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Working, writing, raising kids and playing music from our ranch on the edge of the badlands in Western North Dakota

All the questions that will never be answered

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“Have you ever accidentally brought your ranch dog to town?” I asked the lady getting out of her horse trailer next to me at our county fairgrounds. I had just arrived to enter the girls and goats in their very first open livestock show and when I got out of the pickup, I realized that the goats weren’t the only animal that hitched a ride to Watford City that afternoon.

“Well, ugh, no, my dog just comes with me I guess,” she replied sort of confused while I realized that she was the entirely wrong audience for this self-deprecating banter. She probably had a corgi. Our eleven-year-old cattle dog, who has only been to town on vet visits, stood at my feet just staring up at me as confused as I was as to why he was there. His tail was wagging so hard it moved his whole body, because, while he knew he had made a mistake, there were also cattle here. And kids. And pigs and goats and sheep and all the interesting things he didn’t expect when he chose to leap into the back of the pickup on our way out of the yard, thinking we were going to do some ranch work.

“Well, his trip wasn’t planned,” I laughed and then dialed my husband to see if he had any ideas as to what to do with the dog now. “I’ll come and get him,” he replied, totally unphased but knowing the disaster this dog would be around fancy animals.

Photo by LG Photography (Look how fancy they are)

Have you ever received a text from that same husband on a sunny Sunday morning when you thought everything was going just fine so far, but then it quickly wasn’t? Because the text read, “You wrecked my pickup.”

Turns out pulling a little bumper-pull horse trailer with the tailgate down doesn’t end well, even if you were just moving it a few feet out of the way of the garage so you could go deliver the kittens to new homes in town before we leave on vacation in a few days.

Have you ever finished a complete two-hour set of music on a patio on a beautiful evening only to look down during load-out and realize the zipper on your jean skirt was down.

Was it down the entire time? Like, all the way down? Was my guitar at least covering it please Jesus? Did anyone notice?

These are questions that will never be answered, but they can be re-lived for the rest of my life at 3 am.

Have I reached a phase in my life where I’ve been the supervisor for so long that I’ve forgotten to supervise myself? Like, I forgot that I am the one who needs the most supervising, and that didn’t change necessarily with motherhood. But the responsibilities are greater. And the pickup, well, it’s a little more expensive.

I’m not going to lie here, when I assessed the tailgate damage, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I cried anyway. My level of being distracted is a bit out of control lately, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this working-mom-in-the-summer situation.  I think adding the cost of a new tailgate to camp fees and snack bills might have just sent me over the edge. I faceplanted on my bed. But I couldn’t stay there long because I had a gig in Medora that night and I had to get myself together (note to self: quadruple check my zipper).

On my way my little sister called me. “I have some bad news,” she declared. “Rosie had an accident on the trampoline and she broke her arm.”

“No!” I yelled in the Jimmy John’s parking lot.

“No, I’m just kidding,” she laughed. “The girls put me up to it.”

And then I laughed too. I guess it could always be worse.

But girls? We need to talk about what’s an acceptable prank around here. This mom’s nerves are shot.

The best of times, the worst of times: At the county fair

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When I was a kid I used to spend a week each summer down on the border of North and South Dakota on the ranch with my aunt, uncle and cousins during their preparation for the county fair. Now, my cousins didn’t do the lite version of the 4-H experience. Their version was a deluxe version of showing steers, sheep and horses, plus executing baking demonstrations, sewing projects and entering meticulous projects as static exhibits. My cousins won trophies. All-around titles.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this now because I have just completed my own experience being a mother of 4-H kids with livestock and horses and projects at the county fair. The entire four days I was in the livestock barn I was thinking about my aunt Kerry with a greater understanding about why she pulled my cousin’s braids so dang tight in the kitchen every morning before the fair. Because here I was,  doing the same to my oldest with a quiet, overwhelmed rage, running perpetually behind and trying not to pull her eyelids to her hairline in the process. Let me tell you, this 4-H stuff can be a county fair roller coaster, a lot more dramatic than the one you find at the carnival.

During Edie’s first hour in the show ring with her goats, we went from an experience where I entered her animal in the wrong class, resulting in a red ribbon for a goat who sealed the rough experience by leaping, jumping and flopping her way through the show ring.

Photo by Judy Jacobson

We got back to the pens and everyone was crying, including me. I felt terrible. But after a big hug from our goat show expert friend, there was no time to dwell, because it was time to show the whether, and my goodness if that little goat didn’t earn Edie a purple ribbon in her class, clearing up those tears pretty quick so that she could skip off into a full two hours of carnival rides with her best friend on a high note.

It was the worst of times and then it was the best of times and so it went…

Because our time in the show ring didn’t stop there as we continued the next day with the sale of that little whether, something I apparently hadn’t adequately prepared my youngest daughter for because she proceeded to go into a full-on sob for around an hour declaring to the entire livestock barn that she didn’t want the goat to become hamburger. I sent her up to the bleachers to sit on Papa’s lap for the rest of the sale and, well, guess who bought the goat? Edie exited the ring, and her friend called her over. “Edie, Edie, your grandpa bought Hulk. Now you can keep him!”

It was the best of times.

Rosie showing Hulk. Photo by Judy Jacobson

After the sale we had to rush home to beat the impending thunderstorm to scrub and detangle three ranch horses who didn’t know what to do with all the attention. We got them into the barn before the first raindrop hit. It was a 10 pm bedtime and  5 am wakeup call for the horse show the next morning and if you’ve ever tried to get a half delirious child to listen to instructions at 7 am about staying out of the dirt in her white shirt and watching the judges and setting up a horse without touching it while simultaneously keeping your cool when your child responds with “I know!’” when they clearly don’t know, well, then, we can talk about it over a drink at the Legion later. Because the kids don’t know. But by day three of the fair they are about as sick of hearing your voice as you are.


It was the worst of times.

But we weren’t done yet! Edie had one more task in the arena to show the judge how much she did know about showing her goat, which turned out to be more than I thought. A big smile and a blue ribbon later and we were back on top of the world with Hulk the goat. We were so thrilled it was all over we became delusional enough to think we should head to the state fair next month. I mean, we could keep the goat after all.

(Goat photos by Judy Jacobson)

But here’s the thing, we talk about all the lessons that the kids learn from an experience caring for animals, the heartbreak and triumph of competition in the show ring and the life lessons of selling them, but I think as a parent, I got just as many lessons in patience and perseverance, time-management and tongue-biting out of our first big county fair experience as my children did. Maybe more. Mostly, I learned that saying less is better and that our biggest and most important allies are other parents who have made the same mistakes before and the big kids at the stalls and in the ring leading by example and lending a hand (and a halter and baby powder and horn shining spray…) and showing them with patience and coolness about how it’s done. And then demonstrating how to smile and shake hands when it doesn’t go your way. And how to be humble when it does.

Photo by Judy Jacobson
Photo by Judy Jacobson
Cheering on the winner!

At the end of the week, I stood outside the ring and watched as all the 4-H kids gathered to line dance and two-step and play Red Rover while a DJ played music and helped them celebrate. Every single kid kicking up woodchips that Saturday night had overcome a challenge, helped a friend, wiped tears, and cheered for themselves or others at some point throughout the week. For all of them, there were highs and there were lows, tough competition, underdogs and heartbreak. But at the end of the day, well, they were dancing together. Some of them even danced with their moms, evidently forgiving them for the tight grip on their hair earlier that morning.  I looked over and witnessed a big kid putting down his crutches to demonstrate how to two-step to the younger kid standing in front of him. A teenage girl put my seven-year-old on her shoulders. My friend spun his wife around in a fancy jitter bug move I’d never seen them do before. A thirteen-year-old girl danced with her baby goat. Someone brought their bunny. The steers stood sleepy at their pens. The goats, sheep and pigs fell asleep to the drone of the music. I grabbed my daughters and husband and we swung each other around. The music played until midnight.

And we may not have won the trophies, but boy, it was the best of times

Remain Calm, it’s the County Fair

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We made it to the other side of County Fair Week, but this column was written on my living room chair while we were gathering all the projects and doing the last minute packing and paperwork.

I didn’t know what to expect our first year in the livestock show ring and Edie’s first year as a regular 4Her, but had a great fair, full of lessons and fun.

I’ll tell you more about it next week, but for now here’s this week’s column!

County Fair Week

It’s County Fair week and I’m writing this at 6 am between my first two sips of coffee and before I wake the girls up to get dressed and gather their supplies and their two goats to head to town for four days of trying to convince the judges that we’ve actually practiced leading these animals around every night despite the doe’s tendency to brace up, stick her tongue out and scream. And I know that was a long sentence to start us off here, but this is the vibe right now. Screaming goat. 

After spending two hours filling out the animal record books with only ten minutes to spare yesterday, I asked my daughters if they could just erase those past few hours from their memories because, turns out record books make us all want to scream like that goat. It’s our county fair spirit animal. 

On Tuesday we brought my daughters’ projects to town. My nine-year-old, Edie, is big enough to be a real 4-Her this year, which means it’s no more rainbow participation ribbons for her, but the chance to earn a blue, or, if the buttercream frosting lands right, a pink or purple. We spent the day before decorating cupcakes and making fudge and putting tags on jewelry and drawing and pottery and photography projects. I helped Rosie put together a cute little fairy garden complete with a duck pond, a bridge and as many tiny animals as she could fit and still include a geranium and then we left it under the eaves of the house that night during a thunderstorm that drowned those little ducks and whipped the pedals right off that geranium. And so, we did that project twice. (Cue goat-like sigh). Rosie made sure to tell the judge, all about it. 

And that judge (who’s our neighbor down the road) told Rosie that her fudge was better than Gramma’s and that might have made my daughter’s life, and she’ll certainly never let my mom forget it. “Gramma, maybe you should stick to Rice Crispy Bars from now on,” she joked to her over the phone. 

It’s County Fair Week and I think our community has more kids participating than ever. More goats, more pigs, more steers and more horses in the show since I was entered in the olden days, hoping that after her only shampooing of the year, my horse wouldn’t roll in the dirt before the halter showmanship . Which she did. Every time. And yet, that event remained my favorite. The girls are going to try their hand at showing these ranch horses for the first time this year. We’ve been practicing and brushing and loving on the animals in preparation, which is the most fun part. Taking them to town is the most nerve wracking. Because there’s nothing that tests your patience more than an uncooperative animal, because sometimes, even with all the practice you could fit in, things just don’t go right. But sometimes they do, and there’s nothing better. 

Yes, sometimes your caramel rolls win grand champion, but then sometimes they land face down in the parking lot on your way to the interview. Sometimes your steer is so tame he just lays down in the ring and you’re too little to get him up. Sometimes the chicken escapes your grip, and you have to scramble to catch it, but then you’re standing next to your best friend and the two of you get a kick out of telling the story for the rest of the week, and maybe years to come. 

Photo by Judy Jacobson

And  sometimes the two hours you spent in the kitchen with your mom trying to pipe perfect rosettes on your cupcakes creates such a sweet memory for both of you that your daughter says even if she gets a red she’s proud of herself and that makes you tear up a little for some reason, probably because it’s county fair week and the kids are growing up and now it’s 7 am and I have only had four sips of coffee and we are officially running late, per usual. 

Good luck to all the 4Hers this summer! May your bread rise perfectly, and your goats (and your mothers) remain calm. 

I used to take photographs

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I used to take photographs. Not just with my phone, but with a big camera I would tote around almost nightly on my walks through the hills or on rides through the pastures. I would sling it across my body as a constant reminder to stay on the lookout for the way the evening sunset makes the tops of the trees glow or creates a halo around the wild sunflowers if you get down low enough in the grass. There was something about having that camera in my hand that automatically transformed me back into the little girl I used to be out here. To have the task on hand to capture it  reminded me to look out for the wonder. 

I’m not sure exactly when I put my camera back in the bag and then up on a shelf to collect dust, but I’m pretty sure it was around the time the babies came. I documented my first-born’s every move with that big camera up until her ninth month or so. I know because I have a hundred-page hardcover book to prove it. But then technology turned my phone into a more convenient and quality option and then Rosie arrived and then the wandering changed to carrying one baby in a pack and pulling the other in a wagon down the gravel road. 

How fast this sight has changed

Lately I’ve been feeling farther and farther away from myself. Usually, this sort of ache is reserved for long winter nights, but for some reason, it’s creeping up on me in the change into summer, which has been notorious for snapping me back to myself. I haven’t planted a single tomato plant. The garden isn’t tilled. The horses need about a hundred more rides. My calendar is dinging with deadlines that feel impossible to meet and I find I’m feeling a bit frantic about making sure this summer teaches my daughters some things about responsibility with as much room for play as possible. 

Responsibility and play. I think that might be the never-ending battle we’re all up against. Can they possibly exist together in balance? If you have any sort of roots in ranching or agriculture, I can see you nodding your head along when I say there is never a time where you can relax without thinking you should be doing something more productive. 

Because there is always something to be done here. The barn needs to be torn down and rebuilt this summer and so does the shed. The siding needs to be put on the house and the deck needs to be rebuilt. The old equipment needs to be moved off the hill and we need to resurface the road to the barnyard. We need to rebuild the corrals and spray the burdock plants and ride fences and move cows, and also, we have that day job and softball practice for the kids and the county fair next week. We’re getting none of it done in the process of trying to do all of it. The feeling of being fragmented and frazzled and underprepared for everything is one I can’t shake. A walk to the hilltop to document the wildflowers is the least productive thing on the list. But maybe the thing we need most. 

Last week in our efforts to get the kids ready for the county fair, I took that old camera off the shelf and out of its bag. My sister and I signed our oldest daughters up to enter a photography project and it was time we got it done. We walked out into the yard and bent over the little patch of prairie roses in the front yard. I did a little speech about focus and timing and patience and light and looking around for things worth photographing. My niece pointed out how it would be best to crop out the cowpie under the wildflower photo and I said she was right. There is beauty growing right alongside the poop. We just try to focus on the beauty when we’re behind the camera. 

After the wildflower lesson we set our new kittens up in a little basket out on the lawn for a little photoshoot. Those four little fuzz balls were the star of the show for a good fifteen minutes while we worked on catching their best angles and fawned over how sweet they were.

The lawn was long and needed to be mowed. The tomato patch needed to be tilled. My office work was waiting, but I was too busy saying “oh how cute!” and “get a little lower, focus on their eyes,” and “oh my goodness the sweetness,” to think about anything else. I liked the way the world felt to me in the yard that day. 

I think I’ll leave that camera out and within reach this summer…

Kids in the Branding Pen

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Every year at the beginning of June a group of our friends from Bismarck and Dickinson load up and come to the ranch to help us brand our calves. It’s become a tradition for them to help in the pens as a way to say thank you for allowing them to hunt turkey and deer on the place throughout the years. The gesture and the help are thoughtful and appreciated, but it’s not an expected exchange. We would gladly have them out anytime for whatever reason. But every year for nearly ten years or so, they have been making it work, no matter how much or how little notice we give them. They wake up early, load up their kids and make the drive to sort, wrestle, ear tag and stand ready for whatever other task we might throw at them. And then, when the work is done, all ten or more of the kids run wild on the dirt piles and in the trees collecting ticks and dirt on their jeans, I serve up cookies and a couple big roasters of beef and then we take the kids for their favorite part: a ride on our horses. 

This year was no different. We called last minute, and our friends were there standing by the pens waiting for us at 8 am when we finally got the cattle gathered. Which means that a pickup-load from Bismarck had to leave their houses at 5 am and our friends from Dickinson cut their weekend fishing at the lake short and then, before they left that afternoon, they handed over a big bag of walleye that we fried up and devoured on Tuesday.

I was standing in the pen next to my friend who was running the ear tagger while her eight-year-old daughter, Olivia, was charged with marking the calves who received a vaccination. Her two sons were in the pens too, one spraying antiseptic on the castrated calves and the other now big enough to wrestle. My own daughters had abandoned their post of sorting ear tags and counting calves for some sort of game of pretend in the hills with the other kids and I had just looked up long enough to realize it. I told my friend that her daughter should join them. “She can go play, she’s helped plenty already,” I said, now embarrassed that our friends’ kids were busting their butts while ours ran wild.  

“I told the kids that this is our church this morning,” my friend replied. “Helping our neighbors, acts of service, this is what it’s about.”  

Her kids have been coming to the ranch for years, to help or to hunt or to play, since before her sweet eight-year-old daughter could walk and her boys were toddling around, fascinated by the trees and the wildlife, reminding us every time how special this place is and how lucky we are. At almost every visit our kids have wandered together to places on this ranch that my own kids barely frequent—the thick trees on the banks to the north of the house, the muddy patch of cattails in front of the dam, the old equipment on the top of the hill. When the boys were younger, after every visit we were left with a big pile of old bones and cool sticks and rocks as a collection on our front drive, little treasures they couldn’t keep their hands off. And when it comes to the animals, the horses and the baby kittens, and now, the goats, Olivia has never been able to get enough. She would outlast my daughters’ capacity for sitting horseback by hours, her smile stretched from ear to ear, falling in love with every horse on the place. This year it was no different, even in the heat of the day as we watched these growing kids navigate themselves in the saddle more independently than ever.  I looked at Olivia and wondered how we could fit one of these horses in her backyard in town. And if they would finally agree to take a kitten home. 

It might be the kids getting older, changing so much since the last time I saw them, that got me thinking how grateful I am for the reminder they provide us to not take this for granted. Eventually I got my own kids back in the branding pens for a bit to help, but the magic of the work doesn’t hit them the same way it does for these kids coming in from town once or twice a year. My hope is that I can raise them to appreciate it, to know how rare and important it is to care for a place like this, to stand side-by-side and share in the work, to bring out the big roaster of beef to feed our friends after they’ve put in the sweat alongside us at the end of the day, even if my youngest daughter eventually does run away to New York like she’s been threatening since she could talk and my oldest heads to the ocean. 

In the chaos of the branding pen I don’t know if my kids got the lessons they needed from us this year, but I hope they learned something from our friends about what it means to be there, to be reliable and to be good neighbors, happy to help.  

Mud puddles

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Have you ever had to pressure-wash the gumbo mud off the clothes and boots your children were wearing when they decided to go splash and roll in the giant mud puddle that had formed from a week of rain behind the dumpster in your yard? 

As long as I’m living and they’re not dressed for town, I will never deny my daughters full access to a mud puddle. I stood under the awning of our entryway to protect myself from the rain and in a matter of three minutes those girls had ditched their muck boots and socks on the wet gravel and had covered themselves from head to toe in gray mud and rain water. I felt an urge in myself bubble up to go join them, remembering for a moment what it was like to be that carefree, but remembered the laundry and the supper on the stove and turned back to the house. When does it happen? When do we wake up and become the person who denies themselves a mud puddle?

As I write this my daughters are sleeping under a giant pillow and blanket fort in the living room of their cousin’s house over the hill. Summer break has come to find them at nine and seven years old, right in the very fleeting sweetspot of girlhood where you have as much freedom as your bike and feet will give you. Or, in Rosie’s case, her little dirt bike which she used to recently to retrieve a doll at her cousin’s house so they could keep the game of school going. The rest of the girls suggested that they time her on the task, so it was imperative that she use her motorcycle. And let me tell you, the sight of her in her pink helmet with the American Girl Doll poking her head out of Rosie’s backpack, her hair blowing in wind on the way down the hill was an image of my growing daughter I hope I never forget. If I let her, Rosie would take that little dirt bike all over the countryside. As soon as she’s strong enough to pull that starting cord to start the motor herself, she’ll no doubt be off. Whether I’m ready or not, Rosie always has been.

Last week my husband and I taught our daughters the Jitterbug moves we learned in gym class when we were their age. In the kitchen after chicken dinner, we danced and twirled and never successfully got the spider down. When the weekend came, we brought them to the rodeo in town. We ate popcorn and laughed at the rodeo clown and cheered on the barrel racers and bronc riders and when it was over we headed inside to listen to the band.

My daughters and their cousins have always been the first to hit the dance floor, moving their bodies with the kind of abandon they use when approaching a mud puddle, jumping and spinning and laughing and singing. I stood next to my husband, and we watched as our oldest daughter, at the brave age of nine, take the hands of a boy from her class and show him what she learned in the kitchen a few days before.  

I looked over at my husband and wondered if I was ever that confident. So many times, in the raising of them, my daughters have made me wish that I could be more like them. I didn’t know that was going to happen. 

I grabbed my husband’s hand and I pulled him out on that dance floor. I got a minute or so into the song before he was stolen by a niece or a daughter for a spin or a flip and I happily gave him up to them.

They will never be this young again, but then again, neither will I. But who makes the rules on mud puddles and dancing anyway? We stayed way past their bedtimes to dance a few more dances because the next day they had nowhere or nothing they needed to be but seven and nine under the summer sun that is all too quickly drying up those mud puddles.

Rain Goats

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“What are you doing?” I asked my husband in the dark of our bedroom. He had his face nearly pressed up against the screen of the open window at the head of our bed. That day in May had reached record-breaking temperatures of over 90-degrees and we soon found out that our air conditioning was on the fritz. We had just switched off the heat a few days earlier, but there we were, laying on top of the covers under the ceiling fan before spring had even officially arrived. 

“I’m counting the seconds between thunder and lightning,” he said as another loud clap shook the house, bringing only noise and not a drop of rain.

As a volunteer fireman for a rural department, he’s found himself dropping everything and rushing to the pickup to answer a neighborhood call more than ever these days. With the high winds and dry conditions and the things he’s seen go up in flames, he understands that it could be us at any time. 

Down the road my dad still doesn’t have a rain gauge. He spends his mornings checking the calving pasture and worrying about the status of our springs and the levels of our dams and grass. You can have everything out here, but you have nothing if you don’t have the rain. And if dad ever buys himself a rain gauge, he’s certain it will never rain again. I feel the same way about umbrellas.

And it turns out, maybe there is some validity to those silly superstitions. Because what came next has been over a week of soaking rain that has left us with muddy roads, rushing creeks, full dams, green grass and nearly five inches of moisture and counting. And, when I needed to run with my daughter a quarter mile through a busy parking lot in a sideways downpour to get to my niece’s graduation ceremony, of course, I didn’t have an umbrella. 

Dad, who usually relies on us for the rain report was likely a bit smug to find that the bottom fell out of our gauge this winter. Maybe that’s all it took to open the skies, the absence of rain gauges and umbrellas on the Veeder Ranch. Could we be that powerful? 

“A God send,” Dad sent me a text along with photos of water rushing through the culverts in the Pederson pasture and the creek swollen to the size of the Little Missouri River. My daughter and I sat happily soaked in our seats, our hairdos wrecked, a little shivery but smiling as we waited to watch my niece officially become a teacher that morning.  

I texted our neighbor to see how much rain they had down the road, officially turning into my father right then and there. 

A few weeks ago we brought home two little goats to feed up and get ready for the fair. On the warm days we brushed them and shined them up. On the hot day we hosed them and shampooed them.

Yesterday, after looking at the extended forecast and their soggy little bodies, we decided their shelter wasn’t going to cut it anymore as the rain and chill continues. And so my husband and I arranged a goat transfer to the big barn that sounds simple enough in theory but looks like an hour of locating and moving hog panels, an unsuccessful crash course in halter breaking, two crying goats, one who just three minutes ago, successfully outran and outwitted a mom, a dad and a kid in the pen but is now suddenly unwilling to take another step, one kid standing on the road in the rain crying, one mom yelling “It’s ok! The goats are ok!” one dad yelling “Hurry up. Come here and help us!” to the other girl who, while splashing nonchalantly in a mud puddle got her boot so completely stuck that she had to take her foot out and use both hands to pry it free, which resulted in the sort of timber into the soggy ground that you can imagine before she gathered herself to sit with those two muddy, stinky goats in the side-by-side for their mile-long trip down the road to their new digs where we set up new troughs, a water bucket and a heat lamp that, oops, broke along the way, have to go get a new one, be right back…

And while I’d prefer that this debacle doesn’t make the 4H record-keeping books, I will tell you, even in the muddiest and soggiest of the situation, we never once cursed the rain. And the goats? Well, they perked up right away in that warm and cozy barn and I stand by my assertion that I’ll happily trade fire danger for goat transfer any day. 

If you need us, we’ll be standing next to the window saying things like “I wonder how much we’ve got?” and “We needed this,” like the middle-aged, superstitious cattle (and goat?) ranchers we are…

And I never wanted to leave again

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My husband and I spent a brief time living in western Montana when we were first married almost twenty years ago now. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I reach back for a memory there of us and our big brown lab who was just turning from puppy to real dog, maybe sort of like our marriage. 

We chose the mountains as a challenge to pick a spot to live and that sounded adventurous before we completely settled down at the ranch. We had been married the year before and my husband needed to finish his college degree after spending as much time as a man needed as a roughneck in the oil fields. I had been touring up and down the Midwest, particularly the interstates and state highways of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. I would take my husband with me when his four days off aligned with my time on the road. Our honeymoon, for example, was spent in Redfield South Dakota, a tiny town of 2,000 just south of Aberdeen. I had been hired to perform at a company picnic and so off we went for four hundred miles, nearly running out of gas when we miscalculated the distance between towns. 

We could have been in Jamaica like normal newlyweds, but on our way home, we stayed at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo to be fancy and bought a new refrigerator and microwave at with our wedding money only to discover they were much too big to fit in the tiny ranch house where were living. So, we sold them to his parents. 

Living together as husband and wife in my grandma’s tiny house next to the red barn on the ranch where I was raised when we were so young made us feel uneasy, I think, only because we wondered if it might be too good to be true. We couldn’t possibly be here already; with jobs and bills and the brown lab puppy I bought for him for his birthday. If we stayed here for the rest of our lives, would we grow to resent it? Would we blame every mistake and wrong turn and unsettled argument on the fact that we never spread our wings too far together? What if we became unhappy? Would there be a way we dared blame it on the ranch and the small town that raised us and pulled us back? 

And so, we narrowed it down to two choices. Wynona, Minnesota because once I sang there and brought my husband along and we visited a cute coffeeshop and walked along the river and climbed to the top of a bluff and we liked how it looked like a movie scene from far away, even in the ugly and brown part of March. And then we went to Wabasha and watched the bald eagles and toured the famous restaurant and places that inspired the 90s movie Grumpy Old Men. We got a kick out of all of it. And Wynona had a college with the right program.

And so did Missoula. We hadn’t been there before, but as prairie kids we romanticized the mountains and so that’s what won. Seems like the mountains always win. Who could argue with a college credit in snowboarding and professors who wore Birkenstocks before every teenage girl in the country wore Birkenstocks. We brought our dog, and I brought my guitar and I doubt we had too much else. Maybe a bed and my mom’s old leather couch. We found a cheap place to live, and I found a job and he went to school and we looked for places to find ourselves in the mountains every night and every weekend and we wanted to love it. And maybe we did a bit. But looking back on it now it seems like we spent most of our time trying to climb out so we could see the horizon and the weather coming. So we could get away from the endless swarm of people looking to be found too. 

My favorite hiking spot was the bald face of a mountain outside of town where nothing but prairie grass grew and the trail was cut like a switchback the way the cows and deer and elk would do it at home. There were no surprises there. I could see the sky. 

I lost my first pregnancy in that little condo in Missoula. My husband had already moved back to North Dakota to take a job offer and I stayed behind with the dog and nothing but an air mattress and a suitcase left in the space. It wasn’t time for us to be parents. We were not ready. But it didn’t feel that way when I was alone and wailing. My dad came to get me, my husband couldn’t leave. I protested. I’m like that lab, when I’m hurt I want to hide out under the deck and be alone. 

And that was that. We gave it a year for the mountains to enchant us. But nothing compared to the place that loved us first. After the long trip home, I climbed to the top of my own hill. It wasn’t a mountain, but the view was better. I cried the cry of someone who had lost something. I cried the cry of relief. I cried the cry of uncertainty. I cried the cry of being loved. I cried the cry of being home. 

And I’ve cried that cry a thousand times since, but I’ve never wanted to leave again…

 

She Chose Us-Mother’s Day

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I like to imagine my mother before I knew her–before she became a mom for the first time to my big sister and wife to my father. I like to imagine her long straight hair, jeans that hugged her ballerina legs, her high heels clicking along the pavement on her way to a job she was good at, her tan skin on elegant arms that opened out wide to the world.

Because it was those open arms that brought me into my world. A world with gravel roads, cattle grazing in the yard against the backdrop of clay buttes. One I’m certain she never pictured herself in.

I like to imagine her this way, young and in love and willing to sacrifice the life between city streets, the life she was familiar with, for a man in a band with wild, black hair wearing a suit with cowboy boots and looking displaced in that city where they met–ready to bust out at the polyester seams, saddle his horse and ride out on the interstate toward home.

I like to imagine him, my father before he was my father, enamored by a woman with quiet confidence and an aversion to practical shoes. A woman who was fine on her own raising her daughter, but might be convinced, if treated with the kindness and respect that she deserved, to go with him to live in a place that require more practical shoes.

I like to picture that she pulled on her boots and listened to her new husband’s dreams of cattle and horses while she searched for work, taught dance classes in the nearby small town, had two more daughters and watched us grow and get our hands dirty and tangle our fuzzy hair in the wind. She cheered us on at small town rodeos, tended to broken arms, made makeshift habitats for pet turtles in her roasting pan, gave advice on cheerleading moves, helped with 4-H projects and bought us pretty shoes, no matter the dirt and mud we drug into the house on our boots.

And while she drove one daughter with ballerina aspirations to dance lessons 75 miles away, sent one to ride horses and sing her songs on stage and scheduled the other for basketball and volleyball camps around the state, I imagine her grabbing little pieces of her heart and handing them quietly off to her daughters…

Her pointed toes, blue eyes and beauty she slipped to her oldest in her mug filled with hot chocolate on her way out the door.

Her honesty, determination, quick wit, strength and social graces that exist within my mother flew out of her mouth and attached to her youngest daughter during an argument about boyfriends or clothes or parties with friends.

And to me, her middle daughter, the one who has been so convinced that I had nothing in common with her, she gave a gift of encouragement, belief in dreams and understanding of big emotions. But most of all her sacrifice and acceptance of a world she had to grow to understand and appreciate has been her greatest gift to me because it became my home on a landscape I will always belong to.


But for all that she’s given, through snakes and skunks making their way into her house, through thankless jobs, burned tuna casseroles, drought and dust storms, drained bank accounts and late nights waiting up and worrying, my mother has held on to the best parts of herself:

The beauty queen parts, the graceful selfless parts. The life of the party, the giver of the most thoughtful gifts. The big sister, the caring daughter, the understanding wife parts. The organized and impeccably clean and always prepared (even when 30 miles away from the nearest grocery store) parts.

The parts of her that have always known what is best for her family. 

So, yes, I like to imagine my mother before I knew her, before she was my mother. I like to imagine her with all that love to give, all that joy and all those dreams and talents with the world at her delicate fingertips.

Because of all the things and people she could have belonged to, all of the places she could have laid her heart down, she chose to lay it here.

She chose us and for that we are the luckiest.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and moms everywhere.

Spring things

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We’re in the thick of calving these days on the ranch. Little black specks on the hillsides and in the draws are arriving like little beacons of hope with the crocuses. 

For several years we have calved mostly pure black animals, but with the addition of Herford bulls in the program this year we have more black-white-face babies than we’ve had since I was a kid.

My dad, who is out in the pastures several times of day keeping an eye on things, will occasionally text me photos of the new arrivals proving that he’s as delighted as the children are about the speckled faces and, also that you can be an almost-70-year-old rancher and still be enamored with the process. He took my daughters out for a side-by-side drive through the herd and gave them an in-depth genetic lesson about color patterns and recessive genes. They catch on quickly to those sorts of things, their little minds like sponges ready to memorize. I wish I had retained that skill, mostly to remember all the names they have given the new arrivals. Because when you have black-white-faced calves instead of the standard pure black, you can suddenly tell most of the babies apart! And so, naturally, they all get names. 

And so we have “Tippy” because he has a white tipped tail. And “Goggles” because he has two black rings around his eyes. And then “Patch” and “Spot” and so on and so forth. 

This weekend we will be building a little pen close to the house, down where my failed garden used to sit under the shade of the oak and ash trees. The girls are getting a couple of goats to show at the county fair, and we know nothing about goats except what we learn when our friend Brett comes over for a beer. We’re entering into real 4-H territory these days as it’s my oldest daughter’s first year being what we call a “real 4-Her.” No more Cloverbud rainbow ribbons. We’re pulling out the big books now and learning the rules. 

For her first assignment, before the goats arrive, she and her best friend are doing a demonstration on how to make homemade Play-Dough. They’ve spent a couple days after school making their poster board and rehearsing their lines. And, thanks to her friend’s mom, they will also be dressed the same–in matching t-shirts with the signature 4-H clover. And if you know anything about 8-year-old girls you know that the matching is the most fun part.   

Anyway, I saw the run-through last night and it’s the cutest thing, honestly. Key rural kid memory-making right there. We’ll see if they maintain the same level of squirrely-ness and giggles when there’s an audience present. 

Spoiler alert, they got a purple ribbon!

After the presentation is complete Edie will then move on to the most uncharted territory of all: The Clothing Review.  And if you don’t know what the Clothing Review is, don’t worry, neither do I. But I know it involves sewing. And modeling. Two things I am not built for. 

Because I have experience in the horse show, and I have wood-burned and latch-hooked and picked and identified every wildflower on the ranch in the name of a 4-H ribbon. I even completed an entire information board about beaver habitat that won me a trophy and sat in the office of soil conservation for a bit. But I have never touched a needle and thread without it making me want to bang my head against the wall. It’s only natural then that I gave birth to an aspiring fashion designer. So we’re making an outfit. From scratch, like we’re in Project Runway or Little House on the Prairie, depending on how it all turns out. And when I say “we” I mean Edie and her Nana Karen, who I cornered on Easter at the ranch, right before she was walking out the door. I had Edie ask her, “can you help me sew a skirt for 4-H?” And I’m so glad I was there to see the reaction on my mother-in-law’s face because it was clear that sewing a skirt with her granddaughter was absolutely the very thing she wanted to do most in the whole world.

“We could do a top too!” she responded immediately before declaring that she’s bringing over a sewing machine. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to give it to you!” 

If you need us, we’ll be at the fabric store. And the feed store. And calling Brett with goat questions. And up in the calving pasture naming new babies. A text just came through from my dad, we had a red one this morning and he is glorious. Wonder what they’ll name him?