March | 2025 | Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

There’s ocean sand on the floor of my landlocked North Dakota home and seashells in a plastic cup on my kitchen counter. The smell of sunscreen and the ocean lingers in my laundry room as I let our vacation clothes pile up for a few more days, beach wear underneath dusty Carhartts underneath button-up shirts underneath spaghetti-sauced sweatshirts.

My 7-year-old has a little tan line on her shoulders, her skin kissed by a more tropical sun. Her sister is scratching at her flushed and flaky cheeks from a much harsher reaction to the same sun and surf.

“Once that saltwater hits, it’s gonna be a wake-up call,” my husband remarked as we boarded our connecting flight from Atlanta to Panama City.

Our daughters looked small and spindly under the weight of their bulky backpacks stuffed with books and markers, blankets and sizable stuffed animals that I realized were the completely wrong choice of companions for the trip. In their short lives, our daughters had yet to see the ocean, but that night they would have their chance under a darkening sky and a strong wind.

Dressed in their sweatshirts and long pants after a steady Florida rain, we would take them across the street and across the boardwalk and onto the white sandy beach, where they kicked off their sandals and ran toward the big waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

What a gift to be a kid with the chance to encounter the ocean for the first time. Its vastness and noise, its dangerous playfulness. Its relentlessness. Its saltiness.

It was too cold to swim, but after about five minutes of playing tag with the waves, our northern daughters pushed it far enough to be completely soaked by the chilly water. Of course. Just the day before I caught these two up to their knees in a sorta-still-frozen culvert puddle back home in our yard with their cousins, the chilly ocean was no match for them.

We’d been talking about our family trip to Florida every below-zero day on our way to school for the past month, and here they were, on the cusp of a week that would be filled with more wave chasing, pool swimming, roller skating, dolphin spotting, seashell picking, ice cream eating, beach baseball playing and more pool swimming than their little bodies could handle.

My mom booked this Panama City Beach house for our extended family vacation around the time she decided to close her retail store. I think it was a little bit of certain sunshine she could look forward to in a future that felt uncertain after that big change. And isn’t that one of the best gifts a getaway does for us? It becomes a beacon of hope among what can sometimes feel like a daily drudge.

And in North Dakota, January and February can definitely feel like that drudge. So finally getting to come together, my sisters and their families and my mom and dad, to shed our winter skin, hang out by a pool, make plans, eat too much, and snuggle up on a big couch all worn out and sun-kissed (or burned) at the end of the day is a gift we were so lucky to receive before spring turns into calving season and calving season turns into haying and construction season and 4-H and softball and all the great and busy things about summer in North Dakota.

And Florida … it was great. The sunshine and the pool and the big dinners and the dolphin island catamaran cruise and the beach and the waves that sent our spindly girls rolling, throwing sand down their shorts and yes, that pesky saltwater into their eyes. But when we asked them what their favorite part of the whole trip was, you know what they said? Playing baseball on the beach.

Which, I have to say, didn’t surprise me knowing kids in general. The idea that they had a chance to hit a little soccer ball with a stick with the attention of all their uncles and teenage cousin and their moms and grandma cheering them on from the lawn chair? That’s all a kid can ask for, honestly.

So, if you’re thinking a getaway that requires airfare just isn’t in the cards, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be. Maybe the only cost of taking a meaningful family break is your time and undivided attention.

And I guarantee the memories will linger longer than the sand we’ll be sweeping off the laundry room floor.

When I was a little girl, my favorite book of all time was “My Side of the Mountain.” It’s a classic, about a boy who finds himself living away from home in the wilderness of the mountains inside of a giant hollowed out tree. I can’t remember the exact story now or why he was alone out there, funny how those details escape me no matter how many times I went over the pages and marked my favorite parts. The parts where there were diagrams of how to build a fire with no supplies and something about a windmill and making a spear for fishing.

I still have the book buried somewhere deep in the rubble of the basement. It was one I could not give up to charity or to my younger sister. It’s sitting there among the books about horses and misfit dogs, prairie children and my other favorite, “Misty from Chincateague,” about two siblings who save money to save a rescued wild horse from an island.

I wanted to be these kids. I wanted to be the free-spirited girl who broke the free-spirited horse. I wanted to break the rules. I wanted to tame a wolf puppy, train a wild falcon to hunt, catch fish with a spear I sharpened out of a tree branch and exist in a faraway time where those things were necessary for survival.

Forget microwave popcorn and video games, I wanted adventure!

I’m sure I wasn’t unlike most kids at 9 or 10 or 11 years old. At that age most of us were lost in some sort of fantasy with little more confidence than we had experience at the real world. So I’d like to think that it wasn’t that unusual that as a kid who already lived about as far out in the middle of nowhere as anyone could live, I had convinced myself that I could survive out in the wilderness alone. Without a house. Or a toilet. Or my mom’s cheeseburger chowder.

In the evenings I would step off the bus from a day at country school, grab a snack, and head out up the creek behind our house. For months I would work on building what I called “secret forts” all along the creek that winds through our ranch. Looking back on it now, these forts weren’t that secret at all, in fact, you could probably see one from the kitchen window, but I was deep in my own imagination as much as I was in the oaks and brush that grew along the bank. I would identify just the right tree and use it as a frame to create a sort of tent-like structure out of fallen logs. And then I would begin the tedious process of locating and dragging fallen branches out of their place under overgrown vegetation and fallen leaves back to my tree to hoist them up to rest next to the last one I had managed to maneuver. And when it was complete I would lay down inside of it. And under the flawed “shelter” of fifty logs leaning on a tree and plan my next move. I would need a door. Yes. I could make it the way I imagined Huck Finn made his raft. I would need some rope. And a knife. I wonder if dad had an extra knife in his dresser drawer. I need some sort of blanket. Oh, and a fire. Of course!

I would be scouring the creek bottom for granite rocks to arrange in a fire circle when the sun sink down below the banks and I would decide I wasn’t quite ready to spend the night. Besides, I forgot to bring a snack and the wild raspberries weren’t quite ripe yet. Taking one last look at my creation and deciding to reevaluate the next afternoon, I would turn my back to it and follow the cow trail back toward the house where my little sister was likely lurking in the shadows, having found my path again, begging me to let her help next time. Begging me to let her in the fort as the sun gave off its last light and we argued and grappled until we could smell dad’s steaks on the grill or mom’s soup on the stove.

This was my daily ritual for months and one of my signature childhood memories. Eventually I gave in and helped my little sister build her own fort. A much smaller fort. Across the creek. Out of site. I thought I wanted to be alone out there, left to my own survival skills, but it turned out that having company was a nice addition, no matter how stubborn and annoyingly curious that company might be. So we built a tin-can telephone that stretched from my fort to hers and brought down old chair cushions from the shed, searched for wild berries, tried to catch frogs and minnows in the beaver dam and spent our evenings planning our next move: spending the night.

But we never did it. We never spent the night. Summer gave way to fall, and the leaves fell and covered the floor of our paradise. We would pull on our beanies, mittens and boots and trudge down the freezing creek to clear out the fire ring we weren’t yet brave enough to use. And then the cold set in and the snow came, and the neighbor girls called us to go sledding and our dream of being wilderness women collected snow and waited on a warmer season.

I can’t help but think about those girls on days like these when the warmer weather finally gives in and releases the snow to flow as wild water in the draws and you can smell the dirt again at long last. I get a call from my little sister. She’s driving our daughters home from town. “Can I steal your girls and bring them to the crick? The water is running, I want to take them to follow it.”

Ten-year-old me would be happy to know it, our little sister still just over the hill, a tin-can telephone call away, still following that crick and begging to be wild with us…