If she had wings, she’d never come down from the sky.
That’s why God made wheels for this girl of mine.
And once I thought He made her so we could show her things.
But it goes the other way.
Because she reminds us of a better, wilder world, every single day.
Why I blame my dad for my stick shift struggles
by Jessie Veeder
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com
I have a confession to make.
In the years I spent growing up out here on the ranch as well as those being all grown up here on the ranch, I have never properly learned to drive a stick shift.
Oh, I can make it work. I can get from Point A to Point B if Point A is the house and Point B is the barnyard over the hill, the hay yard, or my parent’s house a mile down the gravel road, but that’s where my gear-finding, clutch-pushing confidence ends.
I know, I know. It’s embarrassing. Some things are just expected of you living out here among cows and barbed-wire fences. But I have a handicap.
And I could say I have no one to blame but myself, because I’m ultimately responsible for taking the initiative to master something I need to know, but forget it.
I blame my dad.
I blame my dad and all the old, impossible, gear sticky, seat-stuck-too-far-back, ancient and impossible pickups he enlisted to teach me to drive back in the day.
I mean, how’s a girl to grab a chance at finding the right gear when the gear indicator knob long ago popped off and rolled around on the floorboards before meeting its ultimate fate in some brush patch Dad was fencing one day in 1995?
Am I in reverse? The only way to find out is to release the clutch and hope I don’t kill it before rolling backwards while simultaneously hoping I’m not in first because there’s not much room for error in the 10 inches between the front of the pickup and the shop.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. There was one pickup he tried to teach me on that you literally had to push down a hill like a Flinstones car to get started. And once it turned over, well, you had to keep it gassed for fear of starting the whole ritual over again.
God forbid it quit at the bottom of a coulee somewhere.
Some of the biggest fights I had with my dad happened behind the wheel of his old pickups where he more than one chose the “just leave her to sort it out” method, and frankly, my pubescent tears of frustration just didn’t allow for that sort of sorting it out.
That’s the flashback I had yesterday when I suggested my husband run me through the workings of the hydraulic bale spear so I can feed cows on my own. I had left chicken baking in the oven, and we brought along the wiggly toddler who wants nothing more than for me to just scooch on out of there and let her take over.
Needless to say, I had a few distractions to blame for me killing it 37 times between my attempts at picking up and rolling the bales out.
But we were in Dad’s pickup, the one with the sticky gears, missing gear knob and seat that doesn’t move forward, so I blame him.
I will always blame him.
The beasts, in their final resting place. RIP…RIP…
“One. Two. Threeee!!!” She yelled before she launched herself from the top of one big round hay bale and over the mud filled gap to the next, landing safely on her knees before scrambling up to her feet to continue her race down the rest of the row of hay.
I stood holding Edie on my hip, both of us laughing as we watched her three cousins run and leap, making an obstacle course out of the hay yard, their blonde hair escaping from ponytails and flying up toward the blue sky in the wind.
I lifted Edie up over my head to sit her next to her cousin and take in the view, my hands held tight around her little waist to hold her steady for a few short moments before my baby girl promptly reached down, grabbed my fingers with a little whine and pushed me away from her, trying to convince me to let her go.
Apparently sixteen months of growing on this earth is long enough to be ready to leap across the tops of five-foot tall hay bales on her own. Now if only she could convince her momma.
The stomp of six rubber boots kicked up the scent of summer dust trapped inside that feed pile combined with the squeals and chatter transported me to a time when I was as fearless and free, racing my cousin to the third tier of bales in the stack, declaring myself Queen of the World on top of her pyramid 20 feet in the air, with no regard for the scary consequences that could result from a slip.
I couldn’t help but notice then the little twinges of worry that shot through my body as I watched those girls reach the top of their own pyramid. And then there was the push and pull I felt in my gut, the tug-of-war of wanting them to go higher, to see what the cows look like from up there, but willing them to be careful.
Oh child, don’t you know what could happen!?
I guess that’s what motherhood is. Holding on tight as you’re letting go…
Edie reached her arms out towards me, and I helped her off the top of that bale and then walked her over to where her grandparents and daddy were watching by the road.
“C’mon,” I said to him as I ran back toward the hay yard, stripping off my jacket as I hoisted myself up to enter the race to see who could be the first to leap across 25.
“One. Two. Threeeee!!….”
The snow melted into big rivers today, shrinking and sinking the drifts in the draws and creating a glorious slop of mud along our prairie trails and I’m hoping we’ve seen the last of the white stuff for the season.
History has taught me better though.
But we’re honing in on another spring season and I’ll take the warm up where I can get it.
I take to the hilltops like I do every year to check out the thaw.
In my other life the only thing that indicated the passage of another winter was a collection of fresh gray strands in my hair and new lines on my face.
These days it’s chronicled by my shadow…
It’s my honor to carry this child across this prairie and through the quick tick of the clock, sun up and sun down, spring, summer, fall, winter and then again and again until she can climb these hills herself, without my hand to hold, and find for herself a dry place to lay in the sun the same way my dad taught me to do on the first warm day of spring.
I hope this place is forever her refuge.
It’s International Women’s Day.
Yesterday the wind blew snow across the plains at 60 miles per hour at times. I got out of bed at 6 am after a completely sleepless night with my one-year-old. I climbed in the warm shower and got my hair washed and legs shaved. I pulled on my robe and shuffled downstairs to wake my finally sleeping daughter, to kiss her cheeks, to change her diaper, to get her dressed, to send her out the door with her dad so she could spend a day at daycare and I could drive in the wind three hours across the state for work and then drive myself home again hopefully in time to miss the dangerous and snowy dark and to rock my baby to sleep.
I’m a mother living on a 100+ homestead at the end of a long winter.
Some days I feel lonesome and isolated.
Most days I feel fortunate.
Every day I think of the women in my family who raised kids before me out here on the edge of the badlands before electricity, before telephones, before washing machines and the conveniences of our modern world that make it easier for women like me to pursue my own dreams.
My grandmother Edith as a young woman helping on her family farm
I wish I could talk about dreams with my great grandmother Gudrun who came to the United States from Norway at sixteen years old and raised twelve children out here in the early 1900s, in all our brutal seasons.
Great Grandma Gudrun with her twelve children, my grandma Edith in the center in the plaid and bow
I wish I could talk dreams with my grandma Edith, one of Gudrun’s middle daughters, who grew up on that homestead with eleven siblings, married the neighbor boy, taught school children on the reservation next to the ranch, raised three kids and took many others into their small home and worked cattle alongside her husband, making sure breakfast was served in the morning and supper was on the table at night.
Grandma Edith holding me
I wish I could talk dreams with my great-grandma Eleanore, who raised two boys on her own as a working woman after the war in a time where single mothers weren’t a common thing.
And I am so grateful I can talk dreams with my mother’s mother, my grandma G. I’m grateful that I’ve taken the time to ask her what it meant to raise four girls in the fifties and sixties as a working career woman. I’m grateful she’s shared with me the struggles and accomplishments she’s found so important to her and to the lives of her daughters so that I can better understand how far we’ve come.
My grandma Ginny with three of her four daughters, two of her four granddaughters and one of her two great granddaughters.
And more than anything, I am thankful for my own mother who taught me to persevere, to pay attention, to laugh, to be kind, to recognize the struggles and have compassion for those different than you, to never be the victim and to work hard.
Always work hard.
I have become the woman I am today because of the women they were yesterday.
Let’s celebrate that strength in our past and look to the future with muscles flexed today.
For a little motivation, a little celebratory music, here’s “Work Girl.”
The new good ‘ol days are on their way
by Jessie Veeder
2-191-7
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com
I was five years old when my little sister was born. I was at an age where only the big things stick with you as a memory moving forward, and her arrival was one of those big things.
I remember the talks my family had about what we were going to name her if she was a girl or a boy. I remember my opinions on the choices. I remember my mom and her big belly at Christmastime.
And while I don’t remember visiting her in the hospital, I do remember bringing her home and wondering why she couldn’t sleep in my bed with me. So, I wholeheartedly offered her my tattered and beloved blankie to sleep with on her first night in her crib, feeling a little relieved when my parents declined my offer.
I wasn’t so certain I could sleep without it. But I was willing to try.
For that tiny new human who would now be living in my house, I would try.
It’s funny to think that my little sister arriving in this world, chubby and with what the nurse would describe as “a critical look” was one of my first memories.
And now that I think of it, even with the space of years between us, there aren’t many big and meaningful life moments that didn’t include her tagging along, or right there beside me or on the other end of the phone line.
When she arrived, a little sister myself, I was too young to understand what she might come to mean to me.
And now the young woman who once called me to ask how to boil an egg, who wept harder than me at the arrival of our daughter and who makes it a point to see her niece at least once every week, preferably on Sunday when she can have her all to herself, well, she’s going to be a mother herself.
I can finally tell you. I have permission. Because given all that she’s seen me go through on my long and heartbreaking journey to motherhood, my poor little sister unfortunately had to inherit the knowledge that when it comes to building a family, it doesn’t always go as planned.
And while there are perks of taking notes from the hard lessons your older siblings face, that warning wasn’t one I wanted to pass on to her.
Because some days I swear she’s still six years old and I’m eleven and I’m building her a fort on the other side of the creek with a tin can telephone strung from my post to hers so that if she needed me she could call.
And she’s always calling. That’s what I love about her. She’s better at things like sticking close and staying in touch. When she’s in your life she’s wholeheartedly there.
And while I lament about our childhood — three girls growing up in this wild and magical place — certain that those were the good ‘ol days, I can’t help but think that I might soon find out otherwise.
Because sharing in the common crazy, magical, sleep deprived chaos that is motherhood, raising our daughters together out here on the backs of horses, listening for the sound of their voices calling to one another across that same creek where we strung that old piece of twine, might take the place of the best years of our lives.
Yes. She’s having a girl.
And when I heard the news a little pang of hope that held its breath inside my chest finally let loose its air.
Because there’s no certainty in knowing if we’ll be able to have or welcome another child into our home, but from the moment I met my daughter, I wished for her a little sister.
And now, come June, it looks like she’s going to have one.
Just don’t make any bets on Edie sharing her blankie…
Today’s the big day for those of you who are all on board with an official holiday that celebrates LOVE!
I have to say, I’ve always liked the holiday, probably because my mom always made us her Valentines, greeting us in the morning with little gifts, candies and cards waiting at the breakfast table, making an ordinary day in February feel fun and special.
My mom is great at holidays.
Also, I was a kid who liked projects, so I took the Valentines Day box assignment very seriously, spending hours with construction paper, glue guns and whatever else I could find around the house and yard to inspire my creativity. Once I made a birdhouse Valentines box out of a milk carton and sticks from the coulee so elaborate that you couldn’t fit a valentine in the slot.
So I (happily) made a different one, bringing the birdhouse to school anyway, you know, as an art piece.
Anyway, now that I have a baby girl I have an excuse to get back into my Valentines Day projects, at least a little bit. And now that we have the good ‘ol invention called Pinterest, I don’t have to be creative…because other mommas can be creative for me.
So in case you have a little one and are looking for something fun to send or drop off to grammas, grampas, aunts and uncles for the holiday (something I meant to do yesterday, but forgot because I might have found the time to do a craft, but I don’t have the mind to follow through with its purpose) here’s a cute, fun, simple and one of the only Pinterest ideas I’ve actually executed.
I found it on a post done by blogger HelloBee, which also includes a few more fun Valentines Day crafts for the babies. Her example looks better, but maybe her baby isn’t as wiggly.
Click here to take a look at her post, “February Activities for Infants/Toddlers”.
But I have to say, Edie loved it. And she’s old enough now to get the concept of things after a few repetitions, so she happily spread her little hands out while I painted them with paint and pressed them onto the paper.
But here’s a tip, make sure you have a wet rag on hand to wipe the damage immediately. I had to turn my back for a second to get one and, well…
Our Valentines Day craft took a quick, but dark turn.
Anyway, I liked this project because I had everything on hand. Paint, brush, construction paper and baby.
And to make things easier on all of us, I put the baby in her high chair and turned on PBS while we painted her hands. And when her hands were done I threw her some Cheerios and we tackled (and tickled her feet).
And although I had to explain to my husband that it was supposed to spell out LOVE, I like it. I think I’ll frame it up and keep it as the only Valentines Day decoration I own.
And I’m putting a note on my agenda today to take the rest of them to the mailbox.
Happy Valentines Day moms and dads and babies and grammas and grampas and aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers and friends and everyone in between.
Celebrate love in all its forms today!
And then make sure you pop open a bottle of champaign, because, well, it’s important to take advantage of any excuse to drink champaign.
I hope my husband got my hint/blatant request to bring me home some Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies.
Peace, Love and smooches,
Jessie and Edie
Because Valentines Day is approaching and because more than anything in this life of ours the little things add up to the biggest acts of love.
Tiny reminders of love in an ordinary life
by Jessie Veeder
2-12-17
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com
Last week I had a couple meetings I scheduled in the late afternoon. I do this on days I don’t have Edie in daycare, strategically overlapping the beginning of my workday with the end of my husband’s.
Because we live 30 miles and a good 45 minutes from town, the planning can be a little tricky and usually involves a quick stop and drop at Gramma’s store so Edie can destroy the place before her daddy picks her up.
Anyway, after one of my meetings ran a little late in town, I decided to stop at the grocery store. Without a toddler in the cart practicing her fast-pitch skills with a bag of oranges, I could linger a little longer and think a little bit about the week’s meal plan, or, because I haven’t made a week’s meal plan ever in my life, at least I could take a second to price compare. Which I did. And I also picked up fried chicken from the deli, so supper was covered for another day.
By the time I finally made it through the door of the house, Edie was already sleeping in her room, the lights were low in the house and remnants of the evening were scattered from living room to kitchen, giving me a detailed map of what father and daughter had been up to together.
I chatted with my husband while I made my way to the bedroom to change out of my town clothes, throwing him the usual questions like, “How was she tonight? Was her nose still stuffy? “Did she go down OK? “What did she eat?”
Then I spotted a little pink bottle of fingernail polish on the coffee table sitting next to her sippy cup and cardboard book. Because I haven’t painted my fingernails since the seventh month our child was in utero, my next question was, of course, “What’s with the nail polish?”
“Oh,” he replied, “I painted Edie’s fingernails tonight.”
He was so nonchalant about it.
“Really? You painted her nails?” I asked, my voice suddenly moving up an octave as I pictured the scene, my heart beginning the melting process inside my chest.
“Yeah, I thought she might like it,” he shrugged. “And she did.”
And that’s really the end of the story because nothing extraordinary happened next in that house that evening. The two of us ate fried chicken at the counter, talked about our day, probably turned on the TV and argued about something in the news before trudging upstairs to bed.
These are the ins and outs of our regular days, nothing so glamorous or extraordinary about our lives or our family or our love story.
But for some reason I keep going back to that little scene, one that instantly brightened up a busy but regular week, the one that starred my stoic and scruffy husband holding that tiny polish brush in his big callused hands while balancing his baby daughter on his knee, gently coaxing her to hold still while he placed teeny dots of pink polish on her miniature fingers.
Ugh, there’s so much to say about that little moment besides the fact that it had the power to lift my spirits in such a unique way.
And it’s not that I think this is uncommon behavior for dads and daughters necessarily; it’s just that I know my husband and I know that I begged him to paint my toenails when I was pregnant with his daughter and the man refused, noting that he didn’t have a steady enough hand.
But the child can’t talk yet. She doesn’t know what fingernail polish is, so nail painting was his idea of something fun the two of them could do together.
OK.
But you know what I realized then? In all of the countless hours I’ve spent with that baby girl in the house alone, I’ve never once painted her fingernails. I don’t have the patience for it. I would much sooner choose banging two pot lids together or letting her rip up the roll of toilet paper in the bathroom.
But her dad chose the fingernail polish and, in the middle of an ordinary week in an ordinary marriage in an ordinary life, I was reminded why I chose him.
In these heated times, listen as much as you speak
by Jessie Veeder
2-5-17
Forum Communications
Last weekend we slowed down our typical agenda and spent some much-needed time with our good friends. Because we both live in rural North Dakota, we thought it would be fun to meet in the big town to do some shopping, eat out and take our babies swimming in the hotel pool.
My friend and her husband have a son who turns one soon and in the years prior to the arrival of our long-awaited children, we would spend hours on the phone together discussing doctors appointments, crying over losses and wondering why it was so hard for us and so easy for others.
These days, much to our delight, we talk about car seat choices and sleep schedules and how working from home and taking care of a toddler is the hardest and most wonderful gig we’ve had so far.
When we finally get a chance to get together, we hardly take a breath. Our husbands shake their heads and change the diapers and connect on what it’s like to be working daddies married to emotionally charged women.
So much of what we’re going through at this moment is the same — same demographic, same type of rural existence, same stage in motherhood, same small-business goals — but (and I think I can speak for my friend here) there are still experiences and pieces of our lives that don’t fully translate.
There are personal situations and feelings that we may never truly absorb or comprehend about one another, no matter how much we have in common or how much we adore each other.
And that’s ok.
“Be careful not to assume your experiences are the experiences of others.”
This statement appeared to me somewhere tucked inside the political back and forth that has become our lives in America these days. For some reason it really spoke to me as a line that somehow sums up what I’ve been feeling in a neat little package tucked in my pocket just waiting and ready to be disputed at any given time.
I’m not sure if I’m going to explain it properly here, but since becoming a mother it feels like every nerve I possess is exposed, every emotion so volatile. I see children in a different way now. I see them attached to mothers like me who felt them kick inside their bodies and welcomed them in the early mornings or long dark nights to worry and pain and then wails of relief.
I see those children, no matter the race, religion or distance across the ocean, and I see Edie.
I see their mothers, by birth or by adoption, by choice or by chance, and I see myself.
And then I wonder if they walk on this earth the way I do, so aware of how each decision made holds their babies so fully in their wake.
But that’s where the shared experience begins and ends. Because I might just be naive enough to think that loving a child the way a good mother loves her child is, in so many ways, universal.
What if I couldn’t give Edie a decent meal? What if the home I planned to raise her in was invaded or destroyed? What if she woke up with a fever or fell and broke her arm and I had to calculate and sacrifice our tight budget to afford a trip to the emergency room?
What if the only chance I thought we might have at surviving this life was to load up my one-year-old on a raft and float across the sea with nothing certain but uncertainty at the shore?
What would I do?
There are mothers in this world making choices like these while I sit in a hotel room drinking wine and playing cards with my best friend, our babies sleeping safe and sound beside us.
It’s not lost on me in these trying times, in a world seemingly teetering on the edge, that our opinions can be thrown around, but dear friends, they won’t go as far as the compassion we might find in stories we hear.
If we listen as much as we speak, we just might be reminded that we are nothing but the lucky ones.
Some old friendship keep you young. I’ve been lucky enough to grow up witnessing that phenomenon, one adventure and mishap after another.
Here’s this week’s column.
The moral of the old friendship story
1-29-17
by Jessie Veeder
http://www.InForum.com
We were all sitting around in the living room visiting about weather, politics and how Edie managed to get her second bloody nose in two days in church that morning when Dad came sneaking sort of quietly through the door, slipping off his snow boots and wool cap before shuffling down the hall and sliding into the chair.
The last time we saw him he was at the top of the neighbors’ sledding hill, brushing the snow off of his Carharts after a lightning speed solo trip on the orange toboggan.
His best friend just came back from the shop with his chainsaw to cut down a dead tree that he thought was in the way of the epic run they were building.
All the kids had already gone in the house due to frozen cheeks and my little sister and I, exhausted from a half hour of trying to save Edie from the ideas she had about running, unassisted and unafraid, down the sledding hill, decided we would all be safer and happier in my living room.
And so that’s where we left him — grampa Gene with his best friend, neighbor and grampa himself, Kelly — alone with two other dads, a slick sledding hill, a stack of sleds and no supervision.
“I bet if Gene and I took that orange sled down this hill together we could get going ’bout 150,” I heard Kelly say as he walked up the hill behind me.
And so I called Dad. I knew he wouldn’t want to miss out on a chance to go 150.
I should have known better, but neighbor Kelly is notorious for building epic escapades in the middle of an ordinary Sunday afternoon.
And in the winter, the go-to adventure is always their sledding hill, which is as meticulously cared for as an Olympic rated luge track.
“So, did you and Kelly go 150?” I asked Dad, thinking his unusual silence was a little suspicious.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “It was plenty fast.”
He sort of half-laughed the way a kid does when he’s holding on to something funny but knows giving in will undoubtedly mean having to explain himself.
Which is exactly what happened as he entered the living room scene, with my mom, little sister and husband all staring at him, knowing there was more to the story.
“What,” I said.
He scratched his head where his hat had been, making his silver, scruffy hair stand up straight and gave it up.
“Oh, it … it was bad,” he puffed. “Kelly got hurt. I don’t know …”
“What? How? Where?”
“Well, his arm I think. Think he tore a tendon. I don’t know … We tried snowboarding.”
“Dad!”
“Yeah, well it’s not a challenge for those young guys; they just fly right down there. It’s more fun for us. To see how far we can go. Anyway. I hurt my shoulder … ”
“Your shoulder?!”
“Yeah, but he wiped out pretty bad at the bottom, don’t know how much hand shaking he’ll be doing these days … ”
“Might be the end of his curling career … ”
And the conversation spun on from there about past near misses, heroic injuries and the epic 2-mile toboggan run from the hay field to the barnyard. One story blended into the next the way they do when you get an old guy rolling in memories with a friend who’s lived up the hill from him his entire life and can always be counted on to help with things like roundup, keys locked in cars, or kittens stuck behind refrigerators.
My favorite is the time he spent the evening at our house in the dark sitting on the floor in the living room while Dad sat in his easy chair, both holding BB guns pointed at the open cabinet under the sink waiting for the unwelcome pack rat they were hunting to make his next and final appearance, a really great scene in the wonderfully ordinary story of their long friendship.
“Well, if there’s a chance to go sledding I’m taking it,” Dad said when someone swung back around to ask how his shoulder was feeling.
And I think that might be the moral of the story, and maybe of friendship in general, no matter how old and reckless you get.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 