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.

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?  

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. 
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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.

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.