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About Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

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

Our new and best wish

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Recently, while scrolling through Instagram hoping to see cute pictures of my friends’ families on the 4th of July, I ran across an ad for a tank top that’s designed to hide the skin that folds at my armpits. The product’s praises were being sung by a woman who looked like she was on the Olympic swim team. She caught me then, innocently going about my life never thinking about the skin that folds at my armpits until that very moment and now, well, now that I know about it, I guess I should hide it? 

It’s summer and I’m a 40-year-old woman living in the age of social media. Around every corner I am told about a part of my body I should be self-conscious of.  Buy the swimsuit to tuck in your tummy, buy the patches to smooth out your wrinkles, buy the pill to curb your appetite to take off the weight and while you’re at it did you notice those dark spots on your arms and face you started to develop because you’ve dared to be alive this long? You haven’t? Well, they’re there and you should fix those too. Buy this cream.  

Over the holiday weekend we loaded up our life and our lake gear and headed to Minnesota to spend a few days at the cabin with our extended family. The excitement my daughters had at the idea of spending the week in that cool, clear lake was unmatched only by Christmas. As soon as we arrived, they changed quickly into their bathing suits and jumped right in to begin playing mermaids or sea turtles or scuba diving treasure hunters, their little bodies morphing in their minds only to match the game they were playing. “Pretend we have fins, pretend we can breathe under water, pretend we have a tail that disappears when we’re on land.” There was no wishing away a thing on their bodies, only wishes to make it do more for them in a pretend world where you can be anything, asking only to cover up because they came out of the lake with goose bumps or because the mosquitos were biting. 

I put on my swimsuit and wished for my old body back, the one I saw before I was told that it wasn’t good enough. I was a girl in the 90s, so unfortunately that oblivion didn’t last long. Then I carried two big babies in my belly and it took a while to recognize that new mother as me. 

My little sister and I, we both have two daughters. We made a pact when they were younger to avoid talking negatively about our bodies in front of them, knowing full-well the world will eventually test their confidence, but until then, we only want them to think of their bodies as a vessel for running fast and swinging on the monkey bars and turning cartwheels and  cannonballing into this freezing cold lake. 

“I can’t wear a two-piece anymore,” I said to my sister in a range too close to my daughters. 

“Well yes, you can, you have a body,” she replied, scolding me with her eyes. 

“You’re right, yes I can. I guess I meant I just don’t want to,” I replied, mad at myself for breaking the rule and annoyed I was even thinking about this body in the first place when there were so many better things to think about and say, especially in that moment.   

When I first moved back to the ranch in my mid-twenties, almost ten years before I became a mother and in the season of my life where I tasked myself with truly focusing on who I wanted to be, I wrote a piece that started “When I grow up I want to be the kind of woman who lets her hair grow long and wild and silver.”

At the time becoming that woman with wild silver hair was decades away and I felt then, in that 25-year-old-body, I could handle silver hair, embrace it. I didn’t know that same body would also have to manage years of infertility, a cancer scare and barely manageable chronic pain. Silver hair? It should be the least of my worries. In fact, woman, you should be grateful, which makes me feel worse somehow…

Because here we are now, silver hair sprouting around my temples, and I’m wondering why I’m not the wild and carefree woman I promised myself I’d be all those years ago. Instead, I find myself battling with the idea of letting my age show or disguising it the way a proper American woman should. According to Instagram anyway. 

But then I watch my daughters, living so fully as themselves inside their skin, asking only of their bodies a little bit more to try to hold a headstand, asking only of their outfits to twirl the right way while they’re dancing, asking only of me to watch them jump off the dock or skip a rock, to tell them they’re strong. 

“And when my hair turns silver, I hope I remember that my favorite colors are the colors of the seasons, changing from brown to white to green to gold and back again,” I read and re-read the line I wrote all those years ago. A lump catches in my throat. 

The wildflowers never apologize for coming up slowly or blooming too brightly or wilting in the fall. Noone tells them to hide, they just celebrate the time they are here…Could this be our new and most important wish? To believe there’s nothing of ourselves worth hiding? How can we convince them? How can we convince ourselves?

A little suffering makes the dessert taste better

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And now for a story I shared a few years back before we put nice gate latches on all the new gates thus releasing me from the gate-closing-rage I experienced as a young woman on this ranch…now if we could just do something about the wood ticks.

Recently I went on a walk to close some gates in our home pasture and check a couple juneberry patches.

Juneberries are a special treat around here. Like wild mini-blueberries, if they show up, they show up around this time to much fanfare for those of us who know people who make pies.

Juneberries make the best pies in the world. Probably because getting to them before the frost kills them or the birds eat them up is so rare, and the entire task of picking enough of the little purple berries sends you to the most mosquito and tick infested, hot, thorny, itchiest places in the free world, so finally making and tasting a Juneberry pie is like completing some prairie, culinary, ironman marathon.

Only better and more gratifying, because, well, pie.

Anyway, my little stroll before sunset was only mildly successful. The gates on this place were made to be shut only by Thor himself. Or the Hulk. Or some hybrid of a bear-man. By the time I grunted and groaned, used my entire body weight trying to push the two posts together to maybe, possibly, for the love of Dolly Parton, stretch the three wires tight enough to get the little wire loop over the top of the scrawny post, I was sweating, cussing, bleeding and wondering how I missed the yeti that we apparently hired to fix the gates on this place.

I called Husband on my cell phone (who was inside the house with the baby, like twenty yards away) and told him there’s no way in hell I’m ever getting that gate shut and that shutting the gates was his job from now on who do you think I am what is this all about who in their right mind makes gates that tight good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart.

And, if you’re wondering, the gate on the other side of that pasture went about the same way…

Anyway, on my way I did in fact locate a big ‘ol juneberry patch. But the best berries, of course, were hanging out about fifteen feet above my head at the very tops of the bushes. And to get to them I had to wade through thorny bushes up to my armpits. But some of those thorny bushes had raspberries growing on them, so that was a win.

I proceeded to eat every ripe red berry I could find, even the one with the worm on it, which I discovered after I put it in my mouth and crunched.

So that was a loss.

Yes, the raspberries, worms and all, were within my reach. The juneberries, not so much. But tonight I’m going to see if my husband might want to come with me to back our old pickup up to that bush, stand in the box, brave the mosquitos and pick us some berries.

Because, well…pie.

Anyway, when I got home I discovered that apparently wading up to my armpits in thorny brush to pick raspberries was not only a good way to accidentally eat a worm, but, even better, it’s a great way to acquire 500 wood ticks.

I came home and picked off a good fifteen or so. Stripped down to my undies, checked myself out in the mirror, sat down on the chair and proceeded to pick off at least five more.

After a shower, when I crawled into bed I wondered out loud to Husband what time of night I would wake up to a tick crawling across my face. He made a guess. I made a guess.

But we were both wrong.

At about 12:30 am, just as I had drifted into a nice slumber, I was indeed awoken by a tick, but it wasn’t crawling across my face. No.

It was crawling toward my butt crack.

Thank good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart, I cut him off at the pass!

I guess, if we need a moral of the story, dessert tastes better when you truly suffer for it…

Ranching and Romance

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Want to know what romance is when you’ve been married almost eighteen years and you’re raising kids and calves on a generational ranch? 

Your husband taking time out of his summer checklist of fixing fence and rebuilding corrals to help you construct a new garden plot in the yard. Especially when that man says, and I quote, “Landscaping is just work to make more work.” 

And he’s not wrong. Out here when we look across our spread of endless big jobs, like barn building and pen building and water tank maintenance and figuring out why the bulls keep getting into the hay yard, lawn mowing and weed eating and tomato planting and pressure washing the driveway aren’t on the top of my husband’s June “to-do” list. 

But they are close to the top on mine, and I appreciated the help when I looked at the calendar and then the radar that indicated I might want to get the peas planted before the predicted torrential downpour and, also, before August. 

Summer is frantic around here. So frantic that major yardwork on a Sunday seems slow. 

Crocs: function and fashion collide

But I got those peas in thanks to him. At 10 pm before the sun set and right in time for the rain to pour later that evening. 

My husband’s love language is definitely “acts of service.” I’ve seen it in him since he was a much younger man. To be of use, to be helpful, to know how to do the thing that needs to be done is a quality that has saved us money and meltdowns plenty more than it has cost us both. (Because, let’s be honest, DIY isn’t a Zen experience). 

There was a time when I was younger and in love with him where I would imagine my future out here on the ranch with more walks hand in hand and picnics under the big oak tree where we got married. How dreamy. 

Our wedding tree

News flash. That’s never happened. Not even once.  

Romance looks more like getting off his horse to get the gate. And then I reciprocate by getting the next one.  

Tick checks, that’s also romance out here. And it’s tick season so, yeah, we’ve been getting romantic a lot lately. 

All joking aside though, I’m thinking about this today because the amount of love I felt for my husband watching him till that garden spot on Sunday knowing how much he was setting aside to do something for me was palpable. It sort-of caught me off guard the way a lump catches in your throat when a sentimental commercial breaks through your sitcom zone-out. My husband, he lives with a good-sized handful of intention when it comes to his close relationships. He’s a guy who’s never really rushing. He’s a guy who will have a long look at it. He’s a guy who takes his time, whether or not it might drive you and your tight schedule crazy. 

And he makes me wonder if I’m too caught in my own drive, letting worries and checkboxes sometimes consume me like the good student I keep striving to be. But no one’s keeping grades here. This is our life and I wanted to plant peas and so he helped me plant peas.  And I guess I just want to say, that’s a really sweet way to love someone. 

The order of things

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At night, in the summer, we sleep with the windows open and so the chirping of the birds wakes me up in the morning. It’s alarming how much they have to say, how loud they seem after so many months of quiet skies.

I’m listening to them right now as I type, the chirping of the birds and my cat on the deck making his presence known through the screen door. Last week he brought one of those birds to that door mat, reminding us of the order of things.

The order of things is ever present here at the ranch. A few days ago I took my daughters on a walk with me to the east pasture stock dam—out the front door and down through the swing gate, along the two track trail, past where we park the old cars and broken down equipment and through the tall brush that reaches their armpits before a quick stop to pick wild flowers to hand to me, to pick off a couple ticks and flick them to the dirt. I used to carry each one of my daughters on my chest in a pack when they were babies out here, just the two of us looking around, but only me, their momma, watching my step for the both of us.

And now look at them running! Look at their thin legs and stretched out bodies, listen to them jabber and make up stories. Listen to them laugh and ask questions about weather and the names of the grasses and the bugs, watch them throw dirt clumps into the dam and remember when we were back here on our horses, this place already drawn like a map on their beating hearts.

Recently my husband came down from the fields with news that he found a sick calf and he was headed to town for some medicine to try to save it. A few days before he had picked my dad up from that very same field after he came off a horse and needed to be treated for broken ribs at the local hospital. The calf didn’t live long enough for the hour it took my husband to get to town and back and dad was stuck in the house, slowed way down but able to give advice on how to help that momma cow who lost her calf become a mom to our bottle calf in the barn.

Things go wrong even when the sky is blue and the grass is green and there is no reason for it really except that things go wrong. I hopped in the passenger seat of the pickup next to my husband ready to be an extra set of hands to coax that calf the girls named “Little X” into the trailer and then to help introduce him, draped in the smell of the dead calf, to that momma cow. The clouds rolled in over the horizon and it started to pour on us, but that momma, she licked that little calf before he spooked and ran to the corner of the pen. And that little lick, it gave us enough hope that this new relationship might work with a some patience.

I think that’s all that ranching is really. Enough hope. Enough patience. Enough little triumphs to keep at it.

And so my husband worked multiple visits to that cow/calf pen into his daily schedule. Two times a day he loaded the cow into the chute and brought the calf to help him suck and each night when I came home from town I got the report. “He’s scared of the cow.” “He’s doing better.” “He’s getting the hang of it.”

Last night I came home late, frazzled from a long and stressful workday where I’ve been navigating my way through uncharted waters. I cried and complained and wondered if I was getting it right. Wondered if I have what it takes. My husband listened and then said, “Change clothes, we’re going to check that calf.” And I would have much rather put the covers over my head, but I went along to find Little X in the pen with his new mom, bucking and kicking and, look at that, sucking from that momma like the calf he was born to be.

And it might sound too simple, but I’m going to say it because it was true. In that moment I was just so proud and relieved about that little victory for those two animals and my husband that it made the impossible things that weighed on me that day seem a little more possible. The lump eased from my throat and I slept soundly that night until the birds woke me, singing because they’re in the business of being birds, not a question in their world if they’re doing it right.

Because that’s the order of things.

The work and all the things to love

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Well, my giant branding-day roaster made it through another year, but how is it that I haven’t figured out the right proportion of roast-beef-to-person ratio after all these years of hosting branding day lunch?

Turns out five total beef roasts is too many to feed 23 adults and ten children. And one whole watermelon, two packs of strawberries and two packs of grapes is about five watermelons and five hundred strawberries and grapes short.

Also, I forgot four pounds of slush burger in the fridge, so apparently “Would hate to run out you know,” is the old Lutheran Church Lady proverb that I truly live by.

Yes, we spent Memorial weekend branding our calves and working our cattle with the help of our friends and family. And while a few key people couldn’t make it this year, it’s always so moving to me to be able to look around and realize that if I put my arms out, I might be able to touch everything in this world that’s important to me.

And some of those things are growing up too fast, running down the road to the pens in big girl jeans asking to wrestle a calf, asking for a job, asking to get on a horse, wanting to help however they can in between pop breaks. In a few short years we will be asking our daughters to call their friends to help with the physical work of wrestling and doctoring calves. But for now, my husband and I, we call our friends who, along with us, are getting grayer around the temples, the repercussions of this type of physical work not as quiet as it used to be in our bodies at the end of the day.

This year I realized that one of those friends has been helping us brand on this ranch for well over twenty years. And then it really hit me, like my aching muscles the next morning, how far we are from being the kids of this operation. As if it wasn’t evident earlier that morning when we were gathering the cattle and I happened to notice a handful of cow/calf pairs had found their way to the thickest brush in the corner of the pasture and there was no one within shouting distance to come to my rescue. Maybe that’s the definition of true adulthood…

Anyway, we got the cattle in, and we assigned everyone a different job to form the well-oiled machine of willing hands that always makes the work go smoothly. I hollered at everyone to “Please eat some cookies!” during our breaks and kept enough worry in my gut and eyes on potential safety hazards to delude myself into thinking I have much control over those sorts of things. And then I breathed a sigh of relief and gratitude when we wrapped up our work and everyone made it inside the garage to watch the sky open up and the rain fall, crack a drink and settle into the stories.



“In the nick of time” I said. And then, “There’s plenty to eat! Everyone don’t be shy, dish up!” the same way I’ve said it year after year, making the full and complete transformation into typical ranch wife at the end of the day, mumbling to myself as I assessed the leftover situation with no bachelor in site to force a to-go bag on.

Anyway, happy branding season everyone. May the grass stay stirrup high, may you always have plenty of roast beef and may the work bring together all the most important things to love…

My sister’s bluebird

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Can you see the rainbow?” The text pinged my phone while I was on hour eight or twenty of laying in my bed with the flu. My husband and daughters had been gone all day for our niece’s graduation, but I had to skip it because, after months of dodging it, it was my turn to be sick.

But my little sister, Alex, who lives right over the hill on the other side of the barnyard, wasn’t going to let me miss an opportunity to see a rainbow, a good remedy for the pukes.

Earlier that day she snuck in to put cookies and fresh baked bread on my kitchen counter, trying to be sneaky, but forgetting that my phone dings every time she gets close to the house, a little hack in the form of an app that helps us with our morning kid pick-ups and evening kid drop-offs.

“Are you going for a walk?” she texted me the evening before, just as I was opening the gate and heading on my two-mile loop to the east pasture and back. “I’ll meet you!”

The ping on her phone told her I was leaving the house and she needed to escape too. Who knew that the tracking app would come in so handy for all sorts of non-emergencies?

But I was glad she caught up with me, a sentence I would have never uttered when I was twelve and she was seven and following me on my after-school walks up the creek. I used to turn around and yell at her to go home, now we coordinate our escapes together.

My little sister, she’s better at it than me. She’s always been the social one, the one to pick up the phone, the one to ask what we’re doing or how we’re doing and the one to make sure everyone knows what’s going through her mind at all times, an endearing feature of her personality that shines most in stressful or beautiful moments.

Which means we get the play-by-play of angst that occurs when she’s trying to get a fresh horse to cross a muddy creek, but then…“Oooo, look at those daisies!!” she squealed while riding through our calf crop with our uncle and dad against hurricane-force winds.

“I just love them, look at all of them,” she gushed as I continued to fight with my flighty pony and the wind, both seemingly out to kill me that day.

My uncle and I looked at each other and chuckled. What a very Alex thing to say. Then we looked over at my dad who sat horseback taking pictures of us because, “The sky is just so blue! It’s beautiful. I don’t want to forget it.”

What a very Dad thing to say.

Yes, it seemed both bluebirds on their respective shoulders were hanging on despite the wind, reminding me to invite mine back.

Reminding me to get up and look outside.

Reminding me that it can be better with company.

And fresh bread. When did she learn to make fresh bread?

Anyway, I’m feeling better now. If you need me, well, call Alex. She knows where I am.

When you look

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From my music video for “Northern Lights” produced by Ken Howie

I remember the first time I witnessed the northern lights. As memories so often go, I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember stepping out of my parent’s car in the driveway at the ranch and my dad telling me to look up. I was 9 or 10 or 11 or 12, one of those ages that blend into one another in childhood, and it was spontaneous, the way things like the northern lights used to be before we could predict them in the way we do now, announcing their arrival on an app or a website or a social media post to help others experience it. Which is a lovely perk of the modern age…

But maybe not the same as stumbling upon them in the way that we did that night, a little piece of magic we witnessed as mere humans who just happened to look up at the right time.

I found them again years later in the dead cold of January when my dad was recovering from a very close brush with death in a hospital bed in the big town. I think my husband was driving me home from a visit with him and I caught a glimpse of them out the passenger window, green and white and gold light dancing on the dark horizon reminding me how small we are here in the scheme of things. Reminding me that even the coldest night can be beautiful if we look up.

Last weekend I walked to the top of a big hill overlooking the ranch with my mom and both of my sisters. It was Mother’s Day and it was just the four of us. We stopped along the way to pick handfuls of wild sweet peas to lay on the spot where we placed my grandmother’s ashes just about a year earlier. We caught our breath when we reached the top, laughing at my big sister who always wears the most impractical outfits and footwear for the ranch. We put our hands on our hips and quieted, looking out across the neon green landscape, catching the scent of the plum blossoms on one of the most perfectly beautiful spring days. It occurred to me then that the four of us—our mom, and the daughters she raised spread across the decades—have likely never been alone like this together, out in the wilds of the ranch. No dads, no kids, just the women here, looking out. Looking up. We placed those sweet peas on the little stacks of rocks and remembered my mother’s mother and noticed a little yellow butterfly make its way through our gathering before heading back down that hill to share a meal and watch the kids play in the lawn.

Recently, my dad brought home a little black-white-face calf to the barn. He had been out checking cows and noticed it wet and left behind, potentially a twin to another brand-new calf nearby who was up and sucking. He placed a little “x-marks-the-spot” on his head to distinguish it from the other calves so he could come back and check on him to be sure he wasn’t claimed before taking him back to the barn to try him on a bottle. We rounded up our daughters to give the calf a proper welcome, glad he was found, and a little worried if he would ever figure out the bottle.

That night my oldest daughter fell off a pony we’ve been working on. She was fine but my husband and I, we felt terrible. “If only if only if only,” are the things we say when little accidents and close calls happen. We always think we should know better. She got back on and shook the scared off before we returned home right before dark to eat a cereal supper.

I missed the northern lights that night despite all the places and ways it was forecast so we could make plans to witness it. We laid our kids down safe in their beds, I said a quiet prayer of gratitude and fell asleep as the last bit of light fell under the horizon. While we dreamed, the lights danced around us and our friends and neighbors took to porches and lawns and parking lots to stand in awe. Turns out, magic happens, even when you’re not looking…

Photo by We 3 Bs Photography

But oh, when you do! Oh, when you do!

My music video for “Northern Lights”

Life in my car

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“The person who invented pants is really smart,” my oldest daughter’s voice chimed in from the way back seat of our Suburban.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I responded, not really that surprised that the comment came out of silence and, also, out of nowhere. She’s eight and that’s her resting state.

“Right because people used to just wear tiny chaps over their privates. And maybe not even over their butts!”

And that was her little sister’s contribution to the conversation as we rounded the corner to school drop off, just another Tuesday under a cloudy sky. Only this one was a little perilous because for some reason my phone had switched itself to Mountain time during the wee hours of the night, something that my husband didn’t bring to my attention until he noticed my level of calm strolling around the kitchen gathering breakfast and snacks and my thoughts for the day didn’t match the level of urgency 7:25 am warranted in our house.

Like we should be out the door in four minutes and all of us were still in our pajamas.

And so, of course I didn’t believe him or the kitchen clock that doesn’t ever change or the fact that it did, actually, look more like a 7:30 am sun situation than a 6:30 am situation, but honestly, I’m hanging by a thread here.

We shifted into warp speed then, but I didn’t have time to look in the mirror if we had a prayer of making it to school on time. And so I didn’t, knowing full well I have everything I need in my car to put myself together in a parking lot somewhere before heading into work. This is a special skill that rural women have. Well, maybe all women have it, but I can only speak from my own experience of living thirty miles from town for most of my life. Pair that with decades of working as a touring musician and I would guess the number of times I’ve applied my makeup in the visor mirror of my vehicle in a gas station parking lot might just outnumber the times I’ve used the one above the bathroom sink.

My husband pointed this out as he was putting the finishing touches on our new master bathroom. He has been making me a little vanity counter right in front of the window because natural light is the best light to illuminate all my flaws, something I’ve come to learn from that visor mirror. Indoor lighting can’t be trusted. I need nature to tell me the cold, hard truth.

He’s been working on a new closet for us as well, something much bigger and more convenient than the front seat of my car where I do quite a bit of my changing. I’ve been pushing my driver’s seat back to change in and out of tights and jeans and boots and dresses for so much of my life it’s a miracle that I haven’t created more embarrassing moments for myself and innocent pedestrians by now.

But then it’s hard to know how many people I actually traumatized in the McDonalds drive-through line as I removed my boots, belt and shapeware from under my dress while ordering a Big Mac for the hour drive back to the ranch.

If multitasking is the pillar from which I run my life, then my car is the sanctuary from which I carry out my last-minute tasks in the few quiet moments between drop off and workday, and workday and school pick-up line. Behind the dashboard is my desk, my phone booth, my five-minute nap space, my quick-bite kitchen table, my vanity, and, maybe most importantly, the place where I get to listen to my growing daughters ponder life as they count the power poles and trees zooming by their windows.

Anyway, if you happen to catch me deep in a rear-view-mirror-mascara situation, just kindly pass on by. The invisible-while-I’m-in-my-car façade is what I have to hold on to these days.

Peace, love and also, Big-Macs taste better when you remove your Spanx.  

The timing of spring

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Welcome to the warm-up North Dakota. As I write this the rain is soaking the grass and I swear it’s turning a neon green right before my eyes. We had ten calves yesterday, and likely a half-dozen or so more will be born in the rain. But they won’t mind, they will be licked clean by their mommas and kept in the protection of the tall grass and they’ll wait for the sun so they can stand up and buck and kick and run, just like us people it seems. Waiting for the sun to launch us alive again.

When you’ve lived on a piece of land for most of your life, you become a part of the rhythm of things. You inherently know the timing of a change in seasons and when to expect longer light. And, like the wild things, no matter how domesticated we become, we change with those seasons too. Like, I know the first crocus is accompanied by my dad taking the first horse out for a spring ride. And then comes the first calves and no more dark morning drives to school, followed quickly by later bedtimes…

Last Saturday after spending as much time as I could outside finding things that needed to be done, I had to head in and figure out supper. Instead of frozen pizza, I picked a recipe I hadn’t made before and regretted every minute of cooking and shredding the chicken. The task and the warm, calm evening made it tempting to turn in my adult badge and join the kids outside.  They were playing with their cousins on the playground in the yard, bringing toys and dolls that had been cooped up in the house outside to get dirty and worn out in the spring sun, out in the sand and dirt. And I don’t mind about that sort of thing, because outside is where kids are supposed to be. Outside is where I wanted to be, and so I had the sliding door cracked so I could feel the fresh breeze and hear them laughing.

All I wanted to do was climb the hills and look for the sweet peas my dad said he spotted that day. Sometimes the business of my current, middle-aged life prevents me from getting there first, but I knew just where to find them: follow the two-track trail up to the field and take a detour before the gate to the hill on the edge of the tree line. You’ll find the yellow flowers poking out among the granite rocks. And just after the sweet peas come the blue bells and after the blue bells the earth comes alive with lady slippers and paintbrushes and prairie roses and wild daisies. Next come the cone flowers.  Then, in the heat, the tiger lilies follow and then the sunflowers come in with the grasshoppers and the ripening tomatoes in my garden.

And none of these names we have for the flowers are likely correct. You probably call them something different, but when it comes to wildflowers, names don’t matter.

We’ll start serving supper later and later and now, it will sneak up on us gradually until the thick of July when we come in at ten o’clock to eat hot dogs and beans. It had already begun last weekend when, at 8 pm, we took our first bites. But there was still time for me to escape to those granite rocks after helping clear the table. And so I raced the light a bit, the dogs running out ahead of me to sniff out any mice or gophers in their path while I was sniffing out sweet peas. It wasn’t a long hunt, because there they were, right where I’ve found them year after year after year. In a few more warm days, after this soaking rain, that yellow flower will fill the hillsides, too many to gather into a bouquet, but that evening I picked just a few for the mason jar on my table. I clenched the stems in my left hand and took a big whiff and headed back home to beat the dark, humming a little welcome song to the warm up and to more simple hot dog suppers…

Yellow Roses

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Listen to the podcast where we discuss our connection to heritage and changing times.

In 1915 my great grandpa Eddie staked his claim on this ranch where we’re now living. He got married and headed off to war. When he arrived back in Bear Den Township he proved up his claim, planting some trees, flax and wheat, building a barn and putting up fences.

Cornelia and Eddie’s Children

Over the course of his lifetime he would watch his crops grow, his wife die too young and his children make their own mark on the land he laid claim to. He would meet a couple grandchildren and serve them his famous buns, tell them jokes and scruff their hair before leaving them all behind in death to do what they would with the place he worked so hard to keep. The red barn, his old threshing machine and dozens of other little relics of his existence are scattered sparsely about the place now to remind us that 110 years ago is not long enough to rust the old equipment to dust, but it might as well be forever.

Great Grandpa Eddie standing in the doorway of his homestead shack

I didn’t know my Great Grandpa Eddie, but I think of him often and wonder what parts of his blood flow through mine. I think it might be the holding on part, just like those yellow roses his wife planted in her garden all those years ago before she died suddenly and only 36 years old, leaving her children, her husband and those roses behind to bloom without her. 

One day I want to write his story with the parts I know and then the way I imagined it could have been. But today I thought I’d share his story in the lyrics of the song I wrote about him. I’m honed in that sort of storytelling, so I started there…

Hear it wherever you get your music or head to www.jessieveedermusic.com to order the album. 

Yellow Roses

14 and 80 acres
A couple horses and two hands
Grind the gears and swing the hammer
Turn a boy into a man
His daddy was near blind then
His brother just 13
His mom, she swept the floors though dirt like that just don’t come clean

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

He built corrals and fences
And the family’s homestead up in time
Rode the river in the big draws
With the cowboys for a dime
But there’s something bout the work here
Made him want something of his own
Signed papers on a tar paper shack and called the land his home

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

Only North Dakota
Where the ground turns white to green
The rain, the snow the storms they blow in
like you’ve never seen

Right there we could have left it
His dreams sprouting from the ground
But if man can make a fortress
Only man can knock it down

But when the war was over
He found himself a bride
Yellow roses in the garden
And their children were her pride
Lost money on the cattle
Lost some on the grains
Lost her when she went to sleep and did not wake again

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

Only North Dakota
Where the ground turns white to green
The rain, the snow the storms they blow in
like you’ve never seen

Now a man cannot give up there
This man didn’t have the mind
He made biscuits in the morning
Taught all the babes to ride

When the neighbors fell on hard times
He lent a hand or bought them out
And watered yellow roses in the heat of summer droughts

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

Only North Dakota
Where the ground turns white to green
The rain, the snow the storms they blow in
like you’ve never seen

Now I stand here with my children
One on my hip, one holds my hands
Another generation breathing life into this land
We count pennies and our blessings
And to the memories we cling
And down in the barnyard yellow roses bloom here every spring.