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We’re officially in the fly-swatting era of summer at the ranch. That goes along with the haying and the weed pulling and the sprinkler running and the contemplating fixing fence era, which goes along with sweating. Lots of sweating. Welcome everyone.
Last week my little sister texted to let me know that her girls had set up a lemonade stand in their yard and were looking for customers. Their timing was perfect because I just gave my husband a ride to bring his pickup home from the hay field. It seemed, by the grace of the equipment gods, that they finished up baling and lemonade sounded pretty good to the guys of the Veeder Ranch about then. Even better? They only had to pay in compliments…
Except Rosie. She likes a chance to grab her pink wallet and spend. Unfortunately her cousins’ stand didn’t take Trampoline Park Cards, but luckily she had some tooth fairy cash, which the small business gladly welcomed.
Is there anything cuter than a lemonade stand? Honestly. It might be the most Americana experience you can find. But country kids, they have to go about it a bit differently. When I was a kid I the early 90s, we used to set up shop up on the highway and wait for the sound of a pickup in the distance. We would have waited until 2010 without a real customer if it wasn’t for our moms, who I now realize were making some calls to the neighbors. I think we cleared about three generous dollars those days, but I’d have to ask my friend, the accountant. I’ve always been in the marketing department…
Anyway, these days there’s a real risk of your lemonade getting blown away by the big oil rigs zooming by, so a successful stand still requires a bit of mom-power. And never mind the random kittens sniffing at the product periodically. Or the chickens dusting themselves in the driveway. This is summer in the country, and the lemonade tastes about as strong as the coffee they sip in the basement of our Lutheran church. It’s perfectly fine and made with love.
Yes, we’re deep enough into the heat of the season that we dare complain about it up here in the North, mostly because it’s not the heat really, it’s the humidity. Could really use a breeze.
And also, are we the only family that has one favorite fly swatter that we swear works better than any other fly swatter ever invented and it’s the puke yellow fly swatter that hung in your grandma’s old farmhouse your entire life until she died and somehow, miraculously, it was left to you? And even though it exists in your house like a fossil, when you go to reach for it it’s never left in the spot you think it was left in and you can only find the stupid, souvenir flyswatter you brought from Nashville because it was shaped like a guitar and you thought it was funny after a couple drinks, but it can’t kill a fly to save a life?
Anyone?
Oh, Gramma’s puke yellow fly swatter and her bright pink lipstick, some of my greatest earthly possessions.
And summer, you’re here now in all your glory and I’m sweating but you’re so many of the things I love about being alive.
Alive and hot and watching the tomatoes and my mosquito bites get red. So you can’t leave yet, we’re still thinking about fencing….
Last week I danced until two puffy little blisters formed on the pads at the bottom of my feet. It was 1,000 degrees and 100% humidity. It was at least five hours past my bedtime and half-way through singing along to “Don’t Stop Believing” with the after-concert bar band before I realized that it was 1,000 degrees, 100% humidity, five hours past my bedtime and I had two puffy little blisters on the bottom of my feet.
And it might be time to go home.
Have you ever had one of those nights where time doesn’t really mean anything? Where you’re standing in a crowd of people singing along to your favorite songs coming from your favorite band and you know all the words and you’re sweating through your clothes, but it doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter because tomorrow you can be the responsible human, tomorrow you can be the other side of your personality that makes the sandwiches and keeps up with the laundry, but tonight your husband has the kids for a cousin sleep-over so you only have to worry about the business of eating, drinking and dancing along to good music.
My little sister and I, we had one of those nights. The Turnpike Troubadours were in the big town for the state fair and so I got dressed and then re-dressed and then I dressed her in the outfit I was going to wear (before I changed my mind) and we left our daughters home with a “Sleepover To-Do List” that included a “Chad Makeover” and “Mario Karts” and a “Movie Night” and for some reason, “Bird Watching.”
I’m not sure they got to the bird watching portion of the evening but judging by the way my closet looked when I returned, they definitely got to the makeover part of the program. (Also, there is photographic evidence of my husband wearing my floral skirt and a shawl with his feet crammed into my pink wedge heels that I will cherish for the rest of my life, indicating that maybe they all had one of those nights too…)
Anyway, my little sister and I, we didn’t plan on staying out all night. It’s very possible that we could have taken to the grandstands, sipped our drinks and tapped our toes, clapped at the encore and called it a night. But maybe the fact that we could pick the restaurant and not have to order a kids’ meal made us feel a little more free. That and the fact that we ran into some friends who called us down a bit closer to the stage to sing along and pretty soon the music moved us right into the front, standing up against the rails and chanting “One more song!” along with the hundreds of people behind us.
Who did we think we were? 22?
Apparently. Because after that one more song, we didn’t go home. Nope. We found another place to listen to music. And then another place to dance. And then, well, that’s about where the blisters started shouting “Hello up there,” and we decided to call it a night, but only after a quick stop at the corn dog stand. I had to trade shoes with my little sister to make the walk back to our ride, like Cinderella, I had run out of time…
But isn’t that what little sisters are for? To lend you their shoes in desperate times. To borrow your shorts and new shirt and belt. To obsess over a band together. To dance like dummies. To share a hotel room and get home too late and laugh off embarrassing moments and to really listen to the lyrics of the new song you love on the drive home. Like silently listen through the whole thing to understand why it means something to you.
Anyway, I’m recounting all of this to remind you of that person you have in your life. You likely don’t need to be reminded; you likely talk every day. But maybe it’s been a while. Maybe you need to schedule a supper. Or a concert. And also, I want to tell you that you can have nights like this. Maybe the late night-hot-and-humid-blister-feet version doesn’t appeal to you, but there is a version out there waiting for you to forget the bills and the broken air conditioner. There’s a version that you’ve been putting off because you don’t think you can be that person anymore. Or maybe it’s too much of a hassle. There’s a version that allows you the space to leave the kids with someone you trust and go be the version of yourself you used to so freely be, before you found all the reasons not to be her…
Even if it’s 1000 degrees and 100% humidity. Even if you stay up five hours past your bedtime.
And blisters? Well, they heal.
The smell of wild onions seeps through the closed doors and windows of the pickup I’m driving pointing back west towards home. It’s the time of night in the summer where it’s too late to be light, but it is the kind of light that turns the clouds pink and gives the sweet clover halos. It’s the time of night in the summer where you wish it wouldn’t end, the day, the light like this, the colors, the cooling down of the air. The season.
I’m driving home with my daughters in the back seat of the pickup. They look out the window at the power lines and ditch sunflowers whizzing by and as they look their legs are getting longer, their skin is a new shade of brown, their hair lightened by days in the sprinkler. Little wildflowers.
I smell the wild onions and suddenly I’m a little wildflower too in the dog days of summer, digging up the sweet salty roots with the boys on the side hill over the barbed wire fence outside the yard of my country school. We’re fresh off summer break, called back to desks and times tables and drinking milk out of little paper cones from the big machine. Before that, every day was like recess.
It’s 95 degrees and the air conditioning in our house can’t keep up and I’m an adult now and I am married and so we are the ones tasked to fix it. But we are hot and it’s July and maybe we could load up the kids and head to the lake, but instead I turn on the sprinkler so the water sort of hits my tomato plants and sort of hits the inflatable pool and sort of hits my bare legs as I sit in a lawn chair sucking on a red popsicle and flipping through a magazine. My daughters splash and slide and make game after game out of the running water. And occasionally a horse fly bites my ankles, and occasionally my daughters holler about a bug in the pool, but it’s summer on the ranch and we wave off these aggravations and carry on with basking and splashing away a Sunday afternoon.
I meet my husband in the shade cast by our deck in the slowly sinking sun. I plop in a chair next to him and the smell of diesel exhaust and sweat and it reminds me of all the good men who ever worked out here on this place in the heat. He’s one of them and the gratitude for that, well I carry it in my bones. He sips a beer and takes off his hat, leaving a band of sweat on his forehead and the salt and pepper hair around his head smashed down. We talk about the yard and the swather he worked on today. Tractors around this place, they don’t run for long, but it’s time to cut hay and so this is the task. Alfalfa and sweet clover and all the tall grasses mixed in, we’ll roll it out in a few months when we find ourselves on a different planet, covered in white, dressed thick from head to toe to shield our skin from 20 below.
But that frozen place doesn’t exist today. Today it is summer, and the dogs are panting under our chairs and those loud grasshoppers are clacking in the tall grass and we slap at that horsefly again and discuss what to put on the grill. It’s too late to be light and we should wrap up the day, but we linger a bit longer and let the words slow between us because the breeze feels nice….
Which brings us back to the air conditioning as we watch our daughters play. We tell one another how they’ve grown as if we both haven’t been witnessing it together.
They run to us then, someone fell or someone’s cold. We wrap each one in a towel and the smell of their damp skin and the wet grass smells like our childhood too. Weren’t we just kids out here. Aren’t we still? Together under the sun, heading in. Heading home.
Recently, while scrolling through Instagram hoping to see cute pictures of my friends’ families on the 4th of July, I ran across an ad for a tank top that’s designed to hide the skin that folds at my armpits. The product’s praises were being sung by a woman who looked like she was on the Olympic swim team. She caught me then, innocently going about my life never thinking about the skin that folds at my armpits until that very moment and now, well, now that I know about it, I guess I should hide it?
It’s summer and I’m a 40-year-old woman living in the age of social media. Around every corner I am told about a part of my body I should be self-conscious of. Buy the swimsuit to tuck in your tummy, buy the patches to smooth out your wrinkles, buy the pill to curb your appetite to take off the weight and while you’re at it did you notice those dark spots on your arms and face you started to develop because you’ve dared to be alive this long? You haven’t? Well, they’re there and you should fix those too. Buy this cream.
Over the holiday weekend we loaded up our life and our lake gear and headed to Minnesota to spend a few days at the cabin with our extended family. The excitement my daughters had at the idea of spending the week in that cool, clear lake was unmatched only by Christmas. As soon as we arrived, they changed quickly into their bathing suits and jumped right in to begin playing mermaids or sea turtles or scuba diving treasure hunters, their little bodies morphing in their minds only to match the game they were playing. “Pretend we have fins, pretend we can breathe under water, pretend we have a tail that disappears when we’re on land.” There was no wishing away a thing on their bodies, only wishes to make it do more for them in a pretend world where you can be anything, asking only to cover up because they came out of the lake with goose bumps or because the mosquitos were biting.
I put on my swimsuit and wished for my old body back, the one I saw before I was told that it wasn’t good enough. I was a girl in the 90s, so unfortunately that oblivion didn’t last long. Then I carried two big babies in my belly and it took a while to recognize that new mother as me.
My little sister and I, we both have two daughters. We made a pact when they were younger to avoid talking negatively about our bodies in front of them, knowing full-well the world will eventually test their confidence, but until then, we only want them to think of their bodies as a vessel for running fast and swinging on the monkey bars and turning cartwheels and cannonballing into this freezing cold lake.
“I can’t wear a two-piece anymore,” I said to my sister in a range too close to my daughters.
“Well yes, you can, you have a body,” she replied, scolding me with her eyes.
“You’re right, yes I can. I guess I meant I just don’t want to,” I replied, mad at myself for breaking the rule and annoyed I was even thinking about this body in the first place when there were so many better things to think about and say, especially in that moment.
When I first moved back to the ranch in my mid-twenties, almost ten years before I became a mother and in the season of my life where I tasked myself with truly focusing on who I wanted to be, I wrote a piece that started “When I grow up I want to be the kind of woman who lets her hair grow long and wild and silver.”
At the time becoming that woman with wild silver hair was decades away and I felt then, in that 25-year-old-body, I could handle silver hair, embrace it. I didn’t know that same body would also have to manage years of infertility, a cancer scare and barely manageable chronic pain. Silver hair? It should be the least of my worries. In fact, woman, you should be grateful, which makes me feel worse somehow…
Because here we are now, silver hair sprouting around my temples, and I’m wondering why I’m not the wild and carefree woman I promised myself I’d be all those years ago. Instead, I find myself battling with the idea of letting my age show or disguising it the way a proper American woman should. According to Instagram anyway.
But then I watch my daughters, living so fully as themselves inside their skin, asking only of their bodies a little bit more to try to hold a headstand, asking only of their outfits to twirl the right way while they’re dancing, asking only of me to watch them jump off the dock or skip a rock, to tell them they’re strong.
“And when my hair turns silver, I hope I remember that my favorite colors are the colors of the seasons, changing from brown to white to green to gold and back again,” I read and re-read the line I wrote all those years ago. A lump catches in my throat.
The wildflowers never apologize for coming up slowly or blooming too brightly or wilting in the fall. Noone tells them to hide, they just celebrate the time they are here…Could this be our new and most important wish? To believe there’s nothing of ourselves worth hiding? How can we convince them? How can we convince ourselves?
And now for a story I shared a few years back before we put nice gate latches on all the new gates thus releasing me from the gate-closing-rage I experienced as a young woman on this ranch…now if we could just do something about the wood ticks.
Recently I went on a walk to close some gates in our home pasture and check a couple juneberry patches.
Juneberries are a special treat around here. Like wild mini-blueberries, if they show up, they show up around this time to much fanfare for those of us who know people who make pies.
Juneberries make the best pies in the world. Probably because getting to them before the frost kills them or the birds eat them up is so rare, and the entire task of picking enough of the little purple berries sends you to the most mosquito and tick infested, hot, thorny, itchiest places in the free world, so finally making and tasting a Juneberry pie is like completing some prairie, culinary, ironman marathon.
Only better and more gratifying, because, well, pie.
Anyway, my little stroll before sunset was only mildly successful. The gates on this place were made to be shut only by Thor himself. Or the Hulk. Or some hybrid of a bear-man. By the time I grunted and groaned, used my entire body weight trying to push the two posts together to maybe, possibly, for the love of Dolly Parton, stretch the three wires tight enough to get the little wire loop over the top of the scrawny post, I was sweating, cussing, bleeding and wondering how I missed the yeti that we apparently hired to fix the gates on this place.
I called Husband on my cell phone (who was inside the house with the baby, like twenty yards away) and told him there’s no way in hell I’m ever getting that gate shut and that shutting the gates was his job from now on who do you think I am what is this all about who in their right mind makes gates that tight good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart.
And, if you’re wondering, the gate on the other side of that pasture went about the same way…
Anyway, on my way I did in fact locate a big ‘ol juneberry patch. But the best berries, of course, were hanging out about fifteen feet above my head at the very tops of the bushes. And to get to them I had to wade through thorny bushes up to my armpits. But some of those thorny bushes had raspberries growing on them, so that was a win.
I proceeded to eat every ripe red berry I could find, even the one with the worm on it, which I discovered after I put it in my mouth and crunched.
So that was a loss.
Yes, the raspberries, worms and all, were within my reach. The juneberries, not so much. But tonight I’m going to see if my husband might want to come with me to back our old pickup up to that bush, stand in the box, brave the mosquitos and pick us some berries.
Because, well…pie.
Anyway, when I got home I discovered that apparently wading up to my armpits in thorny brush to pick raspberries was not only a good way to accidentally eat a worm, but, even better, it’s a great way to acquire 500 wood ticks.
I came home and picked off a good fifteen or so. Stripped down to my undies, checked myself out in the mirror, sat down on the chair and proceeded to pick off at least five more.
After a shower, when I crawled into bed I wondered out loud to Husband what time of night I would wake up to a tick crawling across my face. He made a guess. I made a guess.
But we were both wrong.
At about 12:30 am, just as I had drifted into a nice slumber, I was indeed awoken by a tick, but it wasn’t crawling across my face. No.
It was crawling toward my butt crack.
Thank good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart, I cut him off at the pass!
I guess, if we need a moral of the story, dessert tastes better when you truly suffer for it…
Want to know what romance is when you’ve been married almost eighteen years and you’re raising kids and calves on a generational ranch?
Your husband taking time out of his summer checklist of fixing fence and rebuilding corrals to help you construct a new garden plot in the yard. Especially when that man says, and I quote, “Landscaping is just work to make more work.”
And he’s not wrong. Out here when we look across our spread of endless big jobs, like barn building and pen building and water tank maintenance and figuring out why the bulls keep getting into the hay yard, lawn mowing and weed eating and tomato planting and pressure washing the driveway aren’t on the top of my husband’s June “to-do” list.
But they are close to the top on mine, and I appreciated the help when I looked at the calendar and then the radar that indicated I might want to get the peas planted before the predicted torrential downpour and, also, before August.
Summer is frantic around here. So frantic that major yardwork on a Sunday seems slow.
But I got those peas in thanks to him. At 10 pm before the sun set and right in time for the rain to pour later that evening.
My husband’s love language is definitely “acts of service.” I’ve seen it in him since he was a much younger man. To be of use, to be helpful, to know how to do the thing that needs to be done is a quality that has saved us money and meltdowns plenty more than it has cost us both. (Because, let’s be honest, DIY isn’t a Zen experience).
There was a time when I was younger and in love with him where I would imagine my future out here on the ranch with more walks hand in hand and picnics under the big oak tree where we got married. How dreamy.
News flash. That’s never happened. Not even once.
Romance looks more like getting off his horse to get the gate. And then I reciprocate by getting the next one.
Tick checks, that’s also romance out here. And it’s tick season so, yeah, we’ve been getting romantic a lot lately.
All joking aside though, I’m thinking about this today because the amount of love I felt for my husband watching him till that garden spot on Sunday knowing how much he was setting aside to do something for me was palpable. It sort-of caught me off guard the way a lump catches in your throat when a sentimental commercial breaks through your sitcom zone-out. My husband, he lives with a good-sized handful of intention when it comes to his close relationships. He’s a guy who’s never really rushing. He’s a guy who will have a long look at it. He’s a guy who takes his time, whether or not it might drive you and your tight schedule crazy.
And he makes me wonder if I’m too caught in my own drive, letting worries and checkboxes sometimes consume me like the good student I keep striving to be. But no one’s keeping grades here. This is our life and I wanted to plant peas and so he helped me plant peas. And I guess I just want to say, that’s a really sweet way to love someone.
At night, in the summer, we sleep with the windows open and so the chirping of the birds wakes me up in the morning. It’s alarming how much they have to say, how loud they seem after so many months of quiet skies.
I’m listening to them right now as I type, the chirping of the birds and my cat on the deck making his presence known through the screen door. Last week he brought one of those birds to that door mat, reminding us of the order of things.
The order of things is ever present here at the ranch. A few days ago I took my daughters on a walk with me to the east pasture stock dam—out the front door and down through the swing gate, along the two track trail, past where we park the old cars and broken down equipment and through the tall brush that reaches their armpits before a quick stop to pick wild flowers to hand to me, to pick off a couple ticks and flick them to the dirt. I used to carry each one of my daughters on my chest in a pack when they were babies out here, just the two of us looking around, but only me, their momma, watching my step for the both of us.
And now look at them running! Look at their thin legs and stretched out bodies, listen to them jabber and make up stories. Listen to them laugh and ask questions about weather and the names of the grasses and the bugs, watch them throw dirt clumps into the dam and remember when we were back here on our horses, this place already drawn like a map on their beating hearts.
Recently my husband came down from the fields with news that he found a sick calf and he was headed to town for some medicine to try to save it. A few days before he had picked my dad up from that very same field after he came off a horse and needed to be treated for broken ribs at the local hospital. The calf didn’t live long enough for the hour it took my husband to get to town and back and dad was stuck in the house, slowed way down but able to give advice on how to help that momma cow who lost her calf become a mom to our bottle calf in the barn.
Things go wrong even when the sky is blue and the grass is green and there is no reason for it really except that things go wrong. I hopped in the passenger seat of the pickup next to my husband ready to be an extra set of hands to coax that calf the girls named “Little X” into the trailer and then to help introduce him, draped in the smell of the dead calf, to that momma cow. The clouds rolled in over the horizon and it started to pour on us, but that momma, she licked that little calf before he spooked and ran to the corner of the pen. And that little lick, it gave us enough hope that this new relationship might work with a some patience.
I think that’s all that ranching is really. Enough hope. Enough patience. Enough little triumphs to keep at it.
And so my husband worked multiple visits to that cow/calf pen into his daily schedule. Two times a day he loaded the cow into the chute and brought the calf to help him suck and each night when I came home from town I got the report. “He’s scared of the cow.” “He’s doing better.” “He’s getting the hang of it.”
Last night I came home late, frazzled from a long and stressful workday where I’ve been navigating my way through uncharted waters. I cried and complained and wondered if I was getting it right. Wondered if I have what it takes. My husband listened and then said, “Change clothes, we’re going to check that calf.” And I would have much rather put the covers over my head, but I went along to find Little X in the pen with his new mom, bucking and kicking and, look at that, sucking from that momma like the calf he was born to be.
And it might sound too simple, but I’m going to say it because it was true. In that moment I was just so proud and relieved about that little victory for those two animals and my husband that it made the impossible things that weighed on me that day seem a little more possible. The lump eased from my throat and I slept soundly that night until the birds woke me, singing because they’re in the business of being birds, not a question in their world if they’re doing it right.
Because that’s the order of things.
Well, my giant branding-day roaster made it through another year, but how is it that I haven’t figured out the right proportion of roast-beef-to-person ratio after all these years of hosting branding day lunch?
Turns out five total beef roasts is too many to feed 23 adults and ten children. And one whole watermelon, two packs of strawberries and two packs of grapes is about five watermelons and five hundred strawberries and grapes short.
Also, I forgot four pounds of slush burger in the fridge, so apparently “Would hate to run out you know,” is the old Lutheran Church Lady proverb that I truly live by.
Yes, we spent Memorial weekend branding our calves and working our cattle with the help of our friends and family. And while a few key people couldn’t make it this year, it’s always so moving to me to be able to look around and realize that if I put my arms out, I might be able to touch everything in this world that’s important to me.
And some of those things are growing up too fast, running down the road to the pens in big girl jeans asking to wrestle a calf, asking for a job, asking to get on a horse, wanting to help however they can in between pop breaks. In a few short years we will be asking our daughters to call their friends to help with the physical work of wrestling and doctoring calves. But for now, my husband and I, we call our friends who, along with us, are getting grayer around the temples, the repercussions of this type of physical work not as quiet as it used to be in our bodies at the end of the day.
This year I realized that one of those friends has been helping us brand on this ranch for well over twenty years. And then it really hit me, like my aching muscles the next morning, how far we are from being the kids of this operation. As if it wasn’t evident earlier that morning when we were gathering the cattle and I happened to notice a handful of cow/calf pairs had found their way to the thickest brush in the corner of the pasture and there was no one within shouting distance to come to my rescue. Maybe that’s the definition of true adulthood…
Anyway, we got the cattle in, and we assigned everyone a different job to form the well-oiled machine of willing hands that always makes the work go smoothly. I hollered at everyone to “Please eat some cookies!” during our breaks and kept enough worry in my gut and eyes on potential safety hazards to delude myself into thinking I have much control over those sorts of things. And then I breathed a sigh of relief and gratitude when we wrapped up our work and everyone made it inside the garage to watch the sky open up and the rain fall, crack a drink and settle into the stories.
“In the nick of time” I said. And then, “There’s plenty to eat! Everyone don’t be shy, dish up!” the same way I’ve said it year after year, making the full and complete transformation into typical ranch wife at the end of the day, mumbling to myself as I assessed the leftover situation with no bachelor in site to force a to-go bag on.
Anyway, happy branding season everyone. May the grass stay stirrup high, may you always have plenty of roast beef and may the work bring together all the most important things to love…
Can you see the rainbow?” The text pinged my phone while I was on hour eight or twenty of laying in my bed with the flu. My husband and daughters had been gone all day for our niece’s graduation, but I had to skip it because, after months of dodging it, it was my turn to be sick.
But my little sister, Alex, who lives right over the hill on the other side of the barnyard, wasn’t going to let me miss an opportunity to see a rainbow, a good remedy for the pukes.
Earlier that day she snuck in to put cookies and fresh baked bread on my kitchen counter, trying to be sneaky, but forgetting that my phone dings every time she gets close to the house, a little hack in the form of an app that helps us with our morning kid pick-ups and evening kid drop-offs.
“Are you going for a walk?” she texted me the evening before, just as I was opening the gate and heading on my two-mile loop to the east pasture and back. “I’ll meet you!”
The ping on her phone told her I was leaving the house and she needed to escape too. Who knew that the tracking app would come in so handy for all sorts of non-emergencies?
But I was glad she caught up with me, a sentence I would have never uttered when I was twelve and she was seven and following me on my after-school walks up the creek. I used to turn around and yell at her to go home, now we coordinate our escapes together.
My little sister, she’s better at it than me. She’s always been the social one, the one to pick up the phone, the one to ask what we’re doing or how we’re doing and the one to make sure everyone knows what’s going through her mind at all times, an endearing feature of her personality that shines most in stressful or beautiful moments.
Which means we get the play-by-play of angst that occurs when she’s trying to get a fresh horse to cross a muddy creek, but then…“Oooo, look at those daisies!!” she squealed while riding through our calf crop with our uncle and dad against hurricane-force winds.
“I just love them, look at all of them,” she gushed as I continued to fight with my flighty pony and the wind, both seemingly out to kill me that day.
My uncle and I looked at each other and chuckled. What a very Alex thing to say. Then we looked over at my dad who sat horseback taking pictures of us because, “The sky is just so blue! It’s beautiful. I don’t want to forget it.”
What a very Dad thing to say.
Yes, it seemed both bluebirds on their respective shoulders were hanging on despite the wind, reminding me to invite mine back.
Reminding me to get up and look outside.
Reminding me that it can be better with company.
And fresh bread. When did she learn to make fresh bread?
Anyway, I’m feeling better now. If you need me, well, call Alex. She knows where I am.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 