Blue Lipstick

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

This week’s column is from the archives and I’m sharing again because I love the way a memory sneaks up on you in the middle of an ordinary moment.

I leaned in towards the mirror after my shower, hair fixed and on to my makeup, cursing the laugh lines around my eyes and the gray hair that accompanied them as I worked to hide the evidence of the years on my face.

My 2-year-old daughter stood next to me, her blond hair wild from the morning. Each time I set something down on the counter — concealer, blush, eyeliner — she reached for it, as if mimicking my every move would help her unlock another door to growing up.

“No, no honey,” I said as I saved us all from a mascara wand to her big, blue eyes. “Let me see what mommy can find for you instead.” I pulled my makeup drawer out wide, digging through half-used bottles of foundation, eyeshadow and powders, looking for something safe and convincing that would occupy her. I was reaching for an empty compact when I found it — a clear plastic tube of blue lipstick, the kind you find for a couple of bucks in a drugstore aisle that promises to turn your lips the color of your mood, if everybody’s mood is magenta pink.

I smiled as I picked it up, a memory of my grandmother Edith flashing at me then, the two of us standing together in her tiny bedroom at the ranch, the light from a summer evening shining through the sheer curtains of her open window, making a streak of sun on the carpeted floor. I remember the way the dust sparkled in that light in front of her mirrored dresser and the treasures scattered on top. And although I couldn’t name one specific thing she kept there, I do remember that blue lipstick and how it fascinated my cousins and me, convinced it was magic as it turned colors on her lips.

When my grandma Edith left this world and that little house, she was too young and I was too young, and she didn’t have much to leave behind in terms of material things.

The tube of lipstick I found stuck in the back of my makeup drawer was something my aunt picked up at a drugstore and gave to all of the grandkids to remember her by.

So I turned it over in my hands and remembered her and the way her eyes crinkled at the sides as she threw her head back laughing, just the way mine are starting to crinkle.

That laugh, her stark white hair under her baseball cap, her soft, round stomach and the way her tan and aging hands seemed to be able to untangle any impossible kite string, dress any dolly and braid my fluffy hair, are the pieces of her that have held strong in my memories, maybe more so than her as a whole, perfectly flawed human.

I looked again at my reflection, leaned into the mirror and put that lipstick on, watching it turn bright pink on my lips as my daughter — my grandma’s namesake — eagerly looked up at me. I leaned down, kissed her cheek and made her lips pink, too, and we laughed and headed to town.

Tooth Troubles

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Ok, here’s a legitimate parenting question. When your kid finds a tiny box full of her baby teeth because you sent her upstairs to your jewelry box to look for a pearl earrings for her granny costume, what do you do?

Also, what state of parenthood sentimentality possessed me to save those baby teeth in the first place? I sure don’t possess it anymore, given I completely forgot I had that tiny box containing tiny chompers until my second born reminded me with a very concerned look on her face.

When I tell you that I took a moment to collect myself in the middle of cooking supper and packing for a five day trip away from the ranch…and a work phone call and my husband deep into painting the ceiling of the new addition and collecting items for Rosie’s 100^th day of school costume…I mean I sat there on the floor of my room staring into that box for a good five minutes while my daughter asked all the questions.

Five minutes seems like a week when the truth will pop the Fairy Tale Tooth Fairy myth right in the middle of the part of childhood where the kid with questions is losing all her teeth.

First the Elf on the Shelf and now this?! Where was this in the parenting book?!

And then I remembered that when I was a weird little kid losing teeth I wrote a letter to The Fairy asking her if I could keep my tooth and still collect on the money. And so with that realization I did what any panicked and frazzled mother would do and I lied. I told her those teeth were not her teeth. They were mine. From when I was a little kid. Because I wrote a note. Because I wanted to keep my teeth for reasons I could not explain.

“But you didn’t live in this house when you were a kid!” Rose replied.

And so I said I’ve traveled with them. My baby teeth meant that much that I’ve brought them into adulthood with me.

My six-year-old daughter looked at me like I was a crazy person, which I deserved. Because I am, clearly. And then she said, “Well that makes sense. I counted the teeth and there aren’t eight. I’ve lost eight teeth, so they can’t be mine.”

And then, over a dinner of leftover pizza, Rosie made sure to inform her dad and her big sister that “Mom saved her baby teeth.”

“Gross,” yelled Edie.

My husband didn’t even flinch. Nothing phases him at this point. But Oh Lord. What have I done?

Traumatized her is what my sister decided.

“She’s going to be haunted by that for the rest of her life,” she texted after I confessed to her immediately via text the way I do all my parenting mishaps.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Like, who invented the Tooth Fairy and how did the whole nation of parents from across the generations just jump on board with the concept? Like, yeah, that seems reasonable. Money for teeth. Sounds fun.

It surely always goes wrong as much as it goes right for parents, especially the ones who are on the struggle bus with me. Like last time Rosie lost a tooth, I asked Chad, who puts her to bed every night, to handle the switch. And then when I woke up at 5 am thinking surely he fell asleep too soon and forgot, I walked downstairs and slipped five dollars under her pillow and the next morning Rosie woke up to sixteen dollars and fifty cents. Which really angered my sister. Because, well, that’s a pretty steep precedent to set in the neighborhood.

Help.

One nail at a time…

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I’m not positive, but judging from the evidence, my husband’s New Year’s resolution is to get his entire 2024 to-do list done by then end of the month. By the time you’re reading this he will have a total of five days or so to finish up an 800 square foot addition on our house that has been in the works since 2020, because when we have an idea we like to make it nearly impossible and seriously expensive. Unless, of course, we do it ourselves. Then it’s just nearly impossible and only pretty expensive.

While I type, my husband is currently underneath the floor of the house with the sleeping snakes, spiders, centipedes and the cat that somehow found its way into the duct work to scare the pants off of him, rewiring and rerouting things to make the lights and the heat work in the new space. Which is better than where he was this weekend, standing with both feet on the top of the post of our staircase with a saw between his legs and his head in the rafters. It’s like we don’t own a ladder. But we do. We own several. My daughters were looking for one the other day to get something off the ceiling in Rosie’s room, that, according to her, wasn’t slime.

But oh, it was slime. A lot of slime. Slime she and her sister attempted to remove from the ceiling by throwing more slime at the ceiling. And, honestly if that isn’t a metaphor for how I’m handling life these days. Getting to be too much? Throw more at it to see how it lands and then find yourself home late on a Wednesday night surrounded by slime covered in saw dust rolled up in dirty laundry wondering what’s for supper.

Yeah, what should we have for supper? I asked my husband who poked his head up from the opening of the floor in the middle of the house, covered in dust and insulation, and then, for some reason, I just lost it laughing. What an absurd view. And, also, what an amazing guy. I can barely figure out how to use all the features on the dishwasher and here he’s been just going about his business calculating how to tie a new living room, fireplace, bathroom, bedroom and roofline into an existing structure, complete with plumping, heating, wiring and dealing with a wife who can’t decide on tile colors. And slime on the ceiling.

When he finally opened up our living room wall last weekend revealing the almost doubled amount of square footage in the living space and about ten thousand separate tasks to complete, I wondered what twenty-seven-year-old me would say now. Because, if you don’t recall, we were able to invest in this house because of the crazy idea my husband had to completely renovate a repossessed house complete with a hot tub in the living room and carpet on the walls. And that’s where we lived for two or three (or a hundred years? What is time in these situations?) pulling up nails and carpet, ripping wallpaper off the walls, cleaning, tiling and refinishing cabinets in the free time we had between our full-time jobs.

Statistically speaking our marriage shouldn’t have lasted past the first tiling project, but here we are. It can’t be helped, none of it. Just like the wires in the walls my husband just pulled out of our house, our marriage is tangled up in the drive to keep building things. And because I’ve known this guy for so long, I’m having a hard time deciding if I would have turned out like this without him. Like, if I married a chiropractor and we lived in a finished house in the suburbs would I have dared suggest that we turn our garage into an entryway and just, you know, pop out that wall to extend our living room and while we’re at it add a master bedroom on the main floor because we’re going to get old someday and the steps up to our current bedroom are already annoying?

I’d like to say I didn’t know what I was getting into, but like, I did…

Because never in the history of our relationship living together have we been under a roof that we didn’t put under construction. I used to blame it on him, but at this point I think we just do this to each other.

And right now, the guy is on a roll. Me? Well I’ve been yelling “careful” a lot, because my plan for January turned from thrive to survive and that just has to be ok for now.

See you all in February, hopefully hanging out with my sanity.

P.S. We’re heading to Elko, NV on Wednesday for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. One of my favorite events of the year. I’m taking this new song with me, about a guy who’s hard on equipment and hard on the heart. Enjoy this living room session where the tear in the headrest of my chair is very noticeable and I am singing facing a room full of settled sheet rock dust.

Stream “Hard on Things” and the new album “Yellow Roses” everywhere, or get a signed copy at www.jessieveedermusic.com

Tracking the changing season on the stock dam

Posted on January 18, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

When my husband and I were making plans to build a house out here on the ranch where I was raised, we had a few criteria for where we would place it. Access to rural water helped us check off the first box, and protection from the wind was the second. And the views out here can’t be beat, but we were building a house for the rest of our lives at the height of an oil boom that was changing the landscape pretty rapidly. And so, when we were narrowing down our choices, I remember my husband climbing a tree to get an accurate view of what it would look like outside our front windows.

“Can you see the road?” I hollered at him, safe and sound from the ground where I belong.

“Nope,” he hollered back.

“Can you see that oil rig?” I asked then.

“Nope, not when it starts pumping you won’t,” he answered and so I was satisfied. We would build our house here, where, for years, old cars came to die and cows come for feed and protection in the winter. My sister called it “Cow Pie Heaven” when we were growing up and now that it’s our yard, I really can’t say much has changed in that department. We really need to fix our fence…

Anyway, from where I sit now twelve years later, I like to look out the windows in the morning to catch the pink of the sunset spreading out from behind the hill we call Pots and Pans and across the stock dam my grandpa put in all those years ago. You don’t even have to be lucky to catch a glimpse of deer meandering down from the hill to water or to watch the wild turkeys wander or a coyote trot across the ledge of that little body of water. Sometimes the herd of elk find themselves there, and when the horses are out in the hot summer sun, if you’re on the back deck you can hear the obnoxious ones paw and pound the water to splash their bodies and get a good drink.

When we were first imagining our life here in this house in Cow Pie Heaven, the stock dam was always part of the narrative. I thought I was going to lead a life here where I would be the kind of woman who would put a bench by that little dam and sit to watch the turtles pop up and the muskrat swim.

Turns out I didn’t become the kind of woman that builds benches for wildlife viewing when the big rock and tree stumps do just fine. But that little dam has certainly been a part of our lives as we raise daughters who get as much joy as I do out of watching the water bugs glide along the surface as the hot summer days turn slowly into the reflection of autumn leaves on the mossy water.

There’s nothing like a stock dam to help you keep track of the changing seasons. When we first moved into this house, before we even had proper steps to get from the ground to the door, we hosted a sledding party that turned into a nighttime skating a curling party on the dam with our neighborhood friends, complete with a big fire to keep us warm. It was the kind of thing we did with our neighbors when I was a kid. Sledding of course, but my favorite was when the ice was good for skating and we would meet at someone’s good stock dam, build a fire on the edge and skate in our snow pants and facemasks, pretending to be Nancy Kerrigan winning the gold medal. For a kid, what could be better than that? We would skate until our fingers and toes went numb and then join the grownups by the fire to warm up. We would practice tricks and see how fast we could go, making a ruckus about it all out in the middle of nowhere under the calm, black, cold sky.

Anyway, it seems it’s more natural to acknowledge a dream when we are the beginning of something, the way we did that day when my husband climbed a tree to try to see our future. We could declare it there on that unbroken ground as anything we wanted it to be because we were just beginning. We didn’t know much about how all the tree-climbing dreaming gets replaced with the day to day during the middle part. And so, it’s not as often that we let ourselves acknowledge some of these little things in the day to day are piling up quietly to make the big dream come true.

Last weekend I watched my daughters and their cousins wobble and fall and crash and screech on ice skates, bundled up in snow pants and big hats and mittens on the ice of our stock dam as the afternoon light faded to dark. My dad, little sister and I stood in our snow boots watching and laughing as our bodies were flooded with our own ice-skating memories, so much so that we couldn’t seem to speak them fast enough, our words overlapping, and recollections expounded upon. Remember the fires? Remember the way your cheeks froze white? Remember walking together to that creek with a shovel and broom after school? Remember this is all we wanted to do?

Remember how you wanted this for your own kids?

Remember what he saw, up there, that day, in that tree?

New Album, “Yellow Roses” Out Everywhere Now!

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Featuring generational stories of rural living and rootsy instrumentation from some of Nashville’s best session players, my new album, “Yellow Roses” is as rugged and real as it gets. Recorded in the historical OmniSound studios on music row in Nashville, we’ve pulled out all the stops to breathe life into music that celebrates and tells the sometimes unsung stories of rural, middle America. OUT EVERYWHERE NOW on all streaming platforms.
SIGNED CDS AVAILABLE NOW!
Thank you for listening!

Thank you for listening

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Happy New Year from the ranch. And happy longest month of the year in North Dakota. Or is that February? I can’t remember. Winter up here sometimes is like childbirth, you forget the horrors when you’re in the middle of those beautiful June days.

I sent my daughters off to school for the first time after their break and now I’m alone with my thoughts for the first time in weeks. And so it seems like a good time to announce that my new album “Yellow Roses” is set to release everywhere on January 11^th. I think it’s a proper way to ring in a new year, with new music.

The truth is, I didn’t think I had another album of original music in me. I’ve been at this since I was sixteen years old, writing songs about the people and landscape of a place and life pretty obscure to most of the world. My last original release was over eight years ago, songs written before motherhood and performed and released when I was pregnant with my first daughter.

It was a time in my life that held so much hope and promise, tangled up with no guarantees in that complicated way that hope and promise always seem to be.

And it feels like all our real life has been lived in that space between that last album and now. Between working on raising babies and cattle, we’ve faced the near loss of my dad, a job layoff, a new business endeavor, keeping a non-profit afloat and my cancer diagnosis during a pandemic and my slow recovery figuring out how to live a life with pain that just won’t let up. And we’ve put that all up against the promise to love each other forever and make sure our young kids don’t figure out too soon that life can be scary.

Pregnant with Rosie, playing “Sunshine” with Edie

I’m looking back at that list right now and am fighting the urge to delete it all. I don’t want to be the person that lists the struggles, mostly because I can’t carry on there. I prefer and thrive in the spaces in between: the slow walks to my sister’s with the kids stopping every few feet to pick up a rock or dig in the dirt, the quiet times at night laying next to my husband and telling him the funny things Rosie said, my favorite horse and teaching the girls to ride, wildflowers on the kitchen table, new calves trying their legs in the fresh green grass, watering my tomato plants, walking a cattle trail, the way the evening light hits the Blue Buttes, watching Edie catch and love all the frogs, a small stage in a small town, making you a cup of coffee while you tell me about the old days, sitting in the passenger seat of the pickup while he drives…

These spaces in between, that’s where the songs are for me. And that’s what this album is. It is a finishing up of the ideas that have been sitting in pages on the shelves for years and it’s the songs the tall grass knows that I can finally hear. It’s the retelling of old stories to a new melody. It’s the sound of kids growing up and the generations before us and the weight of the holding on. It’s the hum of April blizzards and frustration and potential of changing times. It’s the sound of Nashville players behind the words of a ranch kid all grown up now.

And so on January 11^th, I hope you’ll take a listen. I hope you’ll find these songs wherever you are and I hope you find yourself in them somehow, even if it’s just in the rhythm of your toes tapping. People like me, for whatever reason, live our truest lives by telling about it. Thank you for listening.

Watch for tour dates coming in early spring, where I’ll take the songs to you.

Buy a signed “Yellow Roses” CD at www.jessieveedermusic.com today, pre-save it on Apple Music and get three of the twelve tracks right now or get the full album on January 11^th wherever you get your music.

Thank you for listening.

After Christmas Poem

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Happy New Year! It’s the kids’ first day back at school after Christmas break and I’m already behind and this is why…

Two days after Christmas

We’re two days after Christmas and all through the house
Wrapping and boxes are scattered about
And slime kits and Barbies and polymer clay
Card games and dollies and Lego all day

Except when they’re science experimenting
On the table we’ve stretched out with all of its leaves
To accommodate Christmas Eve pancakes and bacon
To kick-off ten days of school vacation

Spent inside the walls of the home that we built
And outside on sleds racing down the slick hills
Or snuggled up under the blankets we found
For moments like this when we’re home safe and sound

And I’ve been interrupted writing these lines
About ten thousand eight hundred seventy times
To open a toy or be asked to explain
Directions on how to play this new board game

But don’t ask me to check in their rooms, please take pity
I know what I’ll find and it won’t be pretty
Because I’ve left them alone to be young and create
The magic of childhood Christmastime break

So maybe they’ll clean up or maybe they’ll play
Princesses under the fort that they made
And leave it up as a place to sleep for the night
The rules, I’ve decided, don’t have to be tight

Because there’s plenty of time for them to be grown
Now is the time for their dreams to be sown
And it might drive me mad, they might make me crazy
All the glitter and mayhem flying off my sweet babies

But time, it’s a flash when the children are young
Just when I’ve got it, that phase, it is done
Goodbye to the dollies, goodbye to the slime
Goodbye to the Lego will happen in time

I tell myself this as I step on a crayon
And scrape paint off the kitchen table again
And argue my case for brushing their teeth
And rubbing their backs to lull them to sleep

Soon enough they’ll be choosing their own Christmas trees
And packing up car trunks to come home to me
Oh that is the cusp of my every ambition
That my kids, once they’re grown, will hold tight to tradition

And remember the presents? Ok, that’s just fine
But mostly I hope they remember the time
We all spent together being fully ourselves
No store in the world holds that on its shelves

Yes, two days after Christmas, the calendar says
But holds nothing of how we should spend these sweet days
So we’ll take it slow, take a break, take our time
If you need us we’re probably making more slime…

PJS, Pancakes and Gloria

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Merry Christmas. By the time you open the paper or your web browser to see what’s happening here at the ranch, it will be smack dab in the middle of the Christmas weekend. I hope you’re feeling content with those you love either on their way or settled in. And I hope you’re in a festive getup and making plans to make good on those traditions, new and old.

At the Scofield Christmas modeling jammies from the jammie exchange. I am a crab if you’re wondering 🤣

Each Christmas Eve my family takes on the custom of pancake supper, church and opening a pair of new pajamas the night Santa arrives. This tradition comes from my mom’s side of the family and we’re happy to uphold it with some sausage, bacon, whipped cream and family pictures while we’re all dressed up by the tree. When my grandpa Bill and grandma Ginny moved to the little ranch house after retirement and after my dad’s mother died, along with helping take care of the cows and scaring us with decorations that jumped out at trick-or-treaters on Halloween, my grandma and grandpa would do Christmas Eve right at the ranch. We would eat pancakes and then make our way to one of the three small rural Lutheran churches that was hosting Christmas that year in our community. My favorite was Faith Lutheran, the smallest of them all. That was our church, just down the road a few miles, holding only five or so rows or pews with a small corner for the piano where Elsie would play, confidently guiding us through “Angels we Have Heard on High,” or “Gloria” as we liked to call it. Never had that song ever been sung in unison under the roof of that sanctuary, but boy did Elsie and June try their best to get us there.

Faith Lutheran closed shortly after I moved back to the ranch as an adult, but it holds a special place in my heart for Christmas memories in itchy tights and turning off the lights to share candle flames during “Silent Night.” Even non-believers would have a hard time not feeling something special in the soft glow of the small wax sticks in the hands of the people who chose to pause a moment in the name of something much bigger than this earthly life.

For some reason this year I’m feeling more reflective than usual, more introspective, and maybe a bit anxious. I’m only now, as I type, realizing that it very well could have to do with the ages of my children, now six and eight. When we were celebrating Christmas as a married couple trying and failing to start a family, the idea that we would have these two dynamic, charismatic girls bouncing off the walls of our small living room on Christmas morning seemed like such a far-away dream. And then when they finally arrived and they were babies and young toddlers waddling around, the memories we worked to make with them, the stockings, the jammies, the pancakes, the pictures, they were for us really. The parents who have been waiting to have children of their own on Christmas.

But six and eight-year-olds are made for Christmas, or rather, Christmas was made for them. These moments we get to create for them, the traditions, the elf in the sugar dish, the pancakes and caramel rolls, the time last week I accidentally opened the packages from my husband that were meant to be my gifts, shopping for their dad’s presents at Home of Economy in town after lunch at the diner, the pajamas they will wear, the special dress they picked out, these little things are truly for them, because they are experiences that turn into memories they can keep now that they’re old enough.

And for all the things I’ve wrapped up to place under the tree–the Barbies and the slime kits (seriously, why?), the new shoes, books and art supplies–I think we all can agree that the pancakes and the “Silent Night” candles are our real gifts to them. And I feel as honored and excited as I am scared to mess it up and sad to know how fleeting this whole childhood thing is.

Thank God for a time like Christmas to help remind us.

Merry Christmas from the ranch. Snuggle in. Snuggle close. Love one another.

And, just for good measure, sing “Gloria” at the top of your lungs.

Baby Blue

Posted on December 18, 2023 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Fun news! The kids are feeling better, most of the presents are wrapped, the Christmas fudge is made and the opening track, “Baby Blue,” off the new album is all yours if you pre-add “Yellow Roses” on iTunes TODAY!
PLUS preview all 12 tracks.

Pre-save here

Enjoy this acoustic version of “Baby Blue” and a little about the blizzard that inspired the song.
Thanks for the support!

Yellow Roses Album Early Sale!

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO STILL HAVE A CD PLAYER! Because it’s Christmas, and I have a limited run of actual CDs in hand now, I’ve put them in the store! The full album won’t be available on all streaming platform until January 11, 2024. But if you’re cool enough to be old school, you can hear it first on CD.

Featuring generational stories of rural living and rootsy instrumentation from some of Nashville’s best session players, the new album, “Yellow Roses” is a blend of stories and imagery featuring the rugged landscape of middle America and the people who call it home, come hell or high winds. Recorded in the historical OmniSound studios on music row in Nashville in May, we’ve pulled out all the stops to breathe life into music I wrote on prairie trails, behind the wheel on county roads and late nights when the kids were asleep. I’m so proud of this album because its one I didn’t know I still had in me. I can’t wait for you to hear it.