I hope everyone has that one aunt or gramma or neighbor who has a coveted item they make and distribute to their loved ones that you all fight over.

In our lives, her name is Aunt Kerry and she comes bearing gifts. And those gifts are jars of her Aunt Emma’s Dills, a family recipe that she saved from being lost to the generations.

Aunt Kerry was out to the ranch last weekend to visit and make the delivery of her wares. She’s my dad’s big sister who married and relocated to a ranch near Lemmon, SD, but this ranch is where she grew up and learned to make those pickles from her aunt Emma or her mother in the tiny kitchens of the ranch houses where they raised kids and fed them and fed them and fed them.

I’m a woman who returned home, but growing up I wasn’t naïve to the fact that it was more likely I would become a visitor to the family ranch, rather than an inhabitant of it in adulthood. It’s because of the generosity of my extended family and their strong belief in this generational ranch that my husband and I get to raise our daughters out here. In my life, aside from the ten-or-so-year-stint-away during college and young adulthood, I’ve never really had to miss this place.

But I know Kerry has. And I’ve always been sort of taken by that kind of nostalgia and what that might be like for her, having grown into a young woman out here among these buttes and fields that shouldn’t have been fields, on the back of horses, in the milk barn and gardens and that tiny kitchen eating side pork and pancakes every morning with her little brothers until one day the time came and then suddenly she was just, away. I’ve never asked her if she thought she might return one day to live here. With two brothers behind her, I don’t think that was ever in the realm of thought the way it was allowed to exist in mine as the next generation. The story about a daughter taking over doesn’t happen as often, and less often still as the years tick and often split the family land. But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t always belong here.

I think back on my relationship with her, and I hope we’ve always made her feel like when she arrives home, she arrives to fanfare. And it’s not just because of the pickles and the homemade tomato soup and now, the gift bags full of stickers and candies and art projects she brings for her great nieces. It’s because, at least to me, and probably my dad too, it feels like a little missing piece of a puzzle comes with her too. Her mother’s good humor and warmth puts it back in its place for an afternoon. We feel the same way about their little brother too. Uncle Wade. A celebrity looking more and more like his father with each passing year.

I don’t know if this is going to come out right, but I’ve always believed we carry pieces of the landscape that raise us in our membranes. The dirt and the air and the pollen and the dust kicked up from the heels of horses and cows and fallowed fields become the very makeup of who we are.

Lately I’ve found myself homesick, not for this place, but for moments in time here. Ten channels on the TV and two on the radio. Summer days stretching long ahead of me. Oreos in the visor of grandpa’s feed pickup and grandma in her beanie with the ball on top driving as he shoveled grain out the back. Daily chores like rituals, like magic, like aces in our bike tires humming down the center line of the highway turning us into outlaws at only ten-years-old.

None of us can really stay. None of us can go back.

None of us can truly come home again.

I suppose that’s why we covet “Emma’s Dills” written in our aunt’s handwriting on the label of the Ball Jar, hand delivered with her laugh. I hope everyone has someone like that.
I hope you have it.