Category Archives: Ranch Life

A look at what this really means.

My sister’s bluebird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a very Dad thing to say.

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

Reminding me to get up and look outside.

Reminding me that it can be better with company.

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

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

The good life of a good dog

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My dad lost his old cow dog, Juno, last week. After fourteen years of chasing cows through the draws, barking at squirrels and fighting with raccoons, howling with the coyotes and riding shotgun next to dad in the side-by-side, she took her last rest in her snug bed under the heat-lamp in the garage and didn’t wake up again.

Fourteen years is a long life for a ranch dog living wide open, tasked with the very thing they were bred to do. The job of moving cattle alongside the horses, chasing them out of the tough brush or keeping them motivated while moving pastures is dangerous enough, but add in the other wild and unpredictable things—a rattlesnake or a mountain lion, a truck driving too fast down our county road—and it’s not surprising that some of our dogs don’t live to be old and gray. But Juno did. And while she was with us, she was about the best dog there ever was.

I can say that, and you can believe me, because she wasn’t my dog. Everyone thinks their dog is the best dog, but everyone loved Juno and you would have loved her too. I held her tiny fluffy body on my lap in the passenger seat of my dad’s pickup when we brought her home from the neighbor’s. We had just moved back to the ranch for good and I was excited to have a pup around and just like that she belonged here the same way every animal has on this ranch (except maybe those two wild Corrientes that kept trying to run away to the badlands).

Anyway, dogs out here, they’re special, like an extension of our limbs when there is work to be done or fences to be adjusted or when things need to be checked. And so they ride along, in the back of pickups or in the backseat or, like Juno, right next to you in the cab of whatever you’re driving, bringing along the stink from whatever they rolled in and all the personality they possess.

These dogs, the blue heelers, the border collies, the kelpies, the Australian Shepherds and all the combinations there can be, they know why they’ve been put on this planet, and it’s to follow at your heels, from barn to house to shop to tractor to cattle pen to pasture to pickup to four-wheeler to horse pen to the ends of the Earth in case they can be of assistance, or annoyance, but always in the name of companionship.

Our neighbor had a big blue heeler when I was growing up named Critter. Critter’s place in the world moved up through the years from pickup box to shot gun seat until Critter and my neighbor could be found driving around the place practically cheek to cheek, the dog making a point every once in a while, to put his paw up on his human’s shoulder while watching the trail ahead as a sign of partnership and solidarity.

The other day I came home to find our two dogs in the house. We have a border collie/Aussie cross named Remi and a Hanging Tree Cattle dog named Gus. They’ve lived in the garage and in the yard their entire lives like most cow dogs do, so when they get to come inside, they’re not sure what to do but stare at my husband’s face and follow him from room to room waiting for a command. And I’m not sure why he decided to bring them in, other than he’s been working on the house addition for the past couple weeks and he just likes to have them close. When you open the door though, they can’t get out fast enough to go roll in the snow and pee on the trees and chase the squirrels and run out ahead and do the things dogs are meant to do. Honestly, I’d like to come back as these dogs in another life, to know so fully what it is that you’re made for is a gift that only humans can overthink and screw up.

Maybe we should work to be more like the dogs, more like Juno…Fluffy and affectionate, an easy keeper and ready to be there when needed (and even when she isn’t–cut to that dog showing up ten miles from home when you tried to leave her behind.)

Anyway, life won’t be the same here at the ranch without you Juno. Thanks for all the help.

November at the Ranch

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November is a busy month at the ranch. Not only are we getting ready for the impending (or continuing) winter, but November is the month for roundup, working and checking our cattle and selling our calves. It’s one of my favorite times of the year because it’s one of the rare times that I allow myself to drop everything and focus on the ranch.

One of my jobs is to make sure that the people (who also drop everything to help) get fed. And that there is hot coffee and cookies out in the pens so we all have an excuse to take a few minutes to break between tasks. This is about as important to me as anything because it forces a slowdown during a moment in time that makes everyone who owns these cattle a little anxious. Because a day like shipping day is the culmination of all the work the family has put into caring for these animals–rolling out hay in the winter, fixing water tanks and fences in the spring, watching for and tending to trouble during calving season and keeping them on the best grass in the summer, free of hoof rot and pink eye.

This year we lucked out with a couple nice weather days where you could only see your breath until about noon and then we could take off a layer or two. My sister and I keep our daughters   home from school on the day we ship and sell calves so they can be a part of the grand finale. They ride along to the sale barn with a bag full of coloring sheets and snacks to sit next to Papa and our old neighbor and watch our calves go through the ring. I wonder what they’ll remember more, the sale or eating the pizza buffet and playing in the arcade in the big town after?

Unfortunately, for Rosie and everyone around her who she scared to death, it will be falling off her pony during roundup, an unpredictable incident that left me questioning all my parenting decisions. Things like this don’t happen to kids who live in the suburbs. And kids in the suburbs don’t go to the arcade smelling like the sale barn.

Maybe all we’re doing when we bring them along is solidifying the idea that marrying or becoming a professional YouTuber or a computer programmer is a safer life choice. Because is there a YouTuber or computer programmer in the history of the world who makes small talk with the community vet for two hours while he puts his arm down the backside of 120-some cattle to confirm they’re bred and then invites him over for lunch only to discover that your new kitten has somehow got herself stuck INSIDE THE WALLS OF YOUR HOUSE!!!??

Not a good look for that specific house guest.

But seriously. Anyone ever had to cut open a wall in your house to retrieve a live animal? I don’t want to admit this, but in the history of my life on this ranch, it wasn’t the first time.

Turns out that kitten was just after the dead, rotting mouse that had somehow also discovered the secret wall portal. When I tell you that feline stunk, I cannot stress it enough. And when I tell you that squirmy little barn cats don’t like baths, I also, cannot stress it enough.  

Yes, life on the ranch is messy and volatile and this time of year can make us as grateful for it as we are anxious about it. Because we can control the calf market about as much as we can control the weather and that pony trotting across the field with his reigns dragging…

What are we doing here? Well, all I can say is we’re doing our best, and learning plenty of lessons along the way.

Next up? December and keeping that kitten off the Christmas tree.

Why do we live here?

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Winter field.jpg
Listen to the podcast here or wherever you get your podcasts

Well, winter arrived here in full force, and I got to be one of the first to welcome it as I packed the kids into the SUV to drive 40 mph for 30 miles through sideways-falling snowflakes and atop icy, snow-covered roads while cussing under my breath. It’s not like I was surprised, I expected it. It comes every year.

And it turns out the first blizzard of the season fell on “Hawaii” day at school. And if stuffing the tropical dresses and plastic leis under winter coats and snowpants that are too small because you’ve been in winter denial and haven’t gone snowpants shopping doesn’t scream North Dakota kids, then come and see how we dress for Halloween. When it’s cold enough I don’t have to convince my daughters that cheerleaders and fairy princesses wear snowsuits, too.

It’s days like these, I understand why there are towns and why so many people live in them. 

My 7-year-old daughter and I have been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “The Long Winter” before bed every night, and you know what? Even that beloved homesteading family moved to town in October. They figured it might be the right thing to do when Pa and Laura had to free cattle with their noses frozen to the ground after a fall blizzard. Figuring they could be next, they packed up for their version of civilization.

Why do we live up here? If you asked me last week while I was riding horseback with my family through trees lit by the golden autumn sun, I would have answered with a love song. Ask me today, and it’s a threatening breakup song.

But it’s only a threat. We’re stuck here come hell or high snowbank.

Anyway, this morning while I was plowing through the dark space-scape of blinding snow trying to stay between the invisible lines on my way to get the kids to school before the last bell, I was reminded of an epic winter school bus ride I had when I was in third or fourth grade. It was over 30 years ago now, so I figure the statute of limitations is up. And plus, it was the ’90s.

Once upon a time, I was an elementary school kid who went to a country school only 15 miles from the ranch. Every morning, I rode the school bus with about 10 of the neighbor kids, our house being the first to pick up and the last to drop off, which is the same as our parents saying, “I walked to school five miles uphill both ways,” but I digress. 

This particular morning was especially brutal. I think it was early spring or late fall, one of those times when the winter weather still surprises you. Our bus driver, as seasoned as he was, was struggling to navigate his route on roads completely slick with ice. But he diligently made his rounds, nice and steady and slow, to finally arrive at the last house at the bottom of the final long stretch of hill with only a half-mile to the school to go, only to find that he couldn’t get the bus to move another inch.

After several failed attempts at backing the bus up and taking a run at that big, icy hill with all 10 kids breathing down his neck and sending prayers up to the almighty for miraculous traction, something inside him shifted and he made a decision that, if it worked out, would be regarded as a ranch-y type of heroic that would be recorded in infamy in the Bus Driver Hall of Fame.

Turns out the move did become infamous, but only because no other bus driver in the entire history of the universe would have decided to take his attempt to cross the ditch and then rev the bus into the stubble field where he figured he could get more of that almighty traction. And so off he went, us 10 praying kids now wide-eyed and bouncing around and up and off our seats while our gallant driver slammed the pedal to the metal to keep the vehicle in motion past one tree row and on to the other before Little Yellow School Bus #25 finally sunk into the snow up to its floorboards a quarter of a mile off the highway.

It was silent then as we all took inventory of our new situation. Our bus driver reached for his CB. “Breaker, breaker, ‘Operation Go, Go Gadget snow tracks’ failed us.”

That SOS call would result in my very first ride in a four-wheel-drive SUV when an area superhero mom came down that icy hill to the rescue. I can only imagine what she was thinking as she spotted that bus, bright and yellow and stuck out of place in a white and gold sea of winter stubble field, all 10 of us kids trudging, with backpacks, snowsuits and confused looks through the snow to pile in the back hatch of that 1993 Chevy suburban, a shiny new beacon of hope that we’d make it to school at last.

Making it home would be another story, which is what I’m thinking now, a mom with my own four-wheel-drive SUV, watching the snow drift another inch outside the door.

If you need me, I’ll be checking the radar and ordering the girls snowpants that fit. Because winter’s here, just like it comes every year.

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.

The Girls of Spring

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This week on the podcast we catch up on getting back on the horses in the spring, my dad’s horse-whispering skills and some of our epic horse wrecks. Which brings us to wishing we didn’t know how it feels to hit the ground when we watch our girls ride the big horses by themselves. We also catch up on my Nashville plans and how Chad had to rescue me once again from the side of the road. Listen here or wherever you get podcasts.


Today it’s raining. Not a winter rain, but a true spring rain, one that smells like dirt turning to mud, one that lingers to soak the ground, not a lick of wind, it feels warm even though it’s barely above freezing.

Last Sunday I took my daughters out to the hilltops to look for crocuses. I knew it was probably a bit too soon, but when the first calves of the season are born and the snow disappears from the high spots, it’s time to check. And we did find some, though they were still sucked up tight into their buds, not quite ready to open up to the sun. But that was good enough for us. We’ve waited all this time, we could wait one more day. These are the rituals that come with the seasons, and they take patience.

Our hike around the hilltops on that 60-degree day found us next in the barnyard to greet the horses. After winter months out to pasture and bribing them in for scratches with oats and sweet feed, it was time to put on their halters and brush off their thick coats and get reacquainted.

In these moments, it seems like last fall was a lifetime ago, back when their coats were sleek and shiny and us humans were confident on top of them. It’s been months since we last saddled up the girls’ old geldings. Seven months now that I’m counting.

Seven months is a long time in the life of these little girls. Since then, both have turned another year older, they’ve stretched out inches, they’ve built new muscles and found the answers to new questions. They were ready to see what they could do with these horses now that they were all grown up.

Seven months in old-sorrel-horse-years has made them better, more understanding, a little more gray around their muzzles, and just fine with the task of trotting and turning around the still-sorta-muddy-but-dry-enough arena.

My husband and I stood shoulder to shoulder in that dirt watching our daughters get tested for stubbornness and will by their animals. I think we both held our breath, equally excited for the months ahead and lonesome for those springs that have passed, replacing our tiny, chubby, giggling daughters being lead around the pony pens with these creatures, lanky and independent and capable enough to do it themselves.

Oh, I know from experience, there’s nothing like being a young girl out here on this ranch in the spring! Nothing. The possibilities stretch out before you like that creek full of spring runoff, winding and glimmering and equal parts rushing and patient. Everything around you is waking up, and you can go out in it because you’re a part of it, reaching your bare arms up to the sun, unfolding out of your winter bud like that crocus today.

This spring, my daughters will take to the trees behind the house without having their mother as their guide. They will find a favorite, secret spot, they will wear down their own trails. They will take their baby dolls along and pretend they are mothers out in the wilderness. They will build forts and bring picnics and pick ticks off their jeans and drag mud into the house, and the world outside these doors will turn green as their skin turns brown and their hair turns gold.

They’ll scrape their knees running too fast on the scoria road, they will slap at mosquitoes, they will fight about silly things that are their most important things, and they will come in crying.

And they will have each other and their horses and the hilltops and the budding wildflowers blooming along with them. That’s all I ever wanted.

That’s all I ever wanted to give them.

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. 

Is this middle age?

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On the podcast I contemplate how this phase of life feels like February and sit down with my husband to talk all things middle age. And Chad has A LOT to say about it. And also, did you know he has “work Crocs?” This episode goes long as we get into discussing my battle with chronic pain, my recent CT scan and why it’s so important to share our stories.

February can be the longest, shortest month. It drags with it a bit of hope that once we’re through it we’ll be standing in the months that could bring us warmer weather.

My husband’s been spending every spare minute working on the addition to the house that he started before the pandemic. The way the years fly now is different then when we were younger and making plans. But we’re deep in our plans now, and sometimes they suck the days right out of us. If I knew, when we were 27 and back at the ranch that we would be 40 and still under construction on the house we imagined, I wonder what I would have said?

Probably something like, “Sounds about right.”

Because under construction is a theme in our lives that just hangs on. As soon as we’re settled a bit, we find another project to get us back there. Does that say something about us? Something that we should sit with and evaluate?

Is part of middle age wondering how exactly you got here? Is it hearing a song you used to play on repeat in his Thunderbird, driving too fast on gravel roads and being transported back there for a moment, realizing you’ll never be that magically naïve again? Is it music on the Classic Rock station or that song re-imagined acoustically by a teenage TikTok star? Is that 40? Did I spell TikTok right? Does anyone even know how to spell anymore?

Seriously, that was an early morning discussion I had with my husband while ushering the kids out the door for school. How close are we to being out of touch?

The things we said we could do, would do, can we? Did we? Are we?

I’m thinking about this today because I feel like over the course of the last couple years we’ve hit a new phase in our life. Our daughters aren’t babies anymore. Maybe that’s why. I’m finding a minute for my thoughts because they can wash their own hair and dress themselves and ask Alexa to play “The Fart Song.” And just this year three of my good friends lost a parent. And some of the relationships we stood up for, sang for, bought wedding gifts for, have ended now. We’ve moved quietly into the generation that doesn’t understand the latest fashion trends (mom jeans and dad tennis shoes anyone?). And so that means we’re officially adults. I realize that. But are we equipped? To know the rules or change the rules? To take care of things?

This is the part of the fairytale that got skipped. They never let us in on what happens after the kiss at the wedding. But we were kids, so we wouldn’t have listened anyway, about what “Happily Ever After” really looks like: 401Ks and attorneys, debt and funeral arrangements, hospital bills, annual exams and scans and therapy and broken furnaces and dishwashers that need to be replaced and school drop-off and soccer practices and elementary schoolers and teenagers under one roof and what to make for supper night after night after night.

We didn’t see this part when we were kissing in that Thunderbird. If we did, we would have sworn it all would be different for us anyway.

But it isn’t. That’s the big promise we all get. Time catches us.

But lately, when that song comes on, it makes me contemplate the romance of this phase. Disney shouldn’t have ended there, because this is the most interesting part I think. So much more at stake. So heartbreaking.

Thhe most human part is right here, in the middle of it, trying to teach our children right from wrong and good from bad when we’re all so tragically and beautifully flawed ourselves. Showing them the love thing, when maybe, some of us, weren’t really shown ourselves. Saying goodbye to the most important people in our lives. Starting over. Or hanging on and loving one another through it. Despite it. Because of it.

Learning to take care despite the assortment of roadblocks or rules put in place for us before we were old enough to understand.

But we’re old enough now. We are. We’re old enough to understand that in that Thunderbird driving too fast with the windows down, we didn’t truly know yet what love was. Or commitment. Or sacrifice. Or loss. And that all of those things come with it. But we’re in the meat of it now. The heart of it. And it’s messy. And complicated and dramatic and the longest, shortest time, like February, sitting with a hope of a thaw, a kitchen dance party, a night out, a newly tiled bathroom and a bigger closet, a morning kiss goodbye or our favorite meal to help us through. 

Notes from the road and the top of the hill

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Well, I made it home for Elko on Sunday after a 17 hour straight drive. Turns out it takes a couple days to recover your sleep equilibrium after a trip like that. It also takes a few days to come back around to the real world after an experience like the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. It was such an honor to be a part of it.

Click here to read an interview with myself and poets Yvonne Hollenbeck and Patricia Frolander about opening up the festival with our “Welcome to Elko Town” Show in the Elko Daily News.

This week’s podcast I sit down with my husband and rehash all the highlights of the trip while he patiently listens, covered in sheet rock dust from holding down the home construction project and keeping the kids alive while I was away. I am lucky to be able to be gone, and even more lucky to have place like this, and people like him, to come home to.

So that’s what the column is about. Finding refuge and grounding in my walks through the hills, where I’m most inspired. Most lonesome. Most nostalgic. Most myself.

Photo by Sweet Light Photography, Charlie Ekburg

From the top of the hill
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Listen to this week’s column here or on Spotify, Google or Apple Podcasts

Sometimes, when the day is coming to a slow close and my head is spinning — with worry and lists, schedules and as the dishes sit waiting on the table, the kids playing in the yard, desperately needing a bath — I slip on my boots and head out the door.

I’m usually not gone long, and my husband has grown accustomed to this behavior, understanding it’s not a storm out, or a give up, or a frustrated stomp, but a ritual that I need to put a flush in my cheeks and make sure I’m still alive out here where the trucks kick up dust on the pink road and the barn cats quietly wait in the rafters of the old buildings for a mouse to scatter by.

I tell him I need to go walking and he knows which trail I’ll take, down through the barnyard, past the water tank and up the face of the gumbo hill, the one that lets you look back at the corrals where the yard light glows, the one that gives you the perfect view of the barn’s silhouette, tall and dark against a sky that is putting on its last show of the night as it runs out of light.

It’s a ritual that needs timing, because that sun, once it decides, goes quickly to the other side of the world.

Sometimes if I get out early enough, I head a little further east to check out how the light hits the buttes in my favorite pasture, making the hills look gold, purple and so far away. Sometimes I just keep walking until dark. Sometimes the evening finds me sitting on a rock or pacing in the middle of the ancient teepee rings that still leave their mark on the flat spot on the hill. I like to stand there and imagine a world with no buildings and no lights on the horizon. I examine the fire ring, close my eyes and think about sleeping under the leather of a teepee, covered in the skins of the animals, under a sky that promised rain and wind and snow and a sunrise every morning.

The same sky that promises me these things, but cannot promise anything else.

I think of these people, the ones who arranged these rocks, hunted these coulees, and watched the horizons and I am humbled by the mystery of the ticking thing we call time.

And I wonder what they called it.

Because I take to those hills and look back at my home — the sections of our fences that have been washed away by the melting snow, the old barn that needs to be torn down, the threshing machine looking ancient and ominous in the shade of the hill — I’m reminded that time takes its toll on this land the same way it puts lines around the corners of my eyes, and there is not one thing man can make to stop it.

This understanding is neither comforting nor nostalgic. It just is. Time builds roads and oil wells, new houses and fences and bigger power lines stretching across a landscape. Time grows the trees, erodes the creek banks, crumbles the hills with the weight of the snow, puts blooms on the flowers and withers them away just the same.

I climb that hill, look back at that farmstead and remember those kids we used to be, running through the haystacks and searching the barn for lost kittens. I climb to that hill and I remember my grandmother in her shorts and tank top, exposing her brown skin while she worked in the garden. I remember my first ride on a horse by myself, getting bucked off near the old shop, hunting for Easter eggs with the neighbor girls in the gumbo hills behind my grandmother’s house, branding cattle in the round pen.

From the top of the hill, I could still be ten years old and my grandmother could be digging up potatoes. From the top of the hill, my cousins could be hiding in the hay bales and my dad could be waiting on the side of the barn to jump out and scare them, sending them running and laughing and screaming. From the top of the hill, the neighbor girls could be pulling up in their dad’s pickup, dressed in pastels and rain boots, ready to hunt for eggs. From the top of the hill, you don’t notice all the work that needs to be done on the fences, the water tanks, roof of the shop and the crumbling barn.

From the top of the hill, that yard light is still glowing the same color it was when I would come in from an evening chasing cattle with my dad or catching frogs with my cousins to a yard filled with the smell of my grandmother’s cooking.

From the top of the hill, the only thing certain to change is the sky and everything else is forever.

Notes on Summer

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Notes on a Rural Summer

Listen to this week’s column and Jessie’s conversation with her daughters and her little sister in this week’s Meanwhile Podcast.

By the time you read this, summer will have officially arrived for most of the kids in North Dakota. That last bell, it means more to me now that we wrapped up our first official school year with our six-year-old. I watched her stand smack dab in the middle of one hundred other kindergartners on risers dressed in matching shirts and singing a school kid version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” My favorite line? “Teacher in a tidy room, smell of paint and Elmer’s glue. For a day that seems to go on and on and on and on…” But wait? Wasn’t I just embarrassing her by existing in the classroom on the first day of school? Now she can read and frankly, does math better than me and so we’re on to our next task of cramming as much fun in a three-month time period as possible.

For my family it also means trying to keep up with fencing and haying and barnyard reconstruction projects while juggling yard work and day jobs, my performing schedule and getting the kids in their swimsuits as much as possible, even if it just means splashing in the tiny plastic wading pool currently collecting dirt and bugs on our lawn.

I’m ready for it and determined to keep my focus on what really matters…

Because summer means that my babies constantly smell like sunscreen and bug spray and come in from outside with a warm, sweaty glow on their faces. It means 9 PM supper and 10 PM bedtime because no matter how hard we try we just can’t settle down until the sun settles down. It means picking wildflowers and swatting bugs, brushing the ponies, sleepovers with the cousins and slow walks down the gravel road pulling baby dolls in the wagon.

A western North Dakota summer means digging in the garden and praying the hail from the summer storm doesn’t take our little tomato crop while we lean into the screen and count the seconds between thunder and lightning.

Summer out here means searching for the right place to dock the boat or plant a beach chair on the shores of Lake Sakakawea and spitting sunflower seeds waiting for a bite to hit your pole, trying to convince the kids to swim where they won’t scare the fish away.

And then summer is laughing even though they aren’t listening, knowing that this time of year, especially in a place where it’s so fleeting, is magic for kids. And you can’t blame them, because you remember the rush of the cold lake water against your hot skin and how you would pretend your were a mermaid or a sea dragon and the afternoons seemed to drag on for days before the sun started sinking, cooling the air and reminding you that you were not a mermaid after all, but a kid in need of a hamburger and juice box.

You remember the way the fresh cut grass stuck to your feet as you did cartwheels through the sprinklers or the how you smelled after coming in from washing and grooming your 4-H steer in preparation for county fair. You remember the anticipation of the carnival, the way the lights of your town looked from the top of the Ferris wheel and how maybe you brought a boy up there with you and maybe he held your hand.

Summer in North Dakota is dandelion wishes and a fish fry, fireflies and camping in tents that never hold out the rain. Summer is wood ticks and scraped knees, bike rides and gramma’s porch popsicles, catching candy at parades, swimming pool slides, drinking from the hose and trying to bottle it all up into memories that won’t fade.

And so I am stocking up on popsicles and doing my best to make some plans for my young daughters that don’t include any plans at all. Because they are in the sweet spot right now, wild sisters who have one another and who are just big enough to take on the kind of summer adventures that only happen when nothing’s happening and the sun is shining and the day stretches out long and lazy in front of them. Because they can only be four and six for one June, one July and one sweltering hot August before the next summer rolls around with another year behind it. And I have my memories, but the girls, they are smack dab in the middle of making them. And for all that they don’t know, for all the things they are still learning, they don’t need anyone to tell them how to spend their summer. They are experts on that one. And I intend to take notes.