say scope out, I mean heading to the tree Papa Gene found for us way back in June as part of his cowboy Papa duties of keeping an eye out for us as he rides every corner of this place in the warm seasons.

And how does he give accurate directions to a random, but beautifully proportioned, cedar tree? Like this: “You know that bald knob in the east pasture? (There’s like a thousand bald knobs in the east pasture, but anyway…) OK, take the road through the Pederson pasture, on that side of the crick, there’s that bald knob of a hill at the fence line in the corner of the east pasture and Altons… you know, where so-and-so shot that nice buck a few years back…”

We usually find it, but then again, we usually take him along, in blinding blizzard-style winds or, this year, under a beautiful pink and orange sunset sky. We wore our Santa hats, loaded up in the side-by-side and sang “Jingle Bells” all the way there and all the way home, really getting into the spirit of it all, grateful for the nice weather and the jolly task ahead of us blowing the dust off of our Christmas totes, untangling lights and sorting through all the old ornaments we’ve acquired through the years.

It’s a process, you know, the holidays bringing with them comforting rituals I think we’re all more than ready to partake in, in our own ways, across the country. For us, the cedar tree is at the center of it, a little piece of the prairie that’s so often overlooked, scruffy and homely, standing rugged under the perils of the North Dakota sky, getting its chance to shine under the gaze of adoring fans, warm and cozy in this house, like us.

And Christmas is going to look a little different this year for many, taking precautions, not able to include those we love the way we usually do. But I’m finding so much comfort and inspiration in those who are making the best of a hard situation, and trying to help where I can.

Which meant that my little family found ourselves helping to raise money, shop and decorate the courtyard outside of our local nursing home this year. Surrounded by inflatable Christmas elves, birds, pigs, a Nativity scene and of course a 10-foot Santa, my husband climbed a ladder, my neighbor untangled masses of donated lights and my girls waved to a man on the other side of the window, watching the staff and community scurry around to make a little quick magic come together.

And there are things that have been ugly and hard and confusing this year, but in these small gestures, these simple rituals of love, I have found so much profound good.

My sister over the hill

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My sister over the hill
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My little sister, her husband and their two young daughters have lived over the hill from us at the ranch for over a year now. When they sold their cute little home in town and moved into the cabin while they built a house out here, Alex was pregnant with her now one-year-old, her two year old was climbing the walls and neither one of us could have understood how much the two families would come to rely on one another in the coming months.

Not many people predict a cancer diagnosis, let alone a global pandemic over the horizon waiting to make us all feel isolated, helpless and utterly disorientated, but here we are, all more grateful than ever to have backup.

We celebrated my youngest’s third birthday last night, and this morning my little sister texted me: Let me know if your girls’ poop is blue from all that frosting!

Only a best friend/sister would want to know a thing like that, if only to laugh together about the absurdities of parenthood.

Being in the middle of this season of raising our daughters together is one of those unexpected gifts that all of those years of infertility struggles gave us. If my husband and I would have been able to start our family the way we thought we should almost fifteen years ago, our children would be babysitting their cousins instead of growing up alongside them like sisters, eating blue frosted cupcakes together in their leotards after gymnastics on Tuesday nights and fighting over baby doll strollers and Play Dough rolling pins. And while Alex wouldn’t turn down a couple babysitters living down the road, I think we all feel pretty lucky (not to mention outnumbered) around here.

And the thing is, while raising children on the ranch thirty miles from the nearest structured entertainment comes with so many blessings—the wide open spaces, the life long lessons, unlimited pet inventory and an abundance of big rocks and hay bales to climb—there’s plenty about it, especially as a parent of young kids, that can make you feel pretty isolated. 

Like when you’re in the middle of making supper for a hungry family and you realize you don’t have the main ingredient in your pantry. Like beans for chili or, in my case a few weeks ago, cheese for grilled cheese…

You just can’t have tomato soup without grilled cheese. Also, you sorta halfta have cheese….

Yes, my neighbor/ little sister is my extended pantry, sounding board, change of scenery, chicken nugget lunch time date, quick drop off point and, most importantly, a second mother to my daughters, which is my favorite part.

Because everyone needs a fearless backup who isn’t afraid to climb her own auntie/mom butt up to the top of the playground to retrieve your defiant screaming child while you have your hands full helping the other one take an emergency pee in the grass…

When my girls play “babies” together and neither one of them wants to be the daddy, they pretend they are aunties who live in the same pink house together because their husbands are out hunting or working, or, you know, they died….

Yeah, it can get a little dark in my kids’ pretend world. Alex tells me that’s normal, which is another reason I like having her around.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Rosie needs help on the potty and, frankly, now I’m curious.

Cheers to sisters/friends/family/shoulders to lean on in this crazy world of parenting. My wish is you have one down the block or right over the hill.