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.

The Outfit

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It probably won’t come as a surprise to you considering you’ve heard about my mother, the lady who owns a clothing store in my hometown, that in my life I have always been very aware of “the outfit.”

I mean, my mom was raised in a family of four girls and then went on to raise three herself, so it goes without saying that there have been countless hours spent filling and flinging clothes to and from closets, discussing what to wear for Christmas, for Thanksgiving, for a date, to a concert, to a wedding, to my wedding, to your wedding, to the beach, to the bar, to a baptism and everything in between.

There have been arguments and tantrums over denim skirts and borrowed shoes, a great deal of philosophy spent on the concept of accessories and where to get the right purse and plenty of time wondering why the hell my fashion forward mother let me wear leotards and tights for the majority of 1986.

So I won’t even mention the hair bows and that one moment in time where girls and women were really into the “Pirate shirt.”

As women we spend a lot of time standing in front of our closets, scratching our heads trying to piece together items in our wardrobe that will serve our purpose for who we need to be on that particular day.

Because in our daily lives, just as like our outfits, we rarely are asked to serve one purpose.

Like, some days you need to be a fairy…

And while I can assume we can all appreciate fashion phases, I think even more than that women can appreciate clothes that actually work for them, not against them.

Anyway, these self-imposed trends exist to remind us of the process we’ve gone through to grow on up into ourselves and find a way to present that self to the world. These are the types of conversations I’ve had with my mother anyway, and conversations I’m already having with my own daughters.

The conversations with my dad? Well, they have always gone something like this:

“It’s cold out, you better wear layers, because when we get out there you can take things off, but you can’t put more on.”

And by out there, he meant, of course, wherever it was we were chasing cows or fixing fence or breaking down that day.

As a girl, and now a woman, out on the ranch, function trumps fashion, no questions asked. Even my mother appreciates this, although she’s been known to stand in shoes blistering her feet all night in the name of looking cute. And I can’t judge, because I’ve been there too, but I can blame her for the blisters…

Anyway on the ranch if your feet ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy. Same goes with ears and hands. These are lessons learned through a few wrong choices made before an all-day roundup in the chill of the fall air where there is nothing you can do about it but shut up and ride and take note that next time and every time you get your ass back out there you will wear:

1) Good gloves
2) Proper boots
3) A decent, weather appropriate hat
4) And, for the love of Martha Stewart, the right pants…

This is not a proper example…

Which reminds me of one of the most embarrassing moments of my life–the time I blew through not one, but TWO pairs of jeans on the first day of a two-day ride in the badlands with the world renowned horse trainer, Craig Cameron and his good buddy the-professional-bull-rider-with-the-smallest-waist-I’ve-ever-seen. Did I ever tell you this one? Oh gawd, after I ripped through my second pair before supper on the first day, the tiny waisted bull rider offered me his extra pair of pants as if I wasn’t a 19-year-old college student who spent the last two years eating late-night chicken Alfredo from the campus cafeteria. I had to decline his offer because there was no way my upper thighs stood a chance. But Craig Cameron’s Wranglers? Well, turns out they fit just right…

That’s been over 20 years now and I still cringe at the memory…

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about proper dress these days because it’s the season of bundling up for fall work at the ranch, and so I’ve pulled out all the neckerchiefs, chaps and long underwear I could find. The amount of Carhart we have strewn across the entryway floor, you’d think they’d give me some sort of endorsement deal or something… Anyway, all these years later I hear the advice I got from my dad shoot right out my own mouth to my daughters, who seem to be already scheming on ways to make their warm clothes more fashionable. It’s a trait they get from their grandmother, I thought as I watched my oldest limp across the room the other day after wearing really cute shoes that were one size too small to a recent 4-H meeting. Fashion over function or function over fashion? If only we didn’t have to choose…

Anyway, if you need me I’ll be sorting gloves and wool socks and shopping for the most impractically adorable Christmas dresses I can find because ‘tis the season of the outfit!

What’s in an hour

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I remember when moving the clocks back meant moving the hand on an actual clock. I look around my house and I realize I don’t have an actual clock anywhere. Our clocks blink blue numbers on stove tops and microwaves, on telephones and digital temperature gauges and cellphones, computers and iPads that are smarter than us. They don’t need a human hand to remind them to change, they already know.

They do the same when we cross the river into Mountain time, switching swiftly and we gain an hour. Switching back and we’ve lost it.

I’ve spent that last few days looking at those clocks, the one on my phone and the one on the stove I haven’t managed to change yet, and saying ridiculous things like:

“What time is it really?”

“So, it’s 9 o’clock but it’s really 10 ‘o’clock?”

“It’s 6 am but it’s really 7 am?”

“Man, it gets dark early.”

“Man I am tired.”

“Man, I miss that extra hour of light at the end of the day.”

But what’s in an hour anyway? It’s not as if the changing of the clock changes time. There are still 24 hours in the day and the sun still does what it will do up here where the earth is stripping down and getting ready for winter.

Daylight Savings Time, moving the clocks, adjusting the time, is just a human’s way to control things a bit. Moving time forward in the spring months means daylight until nearly 11 pm. Moving the clocks backwards in the fall means we drive to work in the light and get home in the dark.

It means a 5 pm sunset and a carb-loaded dinner at 6. It means more conversation against the dark of the windows, more time to plan for the things we might get done on the weekends in the light.

It means I went to bed last night at 9 o’clock and said something ridiculous like “It’s really 10.”

But it wasn’t. It was 9.

Because we’ve changed things. (Although I still haven’t changed that stove top clock).

I lay there under the covers and thought about 24 hours in a day.

10 hours of early-November daylight.

If I closed my eyes now, I thought, I would get 8 good hours of sleep.

I wondered about that hour and what I could do with 60 more minutes. A 25 hour day? What would it mean?

Would it mean we could all slow down, take a few more minutes for the things we rush through as we move into the next hour?

Five more minutes to linger in bed, to wake each other up with sweet words and kisses, to talk about the day and when we’ll meet back at the house again.

Three more minutes to stir cream into our coffees, take a sip and stand in front of the window and watch the sun creep in. A couple seconds to say, “What a sight, what a world, what a morning…”

An extra moment or two for the dogs and the cats, for a head pat or a scratch to go along with breakfast.

Four more minutes in the shower to rinse away the night.

Two more moments to brush my daughters’ long hair, to make it style just right while they wipe the night from their sleepy eyes..

Six more minutes on my drive to town singing with them while trailing a big rig without cussing or complaint. What’s six more minutes to me now?

Fifteen more minutes for lunch with a friend, a friend I could call for lunch because I have sixty more minutes now and the work can wait.

Five minutes more for a stranger on the street who asks for directions to a restaurant and then I ask her where she’s from and she makes a joke about the weather and we laugh together, a little less like strangers then.

Then, when I get home, eight more minutes on my walk to the top of the hill, to go a little further maybe just sit on that rock up there and watch it get darker.

Four extra minutes to spice up the supper roast or stir and taste the soup.

One more minute to hold on to that welcome home hug.

Three more minutes to eat, for another biscuit, to listen to a story about their day.

And four more minutes to say goodnight. To lay there under the blankets again, under the roof, under the stars that appeared and to say thankful prayers for the extra time.

So what’s in an hour really? Moments spent breathing and thinking and learning. Words spilling out that you should have said, or should have kept, or that really don’t matter, it’s just talking.

Sips on hot coffee cooling fast.

Frustration at dust while you wipe it away, songs hummed while scrubbing the dishes or washing your hair.

Broken nails, tracked in mud, a decision to wear your best dress tonight.

Laughter and sighing and tapping your fingers on your desk while you wait.

Line-standing, hand-shaking and smooches on friends’ babies as you pass at the grocery store.

Big plans to build things. Small plans for tomorrow.  

It’s not much, but the moments are ours to pass. And those moments, they move on regardless of the clock and the hour in which it’s ticking.

Although not many people have clocks that tick anymore. I suppose that’s just one of the many things time can change…

Winter has me turning into my mother

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Ok, I have another thing to say about the weather and then, as Edie says, I need to start expecting snow instead of being so surprised.

The wisdom in that seven-year-old.

Also, I’m sort of behind on updating these columns. It was going to be nice to say the snow has melted, but then it came back a couple days ago, and so here we are. It’s winter.

Also, we got a new kitten

And I’m turning into my mother…let me explain.

Winter has me turning into my mother
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In case you’re wondering we have yet to thaw out over here in the west. And there are some things that bad weather stops, like school busses sometimes (as we discussed last week.) And occasionally, school (which happened last week), and at times, good moods (which seems to be happening currently).

Because something happens to my character when I’m behind the wheel on bumpy, icy, snow covered, wintry roads in the dark before the sunrise when I have three precious little souls in the back. I morph into the-cage fighting version of myself. When we arrived home from school last week after plowing through thirty miles in over an hour in the eye of the blizzard, I learned that my seven-year-old had been tallying up my swear words so she could report back to her dad. And in my defense, I figure it’s better they hear the language than learn what digging out of the ditch in a blizzard feels like, or worse.

Turns out what does NOT stop for the weather is the oilfield traffic. I knew this, but they could at least slow down for frazzled mothers in dirty SUVs shaking their fists at them while they’re passing in the icy lane. I mean, this weather warrants a little more caution don’t you think? Didn’t we all see the pickup flipped on its roof on the way to town? Do those plates attached to that truck read Texas? What do you know about snow and ice in Texas? (she screams into the  windshield of her Yukon…)

So this is my mood today. It’s been five straight days of some of the iciest road conditions I’ve seen, and I’ve lived here most of my life. Lord knows I’ve put on more than a million miles in all sorts of weather and so maybe it should set me up to brave conditions like this. But honestly, it’s only made me more afraid and more cautious, because I know what can happen!!!

Wait…whoa…did I just become my mother?

Oh no. The transformation might almost be complete. Because when I got to town this morning, I promptly texted her to tell her to stay home. And then I called my little sister and told her the same thing. The weather worrier is a role my mom unabashedly holds. That and the “no running on the dock” announcer and the “careful, careful” caller and the “cut the grapes up in fourths to feed a child with a full set of teeth” police, so much so that we lovingly call her “Safety Beth.” It’s only a matter of time until I get my “Safety Assistant” badge and vest.

I already have four or five weather apps downloaded on my phone and the ND Road Report key memorized. Add to that a stockpile of harrowing stories stored in my memory to rehash when someone dares to actually run on the dock!. “Did you know Shirley’s daughter’s mother-in-law had a cousin who ran on the dock? Yup, sure did. Almost lost an eye to a fish-hook. Couldn’t have been a closer call.”

And anyone asking me today, how I am? Well, I’m giving them the full recount of the six pickups and two trucks who dared pass me this morning. And I’m likely gonna be really dramatic about it. And maybe, while I eat my turkey sandwich for lunch, I’m looking up houses in Florida. Or Arizona. I was there once at a place where you don’t even need a house. Just drag your camper and park it on a slab of fake plastic grass. The lack of lawn mowing opportunities will surly be overshadowed by the absolute insistence that everyone drive everywhere in a golf cart.

Anyway, stay safe and don’t go anywhere for three to six months because I heard it could snow again. If you need me, I’ll be refreshing the ND Road report, stress-baking chocolate chip cookies and saying every worry out loud for fear that if I don’t, it will all come true. It’s all a part of the transformation process…

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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.

If You Were A Cowboy (Official Music Video Release)

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Breaking News! The official music video for “If You Were a Cowboy” is up on my YouTube Channel!

Featuring real North Dakota working and rodeo cowboys and families, this song is a shout out to the men who show up, cheer you on and hold your purse.

Filmed at the beautiful Triangle M, Missouri River Angus, the Veeder Ranch, Burnt Creek Farms and the Mandan 4th of July Rodeo, there’s plenty of cowboy footage to get you through your weekend.

PLEASE SHARE! The world needs more cowboys…

Special thanks to our favorite rodeo cowboy Clay Jorgenson, Quantum Digital, Breaking Eight, Burnt Creek Farm Triangle M Ranch & Feedlot, Missouri River Red Angus and WarnerWorks, Brian Bell, Brady Paulson Beni Paulson and Mya Myer and Travel North Dakota

Song recorded at OMNIsound Studios in Nashville.

My current list of failures

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Before I became a parent there were things I swore I’d never do when I was a parent only to find, rather quickly, that the type of expertise I thought I possessed before children was a total crock.

I knew nothing.

And the more the kids grow, the less I know.

Lately my current list of failures has become a full page, single spaced document in 10-point font. Just a few days ago my husband and I hovered around a homework page like we were back in high school algebra and wondered when the heck they changed second grade math?

“Edie, you’re just going to have to tell your teacher we couldn’t understand the directions,” my husband said handing our seven-year-old back her pages, an act that nearly broke him. I shoved a marshmallow in my mouth and asked our kindergartner if she had anything to color because I know I’m good at staying in the lines and bad at figuring out how to get supper on the table before bedtime. Frozen pizza anyone?

When the girls were little, I spent a lot of time trying to start good habits for us all. I mean, they were so fresh to the world the idea of totally screwing it up in the first few years was daunting. Everyone in my family teases my brother-in-law for asking the hospital if they had softer washcloths for his newborn baby, “like something made of silk maybe,” because she was so tiny and her skin was so delicate. I didn’t blame him for asking, I probably would have asked too if I would have thought of it.

Oh, how quickly they go from itty bitty, fragile little burritos to piling up the wreckage of their bikes on the dirt trail heading to their cousin’s and coming in crying, bleeding and covered from head to toe in dust. How quickly they go from copying your every move to requesting you change out of your Crocs before dropping them off at school.

How quickly I got comfortable going out in public in Crocs.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this today because our family is working on a solution to something I thought I’d have mastered before my youngest daughter turned one. But here we are, five years later, and my darling little almost-six-year-old will not go to bed on her own. And by go to bed I mean fall asleep and stay asleep under her own covers without her dad’s arm around her, her little head nestled in his pit, her favorite spot in the world.

Now I’m going on record here to blame this situation all on my husband. Because I had that girl sleep trained before she moved out of her crib, but once that man started laying down next to her for a story at night there was no returning to the land of the awake-past-8pm. I mean, I understand, he’s tired. He does manual labor, he’s in the elements all day. And the room is dark, the sound machine is on, but darling dear husband we all know that regardless of the state of awake our child is, you’re out for the count by 8:30 pm. You might as well change out of your full Carhart ensemble before you open “Chicken Little.”

 My sister-in-law, who had a similar situation with her youngest, suggested having my two daughters sleep together at night, something they are happy to do at sleepovers with the relatives but is somehow less appealing at home. So when my husband was at a meeting past bedtime, I put both girls in bed together, read a story, turned out the lights, gave them a few snuggles and escaped from between them when their breathing turned to tiny snores. “This will work. I’ll just ease them into this,” I thought as I headed upstairs to begin tucking myself in for the night. But halfway through my face washing routine I heard a door creak and a set of small footsteps heading toward me, and then a cry and then a wail and then I was standing at the top of the stairs looking down on sisters angrily explaining a train of events that can only be described as a full-on sleep fight. I mean, I’m not positive my oldest was even awake when she angrily called her little sister a “big meanie” for attempting to use her arm as a blanket.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” I thought to myself while I followed them both back to bed to wait for the return of daddy’s armpit. 

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be studying second grade math and Googling “sleep training for five-year-olds.” And I’ll probably be doing it all in Crocs, using my embarrassing wardrobe choices as payback because I’m out of ideas…

We belong to the turkeys podcast

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This week on the podcast we catch up on the basics: how we’re failing parenthood, namely, 2nd grade math and bedtime, hunting for elk, working cows, the place Chad sleeps when he drinks too much and the redneck thing he did to start himself on fire (just briefly, he’s fine.)
It’s all over the place people, just like us. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

A few of the things we recap in the episode

Chad making Barbie clothes
Hay bale jumping
Pumpkin carving (and why I need to grow a pumpkin patch)
Taking all the girls riding
Working cows

Thanks for listening and reading about life on the ranch! Watch this week for the premier of my music video for “If you were a cowboy!”

Bye love you bye

Maybe we belong to the turkeys

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For the past few years we’ve been raising turkeys. Have I told you about this?  The little flock of fifty or so comes down from the dam every morning to wander into our yard to check on the garden, peck up some grasshoppers and perch up on our fence to say hello. They’re the most maintenance-free livestock we’ve ever dealt with, because, well, they’re wild as can be. And no matter how many times we’ve seen them or how regularly they all but knock on our front door, it’s always fun to spot them. 

Frequent wildlife sightings sit high on the top of the perks of living thirty miles from town. So often out here we feel like we’re just intruders infringing on the coyote’s chance at a good meal or the deer’s peaceful bedding spot. I’ve always felt a little bad when we come over a hill on horseback or on a walk and scare a pheasant into flight or send mule deer fleeing. The way humans exist out here, the way we stand upright and stride without fear of predators, our steps sort of stomping in boots with rubber soles, crunching the leaves and bending the grass without a care, well, even the quietest among us seem too loud out here sometimes.

When I was a kid I used to follow my dad as he hunted deer in our pastures in November. It was with him I realized how noisy the quiet can be. The creak of the old oak trees, the shrill shriek from a hawk, the sound of your own breath in the cold. I also learned that above the goal of taking an animal, the joy of treading in their territory unnoticed is the biggest gift. If you can get to a place inconspicuously where you are allowed to witness the drama and noise of two bull elk fighting among the herd, crashing into the trees, smashing their antlers together, well there’s no performance more exciting than that. Once, when my husband was bow hunting for an elk, he made himself so invisible that the animals almost ran right over him. He tells the story about the day he didn’t draw his bow back more than any hunt. 

And I tell the stories about all the times I’ve run into curious coyotes on my evening walks or on a ride out to check cows. These young animals have kept me and my dogs in their sightline and at a distance too close for my comfort, stopping dead in their tracks when I turn around to face them and inching closer when I turn my back, like a wild-life version of “red light, green light,” only a bit more unnerving. To be a good hunter, I think, is to welcome being humbled in this way.

Last weekend we hosted a group of our friends who brought their dad out to hunt for an elk. This group of men bring with them evening meals and egg bakes and treats for the kids, canned goods and dried meat and an attitude of complete gratitude for the opportunity to step quietly among these hills. But to be together out here is always their main goal and it’s always sincere. To help the kids shoot their bows at targets, to watch them ride horses, to sit out of the front door under the dark sky and tell stories, to catch sight of those turkeys on the fence in the morning over coffee, to live a rural existence in good company, if only for the weekend, is always the goal as much as anything else.

And their presence reminds us how precious this all is, to live among these wild things and to be charged with taking good care of it. Because none of this is really ‘ours’ alone is it? It belongs to the coyotes and the chickadees, the porcupines, the field mice, the grass snakes and the muskrats, the deer and the elk and the one wandering moose that passed through my sister’s yard. And those turkeys, they don’t know we claim them as a joke. They don’t know anything about jokes, but they know everything about how to survive and multiply out here in this sometimes-brutal place without Amazon prime or the nightly news. And for that I will always regard them, and all the other wild things, superior. And when you look at it that way, maybe we belong to the turkeys?

Letting go of expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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