Category Archives: Love

The big chair and the tree

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Have you ever experienced a moment in your life where, in the middle of it, you’ve heard the voice in your head say, this is it, this is a memory now? 

I have several I go back to now and again, but the recent quietly falling snow has reminded me of this one—my husband and I sitting together, squished side by side in the big leather chair with the big leather ottoman that we had purchased second hand from our landlord the year before. We had only been married a couple years, and we moved that big piece of furniture into our very first house with the level of optimism and delusion you only really get when you’re in your early twenties. And we had it big enough to think that buying a repossessed house that needed to be completely gutted to be livable was a choice that was going to get us closer to the big dream. Little did we know that gutting a house, while trying and failing to start a family, would threaten to gut us too, like the big dream getting the best of us before we even really got started. 

But at night, after coming home from full-time, adult jobs to a house full of ripped up carpet, tools on the countertops and unusable spaces, we would tinker a bit on a project, maybe I would go for a walk with the dogs, we would feed ourselves and then we would sit on that big chair together under a blanket and it would all feel manageable somehow. 

It was in this timeframe in our lives I had my first and only Christmas tree meltdown. The winters we lived in that big, broken house were relentless. The snow never stopped falling and it would drift so high up against the south side of the house that our dog would climb the bank to sit on the roof of our garage and keep watch on the neighborhood. Over those two years, we lost six pregnancies while we worked to renovate about the same number of rooms on that godforsaken house. All this is to say, those rooms and the rooms in my mind didn’t seem well-kept enough to deserve a tree, and so I procrastinated the whole thing, though my husband insisted. We needed a tree. And so he took me down to the grocery store parking lot where they bring trees in from places that can grow trees and we picked one that was perfect and alive and full and we put it in the back of my husband’s pickup and we brought it to the not-done-yet house and we moved our big chair over a bit and we put that tree by the big picture window that faced the street and I put on the bulbs and lights I bought new from Walmart. And they were pretty enough. It was all pretty enough, and sweet and what you do on Christmas. 

And I hated it anyway. Like, I had a total disdain for this tree. I remember it clearly, the sight of it made me angry. It made me cry and it made me frustrated and I tried to blame it on the ornaments with no sentimental value or the fact that it was leaning a bit even though it wasn’t leaning at all. And I remember my husband being so patient with me, but I was not patient at all. I was irrational and at the time I didn’t know why. I just thought I was going crazy in this house with endless wallpaper to peel and sawdust to sweep and this tree, with it’s stupid glass bulbs and not one single baby-hand-print-ornament hanging on it, was just standing there in this mess, mocking me. 

But that night, despite my unreasonable attitude, my husband and I sat in that big chair, his right arm under my back, my head on his shoulder, and we watched the twinkle of the tree against the window while outside the big flakes were falling under the warmth of the street lights. Everything was quiet then, even the thoughts in my head. They stopped too to tell me, this is it. This is what matters, right here squished in this chair. Girl, this is what peace is. Remember it. 

Last weekend I watched our daughters pile out of my dad’s big tractor and plop their little snow-suited bodies in the piles of big snow that had fallen on the ranch the past few days. They rode along with him as he cleared a path for our pickup to drive out in the West pasture to find a Christmas tree to cut and decorate. The sun had just come out and the sky was as blue as it can look, making that fresh snow sparkle and our daughters just ran like wild animals across that pasture while we examined the spindly wild cedars in the hills.

The sight of them, with my dad and my husband and the laughing was closer to heaven than it was to that grocery store parking lot I stood in all those years ago.

The tree we picked? Way less beautiful by magazine standards. And it’s filled with candy canes now, and homemade ornaments and it will probably fall over at some point because these trees usually do. And the years will pass and I know I won’t remember that tree, but that day? It will be with me forever.

And, well, I guess I just wanted to tell you that. I wanted to tell you that in case you needed to hear it.

Who we were, who we are

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I took my husband with me on a long road trip to western Montana recently. I had a songwriter’s festival on a Friday, but booked another singing engagement the night before in Bismarck, so I needed a little help to make the mileage and the math work so I could show up on time.

My husband has been working long hours this summer as he expands his construction business and I haven’t seen much of him for the past four months. The timing to have him come along to help with the drive was terrible, as in, he didn’t really have the time. And also, we would be arriving home the day before school started and so we would be pushing it. But once we lived in Western Montana and it was the weekend of our 19th wedding anniversary and I thought maybe we could combine the work with a weekend spent actually away, just the two of us, with no real agenda after the singing was over. 

This is how you do vacations when you’re married to a traveling musician. It’s been happening since before we were married. Want to go to Northern Minnesota? Cool, I have a gig there, we’ll stay an extra night. Ever curious about Redfield, South Dakota population 2,214? Well, we’re going there for our honeymoon. We can stop in Fargo on the way home and get a fridge that’s way to big for the tiny farmhouse kitchen. 

Funny how nearly twenty years can go by and so many things just have not changed about who we are together and separate. At the little steak dinner we had with the kids on our anniversary, my husband asked me what I liked most about being married to him. I answered quickly. I’ve always felt safe with him. And he never makes me feel guilty for my weird schedule and the sort of unpredictable paths I’ve taken as a writer and musician. I’ve always just felt so certain that he can handle anything. 

“What do you like about being married to me?” I asked in return before our daughters chimed in, dying to know all our favorite things about them, naturally. 

“It’s that you haven’t really changed,” he said. 

And I didn’t know how to take that initially. Certainly, in so many ways I hope I have changed for the better. Age and tough life lessons and motherhood and marriage and illnesses have gotten me there. But what he meant was more like this: “Things that made you happy when I knew you as a kid, still make you happy. You laugh at the same things,” he began. And, probably because we just got back from a family ride on our dirt bikes up to the fields where I chose not to wear long pants and regretted every poky slap of the pig weeds and clover against my ankles, but persisted never-the-less, only to tip my dirt bike over on the bumpy trail on the way home, he continued. “You are up for things the same way you used to be.” 

And I’m not sure that statement is as true as it could be, but I like that his impression of this woman he’s known his whole life is that all those things that could have changed how I laugh and how I show up with joy, well, they haven’t. It felt nice to be seen that way.

So, I took the compliment. And then I took my guitar and my husband to the mountains, stopping at 2 am to take a sleep at a Super 8 Hotel just like our South Dakota trip all those years ago. And while we were there, we tried to remember what it was like for us when, briefly, we were mountain people.  But, for people with so much history together, the two of us have never been good at looking back. Maybe that’s why we like a road trip so much. 

And so, we spent the weekend wandering and eating, listening to music and obsessing over a 1980s fat-tire dirt bike my husband found at a garage sale in Phillpsburg 600 miles from home. Even though school was going to start. Even though his work kept calling. Even though I had deadlines and another gig to get back to. 

And it wasn’t overly romantic. There were no grand gestures of reconnecting. It was slow and it was only two days and it was just the two of us and we did what we wanted, which, turns out was getting cash out of the ATM so we could pick up that old dirt bike on the way home. Because yeah, if I haven’t changed, well, neither has he. 

And I never wanted to leave again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

50,000 people singing….

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I turned forty-one walking along the streets of Minneapolis. It was midnight and we were laughing, all five of us women, about something I can’t remember, something that probably wouldn’t have hit us this hard if we hadn’t just left a stadium where we sat shoulder to shoulder with 50,000 people singing along, at the top of our lungs, to our favorite songs. 

50,000 people in one place who knew all the words to the same songs.

Five women who made space in lives that overwhelm us with ways in which we might be doing it all wrong. And, if we don’t pay attention the proper amount, take or don’t take the vitamins, wear or don’t wear the thing, vote or don’t vote this way, drink or don’t drink the milk, eat or don’t eat the meal, we risk screwing it all up. The parenting. The marriage. The job. The country. The earth. It’s a heavy weight to carry and it’s hard not to sprinkle it with a little dose of guilt when you decide to spend too much money on concert tickets, leave the kids at home, throw your cutest outfit in your suitcase, take the car seats out of the minivan and drive away for a weekend spent with four women who have done their version of the same to put some space between themselves and the notion that we might not all be ok.

It’s a heavy time in the news cycle, which just happens to coincide with the time in our lives where we’ve charged ourselves with raising the future. In the early mornings when I drive that future to school, I ask each daughter and niece to pick a song. This week “Jeramiah Was a Bullfrog” has been on heavy rotation. “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls…” we sing along as we drive, 65 MPH to 45 MPH to 25 MPH on roads they keep constructing. I park in front of the door to school and tell them I love them and tell them to be kind. They run into another day of childhood in middle America where we feel pretty lucky and pretty worried (I pause to wonder here if there are better words I could choose to describe it…)

Back at the stadium a young man behind me stands during the opening act, lifts his drink up in the air with one hand and puts his other arm around the girl he came with. Throughout the entire night, he sings almost every lyric with the vulnerability of a young child. But he’s not a young child, he is a man in middle America singing the lyrics of songs that describe what it feels like to lose someone, songs about addiction and fear, uncertainty and family and hope, tender things wrapped up safely in the sound of the fiddle and guitar and drums keeping time, coming from a man who looks like the guys in his hometown who maybe don’t talk about those things.

And maybe tomorrow, back at home, back at work, he won’t again. But he is here. Here he is, exposed, singing along.

I suppose if we admit that moments like this could save us, we must also admit that it could also be dangerous—50,000 people singing the same words…

I walked out of that stadium holding hands with the women I came with into a night bright with city lights. I turned 41 while the crowd of teenagers and twenty-somethings, mothers and dads with their daughters and sons, filtered out into that same night, sort of sweaty and tired and drunk with beer or feelings. 

Back home my daughters stayed up too late in the big bed together while my husband fell asleep. The next day I drove that minivan back west to pick corn with the neighbors, eat pot-luck after a rodeo, sit in bleachers to cheer on the volleyball team, take an art class, sing with my dad on the deck, make a fish supper for my family, take a ride with my husband to check on a bull, brush my daughters’ hair, pack backpacks and give rides…

“Joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me…” my daughters stop singing to open the car door and run to school…

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. 

Forever’s in the Saw Dust

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Us, in the olden days…

When my husband and I were freshman in college at the University of North Dakota, I used to
visit him in his small, stinky dorm room in Walsh Hall and he would make me tuna salad
sandwiches.

This seems like a silly way to start things off, but every single one of us is living in the ordinary,
everyday moments here, and February has drug on and left us with March and more routine
and I think there’s something to say here…

Recently, our little routine has been intercepted by a home remodeling project. Our plans,
homework and furniture are covered in a layer of sawdust as the girls and I help my husband
where we can between work and school, laying flooring, handing him tools, holding boards and
picking playlists heavy on the Taylor Swift. He’s been working hard to finish a project that, for
so many reasons, some in and some out of our control, has drug on through years. It’s finally
the time to wrap it up and so here we are working supper around hammers on the kitchen
table, and evening snuggles next to the table saw.

Take note of the fireplace ‘decor’

This house of ours seems to be a structure changing and growing along with our lives together.
Maybe only a poet could draw the comparison eloquently, but when it was just the two of us,
new in our marriage, it stood as a brand-new cozy cottage in this valley full of hand-me-down
furniture and the dreams we had for our lives here. I remember the first night we spent
together in this house. The waterline hadn’t been dug yet and our upstairs bedroom still had
walls to put up, so we lived downstairs in what was going to be the guest room and we just laid
there, side by side, looking up at the stars out the new window with no blinds.

Fast forward through the years and those two extra bedrooms are now home to dozens of
stuffed animals, puzzles, games, art supplies, night lights, baby dolls, twenty to twenty-five
Barbies, a couple Kens, one Christoph and their dream wardrobe/house/barn/car/camper.
When we were in the planning phases of this house, we didn’t have children and I wondered if
we would regret the staircase or the hardwood flooring if they arrived. Then my friend
reminded me that they would only be babies for a blink of an eye, and that you make your
space what it needs to be along the way. And so here we are taking that phrase quite literally,
adding an entryway to catch the mud, cow poop and the occasional bottle calf at the pass. And
we’ve added a pantry too, because out here so far from the grocery store you need to have
more on hand.


Which led us to where we are now, expanding our living and dining room so we
have more space to host gatherings and holidays, putting our bedroom back on the main floor
and turning that old bedroom loft into an office space for all the paperwork that piles up when
you find yourself smack dab in the middle of middle age.


It seems ridiculous and over the top when I lay it out here, our little cottage in its first form
would have worked perfectly fine for us through any stage. But looking back, I doubt we could
have helped ourselves given my propensity to dream and his to make things. And that’s how
we’re in what is turning out to be, after all these years, a quite beautiful sawdust covered
predicament.

Which brings me to the tuna-salad-sandwich my husband made last weekend during a break
between laying the floor and me taking the girls to 4-H. I sat at the kitchen counter and talked
with him about grocery lists and schedules and mundane things you only say out loud to
someone you’re married to because they listen in a way that’s sort of not listening and that’s
just what you need sometimes. While I chattered, he made his way around the kitchen
gathering ingredients and carefully chopping and mixing—the tuna, the celery and then the
onions, followed by the mayo, the mustard the salt and pepper and some other things I’m sure I
didn’t catch. I looked up and joked, “you sure make a big fuss over a sandwich,” to which he
replied, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.” And it was that ordinary moment
in the middle of February in the middle of marriage in the middle of our lives that flipped the
mundane to affection and then to deep gratitude.

He handed me a plate with two slice of toast, and offered, as he always does, for me to serve
myself first before he stirs in the jalapeños and I guess what I’m trying to say right now is that
sometimes we look for love and forever in heart shaped boxes when maybe the best of all of it
is hidden among the years of tuna fish sandwiches and saw dust.

That’s all. That’s all I wanted to say. If you need me I’ll be sweeping and then vacuuming and
then sweeping again…

Us, these days…

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..

Darling we haven’t gone dancing…

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Last weekend, the girls decided that my husband and I needed a makeover. This happens occasionally. They take it upon themselves to fix our hair, put makeup on me, paint my nails, and dig in our closet to pick out our clothes.

I always like to see the outfits they come up with. Usually it’s a combination of whatever animal print I have within arm’s reach, a flowy skirt that twirls, a jacket, and some high heels. Nothing ever matches. Their dad doesn’t have many fancy options to choose from because once I thought it was a good idea to throw all of his neckties in the washing machine and, as you can imagine, none of them survived, so I always come out as the most overdressed of the two of us.

Anyway, once they get us all dolled up, the next step is, naturally, to clear out a spot in the living room so we can dance while they watch. They give us orders on how we should hold one another and how he should dip me, and this all lasts about three minutes before they run to their rooms and pull out their most frilly dresses and sparkly shoes so they can join the show.

So, once again, this was our Sunday morning routine, the same as it has gone multiple times before. We two-stepped across the crooked rug in my snakeskin booties and twirly skirt with my arm around the guy I’ve been dancing with since seventh-grade jitterbug lessons in gym class.

As we worked the rust off our best spider move, my oldest daughter came rushing up between us, hugging our legs, a smile from ear to ear, overcome with emotion. She was having the most wholesome, adorable, whole-hearted reaction to this moment she helped curate, and it caught me off guard in the most lovely way. To see her parents dancing, holding on to one another, laughing at our clumsy attempt at a dip, letting go a bit in the routine of dishes and schedules and work made her whole little being light up.

There’s an old Ian Tyson song that my dad sings with the band called “Own Hearts Delight.” The lyrics are full of nostalgia the way some of the best songs are.

The chorus goes: “Darling, we haven’t gone dancing, for such a long time now. It’s been so long since we’ve twirled around the dance floor, I’ve almost forgotten how. So gas up the pickup and I’ll get the babies, they can stay with the neighbors tonight. And if the band at the bar’s playing waltzes and shuffles, I’m gonna dance ‘til my own heart’s delight.”

Long before I was married, I used to listen to him sing this song. Even as a kid, I understood the ache that sat within its lines.

I was raised by two people who worked two or three jobs each while raising kids and cattle. My dad was always the singer in the band, so I rarely caught them dancing, and never in the living room. But those quiet evenings at home in the winter while I sat on the floor doing my 4-H latch-hooking project, or at the kitchen table working on a math problem, I would see my mom swing her legs over my dad’s lap as they sat on the couch together, him reading the paper or a book and her surfing the channels, and I would feel safe.

Before our daughters were born, my husband and I used to spend our evenings both tucked together under a blanket in our oversized chair. Then my belly started to grow bigger, and then there were three of us, and then there were four of us, and our arms became busy, our nights occupied by crying babies, then kids with the sniffles and teeth brushing and “Just one more book before bed, please.” I’ve only just recently remembered that ritual of ours. We’ve long gotten rid of that big old armchair.

Lately, my daughters have become increasingly interested in marriage and coupling up. It’s a natural curiosity, I suppose, to try to understand what love is, what it might look like, what it might feel like, and if it might be something for them someday. There was a time when my oldest was around 2 or 3 when she thought dancing meant marriage. Marriage was dancing together. I didn’t hurry to correct her.

“Darling, we haven’t gone dancing, for such a long time now …” The words couldn’t echo more true for us these days. I guess we have our daughters to thank for the reminder.

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.

The vows and working cows

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The Vows and Working Cows
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Listen to this column and Jessie’s conversation with her husband on this week’s Meanwhile Podcast

Do you know what almost 16 years of marital bliss looks like? It looks like yelling at each other in the wind across the cow pasture because 1) you didn’t fully understand his plan 2) even if you did, the plan wouldn’t have worked and 3) you don’t and never will understand his hand-signaling for crying out loud and 4) turns out catching an orphan calf with you in the ATV and him on foot real quick before our daughter’s piano recital was not, in fact, going to be real quick.

My husband and I have known each other since we were kids. We have had so much fun together, lots of lovely moments, which really helps in the stupid idea times, like taking on a total house remodel in our 20s and not taking the time to go get a horse to get this calf in. And the hard times, like years of infertility, a sick parent and cancer. But working cows together? Well, it’s in a league of its own in the marriage department. There should be a line item in the vows about it. Like, “I vow to not hold anything you say or do against you when we are working cows if you promise to do the same for me. Amen.”

When it comes to starting a life together, no one really mentions stuff like that. I’m not just talking about the annoying and surprising things, but the things that come with sharing a house, and plans, and dinner and children and new businesses and careers and remodels and a herd of cattle and six bottle calves in the barn.

Because, if we’re lucky, there’s a lot of life in between those “I do’s” and the whole “death parting us” thing. Not even our own wedding day went off without hitches. (If I recall, there was a cattle incident that day as well. Guess that’s what you get when you get married in the middle of a cow pasture.)

Yes, marriage officially joins us together, our love, yes, but also our mistakes and small tragedies, goofiness and bad ideas, opinions and forgetfulness and big plans in the works. You’re in it together. You get a witness. You get a built-in dinner date that sometimes is really late to dinner and it now you’re annoyed.

And it isn’t our anniversary or anything, but, after we chased that tiny calf across the pasture and down the road and into the next pasture and then into my little sister’s backyard where my husband finally dove in and caught a leg as I slid down a muddy gumbo hill in my muck boots after him and we finally got that calf onto the floor of the side-by-side and drove her to the barn, made her a bottle and got her to drink and wiped the sweat off of our faces, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the reason this will last until death parts us is that we don’t hold grudges.

Because (and this doesn’t always happen) we were laughing at the end of it. About the yelling part. About the dumb idea part. About the part where he’s terrible with a rope and knows it. About the ridiculous predicaments raising kids and cattle put us in. How is it that it’s equal parts easier and harder to do these things together? What a balancing act for a life that’s never balanced.

Because it’s all so annoying sometimes, and sometimes it’s his fault. Sometimes it’s mine. But I tell you what’s also annoying, that pickle jar that I can never open myself or the flat tire he’s out there fixing on the side of the road in the middle of a winter blizzard, proving that regardless of our shortcomings, life is easier with him around.

Ugh, it just has to work out. That’s something, isn’t it? As if the whole working out thing happens on its own because love will make it so. Love helps, but it doesn’t make you agree on the arrangement of the furniture. Love will not make him throw away that ratty state wrestling T-shirt, but it will make you change out of those sweatpants he hates every once in a while, you know, on special nights. And initially, love will send him running when he hears you scream in the other room, but there will come a time when he will wait for a follow-up noise, because love has made the man mistake a stray spider for a bloody mangled limb too many times. And, really, love makes it so you don’t really blame him.

And, just for the record, sometimes love is not patient. Sometimes it needs to get to town and she’s trying on her third dress of the evening.

And sometimes love is not as kind as it should be. Because love is human.

And no human is perfect. Not individually and surely not together. And especially not when working cows.