The Official Music Video for Red Barns and People Get Old has just been published. Please take a moment with this special and personal story about generational ranching and the hearts and land involved.
Thank you for listening and thank you for sharing with the people in your life who may see a familiar story in this song.
Red Barns and People Get Old: Written by Jessie Veeder Starring: Cody Brown, Carol Mikkelson and Rosie Scofield Special thanks to Patty Sax Directed by: Nolan Johnson DoP Editor/Editor: Steven Dettling Video by @quantumdigital1404
Recorded at @omnisoundstudios Nashville, TN Produced, Mixed and Mastered by Bill Warner, Engineered by Josh Emmons and Bill Warner
The window to our bedroom was open and in my dreams I smelled it and heard it falling on the oak leaves still clinging tight to the branches. In our bed, between my body and my husband’s, our youngest daughter slept. Sometime during the darkest hours of the night, she wedged herself there, as she usually does, on a sleepy hunt for her father.
She is still only six. Or, she’s almost seven! She should sleep through the night on her own by now! We go back and forth on where we land with this, but in the middle of the night when the child needs someone to hold on to, neither one of us feels the need to fight it too hard. She’ll be grown soon. The bed is big enough. She won’t need us like this forever. I pull back the covers and I let her in.
I woke this morning to my alarm singing. Last week at this time, the sky would have been pink with the sunrise. This morning it was black.
“It’s time to wake up,” I huffed into the dark as my bare feet searched for the floor.
“Did it rain? Or did I dream it?”
My husband rolled over to try to wake our daughter and told me it wasn’t a dream. I pressed my face to the window screen to smell it the way I smelled it in my dream.
Even with the rain falling, my sleep wasn’t restful. My mind woke my body to worry about bills and things I shouldn’t have said and the work I should have done by now. And then enter the state of the suffering in the world, then of people I know and love, and things I can’t possibly change. Not at 3 am. Not ever.
Why is the quietest part of the night the loudest in my head?
Last week I visited a tiny town in North Dakota to play some music for a special event. In my career as a touring musician, I’ve had the privilege of learning how so many rural communities choose to bring people together, on a blocked off Main Street, in a Legion Club steel building, in an old high school gym, in parks and on patios. I perch myself up behind a microphone to tell stories to people listening intently or to a room full of folks who just want to visit, my music the backdrop to their conversations about the weather, the hay crop, the football team, the latest local tragedy or scandal. I use the word privilege because I regard the opportunity that way, even when the night is long and it feels like no one is listening. I get a front row seat to watch it all play out, who’s refilling the punch bowl and swapping the casserole dishes. Who’s folding programs and is the only one who knows how to turn on the old sound system. Who makes her rounds to each table to say hello. Who sticks around after to put away the folding chairs. Who’s kid grabs the big broom when the room is all cleared out.
Usually, I’m sent down the road with an extra centerpiece or noodle salad or a bag full of sandwiches and plenty of kind words and “thanks for coming all this way,” sometimes apologetically, as if their community isn’t as deserving of a visit as any other community in this country.
The air feels heavy as the weight of an election year makes big waves, moving through our conversations, across our kitchen tables, streaming through our speakers, screaming in the street. I lay awake last night and wondered, after all my life experience on the road and working in small towns, why it’s easier to holler enemy than try to understand one another. We’re making rivals out of our neighbors. It’s unsettling.
If I’m being honest, I’ve written and re-written the next two paragraphs a dozen times. Because I’m not sure what to say next. Here’s what I chose: Maybe you too were up in the quiet hours of the night with a loud head and a heavy heart. Maybe you felt lonesome or helpless, even with someone lying right next to you. Maybe you stood up and walked to the kitchen to feed your body and look at the moon. Maybe you slept soundly and dreamed about rain. Maybe you didn’t sleep at all. And maybe, in the midst of your insomnia, your daughter crawled in bed with you because she needs to be close. She needs to feel safe and loved. She needs something to hold on to.
And maybe, in the most tumultuous times, we could be brave enough to consider she’s all of us…
When we were growing up my little sister and I would spend every minute the weather would let us out in the trees behind our house. We’d get off the bus, take a snack break and then we’d get out there. Because the creek and how it changed with the seasons was more magical to us than anything else in our world in the 90s.
My sisters and I are spread out pretty far in age. I’m in the middle of a lineup that puts my older sister seven years ahead of me and my younger sister five years behind me. I never got the bathroom to myself. Ever. But also, that age gap seemed to make things a little quieter on the ranch back then.
Now that my little sister and I are raising daughters close in age and right over the hill from one another, we find ourselves trying to re-live our childhood adventures with them. They’re not babies anymore, so we’re excited to take them down to that creek to follow it, wade in it, and help them float sticks and build little boats.
Just to give you a glimpse into what we’re dealing with here….
And so that’s why we found ourselves a mile or so in the back woods by a little beaver dam with all four of our daughters last weekend on a perfectly beautiful fall day. As usual, it took forty-seven years to get all four of them in their shoes and out the door at the same time because someone needed to pee, someone needed a new hairstyle, someone had a hang-nail and someone was already outside somewhere and we couldn’t find her. It’s either that or they are so deep in their own game of Barbies or Babies or Animal Doctor or Orphaned Children on the playground that convincing them to follow us into the woods takes a lot more prodding than we expected. And when we finally got them all together and moving the same direction, well, someone always has to pee.
Anyway, marching with four girls aged four, six, seven and eight out into the wilds of this place is a little noisier than when it was just me making up Disney-style songs and my little sister trailing secretly behind. Now, as moms searching for that same feeling of wonder and freedom, the two of us walk out into this magical and familiar world with our daughters and, well, yes there is singing, but think more like, “This is the Song that Never Ends,” only with words Rosie is making up as she goes along and also, like really, really loud.
“Look at these beautiful trees,” my little sister exclaims as her youngest daughter drags her long hair through a patch of sticky cockleburs. Her oldest picks up her thirtieth stick.
We have gone fourteen steps.
My eight-year-old, Edie, who has suddenly developed a plague that didn’t exist when we were in the house ten minutes ago, sneezes and a giant green snot string dangles ominously out of her left nostril. We have now gone fifteen steps. I gag and she sort of just stands there. Rosie screams “Snot Rocket!” and I give a lesson on choosing the right leaf because no one has a tissue. She chooses a giant piece of oak-tree bark.
We have now gone sixteen steps. Rosie’s gone 345, mostly up hill.
We stop for the youngest to pick up another piece of moss to add to her acorn and tiny stick collection. She asks her mom to hold it. She refuses. She asks me. I say yes, of course, because she’s my adorable niece.
Rosie finds a fluffy turkey feather. Edie finds another giant piece of bark that she intends on floating down the creek, but the creek is running pretty low and slow, so she’s saving it for the beaver dam. She asks me to carry it. I say no. She asks her aunt. She says yes. Because of course, she’s her adorable niece.
The breeze picks up and in the golden light of the morning the trees sway above our heads and gently sprinkle us with falling leaves and in that moment, we feel like we’re in a fairytale.
“SPOOKY, SCARY, SKELETON SENDS SHIVERS DOWN YOUR SPINE!” blasts from Rosie at the top of the draw.
The youngest falls down.
The seven-year-old has to pee.
We reach the beaver dam.
“Look at how the blue sky reflects on the water girls,” my little sister says as that same water spills over the top of Edie’s shoes. She flops the bark in the shallow end. It pops up and goes nowhere. She sneezes again and sits in the tall dry grass.
“I’m sick,” Edie declares.
“SPOOKY, SCARY SKELETONS SPEAK WITH SUCH A SCREECCCHHH!!!”
“Time to head back girls! Do you think you remember what way we came from? Follow the trail,” my little sister takes a cue and we watch three girls head the exact wrong direction.
Edie lays down. My sister and I look at each other and laugh weakly, hands full of sticks, we holler into the woods, “Follow us now!” and off we go, the magic and adventure follows us home…
I stand on my back deck and look up at the night sky. The air is still and cool, and the stars are twinkling among the shine of the Northern Lights. It’s a welcome sight, a sort of calm before the restless night of sleep I would experience when I lay down that night beside my exhausted husband.
Just two days before, white and gray smoke billowed and bubbled and raged ominously from that same horizon to the northeast of our house, the high winds pushing a massive wildfire away and in our favor and saving us from having to worry about evacuation or trenching around our home.
Our phones buzzed, warning us that everything between mile marker 138 and 148 on Highway 22, and one mile west and east on each side needed to be evacuated.
Our ranch is three miles west of mile marker 135.
Residents from Mandaree, the little town just seven or so miles northeast of us as the crow flies, were told to leave as rural firefighters and Black Hawk helicopters worked to save it. I could see them from my back deck, black specks moving across the sky, the thick gray plumes of smoke making those helicopters look like children’s toys. It seemed like an impossible task as the wind kicked up 70 mph gusts, snapping powerlines and wreaking havoc across the prairie.
Badlands Search and Rescue Screen Shot. Our house is the heart
Just an hour or so earlier that day, my friend 10 miles to the north of us looked out her kitchen window and saw smoke burning the corrals and old outbuildings of an abandoned homestead directly to the east of her. She called 911 in a panic.
All the rural firefighters she knew, including her husband, including mine, including dozens and dozens of other friends and community members, were fighting fires five or so miles to the north of her by our church on the other side of the Blue Buttes. She hung up with dispatch and called all the neighbors she could think of who could possibly be in its path and then loaded her kids in the car and sat helplessly watching the grass and trees catch fire.
The night before, around 2 a.m., all volunteer first responders who were available in our community were called to the scene of a fire that had erupted near the town of Arnegard. During the night, the winds had picked up to 50-60 mph, and it would take three days to get that fire contained while more and more resources were deployed and more fires sparked and spread.
That one fire was more than enough to handle, but in the next 24 hours, I heard my husband on the other end of the phone line say in his steady, stern voice: “All of western North Dakota is on fire.”
The Elkhorn fire, the Bear Den fire, the Charleson fire, the Arnegard fire, the Ray fire, the big ones … they all have names to us now, but in the heat of raging wind and black walls of smoke, to my husband and those on the front lines, it felt like everywhere they turned, there were more flames.
I looked to the north of the house, the east, the south, nearly every horizon was billowing smoke.
“It feels like we’re surrounded here, Chad,” I told him, hoping he had more information than I did that would reassure me that our place wasn’t in danger.
“Well, you are. You are surrounded,” he replied with a reality that many many more were facing, even more dangerously than us in that very moment.
I learned that sitting in our house with a direct line to social media reports from neighbors and emergency management offices, I might have had more information on the scope of the fires than the men and women focused on moving inch by inch in the black of the night and relentless howl of the wind, fighting for homes and land and the livelihoods that depend on it.
“I have never seen anything like this in my life,” my husband said as he drove his truck from one fire location to the next, trying to fill me in as best as he could when he could. “We can’t see anything out here, it’s like a black wall of smoke and dust. It’s absolutely out of control.”
I stood in the house, helpless and anxious. We had company from Bismarck. They had come to fill an Elk tag, but our fun weekend turned on a dime and we were left to distract one another, to feed one another, and to analyze and speculate and wait for the clock to hit 10 p.m. when the weather report promised a calmer wind.
My dad took to the hills to watch for any signs of new flames close to us. I watched my phone for any more updates. I called and texted neighbors. I worried about them. And then I worried about us. And then I worried about my husband and everyone out there in an unprecedented situation, doing the best they could against Mother Nature, who turns from companion to rival at the suck of a breath.
My friend Megan Pennington took this picture of Keene Volunteer Firefigbters watching and putting out flare up’s around her house the day after the fire
The winds did die down around 10 p.m., and it was close to 1 in the morning when my husband called and said he was headed home for now. My dad came off the hilltop. We all looked at my soot-covered, exhausted husband and waited for what he wanted to tell us.
The next day and the day after that, he was out again, mopping up flare-ups, assessing the damage, fixing the trucks, checking in. Some men have barely left the fire sites, too nervous to look away as the repercussions of a wind shift could put their houses in danger.
As I write this, some big flames are still raging in the badlands at the Elkhorn fire, putting ranches at risk and the National Guard to work. The Bear Den fire is contained but still burning. The wind shifts and dry conditions keep the first responders and ranchers watching the hot spots and continuing to put out flames. The helicopters land and take off and scoop water from Lake Sakakawea. The planes dump.
The Elkhorn Fire raging near the Best Ranch. Photos by Vawnita Best
All across western North Dakota, a person will tell you their own story about these fires for years to come. Two men who lost their lives won’t get the chance. At least four homes were lost. Livestock were lost and killed. Early law enforcement reports indicate nearly 90,000 acres in Williams County were destroyed, with more in the surrounding counties.
My husband comes home from the fire hall and steps out on the deck next to me to watch those Northern Lights. His hair and skin smell like smoke and ashes. The light of two helicopters moved across the sky, little beacons of hope among the stars.
Photo out our back window on Saturday of the Bear Den Fire raging just five miles or so to the North West of the Ranch. Chad and countless other first responders, ranchers and community members spent hours and hours in 50-70 MPH winds trying their best to battle the dangerous spread.
On Saturday we had wild fires rage across Western North Dakota. Over 100,000 acres of cropland, federal land and private ranch land has burned. Two fires, one just to the northeast of our ranch surrounding the town of Mandaree, is only 40% contained as of yesterday. The National Guard has been working to contain this one and one in the badlands to the south west of us for the past five days. Homes, pastureland and livestock have been lost. Worst of all, two lives were taken by these fires, men who were trying to fight them in the area around Ray, ND. Please send us prayers for rain. And if you feel inclined, here’s a link to help aid the ranchers who lost so much this past week.
The North Dakota Stockmen’s Association and North Dakota Stockmen’s Foundation have teamed up to support cattle-ranching families in North Dakota who have suffered catastrophic losses in the horrific wildfires. In addition to their own $50,000 gift, the NDSA and NDSF are inviting others to join with them to provide financial support to help these ranchers rise from the ashes and rebuild their herds, their homes and their hope. Checks can be sent to the North Dakota Stockmen’s Foundation with “Out of the Ashes” written in the memo, or credit card gifts can be made at https://app.givingheartsday.org/#/charity/1576. The NDSA and NDSF will distribute 100% of the money raised to the victims of the wildfires through an application and nomination process. Applications will be available later this month. The NDSF is a 501(c)3.
The latest information about the state of these wildfires can be found here
Many of you have checked in on us as this news has developed. We were lucky as the wind was favorable to blow these fires away from our homes and the ranch, but many of my friends weren’t as lucky. And with the dry conditions and hot spots still looming, we’re not out of the woods until the snow falls. Thank you for your concern and thank you to the first responders who are working to keep us safe.
With that, lets move on to a more light-hearted predicament we found ourselves in last week on the ranch. I write about it in last week’s column:
Hegotstuck…
Last week I looked out the window to find my husband walking through the home pasture gate in the middle of the morning, like I do when I take a little stroll except my husband hasn’t taken a little stroll in his entire life. So naturally, I could only conclude that something did not go as planned.
And probably, more than likely, the man got something stuck somewhere…
Around here, no one really gives anyone guff about being stuck, because you never know when it could be you. Because, inevitably, it’s gonna be you.
But the man, he walked almost two miles in pretty cold 50 mph winds just to avoid the call to me or his father-in-law for help. I asked him why he didn’t use his “phone a friend” option and he said a guy who gets himself stuck so stupidly probably deserves to walk a good mile or so, you know, as a sort of lesson or punishment or something.
But walk-of-shame or not, he did need help, so he rounded up another side-by-side and me, his wife, who was wearing the entirely wrong outfit for traipsing around in 50 mph autumn winds miles from civilization (which is almost always my outfit choice in times of impromptu crisis.)
When I tell you this is not side-by-side or ATV country, I mean it. The denial of this fact is what lands us all in the sort of stuck-up-to-the-floorboards predicaments my husband found himself in that day. Because we live on the only quarter of North Dakota that isn’t entirely flat. We live where the hills drop down to form coulees ripe with springs and creeks that hold water and mud at different levels at different times depending on the season or the mood just to keep it sketchy and iffy and dangerous. And in those coulees the thorns and the brush patches thrive and twist and tangle over cattle and deer trails, letting enough light in to make you think you can make it through without a tree branch to the face, but usually you can’t, especially if your little sister or big brother is riding in front of you, scheduling that branch release to land just right.
Anyway, you can avoid the brush and the big canopy of oaks and ash trees if you keep to the hilltops, but you can never avoid the rocks and the holes and the craters on the edge of the badlands, so this is why we ride horses mostly. And, well, honestly, we’ve had to pull a good handful of horses out of thick mud and ravines in our days too…
But we forget all this somehow when we think we’re just gonna go check something quick, as if the fact that we’re in a hurry changes the landscape in some way. And that’s what my husband was doing that day he hopped in his all-terrain-vehicle and decided to go look for a missing bull, you know, real quick.
“What were you doing?” I asked him when het got into the house, cheeks flushed and a bit winded from the ordeal.
“Yeah, I’m stuck. Like, way back east.”
And I tell you, between being raised by my dad and being married to my husband and being, well, me, I have seen a lot of serious stuck-in-something-or-other predicaments and so I wasn’t surprised to find that this most recent one was no different. A classic case of “the crick bottom looks dry enough” and then, surprise, surprise, it gives way to the stinkiest, stickiest, black mud that Mother Nature makes. I know. I’ve been here before myself, I just happened to be a little closer to home.
And I tried not to say anything. I did. I stood there and took my directions as he hooked one bumper to the other with a random old calf roping rope that was in the back of the second ATV. I wondered to myself silently why on earth my husband didn’t bring a tow strap or a chain since he knew the task ahead of him. But I didn’t say anything. Not even when he instructed me to gas it but try not to spin the tires, but gas it, but try not to spin the tires, but gas it, and we went on like this not moving a nudge for a good 30 to to 60 seconds before his makeshift tow-rope snapped.
Then I couldn’t hold it. I had to ask, why. Why no tow strap? Why no chain?
Because he thought he had one.
Fair enough. Been there. But I was certain then that both of us would be walking home in no time and wished I wouldn’t have worn these stupid leggings and no wool cap like a dummy.
So then, because I couldn’t help myself looking at the cliff-like, brush tangled terrain in front of the stuck-side-by-side, I had to add ,“Where were you gonna go if you actually made it? “
I didn’t get a real clear answer on that one…
But the man is nothing if he’s not determined. So out came the shovel (he did remember that), a bit more rearranging of the rope, a bit more shoveling and five or six more “gun its” and well, what ‘do ‘ya know, we were out.
So off we went, me following him following our tracks back to the house. It was a miracle! I never doubted it! Sorta felt like a date then. I wonder if he learned his lesson…
And now, because I am publishing this for you and Jesus to read, I suppose to be fair, some day I’ll tell you how I got the side-by-side stuck between a tree and the dog kennel in our yard this summer. Well, my side of the story at least.
Stay safe out there. If you need me I’ll be hosing the black mud off the side-by-side and my stupid leggings…
My husband and I spent an entire Sunday cleaning out the closets and drawers and nooks and crannies of our bedroom in our loft in an effort to officially move into the new bedroom he built for us on the main floor of the house. This room was part of a home addition project that went on longer than…well…let’s just say babies have been born and have had their first day of school in the time it took us to finally paint the walls.
But the fact that I won’t have to climb the stairs to our bedroom with my laundry when I’m 90 and my knees are bad is something I will thank us for when I’m 90 and my knees are bad.
For over ten years we’ve been working on and living in a house that we have no plans to ever move from. And so, unlike other families, we haven’t had the whole “moving house” excuse to force us to sort through my husband’s 30-year t-shirt collection or deal with my need to have two or three pairs of boots in every color. I think the last time we tackled that project was when we moved into this house over ten years ago.
Anyway, since it should be obvious that absolutely none of my boots need to be given or thrown away, let’s talk about my husband’s inherited traits that beckon him to save things like tiny little washers and screws, bits of wire, one thousand stray plumbing parts, non-working batteries and every feed store and oil company ball cap he was ever gifted throughout his entire adulthood. The instincts he has to fight when presented with the idea that maybe he isn’t a polo-shirt kind of guy even though he owns four to five perfectly good polo shirts is distressing.
Dear Husband, you never wear these. Well, ok, maybe that one time we went on a cruise fifteen years ago. But maybe it’s time to let them go. They have collected literal dust while hanging in this closet. Maybe give the shirts to someone who spends his weekends golfing instead of fixing fences, water tanks and tractors. You are more of a snap-shirt kind of guy. Which is a good thing, because you currently own 325 of them.
Anyway, when it comes time for a great-closet-clean-out, I have implemented a system to help the poor, tortured soul. And it basically looks like me pulling out shirts and jeans so worn you can practically see through them, holding each item up so he can get a good view, giving him a beat to process his attachment, and then forcing him into a decision. Keep? Give? Toss? It’s easier if I’m the one with the garbage bags. And I don’t give him any pushback if he says keep. I have to remain an ally.
But truly, I must hand it to the man. He is as loyal as they come in the world, and that loyalty applies everywhere –even t-shirts. Which you can argue is a result of his low-key sentimentality, especially when you realize that he still has the one I bought him for his sixteenth birthday. Ask me someday about the pair of underwear he kept for long enough that the holes finally connected to turn them into a skirt.
Sentimental to the core. And a bit superstitious? Maybe.
Chad and the cat he doesn’t like
Anyway, lately my husband and I don’t spend long stretches of time together. With both of us working two to three jobs and running after our rapidly growing daughters, our idea of a date has turned into me riding along in the side-by-side to check water tanks without the kids.
And last Sunday, on a perfectly beautiful fall day, one of the last things I wanted to do was sort through piles of decisions and problems of our own making. But I caught my husband in a weak moment where he thought cleaning out the bedroom was a better option than cleaning out 85 years of stuff that has accumulated in the ranch shop, and so he joined me up there in my pursuit of a normal, tidy life.
And who knew moving dressers, throwing away three generations of cell phone boxes, flipping through half-read books and, eventually, piles and piles of t-shirts, would turn out to be a fun little exercise in reminiscing. We excavated that weird and worn “bear with the antlers” shirt he got from a thrift store in 1999 and suddenly we were back driving backroads in his Thunderbird. Two vintage camo-t-shirts that were his dad’s and he was twelve, bored in a hunting blind, waiting on a deer to walk by. Even I couldn’t let him part with those. Oh, there were plenty of plain ‘ol shirts in the pile, but when we came across one from a music festival or a band we loved, or a trip we took, we both agreed to keep those shirts, and we remembered to be grateful for it, this little mess of our own making…
Does this mean closet-cleaning qualifies as a date? In our world, probably.
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be tackling the bathroom closet, for the rest of my life…
I’ve been eating a tomato and cucumber sandwich almost every day for the past couple weeks. This year my tomato crop isn’t as prolific as past years, but they are tasty and there are plenty to choose from when I step outside my door and go rummaging and hunting under big leaves and stems. I send my girls to do the same some days when I’m busy doing the dishes or making supper and realize they are so much like me, never truly prepared for the bounty, dozens of tomatoes of all sizes weighing down the bottom fold of their little shirts.
The garden will surprise you like that. One day it will be all stems and tiny blossoms and the next you go out to find that forty-seven giant cucumbers just magically appeared overnight.
What a thing it is to celebrate the end of the growing season by hunting for ripe things in the cooling down of a late summer evening. The perfectly weird shaped carrot, the pearl white onions, the zucchini that is absolutely out of control. The picture-perfect tomato. It makes a woman feel like she’s accomplished something spectacular even if that spectacular thing was simply planting a seed.
If I’m being honest, this month the weeds have finally won the race to fall, but not enough to prevent those carrots from making themselves into the most perfect snack a kid could pack in their backpack on a Tuesday.
My little sister has been baking bread. I think I’ve told you this before. It’s a little magic trick she performs to ensure that she remains the favorite around here, and it’s working. Lately, on the weekends she’ll bring over half of a fresh loaf (because her kids get first feast of course!) and we will toast it up and spread it with a mixture of mayo and sour cream, (a trick I learned from a friend who makes the cutest little cucumber sandwiches on rye bread.) And on that spread, we will layer thin slices of juicy red tomatoes, then the cucumber and then a healthy sprinkle of some fancy garlic pepper. If my husband’s involved, he will cook up some bacon to add to the mix, and no one on earth is going to stop him. But the veggies and the bread, they can stand on their own, which is something to say when bacon’s involved.
I’ll stand over my kitchen counter and eat that sandwich open faced, so it’s really not a sandwich at all, and let the cucumbers and tomatoes sort of spill and juice back on my plate. I turn into some sort of human-shaped animal, devouring the whole creation in four hearty bites, no concern with napkins or social cues, because it’s too good and tomato season doesn’t last and the faster I eat this one the faster I can eat another one.
My daughters have the same sentiment about the big Colorado peaches we pick up every other week from the farmer’s market. Peaches cut up and smothered in cream and a sprinkle of sugar will be a core memory of their childhood they’ll have tucked away to balance out the hard things. There are few things better in the world than a ripe peach and our supply never lasts for canning for freezing. We make every effort to devour them fresh and then mourn the last lonely fruit in the fridge as the weather turns.
I drove by a rugged little house in a tucked away neighborhood of our town this morning. Outside the door with a little tear in the screen and up against the slightly faded, slightly chipped siding sat a small but vibrant display of perfect pumpkins and fake plastic mums. It wasn’t a grand presentation of the change of season, the kind that costs hundreds of dollars and looks like a photo backdrop in Martha Stewart’s magazine. No, it wasn’t that. But in that moment as the leaves were slowly changing on the trees and the morning light was hitting that humble house along the sidewalk just right, it shone out to me in my current state of frazzled-mother-on-her-way-to-work-after-school-drop-off, as an effort of gratitude for a new season—a chance to show on the outside what this person was feeling on the inside. I pictured the resident of that house humming quietly to herself as she arranged it all and I was glad she made the effort then, if not for my smile, but for hers.
When I say my prayers or make my wishes I send up hope that my daughters have a happy life. But happy can become such an ambiguous word when you try to define it. So I came here to tell you that we may have more control over it than we think. I mean, have you ever ate fresh baked bread with a tomato on top leaning over your kitchen counter with no regard for the mess it makes dribbling down your chin? Have you ever picked a perfect pumpkin to place in your yard for no practical reason other than to have a perfect pumpkin in your yard? Have you ever taken a bite of a fresh garden carrot with a little bit of dirt still on it? Have you ever baked zucchini bread with your mother who finally gave you the recipe? Have you ever stopped to think that perhaps this is it? This is what joy might look like on the outside of our skin, me and you eating peaches in cream for breakfast every day for as long as we possibly can because we can, Hallelujah. Amen.
News from the ranch: Rosie, my six-year-old, found out her uncle had a tiny little dirt bike in his garage and has been driving it around the loop in our yard incessantly for the past few days. This discovery was made when I left her home with my husband for a daddy-daughter weekend while I worked meetings in town and her big sister was at the sleepover of a lifetime at the lake.
As you can imagine, one sister’s announcement about a sleepover at the lake with friends could have been disastrous in the jealousy department if the next words out of my husband’s mouth weren’t, “It will be just you and me! We can do whatever we want!”
“Rollerskating?! Horse Riding?! Movie Night?! Waterpark?!” Rosie’s list went on and on while my husband nodded and I walked out of the door that Saturday morning only to return fourteen hours later to find my youngest daughter wide awake in our big bed at 10:30 pm, my husband dozing next to her, both of them surrounded by a variety candy wrappers while a very dramatic part of the movie “Hook” played on the TV.
“Oh, you’re still awake?” I noted, not really that surprised.
“Daddy, pass me the bubblegum would ja please?” Rosie chirped.
Turns out after they dressed up and went to town for a “fancy” supper at the steakhouse, my husband took his youngest daughter to the grocery store, let her push one of the kid’s carts, and told her to have at it in the candy section. And if you know Rosie, the girl didn’t hold back.
I looked at them all cozy in the bed after coming home from a long day of meetings and was immediately jealous. I haven’t been on a date like that with my husband in over a year. What a night!
And it turns out the day was just as good as Rosie tagged along with her dad to help with chores, played with her cousins (of course) and discovered that she was, indeed, born to be wild on that little dirt bike. Then, she returned home for lunch and to perform an extended version of her solo concert for her adoring audience of one on her guitar, singing at the top of her lungs without any threat of a “shush” coming from her big sister.
Sunday came and my husband kept the promise going (with a proper amount of prodding from his daughter). I came home in the afternoon to find them out in the yard shooting bows at the wild boar target. Rosie glanced over her shoulder at me with a slight look of annoyance and shot an arrow right over the back of that boar. “You missed all my bullseyes,” she declared, before pulling that little bow back again to prove her point. Then, “Come watch me on this dirt bike.”
The girl was living her best life. Round and round she went, each pass reminding me that she’s the culmination of generations of adventurous men, whose next step would certainly have been to build a ramp.
I suggested we go inside and catch up and cool off before it came to that. I stood in the kitchen attempting a conversation with my husband, but Rosie made sure to remind him that the weekend wasn’t over. I stepped away to change my clothes and came back to the kitchen to find our daughter sitting on her daddy’s lap, trimmer in hand, shaping up his beard (for real), deep into a game of barber/makeover. The amount of mousse she put in his hair made a quite permanent spike on top of his head, which she was pleased with after about 20 minutes of fussing and ordering me around as her assistant. Then she picked out his outfit (but first had to try it on herself) and off we went to my parents’ for Sunday supper, my husband in his vacation shirt, Rosie in her fancy shoes and me, charged with the task of being their pretend professional driver on their trip around their private island.
Anyway, I’m re-hashing all of this because some days I worry about raising these daughters in a world that puts on so many facades. How will they find genuine people to love? How will they keep their confidence? How can they stay brave? Will they stick to things that bring them joy? Most days parenthood is clouded with all sorts of these uncertainties.
Some days it all feels so powerless, the task of changing the world.
But last weekend I looked at my husband plopping that helmet on his daughter’s little head and hollering out encouragements as she kicked up dust. In that moment he wasn’t afraid for her, but excited to see her zoom. Happy that she was mastering something with enthusiasm. Filled with patience and adoration for his little shadow and good Lord that man. Good Lord he’s doing it, changing the world, one little girl and one rock-solid hairdo at a time.
I turned forty-one walking along the streets of Minneapolis. It was midnight and we were laughing, all five of us women, about something I can’t remember, something that probably wouldn’t have hit us this hard if we hadn’t just left a stadium where we sat shoulder to shoulder with 50,000 people singing along, at the top of our lungs, to our favorite songs.
50,000 people in one place who knew all the words to the same songs.
Five women who made space in lives that overwhelm us with ways in which we might be doing it all wrong. And, if we don’t pay attention the proper amount, take or don’t take the vitamins, wear or don’t wear the thing, vote or don’t vote this way, drink or don’t drink the milk, eat or don’t eat the meal, we risk screwing it all up. The parenting. The marriage. The job. The country. The earth. It’s a heavy weight to carry and it’s hard not to sprinkle it with a little dose of guilt when you decide to spend too much money on concert tickets, leave the kids at home, throw your cutest outfit in your suitcase, take the car seats out of the minivan and drive away for a weekend spent with four women who have done their version of the same to put some space between themselves and the notion that we might not all be ok.
It’s a heavy time in the news cycle, which just happens to coincide with the time in our lives where we’ve charged ourselves with raising the future. In the early mornings when I drive that future to school, I ask each daughter and niece to pick a song. This week “Jeramiah Was a Bullfrog” has been on heavy rotation. “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls…” we sing along as we drive, 65 MPH to 45 MPH to 25 MPH on roads they keep constructing. I park in front of the door to school and tell them I love them and tell them to be kind. They run into another day of childhood in middle America where we feel pretty lucky and pretty worried (I pause to wonder here if there are better words I could choose to describe it…)
Back at the stadium a young man behind me stands during the opening act, lifts his drink up in the air with one hand and puts his other arm around the girl he came with. Throughout the entire night, he sings almost every lyric with the vulnerability of a young child. But he’s not a young child, he is a man in middle America singing the lyrics of songs that describe what it feels like to lose someone, songs about addiction and fear, uncertainty and family and hope, tender things wrapped up safely in the sound of the fiddle and guitar and drums keeping time, coming from a man who looks like the guys in his hometown who maybe don’t talk about those things.
And maybe tomorrow, back at home, back at work, he won’t again. But he is here. Here he is, exposed, singing along.
I suppose if we admit that moments like this could save us, we must also admit that it could also be dangerous—50,000 people singing the same words…
I walked out of that stadium holding hands with the women I came with into a night bright with city lights. I turned 41 while the crowd of teenagers and twenty-somethings, mothers and dads with their daughters and sons, filtered out into that same night, sort of sweaty and tired and drunk with beer or feelings.
Back home my daughters stayed up too late in the big bed together while my husband fell asleep. The next day I drove that minivan back west to pick corn with the neighbors, eat pot-luck after a rodeo, sit in bleachers to cheer on the volleyball team, take an art class, sing with my dad on the deck, make a fish supper for my family, take a ride with my husband to check on a bull, brush my daughters’ hair, pack backpacks and give rides…
“Joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me…” my daughters stop singing to open the car door and run to school…
This week I revisit a little predicament I found myself in back when we were working on landscaping our new home…
Happy Hay Hauling and Fly Swatting Season. Happy September!
Out here on the ranch there are people and animals and machinery and water and buildings and growing things and plans thought out but maybe not discussed with one another…
When you combine all the moving parts sometimes things can go kinda weird, get tangled up so to speak.
Like last week I came home from something or other to Husband pushing dirt on the Bobcat, just like every other dry summer day. We have been working on landscaping and planning for a fence to keep the cows out of yard, so getting the dirt in the right places has been the longest and first step in the process.
Anyway, so I get home and I drop my bags, shuffle the mail pile on the counter and look out the window at the hill where the horses generally graze, and then down at the plum patch on the edge of what will be our fenced in yard one day.
Then I notice a piece of wire or string or something stretched across the edge of the yard, from the plum patch, across the open toward the dam, with no end that I could see…
With Pops and Husband involved in this place, a few scenarios run through my mind about the existence of this piece of wire or string or whatever.
1) Maybe Husband is staking out where the fence will go, which is good, because I think he’s right on in the placement.
2) Could Husband have strung a piece of electric fence or wire or something to temporarily keep the cows off his dirt moving masterpiece?
3) But it sorta looks like a piece of twine, and Pops was out here on the 4-wheeler the other day driving up the hill to check on things. I bet a peice got stuck to the back of his machine and he drug it a ways…that’s probably it…
4) Who the hell knows…these boys never tell me anything…I gotta call Pops, I’m too lazy to try to catch Husband on that Bobcat right now…
I dial…it rings…he answers.
“Hello.”
“Hi, it’s me. Yeah, did you like, string some twine across our yard, or like, maybe drag a piece on your 4-wheeler when you went by the other day…”
“No. No I didn’t. I noticed it too. It was there when I drove past…piece of twine, goes all the way up to the dam as far as I can tell…a cow musta drug it I think…”
“Well that’s a theory…really? Weird…I wonder how far it goes?”
“Yeah, I don’t know…”
“Well, ok, just checking…I guess I’ll go investigate…wrap it up…”
“Yeah, ok bye.”
I hung up.
Wonder where a cow picked up all that twine? Wonder where it got hooked? On her foot? On her ear? On a tooth or something?
How did she pull it all that way without a snag or a snap?
I headed down to the plum patch, which seemed to be the middle of her destination, twine strung up in the thorns and heading toward the dam in one direction, to oblivion in the other…
I grabbed it and followed it along the cow path that lead to the dam…
To the edge of the dam where she grabbed a drink…
and then literally into the dam where she must have hung out to cool off.
And then turned around Then turned around to head to the shade of the trees up by the fence…
Where it looked like she might have taken and a nap and detached from it…
But that was only the beginning. because there I stood with a pretty substantial roll of twine around my arm looking for the end, which seemed to be trailing back toward my house again, up the hill and toward the barnyard, with no end in sight.
I backtracked, to find the source, coiling as I went…
It was going to be a long trip…
Back past the plum patch, up along the cow trail that turns into the road on the top of the hill. Past the old machinery and the broken down three-wheeler and lawn mower that we need to move for crying out loud. I have to get on that.
Then down toward the shop where the cow seemed to have gone back and forth, back and forth, zigzagging in front of the old tractor and little yellow boat. Then up to the old combine to scratch her back or something…
Then back up to the top of the hill, across the road, to the scoria pile we’re saving for a literal rainy day, then back down through the brush on the side hill toward the old combine again, tangling up in the thorns of the prairie rose patch somehow…
Then over toward the barn yard…wait, turn around, not yet…back in front of the shop, hooking on every stray weed and grass along the way, but never coming undone…no…where the hell did she pick this up?
Why did we leave a big-ass roll of twine just laying around for some creature without opposable thumbs to go dragging for miles and miles across the countryside?
Why can’t we get our shit together around here?
How long is this damn roll? How long is this going to take?
Then up to the old combine to scratch her back or something…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 