Category Archives: Family

Stories about the characters in my life

Let us be bored.

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Last night while I was folding laundry, my daughters wandered out into the living room on a pretend mission to escape something. Edie, my oldest, was dressed in overall-shorts with a little toy fox stuffed into her front pocket. Rosie, well, she was dressed as a granny, complete with big glasses, a bun, sensible shoes and a stick horse as a walking cane. I listened to their conversations a bit to see where the game was going, laughing to myself at Rosie’s grandma voice and her commitment to her character. When I asked her if they could stop for a minute so I could take their picture (they were so stinkin’ cute) Rosie replied, “Well, make it quick deary, my back is killin’ me!” Which tracks, I guess, for a granny.

So did the extra pair of underwear, flashlight and cardigan that Rosie packed for their pretend adventure. But what really put the whole thing over the top was when I looked to where they were playing in the kitchen to find Rosie snoring, eyes closed, standing up. Because, well, grannies get tired.

When these girls play, I tell you, they play. And it’s the best.

Because it’s their job.

When my first daughter was just a baby, I heard one of my more seasoned mom-friends say this in a conversation we were having about parenthood. In all the expectations we have laid out for our children, the schedules and the lessons and the homework and the chores, their number one priority should be to play. It’s a sentence that runs through my head when I’m feeling overwhelmed with the variety of choices for after school activities and completing extra homework, wondering now, especially as the kids are getting older, if I’m failing them by not putting them in travel basketball or hauling them to every youth rodeo in the region. It’s not how we were raised, but that was in the olden days. What are we supposed to be doing for our children now that we have access to a world full of expert and non-expert opinions?

Well, I have an opinion too I suppose, and it’s that the very best thing we can do for our children is to let them be bored.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a scheduled play date and paid-for weekly activities as much as the next mom. There’s a place for this on the schedule too. But the most fun I had as a kid arose out of no schedule at all, just an endless afternoon stretched out before me, with nothing but my imagination to fill it. But that was back before there was a choice otherwise. We had a handful of channels on TV and, gasp, we had to watch the commercial interruptions in our 30 minute after school episode of “Garfield and Friends”. Might as well just go outside and see what’s floating in the crick.

It happened fast, in less than one generation, but here we are raising kids in a world, where, if we allow it, they can be thoroughly entertained at every turn of a moment. I mean, has anyone ever found the bottom of Netflix or YouTube? Never. It’s up to us to turn it off so they can tune into that part of their little spirit that guides them toward an interest or a passion or, heck, just the opportunity to learn how to turn inward and rely on themselves in the quiet moments. More than my daughters’ basketball career or math grades, boredom is the thing I worry about failing them most.

Taylor Swift Concert…..

Now, I’m not saying that I turned into a professional fallen log fort-maker because of all the time I spent at the crick when I was a kid, but I did hone my songwriting skills singing at the top of my lungs pretending I was in a Disney movie where I had to learn to survive in the North Dakota wilderness alone. I learned that I like making up stories. And I liked performing, even if my audience was the squirrels I was terrifying and my little sister who was following a quarter mile behind me. And I learned it meant a lot to me to be there to witness every quiet turn of the season. It taught me gratitude. It taught me how to be alone and be ok with it.

Anyway, I realize I’m reflecting on this from a parenting perspective, but maybe even more importantly it’s a reminder to do the same for myself now that I’m a full-blown adult with adult responsibilities. Because in this season of life and parenting, boredom doesn’t exist. But it should. We should demand it of our lives as much as we demand anything else. I am saying that here to remind us all. If a kid’s job is to play, who said we had to take a promotion?

In a few weeks the weather will turn and I am going to put “wander the hills” on my to-do list. Because, like my daughters last night, I need the opportunity to escape in my mind once in a while. And lucky for me I was a kid in the ‘90s, so I know how to do that.

Chad and I are working to get our “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” podcast back in circulation now that the house project is a bit more under control. Until then, take a listen to an interview I did about music and ranching and motherhood while I was in Elko with “The Art Box”

Letting go of expectations

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Letting go of expectations
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It rained all day yesterday. It was the kind of melancholy soaking that only October can do right. The sky was part deep blue then part glimmering, then part rainbow before turning slowly back to the gray before the night.

I had paperwork to do and so I did it, begrudgingly at first, then sort of grateful for the kind of task where I don’t have to think, I don’t have to create a new idea or form a cohesive thesis. No human interaction or compromise, I just needed to pay the bills, count the numbers and settle up.

Recently I heard a famous person say that being an actor is constantly hoping you get invited to the party, constantly hoping you measure up against the competition, hoping to catch someone’s eye, hoping to be picked. I am not an actress and I am far from famous, but I found myself nodding along because some part of it I understood as a writer and a performer pursuing the best way to convey a thought or a feeling in a way that resonates. Bonus points if it’s catchy so that people listen and ask for more, not for the sake of fame, but for more ears so I might get more work. Some days it’s inspired work. Some days it’s exhausting.

Yesterday it felt exhausting. And so I welcomed the paperwork because I couldn’t think of one inspired thing to say, except the rain is nice.

Earlier in the week I took a two-hour drive to a big town to drop off my taxes because I was pushing the deadline and the mail wasn’t quick enough. I walked into the building dressed in a ballcap, flannel and my red sneakers and placed an envelope in the hands of one of the well-dressed receptionists. The envelope was fat and filled with calculations on what it costs to be creative while raising cattle and kids and fixing up people’s houses. Numbers that are supposed to outline if being unconventional is worth it.  I wondered, as I drove away from that tidy building with big-windowed offices, who I would be if I had a job like that. I certainly wouldn’t be wearing these silly sneakers on a Monday afternoon. Since I was old enough to make big life choices for myself, I’ve wrestled with the idea of what success means. Is it money? Status? Approval? A big house with well-kept kids and swept floors? That picket fence everyone refers to and hardly anyone owns?

There was a time in my life I thought it might be more like the above and less like sitting in a chair in the basement of the Legion Club in my hometown, an old steakhouse turned tattoo shop asking the young artist to draw yellow roses on my arm, one for my husband, two for my daughters, six for the babies that never got to be born… And yellow for the holding on part, like the ones in the barnyard my great grandmother Cornelia planted nearly a century ago. The ones we never tend to, but choose to bloom regardless…

Twenty-something me would have never dared do it, worried about what people might say, worried about my future employment being tarnished by such a form of self-expression. Twenty-something me would wonder if I’m I the thing I’ll be forever?

But forty-year-old me needed a way to control something on a body that has so often felt out of my control. Forty-year-old me writes for a living and plays mediocre guitar and spends her days planning ways to help people believe in the power of the music and the canvas and the words and the movement and the way the light reflects off it all. And some days we all sit in a room and feel it together, and some days the emptiness of that room feels disappointing. But every day I get up and brush my daughters’ hair and help them pick out their clothes and tell them to hurry up and eat or we’re going to be late and then we turn the music up in the car and sing along loud to all the ones we know because we all know how to do that. I we all know how to sing.

And at night, before I lay down in bed, I shower the day off of me and step out to see a body in the mirror reflecting scars and lines and soft flesh slowly turning back to its winter shade from the lack of sun we’re supposed to hide from anyway. I’ve never listened to that rule and I suppose it shows. I will get up in the morning to do it all again, brush my hair and then my daughters’ and on and on with the schedule of the days. And sometimes I’ll stop and wonder who they might become, it’s fun to imagine, but not as much fun as watching and enjoying who they are right now. I think it’s time I give myself the same grace…

Because right now I’m like the October sky, part melancholy and part rainbow. Part rain and part glimmering sun, dark and light parts, part unpredictable and part steady and maybe, finally now, wholly unconcerned with expectations…

Cousins by the camper

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Cousins by the camper
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Listen to the podcast here

There’s a family photo that resurfaces every once in a while of six little kids with fluffy ‘90s hair sitting on a picnic bench in front of a 1980s tin-sided bumper pull camper. One of us is in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, a couple in tight rolled jeans, all of us had bangs that started in the middle of our craniums. It was summer in North Dakota on the edge of the clay shores of Lake Sakakawea and we were squinting against the morning sun, a calm moment captured between itching mosquito bites and slapping horse flies away. A calm moment captured before a picnic of watermelon and juice boxes and hotdogs cooked on my uncle’s tiny grill. A calm moment captured before we became who we really were in that fuzzy photograph—cousins, grandchildren of Pete and Edith Veeder, connected by blood and big love and orange push-up pops and a ranch with a pink road that runs right through. Cousins reunited for a weekend of camping under a fussy North Dakota sky where it’s always a little too cold for swimming with a good chance of a camper-shaking thunderstorm.

Those six kids are all grown up now and so are the two who were too wiggly to sit still for the photo, some of us raising fluffy haired kids of our own. And this summer, for many different reasons, I will have seen every one of my cousins in person, on both sides of my family, in the matter of a few months. This very likely hasn’t happened since we were kids and it’s been an unexpected blessing in this season that is rolling in and out of my life as quickly as one of those thunderstorms.

I watch my daughters take the road that cuts between my house and my sister’s on their way to play because they can hardly stand a day without seeing one another. Now that they are old enough, they take that road themselves. And when I tag along, they leave me in the dust, holding hands and pulling tight on that thread that binds me to them, stretching it out to reach the people they need beyond me. What I would have given to have lived right down the road from my cousins.

I watch these girls run toward one another and I can’t help but wonder how these relationships will continue and evolve through the years, as sisters and cousins and friends. Their innocence presently has us all fooled into thinking that it could last forever, that they will eternally be bonded in this same tender and intricate way. But years have shown me enough scenarios in which it can all quietly or not so quietly fade or crumble or implode because humans are complicated, and our hearts are tender, and time is a thief. Sometimes my sister and I let ourselves imagine our daughters as teenagers fighting over boyfriends or driving themselves to town for a rodeo or a football game. We think my youngest, Rosie, will insist on driving and then we think she’ll drive too fast. And Edie, my oldest, will try to keep them in line but Emma, my youngest niece will take Rosie’s back. And Ada, the animal lover, might prefer to stay home with the horses, but could be convinced to break any rule because Rosie and Emma plead a good case. Oh it’s fun to imagine but not without wondering how they could ever be anything but here safe at the ranch at 3 and  5 and 6 and 7, in the sweet spot of sprinkler running and Bible Camp songs and endless game of babies in our basement.

Is that what our parents thought that day they asked us to sit shoulder to shoulder on the picnic bench? That if they pointed that camera and developed that film that it would help them remember this fleeting moment where we were together and sun kissed and smiling, before we knew that growing up could simultaneously ache and excite us. Before that thread pulled tight on us across the countryside as we wandered off to find out who we were supposed to be beyond the grass-stained knees of those tight-rolled jeans. I know it is. And then I wonder if they knew that it was because they believed in that pink road and that picnic table bench and family camping trips and Christmas suppers and Easter egg hunts at gramma’s that even now, after all these years, we do what it takes to have the chance to be who we really are, who we’ve always been, Pete and Edith’s grandchildren, squeezing in to say cheese.  

Rescue Mission

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Listen to the poddcast here or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

My three-year niece, Emma has a bird book. She stands on the couch in the living room and looks out the window with that book in her chubby little hands and marks the ones she sees. It’s adorable, and that kid doesn’t miss a beat. She’s looking up at the sky whenever she can.

The other day I was walking with all the girls, my two daughters, who are five and seven, and Emma and her sister Ada, who is also five and probably loves animals the most of any kid I’ve ever met. Like, she has a gift with them, truly. Now bear with me here, this all matters because as we approached my house I noticed Emma stop dead in her tracks to stare intently at something way up in a tall tree by the road. When I caught up to her I looked up too and realized that what had her attention was a bird, about twenty feet up in an ash tree, flapping and panicked, trying to escape the small piece of twine that had somehow wrapped around its leg and attached him to a small branch. I later learned it was a cedar waxwing, which explained why other cedar waxwings would occasionally fly in to check on it, wondering why it couldn’t join the flock.

It was heartbreaking to watch, and even more heartbreaking to watch these four little girls discover the bird’s misery. Edie, my oldest, looked at me with urgency and, of course said, “We have to help it! Hurry!” Which is exactly what would have been going through my mind as a 7 year old, and, actually, it was going through my mind as a mom then too, but with a little more apprehension because I was home by myself and I’m afraid of heights and, frankly, a little unnerved by flapping birds. Also, so many things could go wrong in this situation if I actually figured out a way to get up there. Like I wouldn’t make it in time for one, or if I did, the bird might be gravely injured. Or, maybe of more concern, I could be gravely injured, I mean, I don’t have a great track record with ladders.

Anyway, if you’ve ever been in an urgent situation where four innocent and sweet little animal-loving girls are looking to you to SAVE A LITERAL LIFE, you can’t blame me for trying to do something. So they told me they’d keep watch while I ran to the house and got the ladder…and the pickup… because my plan was to, you guessed it, back the pickup up to the tree, put the ladder in the box, climb up there with my scissors and bibbidi bobbidi boo, release the wax wing like a Disney Princess Superhero.

But first I needed to call my sister to hold the ladder, grab me those gloves, and, in case it all went south, divert the attention and call the ambulance. Only a sister would come tearing in the yard in minutes flat after only being told, “there is a bird situation here.”

Turns out, once I got the ladder in the back of the pickup and got to the third rung, I also needed her to give me a pep talk. “If you’re going to do this, you just gotta commit” she said handing me the scissors and then wrapping a tight grip on my leg because even though we both knew that wasn’t going to keep me from falling to a bloody death in the name of a tiny bird, it made us both feel better. Oh, and also she needed to call off the dogs that suddenly came to investigate, both of us imaging that unfortunate scenario.

Anyway, if these girls ever say I never did anything for them, I’m documenting it now in this publication that me,  their mother, who is indeed truly afraid of heights, backed our pickup up to that tall tree, placed the ladder in the bed, climbed it, pulled the branch attached to the bird down to my level and detached it, untangled the tiny little bird leg from the twine and didn’t scream once (or at least not too loud) in front of my audience of little girls. In fact, I held that bird long enough for all of them to get a quick, closer look and then let it go, off safe and sound into the trees.

And then I sopped the sweat from my face and calmed my shaky legs and we all went on with our weird, wonderful little lives feeling good about the one we all saved. And Emma marked Cedar Waxwing in her bird book.

My grandma, she could float

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This week we said goodbye to my grandma Ginny, my mom’s mother, in a little lake town in Minnesota.

It’s easy to look back at what I knew of this woman and be proud to have called her my grandmother. And for a few days we spent time with family in her and grampa’s cabin on the shores of Lake Melissa. And it seemed she ordered the weather up just for us, so our kids could jump in its cool, clear waters and pull up fish after fish after little sun fish. She was smiling down for sure.

Due to the crazy travel schedule, watch for the podcast to be published tomorrow.

My grandma, she could float
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There are things about people you remember when they’ve left this world and it’s never what you think will stick with you when you’re mourning their death at their funeral or writing an obituary or a note of condolence.

I want to say something profound here today about my grandmother Virginia Blain, who died peacefully in her bed last week in a little lake town in Minnesota at 89 years old. I want to tell you about a woman who grew up as a baker’s daughter and married and nurtured the love of her life for nearly 70 years. I want to tell you how she built a professional career in the 1950s, kept her own checking account and raised four smart and independent daughters. I want to tell you how she swam in lakes and oceans around the world and planted hundreds of flower gardens and read a thousand books and played a million games of bridge before time made her mind betray her, slowly taking her away from the people who love her, in this life, where she will be dearly missed…

But all I can think about right now is how she could float. My grandmother, who was an accomplished Girls Scout and a lifeguard and a strong swimmer who spent her long life on the shores of Minnesota lakes, would walk out into the water and just let it hold her up as she smiled under her straw hat and splashed her grandkids with the hands she didn’t need to use to keep her head above water. And we would all try it then as we watched her, our skinny, pale, Midwestern bodies flailing, our cheeks puffed out as we held our breath and sunk under the water while she laughed.

“Ginny was a happy person,” that’s what my grandfather wrote at the end of her obituary and I can’t stop crying over it and I’m not sure why. After all the things that she was, that line reaches inside me and stirs it all up.

Because it’s true. In fact, she might have been the definition of it, even in the most challenging times in her life. She dealt with doubt or loneliness by organizing a card game or hosting a party or getting to work. When her husband’s military career took her from the familiar sidewalks of her North Dakota home to Japan in the infancy of marriage and new motherhood, she called it an adventure and took a flower arranging class and for the rest of her summers there was never an empty flowerbed or bud vase in sight.

To be loved by a person like my grandma Ginny is to feel like she created her sunshine just to have you stand in it and warm up. She had a way of making it all special. I wanted to make sure I said that because it’s true. Serving pretzels? She’d put them in a pretty dish with sour cream and garlic salt for dipping. She’d wrap the son-in-laws’ Christmas socks in a nice box with tissue paper and a curled bow, making Hanes look luxurious. She’d mix salted peanuts with M&Ms and make sure the glass bowl was always full for company. She’d make a game of waiting in line. She put a cherry in the vodka tonic. She put the music on for supper. She made plans for breakfast in bed, then made sure he made plans to reciprocate. She’d have you circle your favorite things in every catalog. She’d tell him he’s handsome. She’d tell everyone he’s handsome.

To my grandma, life was a game that she genuinely wanted to play, and she wanted you to play with her.

When you’re loved by someone like her, you want to make her proud. That alone is the greatest gift she could have left us with.

My grandma was hydrangeas in the garden and a sailboat ride with her husband. She was a good book in the lawn chair in the shade by the lake and a cold washcloth on your forehead when there was nothing else she could do. She was a big laugh, a game of Tripoly and leave the dishes for later. My grandma was lumpy mashed potatoes and mediocre Salisbury steak that tasted better than it was because she made no apologies and it wasn’t about the food anyway. She was licorice in the candy drawer and doughnut holes from the bakery and fishing with gummy worms off the dock. And my grandma, she was happy.

My grandma, she could float..

Colors of the season

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On the podcast this week I visit with both my daughters on what it means to be a cowgirl and how it went at their first rodeo. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

This morning the new calves were frolicking, bucking and kicking up their wobbly legs outside my window as the sun began to rise magenta pink on the cusp of the hill. The grass is neon green and I thought then that those colors of the morning sky and that green and the shine of the black on the backs of those calves were all my favorite colors.

This week Rosie, my youngest, graduates from preschool. They give her a little graduation cap and everything. She’ll wear her new dress and sing songs she’s been practicing for a month alongside her cousin. A few days ago my sister and I took our five-year-olds to kindergarten orientation. As the our daughters held hands and skipped around the school behind the teachers at the front of the line, brave and excited together, my sister, who is five years younger than me, whispered, “Did you ever think we would have kids going to school at the same time?”

“No,” I replied. “I guess this is how it was always supposed to be.”

This season change from white to brown to bright is following this little season change in my life. We will play through the summer and then both of my daughters will be in school—a kindergartener and a second grader. If my husband and I would have come into parenthood without ten years of heartbreak and loss, we would be long past this elementary school part, with a teenager practicing to take the drivers test. Our kids would be babysitting my little sister’s kids if we had control of the timing of any of it. If we wouldn’t have suffered loss after loss…

And you couldn’t have convinced me at the time that it would all work out the way it has. The heartbreak of infertility and miscarriage is a weight that sometimes pulls the heaviest when you’re trying your best to stay positive. There were years I gave up on the idea of parenthood entirely. There were years the pain made me avoid the subject.

Yesterday my sister, husband and I took all the girls (aged three, five, five and seven just so you can get the complete picture here) to practice riding horses and to get ready for their first little rodeo in town at the end of the week. The older girls were working on navigating their horses around the barrel pattern. With old horses fresh off of a lazy winter that know the grain bucket’s at the barn, it takes a bit of coaxing and skill to get them to take these little bodies on their backs seriously. It can be frustrating for a perfectionist like my seven-year-old and she wasn’t handling it well. And I haven’t read a parenting book that addresses the specific issue of teaching your kids to be calm and patient on the back of an old, stubborn horse, and so I wasn’t handling it well either.

An animal will test all the things that need testing in you, and so after we put horses away and loaded up to go home, I turned to my daughter and reminded her that she’s a cowgirl. And then out of my mouth came a list for her, a little guideline that I thought my rule-follower could appreciate:

A cowgirl is kind. A cowgirl encourages others. A cowgirl stays calm in tough situations. A cowgirl doesn’t give up. A cowgirl tries her best.

We both repeated it. And then so did Rosie.

And I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say here except I wanted to acknowledge that there are many ways a life can turn out, even if it isn’t the way you planned it. And I can’t say it would be better or it would be worse because the ‘what ifs’ don’t have answers. But I do know that all the mistakes and lessons and heartbreaks and little victories live inside you. And they’re there for you to tap into when you need them. And maybe that’s how you show gratitude for the things you thought might break you, or maybe that’s simply the definition of gratitude itself.

And maybe my favorite color is the color of every sunrise, in every season, reminding us of another chance at a new day.

Stuck Season

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This week on the podcast we talk stuck stories and I share a rough cut of a song from the new album. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.


I don’t know what comes over us when the snow melts and forms spontaneous rushing rivers in the barnyard, in the ditches, and through the trees, but I will tell you it’s not exclusive to the kids. I heard my neighbor’s grown man son took his kayak out the other day to see where the water would take him and I was immediately jealous that I hadn’t thought of it.

Yes, the first day the weather hit above 50 degrees my daughters were out chasing the runoff in their shorts and rubber boots and skinny white legs. And I was following right behind on the same mission, only in long pants because I have learned some lessons in my advanced age.

Like no matter your careful intentions on this mission, you will always wind up with the entire creek over the tops of your boots. Not a soul can help it after months and months in a deep freeze. We always go a bit too far.

And it seems the same goes with the mud. It could be. Or it could be hereditary, or it could be that I just really wanted to get closer to the first new calf of the season on our way home from celebrating Easter in town with my husband’s family. Turns out the sight of a cute calf makes you forget that just 24 hours ago that little mud puddle was a snow bank. Turns out off-roading in a SUV/Grocery Getter on the first warm day of the year with two kids and everything the Easter bunny could fit in the back is a dumb idea. I sunk into mud half up my tires immediately. It was only by pure willpower and utter embarrassment at the thought of having to call my brother-in-law to pull me out that I was able to maneuver out of that sticky situation. I counted that as a bullet dodged and moved on with my life.

The next few days were warmer yet, like 70 degrees! We hadn’t seen this since the Middle Ages! My little sister called to see if we wanted to go walk the creek bottoms and float sticks, even though our darling daughters were plumb happy with the little rivers forming puddles and running in the ditches in our yards. But the responsible adults in this relationship, that was not going to cut it. With one whiff of melting snow my sister and I were transported to our childhood, knowing the window of opportunity for this sort of dramatic landscape change around here is fleeting.

My husband was busy digging out things that had been lost in the snow banks for months and so I told him that we were going to load the girls in the pickup and head for the creek. He suggested we take the side-by-side instead so we wouldn’t get stuck. I ignored him.

And so off we went to find the creek as big as it’s ever been, rushing and flowing and cutting through ice and snow along its edges, melting and forming a new river right before our eyes. This was no stick-floating situation, we should have brought the kayak! We stood on its edges a while with our daughters, mesmerized. The we pulled them some good walking sticks and I held the big girls’ hands while we waded in a bit along it’s edges, until, inevitably, Edie got two boots full of ice cold creek and we hauled them back through the snow bank and up to the pickup to make our way back home.

It’s here my husband showed up with the four-wheeler. I dumped a gallon of water out of our daughter’s boots and we loaded our soggy selves into the pickup. From the driver’s seat I told my dearly beloved that we were heading home, put it four-wheel drive and crept toward my fate. In the rear view mirror I saw my husband on that ATV quietly watching to see how I was going to turn this big ‘ol pickup around on a skinny scoria trail surrounded by snow banks and mud and icy puddles.

And I could go into the step-by-step details here, but I think you’ve predicted it. Not only did I get stuck, I nearly landed the whole pickup in the creek. I did a number that not even my husband could undo. And the man, he didn’t even say, “I told you so” when I profusely apologized. He just poked his head in the window and replied, “We all gotta learn our lessons our own way.”

And then my sister called my brother-in-law to come with the towrope.

Oh, Happy Spring! If you need me I’ll be ignoring logic and the mud in my entryway. 

Prairie People Hit the Beach

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Do you know what it takes to get out of the great white north in March?

Ask anyone who tried it the past couple weeks of spring break and they will tell you it was an act of God. Some of them never made it out.

Listen to the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

We were the lucky ones (cue dramatic music). Because for some reason our tactic of driving more north to Canada to catch a flight to Mexico actually worked. I mean, the flight was delayed ten hours, but the promise a 100 degree temperature change and unlimited access to tequila kept our spirits up. And also, not one soul left behind in North Dakota will tolerate any complaints about a March trip to Mexico in the middle of the blizzard, so I wouldn’t dare. Didn’t even want to send a picture of me blinding the country with my neon winter white ranch kid legs blazing in the sun. My plan was to just slip quietly away with my husband and my sunscreen and giant hat to pretend for a week that the only care we have in the world is how many more chips and guacamole we could possibly eat before it was time to eat an actual meal.

Traded our wool caps for vacation hats

I turn 40 this year. My husband had his turn in September. Mexico with friends was a gift we gave ourselves for making it this far. And now I’m scheming on what excuse I can come up with to do the same thing next year. Although maybe the only excuse a person needs to get away from it all is that, in the end, it makes you more tolerable to the people who have to live with you.

I will also take a moment here to plead my case for a week’s paid vacation in a tropical place for every person who has had to endure this forty-five month North Dakota winter. I don’t know who is going to pay for it, but I’m sure we can work it out in a bake sale or something…

So that’s where we’ve been, my husband and I. We left our kids behind with the in-laws to do things kids do with grandparents—bake cookies, eat cookies, bake cupcakes, eat cupcakes, snuggle, watch movies, swim in the big community pool and, apparently, partake in major shopping sprees. When they Facetimed us to model their new outfits, with a margarita in my hand and my feet in the pool it was hard to tell among us who was having more fun–and I threw my body down a 98 foot waterslide. In hindsight, the waterslide was a terrible idea, but I’ll never admit it, not to my kids anyway.

Oh, vacation life! Where nobody knows you except the yahoos you brought with you and so somehow you can convince yourself that you are the person who thinks 98-foot waterslides are fun and not just an un-prescribed enema/neti pot treatment.

In Mexico, it could not be clearer that the lot of us were northern folk. With one half of our crew of 14 residing in Canada and the other from North Dakota, our combined complexions lounging in the pool could likely be seen from space. And if that didn’t give it away, one of us puking on the 20-minute ferry ride to the island probably did. We are prairie people. The only waves we have up here are made of grain.

But in Mexico, we’re different. In Mexico, I scuba dive.

Yup. Just give me a 20-minute lesson on land and I’m expert enough to put my face underwater and not panic. And by not panicking I mean managing only to do the one thing required of me to not die while scuba diving and that is to breathe. Need me to actually swim, or push that button that releases air to send me up or down, or look at fish or pose for a picture or not float to the surface and need to be pulled back down? Can’t do it. Working on breathing here.

Oh, if just breathing were the only task. That’s the power of vacation mode.

If you need me I’m back home now, eating noodle soup, re-acclimating to my natural habitat and making plans for the bake sale.

When ranch kids hit the big town

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Rosie and Edie on the set of “Don’t let the pigeon ride the bus”

We’re back at the ranch after week in Mexico and I’m working on getting acclimated to my natural habitat. The shock of 85 degrees to -4 has yet to wear out, even though I’ve eaten knoephla soup for supper two days in a row. Oh, how quickly I can become a beach person.

Anyway, because of our hiatus, I’m a little behind on sharing the weekly column and podcast. Chad and I plan to sit down and record a bit tonight.

The weekend before we left on vacation we took the girls to the big town across the state to visit friends and take them to a theater production. I don’t know why I decided this was something we had to do, but it turned out it was something we had to do. Sometimes you just need to make plans to break out of the ordinary routine and give your kids some new experiences. Especially on the edge of an eternal winter.

Anyway, this column is a reflection on what it means to take our little ranch girls to the big town. Turns out it’s a lot of time on the escalator.

The dangers of taking the country kid to town

We spent last weekend in the big town. I decided to make a singing trip a family trip all the way across the state, which happened to be right on the heels of one major winter storm and at the helm of another because it’s March and that’s what March does up north. And the cows aren’t having calves yet, so we took the chance to get away.

Also, lately the girls have been asking when we can go to the beach, and the closest we can get right now is meeting friends at a hotel pool in Fargo where there was 47 feet of snow piling up outside and more promised for Sunday.

And they were thrilled about it. Truly. Isn’t that the best thing about kids? It takes such simple efforts to make them happy. A promise of ice cream. Pizza for supper. A quarter in the gumball machine. Going up and down the escalator 55 times.

Seriously. I think the level of excitement about the escalator is the reddest of flags when identifying a rural/country kid in the big town. We also rode the store’s Ferris Wheel, but the escalator won in popularity. Rosie rode it so many times that her big sister Edie started to be seriously concerned about the rules. Could she get kicked out for shenanigans like this? Are you allowed to go up and then immediately down? Is there a limit on escalator rides? Does she know she’s starting to get embarrassing?

So went all of Edie’s 7-year-old concerns about her little sister’s lack of decorum in public. It’s like the big sister took a trip to civilization and realized that, perhaps, her little sister wasn’t equipped for these types of outings considering she wasn’t yet civilized herself.

So we took them to the roller-skating rink. Because etiquette goes out the window when you’re fighting for your life with eight tiny wheels strapped to your feet. And in case you’re wondering, country kids don’t know how to roller-skate due to the lack of available paved surfaces.

My kids took to the wood floor with all the confidence and grace of baby zoo giraffes on a frozen lake while their professional Rollerblading town friend and my husband spent the majority of the two-hour rink time holding hands and elbows and dragging our daughters back up on their wobbly, wheeled feet.

Which reminded me of the only time I ever roller-skated in my life down at my cousins’ ranch on the South Dakota border. Between the four of us, we had one pair of real, leather roller-skates with the orange wheels. They were at least four sizes too big, but it didn’t matter. We would take turns, two at a time, gliding around in circles on one skate on the small slab of concrete outside of their garage, skinning our bare knees there as we developed confidence entirely too quickly for the make-shift sport.

Needless to say, I didn’t step foot in a roller-skate that day. At this age, I have to seriously consider the repercussions of breaking a hip.

But my girls? After two Slurpies, three pieces of pizza, and five games of skee ball on the way out the door, they deemed themselves experts and have decided they’d like to live in Fargo now. Where they have roller rinks.

And Target.

Oh, yeah, Edie decided she’d really just like to live in Target, and now I’m wondering how I’ve failed as a ranch mom, because surely now they’re going to leave me for the big cities with roller rinks and escalators, and I’m going to have to follow them and live in an RV in the local KOA to have a proper relationship with my grandkids.

Anyyywaaayyy …

My activity of choice for the weekend was less physical and more theater.

Edie’s been reading “The Pigeon Series” books by Mo Willems, and my cousin (the one with the roller-skates) just happened to be directing the play “Don’t Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus” that weekend. So we went, and it was adorable, and now Edie wants to live in Target and be an actress, and Rosie is so brave she goes down hotel pool waterslides backwards and headfirst even though Edie tells her it’s explicitly, most likely against the rules, and so now they’re both surely going to leave me for the warmer weather and waterslides in LA.

But first we had to get back to the ranch, which was completely impossible on Sunday because when you live in North Dakota, you shouldn’t go anywhere but Jamaica in March. And so we were forced to spend one more evening in the oasis of the hotel pool. As I drove us white-knuckled back west for five hours on icy and drifty roads, I wondered if maybe my girls were on to something. I mean, escalators are pretty fun.

But then, so are baby calves.

See you at the beach.

The dangerous life of a handyman’s wife

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On the podcast I pop in quick to give an update as we get ready to go on vacation!

I am the wife of a handyman.  Because of him we live by the mantra: “If you want something done and still want to be able to afford to buy Cheerios, we do it ourselves.” I came to terms with this concept early in our marriage when we were young and naïve and took on the complete strip-down of a shag carpet, hot-tub-in-the-living-room remodel that brought a 1974 Brady Bunch house up to the times of hardwood flooring and no hot tubs in the living room. Seven thousand hours of staining and varnishing and stripping and sheet rocking, a few dozen arguments and one head stuck in a ladder later I began to fully understand what it truly meant. Wife of a handyman=this is your life, forever and ever amen.

Here we are, ten years ago when the shell of our house arrived. So young. So naive.

Fast-forward twelve years and here we are, proving that I was right. We’re still working on our house. Because just when it starts looking like it’s going to be finished, I come up with an idea for an addition or a remodel. I guess that’s what happens when your tool-belt-wearing man can make anything happen, you start to feel empowered with your vision.

Anyway, lately he’s been empowering me by requesting I help him put rocks on the new fireplace in our new living room, to which I say: it could be worse. I could be trembling on an eight-foot ladder on top of ten-foot high homemade scaffolding with my arms above my head because we decided that 20-foot ceilings were a good idea without considering that one of us is deathly afraid of heights.

Plummeting to a bone-crushing, bloody, mangled death is what I pictured every time I walked across that homemade scaffolding, boards creaking in my attempt to bring a nail-gun to my dearly beloved who thought positioning his ladder on the tippy-toe edge of the ledge, standing at the very top rung and then leaning out into the abyss of death that is now our living room was an acceptable risk to take in the name of homebuilding. The urge to scream “screw the board, save yourselves!” and run to lay on solid ground is a hereditary condition spawned from my prairie dwelling ancestors who passed up the terrifying mountains to come live in houses with one floor, low ceilings and basements.

My dad has the condition too, and so that’s why this memory of recruiting him to help install a wooden beam on our tall ceiling is etched in my brain. I suggested calling the National Guard, but my husband just told me to go get my dad. And the task I approached him with was one straight out of his nightmares: Stand on this tall ladder on this shaky scaffolding and hold this 15 foot beam up to the top of the 20 foot ceiling while my husband climbs and dangles and runs and jumps and back flips with nail-gun in hand to get the thing to hold.

My job? Same thing, only with trembling, holding my breath and throwing up a bit of my morning eggs.

And so there we stood, my dad and I, conjuring up worst-case scenarios as Ninja Bob Villa went from one near death position to the next. Dad told me not to watch as my husband stretched his ladder across the stairway and stood with nothing but a thin board between him and a fifteen-foot fall.

So I didn’t watch. And neither did Dad.

I remember us working hard to hold it together. The two of us only hollering “be careful up there!” and “don’t fall!” like fifty-five times during the course of fifteen minutes. But just as we thought we were out of the woods, everybody’s head in tact, my husband climbed down from the ladder and put his hands on his hips.

“Looks good,” he said.

“YES! IT DOES. GOOD WORK,” shrieked Dad and I.

“I just need to nail one more spot,” my husband said scratching his head. “I wonder how the hell I’m going to get to it?”

We followed his eyes to where they rested on a piece of the beam that towered past the edge of the scaffolding, too high for a regular ladder, un-reachable unless you had wings.

Dad used our best material to try and convince my husband that a nail in that particular location was not necessary. We suggested putting more nails in other places to make up for it. But my husband wouldn’t have it and before we knew it he had his ladder on the ledge of the scaffolding, his feet on the top rung, his back bent at a 90-degree angle out over the staircase with a nail gun in his hand reaching for the ceiling.

And that’s where we both lost it.

I whimpered and squeezed back tears as I white knuckled the ladder. And while I was saying fifty prayers to Jesus, Dad threw down his tools and grabbed on to his son-in-law’s belt buckle as my husband leaned further back over the abyss.

“Son, if you fall it would be sure death,” my dad declared.

“And if either of you tell anyone that I grabbed your belt, I’ll kill you both…”

So there’s that story. Now if you need me, I’ll be hiding from both my husband and my dad.

Stay handy!
Jessie