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 clothesHay bale jumping Pumpkin carving (and why I need to grow a pumpkin patch)Taking all the girls ridingWorking 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!”
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?
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…
Another podcast up and at ’em for you. This week we sit down to reflect on our role in other people’s memories, especially our children’s. Speaking of children, ours are really loud in this episode, so fair warning if you’re not as good at ignoring them as we are. Also, I brings up the time I overbid on my husband dressed as the world’s ugliest woman in a local fundraiser. This has nothing to do with anything, but you get to hear it anyway. And as a special treat, Edie tells the story of Paul Bunyan and it’s adorable. Listen at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.
Recently, on my regular trip bringing the girls to town for school, we spotted a rainbow against dark blue rain clouds, stretching its arch over ash trees glowing in the warm wash of light from the sunrise.
“Look at the rainbow girls!” I declared as we pulled out of my little sister’s driveway and up on the gravel county road. I stopped the car so they could get a good look and then we followed it the next 15 miles to town. As the colors grew darker and more vibrant, the girls looked out the windows to name the colors they were spotting. Light pink melting into red into orange, “I see yellow and turquoise and purple!” yelled Rosie. “And blue!” my niece Ada piped in from the way back. They’ve learned the colors of the rainbow, but, according to Edie, the oldest, the real thing seemed different. There were colors that were hard to name, not properly identified in the textbooks and worksheets she’s familiar with and it sort of bothered her.
I thought about this as I watched the arch of those colors sweep vibrant across the sky and then slowly fade away as rainbows do. These things in life that can’t be replicated or adequately described, the sights and moments the camera fails to fully capture, that are too fleeting or deep feeling that all our efforts sort of fall flat, how can we make ourselves know it when we’re in it? How can we make our hearts and bodies remember once it’s passed?
And then I thought maybe I was living in one right then and there in that car looking at the rainbow on our way to school. Even the arguing I was witnessing about who knows most about rainbows and Rosie describing (in detail) what she thinks all of her friends are going to be wearing to Kindergarten’s “Hat Day” in her small but loud matter of fact voice, my niece Ada pulling her cowboy hat off and on and backwards and forwards, Edie making sure they both know the rules for recess—this version of them—these girls—will not be my passengers tomorrow.
Tomorrow they will be one day older and maybe then they will know more about rainbows, or how to subtract seven from ten, or what it feels like to be left out or to perfect her cartwheels or make a brand-new best friend…
And I won’t be the same either. We never are, are we? It’s just that the slow change in us is much more gradual than the light fading from the sky, the colors changing on the leaves, the air getting cooler. We marvel at those leaves, that sunrise, that rainbow, but how often do we stop to marvel at ourselves and the life we’ve built over this passing of time, time that feels too slow before it feels too fast…
Oh, this time of year makes a nostalgic woman like me worse for it. I notice a good portion of ankle sticking out from under the hem of my oldest daughter’s jeans and wonder how I missed her growth spurt. I mean, how do they do their growing without us noticing every new centimeter stretching toward the sky?
Last weekend we took the girls our riding their horses on a beautiful fall day. We took them out to notice those leaves changing and to learn about paying attention on the backs of their animals. Edie asked me then if I knew the Tall Tale of Paul Bunyan. I told her it had been a while. And so, she told it, word for word, inflection by inflection as we rode through the tall grass, past the stock dam and across the creek bottom and up toward the barnyard again. And now that I’m thinking about it, there’s still not much of the Paul Bunyan story I retained from her retelling, but oh, the way my daughter’s voice rose with excitement getting to the punch line, the way it filled the quiet hills with a chatter, the way she remembered so well and the way we all were together under the warm fall sun, on the backs of horses, together? I will reach for that moment when I’m lonesome or scared or ailing or worried. I won’t remember the length of my daughter’s hair or the color of her shirt or maybe even how old we all were, what year, maybe she was 7 or 8, Rosie 5 or 6. And I won’t be able to describe it and it won’t matter to anyone else really anyway, that day we all rode together slow and easy and Rosie was nervous and so the story helped her and I declared, like I do, “Well, that was fun,” when we arrived home to cook supper again, get ready for bed and up and at ‘em for another morning of growing up and growing old…
In time Edie will forget the details of the Paul Bunyon story, she’ll need to make room for fractions and grocery lists and tall tales will likely be pushed from the priority. But I will remember her here, the way she was that autumn day. I was made to remind her when she needs reminding…because I am her mother, the memory keeper.
Listen to the podcast here or wherever you get your podcasts
Once upon a time, when my husband I were young, like 24 and 25, and just married, we were out with friends in the big town of Fargo, ND. That was back in the old days when bar hopping in below zero temperatures still sounded fun because it didn’t take us three to four business days to recover. Anyway, we were about ready to wrap up the evening of yell talking, questionable drink choices and dancing to bar bands when, while heading out the door, I realized I should probably pee first. (Never pass up a perfectly good restroom is a lesson I learned early). And so I asked my husband, who was the only man wearing a cowboy hat within a 300 mile radius, to please hold my purse. And so he did, standing patiently by the door with it swung over his shoulder like it was his own accessory. Now my mid-twenties are way in the rearview mirror, and I’m pretty sure I was drinking whiskey sours, so the details on this next part are fuzzy, but essentially a group of college-aged guys approached my husband leaning up against the wall all nonchalant for a guy in a cowboy hat holding a purse and indicated that they didn’t approve by puffing up and saying “Nice purse.”
To which my husband smiled and replied “Thanks!” and then gave that purse a proud little pat and continued on with being indifferent about the entire situation. And off we all went into the frozen Fargo night with not a punch thrown. This week I released a song I wrote with this image in my head, attempting to define a man like Chad who can “hold the reins and still hand me my purse.” I had to get that line in there because it’s the crux of the song titled “If You Were a Cowboy,” which essentially, for the purpose of the song, means “If you were a decent human in this relationship you would respect me.”
There are plenty of ways to interpret all the cowboy references I sprinkled in to a punchy little tune about love and commitment and all the spoken and unspoken expectations that come with it, but “knowing when to shut up and when to pick up the phone,” also seems to cover it. Anyway, last week my husband drove us and a borrowed bumper-pull camper across Montana and into Cody, Wyoming to help and hang out with me while I participated in the Yellowstone Songwriter Festival. He rarely gets to tag along on my singing gigs because when I’m gone he needs to stay back with the kids, but we made arrangements for them this time so we could call it a vacation. And it really was, because for us you can’t beat a road trip, sleeping under the mountains and listening to good music all weekend. The fact that I was scheduled to share the stage with other songwriters from across the country for a few hours a day was the icing on the cake.
And here’s where I’ll tell you that if one of my daughters comes to me when she is 22 years old and says she’s marrying her high school boyfriend I think my gut reaction will be worry. I’m not sure if that was the case for my parents, but as a woman who married her one and only real boyfriend, I’m not necessarily a proponent of it. I wasn’t even entirely convinced we should do it when he asked me. I mean, my heart was saying “yes!” but my mouth said, “I guess so,” tentative only because I knew we were young and I’ve always been fixated on the idea of “doing the right thing.” I mean, don’t well-adjusted adults get married much later in life? My romantic and practical sides are at constant battle, but thinking about it all now it seems I fulfilled both in my marriage to Chad.
Because never once in my long and unconventional creative career has the man become jealous of the time I put into it. I could drive across the country for weeks at a time and he will only ever ask how it went and “where are you again?” I know that’s the trust we’ve built, but still, I appreciate the faith he has in me. And in us.
And while both of us are far from perfect, it’s the letting one another be exactly who we are that has kept us together since we were just kids. And if you ask Chad why any relationship works, he would simply say just be friends and take care of each other, the way he did without apology all those years ago in that bar. My husband has always known who he is and who he loves and I suppose he’d get in a fist fight over it if he really had to, but why fight about any of it? “Fighting hurts.” (Now I’m quoting him directly.) If you ask me? Well, I’ll just write a song about it.
Go have a listen to “If You Were a Cowboy” wherever you get your music or on www.jessieveedermusic.com! Now go take of one another.
This week’s podcast is from the camper in Wyoming where we attended the Yellowstone Songwriter Festival.
Today’s the Day! It’s all about the new single “If You were a Cowboy!” Listen to it wherever you get your music and hear Chad and I discuss our recent trip to Cody, WY for the Yellowstone Songwriter Festival and how how he held my purse in a bar in Fargo, ND inspired this song.
Greetings from the passenger side of the pickup! Chad and I are driving home from the Yellowstone Songwriter Festival in Cody, WY where we spent four days soaking in the mountains, listening to amazing artists, performing and eating in all the places we could fit in!
I’m not sure I’ll have service much longer as we approach the badlands of home, but wanted to share the video Chad took of me performing my new single, “If You Were a Cowboy.” I was honored to share the stage that afternoon with Montana musician Ashly Holland and Carin Mari, Colorado songstress and lead guitar player for Michael Martin Murphy.
It truly was a magical weekend with the best audience and event staff and volunteers and I feel lucky to have been a part of it.
“If You Were a Cowboy” will be released tomorrow everywhere you get your music. Pre-save it on Spotify here: https://show.co/F7fIri3 to get it first! Or be sure to find it wherever you listen to music tomorrow!
The kids are back to school, the mornings are cool, the tomatoes are ripening in the garden and so are the wild plums in the sharp and poky brushes of the ranch. Just yesterday my nieces came in with handfuls they had collected with their mom and grandpa and informed me that they are ready by dropping them on my kitchen counter and inviting us all to indulge.
Ripe wild plums are one of the signs that we’re transitioning into fall and so I wanted to share with you a memory from the archives from when I found myself with a bag full of homegrown apples and the urge to do something beautiful with them. And so my mom, little sister and I (none of us seasoned bakers) decided to take on my grandma Edie’s pie recipe, crust and all.
It’s a sweet memory sprinkled with nostalgia from when my oldest daughter (who just started second grade) was just a baby. She was fresh and new to this world, named after the grandma’s whose recipe we had in hand, and I was fresh and new to motherhood and feeling domestic and content in the kitchen surrounded by the comfort of generations and the promise of a cool down.
Enjoy this season. Enjoy the fruits of your labor and lock your doors because it’s also the time of year that zucchini starts hitchhiking…
Making Memories. Making Pies. September, 2016
My mom keeps a small wooden box in her kitchen, tucked up in the cupboard next to her collection of cookbooks. On the front it reads “RECIPES” in the shaky, wood-burning technique of a young boy trying his hand at carpentry.
And inside is an assortment of recipe cards, of course, notes from a kitchen and a cook who left us all too soon, taking with her that famous homemade plum sauce.
And the from-scratch buns she served with supper.
And the familiar casseroles that you could smell cooking as you walked up toward the tiny brown house from the barnyard after a ride on a cool fall evening.
Every once in awhile my mom will open that box on a search for a memory tied to our taste buds. She’ll sort through the small file of faded handwriting and index cards until she finds it, setting it on the counter while she gathers ingredients, measures stirs and puts the dish together the best way she remembers.
I’m thinking about it now because it’s sitting on my kitchen table, the one that used to sit in my grandmother’s kitchen all those years ago acting as a surface to roll out dough and pie crusts or a place to serve countless birthday cakes or her famous April Fool’s day coffee filter pancakes.
And so they’ve met again, that table and that box, which is currently sitting next to a pie pan covered in tinfoil.
Because last week we pulled the box out on a mission for guidance on what to do with the 50,000 pounds of apples my little sister inherited from the tree in the backyard of the house she bought a few years back.
“Maybe we should make applesauce or apple crisp,” we said as Little Sister plopped the fourth bag full of fruit on my kitchen counter, my mom sipping coffee and my big sister entertaining my nephew beside her.
I reached up in the cupboards to dust off a couple recipe books because we all agreed then that apples this nice deserve to be in a pie, and Googling “pie making” seemed too impersonal for such an heirloom-type task.
Then Mom remembered the recipe box.
And that Gramma Edie used to make the best apple pies.
It was a memory that was intimately hers and vaguely her daughters’. We were too young to remember the cinnamon spice or the sweetness of the apples or the way she would make extra crust to bake into pieces and sprinkle with sugar when the pies were done, but our mother did.
And most certainly so did our dad.
So we dove into the recipe with the unreasonable confidence of amateurs and spent the afternoon in my kitchen, peeling apples, bouncing the baby and rolling and re-rolling out gramma’s paradoxically named “No Fail Pie Crust,” laughing and cheering a victory cheer as we finally successfully transferred it to the top of the pie using four hands and three spatulas, certain this wasn’t our grandmother’s technique.
Wondering how she might have done it.
Little Sister carved a heart in the top to make it look more presentable. We put the pie in the oven, set the timer and hoped for the best.
We fed the baby and gave her a bath. We watched my nephew demonstrate his ninja moves. We talked and poured a drink. We cleared the counter for supper. We put the baby to bed.
And then we pulled the pie from the oven. We marveled at our work. We decided it looked beautiful, that we might declare it a huge success, but first we should see what Dad thinks.
So we dished him up a piece. It crumbled into a pile on his plate, not pie shaped at all. But he closed his eyes and took a bite and declared it just the right amount of cinnamon, the apples not too hard, the crust like he remembered, not pretty but good.
We served ourselves and ate up around that old table. We thought of our grandma, wondered if she might have given us a little help and put the recipe back in the box right next to her memory and the new one we made.
And we closed the lid.
This story, Grandma’s recipe and more can be found in my book “Coming Home” available for purchase here.
Music News
My new single, “If You Were A Cowboy” will be released on September 12 on all platforms! Pre-save it on Spotify here to help it gain some momentum and to get it delivered directly to your inbox on release day!
Enjoy a sneak peek into the making of the music video, which we wrapped up this week in a cool old barn near Bismarck with some great North Dakota based musicians and videographers.
Rosie, my five-year-old, fell off her horse for the first time a few weeks ago. I made plans to drive my oldest and her best friend to bible camp for the day and so my husband took Rosie on a ride to the east pasture on our trusty old gelding named Cuss. They were going to check some fences, water and the cow situation and I was going to send Edie off to pray and play along the little lake by Epping, ND. These were just our morning plans.
And because there’s never a dull moment around here, on my way home to the ranch I met my husband driving the horse trailer back to the barn, with little Rosie tucked up next to his arm. We stopped in the middle of the road the way we do on the place, rolling down windows and checking what’s new and before I could utter a “How’d it go?” Rosie, with a fresh, small scratch on her chin, leaned over her dad and proudly announced, “I got bucked off!!!”
My husband just sorta calmly looked at me then from under his palm leaf cowboy hat and dark glasses, his lips closed tight and slightly pulled back toward his ears, his tanned arm resting casually out the open pickup window. Unlike his wife, who’s jaw was on the floor of my SUV while my eyebrows reached up to the ceiling, he doesn’t have many big expressions that indicate what’s going on in his head. But I knew this one. This one meant that it was true…
Well, at least partially true, because everyone knows that old horse can’t and won’t buck. But he did make a bit of a dramatic effort when climbing a hill and that’s what put poor Rosie on the ground.
And I wasn’t going to tell this story because in this day in age there are plenty ways you can be shamed as a parent, especially when you dare to be honest about anything that doesn’t resemble picture-perfect moments topped off with themes, balloon arches and gift bags for everyone. But I decided to share it today in case it helps someone. Because Rosie was just fine. Chad calmly tended to her, helped her up and made her feel taken care of in that moment. When he assessed that her tears were more out of fear than pain and realized that it was a fair hike back to the house, he asked her if she was comfortable getting back on her horse or if she would like to ride with him on his. She wanted to get back on and so she did, but Chad took her reigns and led Rosie and her old horse home safe and sound.
In the hours and days that followed my husband and I assessed and re-assessed the incident in our heads and in conversation with one another. And even though she was alright, we felt terrible about it. We wondered what we could have done differently, if she was too young to be out there, if we are bad parents, if she’s going to be afraid now. Did we push it too far? But what’s the cost of being overly cautious with them? And, the most important question, should we get our kids bubble-wrap suits?
When parents like us (I think we’re called geriatric millennials now, which I don’t appreciate, but I digress) talk about parenting-musts like car seats and helmets, unsupervised play in the neighborhood until dark and not putting our kids in the gooseneck of the horse trailer for a ride to the next town, we tend to respond with phrases like “Ah, we all lived through it,” which, when you think about it, is the privilege given only to those who lived through it.
There are reasons for rules.
But there are no official rules when it comes to parenting, especially parenting your kids on a working ranch. And so it’s hard to know sometimes—especially when you screw up—if you’re even close to the right track or if you’re bouncing up over that far hill with Cuss.
And I wish I could tell you that my husband and I came to an enlightening agreement, making our own ranch kid parenting playbook that I could lay out for you here, but we didn’t. And even if we did, I wouldn’t share it, because, put simply, it would be ours and ours alone. You don’t need to hear from us all the ways you could improve or change the way you love and care for your kids. If you’re a good parent, then you’re assessing that for your family daily. I know we are. Oh, and one more thing I want to make sure I add –our kids are living, breathing, heart-beating, mac-and-cheese snarfing humans who are begging us every day to help them grow their wings stronger so they can fly. I’m sure I’ve said it before here, but this summer alone my kids have outdone my expectations of them. Not necessarily in the room cleaning, Barbie pick-up categories, but in the ways they ask us to trust their capabilities. At the beginning of the summer, just a few short months ago, I planned to lead Rosie on Cuss through the barrel pattern at our hometown kids rodeo and she absolutely wouldn’t have it. She knew she could do it on her own, and she did. Who are we to let our own fear hold them back? Holding too tightly to the reins has consequences of its own.
But man it’s hard isn’t it? To watch them grow up and stretch farther into this world that’s so beautiful and unpredictable. But who would they become if we could guarantee their safekeeping? They would live through it but what kind of life would they live?
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be searching Amazon for that protective bubble suit, for my kids and for my heart, just in case.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 