Today I am grateful.
Grateful to be surrounded by so much beauty.
Grateful for the music.
Grateful for this man.
Grateful for this family.
And grateful to be working and so busy that I don’t have time to say much more than thank you.
Thank you for your encouragement, friendship and for checking in on us out here every once in a while.
Cheers to a life worth living.
Well, we moved some furniture into the new house this weekend and it is looking like my birthday month will be the month we move into our new home, whether or not the staircase and/or master bedroom, trim work or basement is complete.
I’ve lived in construction zone before, and I’m prepared to do it again. Just imagining us sipping coffee on our deck (which does not exist yet either) and watching the sun come up over the hills we’re nestled in together reminds me that life is a work in progress that is worth the wait.
Sometimes I get a little anxious about it all. I catch myself thinking that other people have it figured out..that other people have houses complete with carpet and painted walls and tiles, a beautiful, finished staircase and money left over to go on a Mediterranean Cruise.
The reality is, some people do. Some people have the vision and the cash to make what they want appear before them without a smudge of tile mortar crusted to their unshaven legs.
We are not those people. We are the people with the vision and the muscle to watch it come to fruition before us slowly, with a little sweat, a lot of muscle and a few tears mixed in.
But despite the hard work, saw dust on my clothes and paint in my hair, I have to say, at this moment where we’re able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I wouldn’t trade the experience of doing it ourselves for all of the contractors in California.
Because there is something about working alongside your family as they hammer and nail and paint and move heavy things in an effort to see your dream realized. There’s something about hearing thier encouraging comments and seeing their excitement as things come together that makes me grateful to get my hands dirty with them.
And it means everything to be able to stand next to a husband who so desperately wants to make our dreams come true that he works long days and comes home to climb ladders, string wires and nail flooring only to put his hands on his hips and look at me all frazzled, sweaty and cranky and say “dream house, dream girl.”
It means everything to believe him.
It means the most to feel the same way.
So this week my mind’s in a thousand different places–in my music, in my writing, in my work, in the clothes and paperwork I can’t find and the budget we need to stretch to get this done. But I’m going to work hard to stay in the moment and notice the smile on my husband’s face as he checks off his list and gets us one step closer to having coffee together in our new home.
Our view from the kitchen…
Because I want to remember this, as hard as it’s been. I want to remember that when I was sixteen I drew him a picture.
And when I turned twenty-nine he made that picture come to life.
We’ll get the goat and the pigs next year…
I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this with as much enthusiasm as I feel in my heart about the news, but Little Sister has recently moved back to the area to work as a teacher in a neighboring town.
My built-in-best-friend is now my neighbor and I couldn’t be happier. And even though our lives are currently in two completely different states of chaos, when we get together it seems like we do a pretty good job of zoning out everything else in the world and concentrating on the things that matter.
Like the movie she watched last night, the new boots I’m thinking of buying, what we should drink for happy hour and how we are going to pull off the next waterballoon ambush on Husband. The first and second were not so successful.
I heard third time’s a charm and we’re counting on it.
Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to confess here the level of worthless we are when we get together. And nothing exemplifies our incapabilities more than when we so generously volunteer to help our father move cows in the early morning and then linger in the house just long enough over a cup of coffee, a piece of toast, Little Sister’s missing boot and the a.m. hairdo I can’t fit under my hat for Pops to get out the door, up the road and into the barnyard to locate our saddles, sort out our bridals, catch our horses and assume the position of waiting patiently while he listens to our jabbering as we finally make it out of the house and to the barn to meet him.
Pops is patient. He’s had to be out here in the wild buttes of Western North Dakota surrounded by girls. Sometimes I wonder if his life on the ranch as a father would have been a little easier if he would have had a few boys tossed in the mix. But he’s never once complained and you gotta love him for it. Pops is just grateful for the help, even when his help is riding a half a mile behind him talking over how weird it would be if we rode cows instead of horses as he works to keep the herd from the black hole that is the brush patches in the hot 10 a.m. sun.
We were supposed to be out there much earlier you see, but we were a little late because Little Sister and I had to finish watching the story about Michael Phelps on the Today Show. By the time we made it to the barn to meet Pops he was deep in the middle of a nasty battle with Husband’s horse who decided over the summer to become wild and un-catchable. We sat in the tack room for a few minutes before we realized that perhaps the stampede of horses and Pops’ cursing coming from the other side of the hill indicated that perhaps he could use our assistance.
Because we really are a lot of help, with one of us ducking, swatting and screaming at anything that resembles a bee and the other one tripping over anything that resembles the ground.
A half-an-hour later we got the damn horses in and took a moment while Pops assessed the sweat dripping down his back and we assessed the bur situation tangling in the manes of our beautiful horses.
A girl cannot be seen on a horse with a bur situation.
Three gallons worth of Show Sheen, two curry combs, seven curse-word combinations and another half-hour later we had the hair situation under control.
And once we got past the missing reign situation, the stirrup situation and the fly spray situation we were finally on our way to moving some cows in the heat situation.
Little Sister hates the heat.
She’s also the one, if you didn’t guess it, who hates bees, or anything that looks like it might belong to the bee family.
Anyway, the rest of the roundup went something like this:
Girls: “Where are we chasing them? Which gate? That gate? Where are you going? What? I can’t hear you?”
Pops: “Just stay there, I’ll head up over the hill to look for more then we’ll move them nice and easy.”
Me: “I think we missed one. Should I go and get it?”
Little Sister: “Should I come with you? I should probably come with you. I’ll come with you…eeeek! A bee…I hate bees…eeeeeeeekkkkkk.”
Pops (as he races through the brush and up the hill): “Just stay there!!! Girls! Stay there! I’ve got it!!!”
Little Sister: “I’ve never really liked chasing cows…I mean, I like it when things go well, like we can just ease them along, but they start going the wrong way and it stresses me out.”
Me: “Ooo, chokecherries.”
Little Sister: “Where’s dad. Maybe we should go find him. Should we take these cows with us?”
Me: “Oh, yeah. We should get going.”
Little Sister: “I think my horse runs weird. Look at him. Does he look like he runs up hills weird?”
Me: “That horse is weird. Look at his hair. He reminds me of you.”
We finally catch up with Pops who is behind twenty-five head of cows and their calves.
Little Sister and I have brought along four, who are currently headed toward the wrong gate on the wrong side of the creek.
Me (hollering across the pasture to Pops): “Oh, there you are. We couldn’t find you. We’ve got these here…thought we were going to the other gate…”
Pops (hollering from behind the twenty-five head of cattle and their calves he’s just moved through a half-mile brush patch on his own): “No problem, actually you’re going to have to turn them or leave them because they’ll never make it across the creek and through the trees…”
Me (running toward my small, straying herd who are eyeing a brush patch) “Oh shit, oops. I’ve got em. Sorry. Wasn’t paying attention.
Little Sister: “Do you think my horse runs weird?”
Pops: “I think you’re horse is just fat…Jess, you’re never going to get them. Just leave them. I’ll get them later.”
Me, hollering to Little Sister: “Whhhattt? Whhhattt did hee sayyyy?!! Ask him? Should I leave them???”
Little Sister, hollering to Pops: “DAAAADDD, SHOULD SHE LEAVE THEM?”
Pops, hollering to Little Sister: “Yess, ssheeee ssshhoullld lleeave them!!”
Littile Sister, hollering to me: “HEEE SSAAAYSS LEEAAVEE THEM!”
I leave them and point my horse in the direction of Little Sister, who has now decided her stirrups are still too long.
We meet up behind Pops’ herd and discuss the matter while we walk with the cows toward the gate. But our conversation about leg length is interrupted as we hear Pops calling from the fence line and turn to notice our herd is heading toward the trees again.
“Girls, I need you to actually CHASE them.”
“Slap”, a branch hits me across the face as I manage to distract the lead cow from her destination and back toward the gate.
The rest of the herd follows and we proceed to do the same.
Pops informs us we’ll just push them over the next hill…
Five giant hills and three miles later we’re on the opposite end of the pasture where the stock dam is located and where Pops had intended to lead us all along.
Little Sister has melted and seriously considers joining this cow for a swim while I scope out any signs of wild plums and wait for Pops’ next move.
It appears that it’s toward home, so we follow along as he thanks us for the help and stops to take our picture.
He said he couldn’t do this alone.
We argued that he probably could.
He argued that it wouldn’t be as much fun.
And we all had to agree as we moved slowly across the pastures turning gold in the late summer sun, happy to be together out here again with the burs, and the chokecherries, the sun and even the bees.
This summer seems to be slipping away into the horizon all too quickly. Since the house fire temporarily transplanted us we have been on a fast track schedule to get our new house ready for the arrival of all of the crap we don’t really need that’s currently residing in my parent’s garage. I’ve been wearing the same three shirts for the last month because I don’t have the energy to dig through the giant plastic Tupperwear bins that are currently serving as my drawers. I’ve also been feeling a bit too comfortable in the only pair of cutoff shorts I can find. I’m not sure when I officially became a rag-muffin (does anyone else say that or is that just something my Pops made up?), but apparently I don’t seem to mind that my shorts are covered in paint and grout and sweat and Lord knows what else. At the end of the week I just throw them in the wash with my pink socks and black tank top and I am ready for Monday.
It’s funny when all of your things are packed away how quickly you realize how little you actually need to get by. Apparently I’m pretty low maintenance.
And apparently, between the grouting, painting, scrubbing, sawing and cleaning I should consider bathing a little more frequently.
What I have become?!
Before my eyes I’m turning into a woman who leaves the house donning pink socks, hiking shoes, stubbly armpits, not a shred of makeup and paint in her ponytail.
A ponytail that hasn’t been washed for days.
Since the realization that I am on the verge of ‘crazy cat/bag/stinky/wilderness lady’ I have tried to pinpoint what has gotten into me. I try to blame it on being in the moment, or being frazzled with deadlines and things scattered in all corners of the ranch. I try to make excuses for myself that include little phrases like “Oh, I was laying tile and I have to do it again in twelve hours so what’s the point of scrubbing the mortar off of my legs.”
Or, “Oh, the paint will just wash right out of this shirt. But I have to paint some more in twelve hours so what’s the point of changing”
And my favorite “It’s hot. I was sweaty. Now I’m tired. I’ll shower tomorrow.”
And then I find myself alone in a room, crinkling my nose and wondering what stinks.
Now I know it’s me.
I need to get it together. So after much consideration, contemplation, analyzation, self-deprecation and meditation I have come to the conclusion.
It’s my parents’ fault.
Hear me out here as I explain myself.
See, since we have been essentially homeless, my parents have done everything they can to make us feel comfortable. They are lovely people who are very aware of their actions and very good at taking care of the people they love. They felt bad for us and didn’t want to see us living in a tent on their lawn, so they gave us a room like any parent would. Then they made us a hearty meal full of every vegetable, listened while we complained, handed us a cocktail and never once have mentioned that perhaps I should consider using their shower more frequently.
I haven’t lived with my parents since I was seventeen, and now, more than ever, I am grateful I hadn’t come back until now.
I would have never left.
Because something shifts when you find yourself as an adult living between your parents’ familiar walls. I’ve often wondered about this when hearing about those bachelors who never get married, who stay in their mom’s basement for years, whittling wood or playing computer games in their free time.
Why? Why do they stay?
Now I know.
Because your momma makes banana bread and Rice Krispy bars on Sundays and then leaves you home alone with them all week as you find the sweet tooth you have repressed since childhood.
When you go to the fridge to try to locate the ketchup or the ice cream topping, all it takes is one call out to your momma and she is at your side, showing you exactly where it is.
She also knows where you set your cell phone, keys, missing boot and sunglasses.
When you live with your parents there is always someone there to worry about you, so you don’t have to take the time to worry about yourself. If your momma walks into the kitchen to catch you with a big knife in your hand, prepped and ready to cut into a giant watermelon, she will quickly locate your father to remove that knife from your hand and take over the job himself.
See, your momma knows you, and knows that giant knives could mean a disaster.
You will protest for a moment, explaining that you are an adult and have cut up many watermelons in your life thank-you-very-much, but you will start that adult conversation with something that sounds like “Moammmaaa, geeezzzeeaa” before you hand over the knife to your father, secretly grateful that you won’t have to struggle with the task.
Apparently this man is better suited for the dangerous task of cutting watermelon…
When you live with your parents, despite your best efforts, the laundry gets done more often. You have a never-neverending stack of clean towels and, while she’s at it, cheese and crackers on a tray waiting for you on the counter at any given moment.
Right next to those blasted Rice Krispy bars that are quickly going to your ass.
But Rice Krispy bars won’t be the only thing you have a hankering for. No, when you find yourself living with your parents you will also find yourself searching the cupboards for Honey Nut Cheerios and Lucky Charms. You will ask if they have fruit roll-ups.
Your mom will buy you popsicles and tell you you look skinny.
You will believe her.
You will have another Rice Krispy bar and curl up on the couch with her while she watches “The Real Housewives of Wherever.”
She will make you one of her signature vodka tonics and you will fall asleep under the fluffy blanket with your head on the arm rest of the couch and your mouth wide open as you drool on her throw pillow.
Your husband will see this. He will be horrified.
He will order you to go to bed.
You will oblige, wipe the drool from your mouth and wish your momma and pops good night only to crawl into a bed that you haven’t made for a month…
because you’re living in your parents house…
and the way you’ve been behaving, you might as well give up adult status.
If you need me I’ll be painting something, tiling something, taking a shower and scheduling a hair-cut.
If I don’t move out soon, I am afraid I never will.
This morning a documentary film maker came to the ranch to visit with Pops and I about what makes our community special and to try to get to the root of why the people who chose to stay or come home to farms, ranches and small towns in Western North Dakota are so passionate about this lifestyle.
He asked us what it is about the landscape that inspires us.
He contemplated what it’s like to watch a community you know so well boom and bust and boom and bend and mold and grow in front of our eyes.
He wanted to know about our roots.
And in between the lighting checks, the questions about the economy, the oil boom and what it was like to be a child surrounded by all this wild space with an unspoken expectation to get gone someday, he wondered what it was that brought us back…
I have many answers to this question:
The promise of a sunrise over a landscape that grew me.
The need for the wind in my hair.
The hope that my children might be born to dig in this dirt and smell the first rain of the season.
The fact that I was planted here
That I belong nowhere else…
How do you say these things? How do you explain reasons to a stranger that you have not understood well enough to explain to yourself?
I thought about the question and kept quite as my father looked into the camera and told this story.
About his mother’s father.
His grandfather, Severin, tall and lean from the fjords of Norway.
A homesteader.
A farmer.
A husband and soft-spoken, good-natured, father of twelve who made a living with his family plowing fields and raising a few farm animals for milk and meat.
In those days when farmers like my great-grandfather were sectioning off land and turning up dirt in the more fertile landscape north of the Little Missouri River, there were major cattle operations still present that would use those acres to drive a herd of hundreds across country to the big operations in the badlands to the south.
And so the story goes, and it isn’t a long one, that Severin woke one morning to find his cattle missing. My father is quick to point out here that the quantity of cattle raised by Severin’s large family likely consisted of only five to seven milk cows—not a large herd worthy of the drama of a Western novel and apparently not significant enough for the cowboys to take notice or any action to sort them off from the herd.
But no matter the numbers, they were Severin’s cattle and he was determined to retrieve what had mistakenly and nonchalantly been taken from him.
So the tall and soft-spoken Norwegian homesteader from the clay-packed fields of western North Dakota (the man who rode his bicycle 93 miles over North Dakota prairie from the train station to his homestead) took off that day, with a big stick in his hand, to begin the 7-mile walk over rugged buttes, under the hot sun (or maybe the relentless wind, to this story there is no season) to find his cattle, to sort them off from the herd that tried to own them, to turn them around and bring them home.
7 miles.
To the land he laid claim to.
The home where his son raised his family.
Where his grandson has raised his.
Where his great-grandchildren are likely to return.
My father laughed as he completed painting an image of a man from another time.
A time when you gave everything inside of you not only to belong somewhere, but to survive there.
Severin’s blood pumped through the veins of my grandmother just as it moves with every heartbeat inside the body of the man who raised me.
Inside my body.
The one I can’t seem to move off of this place, not because the land is mine…
but because it is me.
Severin’s Family.
My grandmother is the young girl in the middle with the bow.
The sunsets on this prairie are nothing short of a gift.
After a long day working under the hot summer sun, or inside the walls of buildings that make us feel small, we understand that if we look up towards the heavens to catch the sun sneaking away, we may be rewarded with a splash of spectacular color.
I’ve seen sunsets in other parts of the world–across the vast ocean, peeking over the mountaintops and at the edge of rolling corn fields, but there is something about the way the sun says goodbye along the outskirts of my own world, against the familiar buttes and grain bins and horses on the horizon that puts me at ease and thrills me at the same time.
I have theories about things like hail storms and tornadoes and blinding blizzards, that they’re a way of slowing us down, reminding us to surrender to an earth that spins no matter what our plans are for crops or hair-dos or making it our Christmas party on time.
The storms are unpredictable, but the sun is always there.
And it will always set and rise again.
And sometimes as we put the burgers on the grill, close the gates for the cattle or put the lawn mower in the shed we will find ourselves bathed in yellow, gold, purple, orange, pink and blue and hues we cannot find in our crayon box. We will look above the oak groves or down to the end of the pink road and we will find that sun playing and bouncing against the clouds that roll over the prairie and buttes that we know so well.
I tilt my head up and run to find the nearest hill so that I may watch how this landscape looks under the different shades of light.
Under these prairie sunsets I am a spectator on the familiar ground of home.
A tourist with my mouth agape in wonder.
And thankful for a world that’s round and a sky so vast and forgiving.
Summer if I could put you in the pocket of my jeans
I would take the way the sun shines through my dad’s fresh garden peas.
Then I’d grab the smell of green grass and the sky a vivid blue
I’d leave behind misquotes and I’d forget my shoes.
And oh, if I could catch you under an old mason jar lid
I’d be sure grab a baseball and the sprinklers for the kids.
Then I’d saddle up the horses and put the cattle out to graze
because I need my ponies ready at the end of long, hot days.
We’ve talked about this summer, how you come and go too fast
and I’d like to find a way to hold on tight and make it last.
So summer, I have warned you that I might just catch your light
and keep you by my bedside for those long December nights.
My world is packed up in boxes in my parent’s garage. Stacks of important papers and photographs, hats and shoes, books I’ve never read and albums I haven’t listened to in years. We pulled these things from a home that was threatened by flames and forces we can’t control.
We did not grab one another when the wall of our home was smoking from the inside out into the night. No, we placed our arms around computer screens and television sets, guns and guitars. We threw our possessions on the earth to be saved and to save us from the need we might feel to replace them.
What it would cost us to purchase another would mean time and money, the things that take up the biggest part of us some days.
And now here it all sits waiting for us to use it. To go through the books and read the stories inside. To listen to the music, to watch others live their lives on the television screen, to step into our favorite dress or shirt and go out into the world to show it off.
Some days I don’t want all of this shit. I don’t want any of it. I don’t want a choice between red boots or black, I don’t want the papers reminding me to pay, I don’t want the movies suggesting I should stay in and watch a world that doesn’t exist for us.
I don’t want the memories waiting in boxes for me to recall what we were when we were sixteen and sun kissed and scared to death.
I don’t want it weighing on me.
Some days.
Yesterday a wise voice coming through the radio on my car spoke to me.
He told me that we do not have a soul, we have a body.
I pause to think of this today when my clothes feel heavy against the wet sticky heat of the summer and the body that houses my soul is feeling tired at the thought of moving through the tasks we’ve laid out for the day.
And I think about where my soul might live next.
Perhaps in the body of the yellow bird that returns to the feeder outside of this office window, concerned with nothing but her next bite, spreading her wings and cooling herself in the puddles left from an early morning rain.
A bird attached to nothing but the sky.
Or maybe a long living oak with the mission to reach my branches out to the sun in the summer, to release them in the autumn chill and sleep until the spring sun asks me gently to bloom again.
I would have roots that would keep me grounded and grass and branches from the aspen or the birch to keep me company, to lean on, to protect me from the wind.
Maybe a wildflower, a thistle or a cricket screeching my song into the night.
I could be all of those things.
But today I don’t want to be attached to anything…
I have felt like this as a teenager, before I understood what I was so anxious about, what it was that was worrying me.
Why I suddenly had so many emotions pulling at my skin.
I remember walking out into the rain on a cool late summer evening. I wasn’t upset or worried or milling anything over in my mind. I just wanted to be out there, away from the four walls of a house, away from the telephone and parents who wanted to talk, things that needed to be thought through. I don’t know why, but I felt heavy that day with the business of being human and I wanted nothing more than to be a blade of grass, grounded and soaked in this rain.
I walked further into the protection of the oak groves and stepped off of my path, then slowly out of my shoes and finally out of my clothing. I stood there in the lush green of the weeds and wild fruit bushes, under a canopy of leaves dripping the rain down through their branches and onto my bare skin. There I was naked and caught in the moment of what it feels like to be so alone and so exposed and so unbelievably grateful for the silence and familiarity of nature.
I was comfortable like this for only moments before I glanced down at my pale skin and recognized that imperfect body once again as my own. But for a moment I was there, holding my breath, and I was the rain and the clouds and the dirt. I was the grass and the still, damp air.
I wasn’t my body.
I was my soul.
I know I am blessed as a human, blessed to have this soul in this body with a voice that can sing out loud, arms that I can wrap around the people I love and legs capable of moving me to hilltops to get closer to the sky. I understand that those boxes are stacked high and filled with things that many people would love to possess. I am not taking them for granted and I am not wishing for the reminders of a good life that are held in those albums to disappear. I am not wishing them away.
Today I am just asking to not be held accountable for my possessions or a body that doesn’t do much to hide the relentless emotions of a soul that too often crinkles up my nose when it cries, bites the scar on her lip in worry, screams air out of her lungs in frustration and laughs with an enthusiasm that sometimes cannot be contained.
Today I am just taking a moment to remember that someday my soul may have wings…
I married a man who knows where he can get a surplus of washing machine motors in case of a clothes-washing emergency. I fell in love with a guy who has hauled a broken down three-wheeler to all five of the places we’ve moved in the last six years with the intention of making the thing run when he has a spare moment (or twenty-thousand).
I am living with a person who has seventy-five Tupperware containers full of drill bits, little pieces of wire, nails and screws of various sizes, scraps of leather, broken saw blades, old speaker cords, empty shotgun shells, half-used rolls of tape, weird shaped things made of metal, something that looks like an electrical box, loose change from years of emptying pockets and a partridge in a pear tree because he might need it someday.
He’s a handyman, a carpenter, a Jack of all trades.
He’s a man who once spent the summer of his sixteenth birthday helping his father build a garage so that the next summer they could use it as a space to rebuild a tiny wooden boat from when Jesus was born into sleek and shiny yellow watercraft complete with a motor made to propel them around the big lake at speeds safe for a boat of a much bigger size.
He’s ambitious, a visionary, a guy with a tool for everything and a “why pay someone else to do it when you can do it yourself…and do a much better job…” attitude.
I am none of those things.
In fact one could argue that I’m the exact opposite. Where Husband has the impressive ability to breathe life into objects that belong on the bottom of a junk pile, I am the culprit who sent that thing to its grave in the first place.
I break things.
But it’s not my fault. Like Husband inherited his skills and interest in nailing things together, I was born to find a way to break them apart.
See, we’re neck-deep in working on the finishing touches it’s going to take to get us living in our new house. It’s an exciting time for a man who has been planning this home in the blueprints of his mind for years.
It’s a frightening time for a woman who once saw her life flash before her eyes when she got her head stuck in a ladder in her attempt at house painting.
But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around and make sandwiches while my husband is measuring and cutting and making sawdust fly.
Nope.
I’m gonna help.
But before I could strap on my tool belt and suspenders that look like rulers, I was sent with Pops to go get supplies.
And when I say supplies, I mean, hook up the giant trailer, grab your coffee and be ready to set up camp in the store for a good five to six hours…because the man’s got a list…
And he wrote on both sides.
Shit.
Fast forward through the part where Pops and I got a flat tire and had to pull over on the highway to change it only to discover that the spare was a little skimpy on air as well.
Then skip the next part where I had a mental breakdown in the plumbing section trying to explain Husband’s hand-drawn diagram of a small piece he needed with a male end that connects to another piece with a female end that needs to be threaded and bedazzled with rhinestones and copper and is a 1/2 inch wide (or is that 1/3?) with metal studs while Pops mastered the art of sleeping while standing up.
Then zip on through the fourteen hours it took the two of us to load 750 square feet of hardwood flooring, 300 slate tiles, three bags of mortar, two bags of grout, a nailer, 20 pieces of sheet rock, six oak doors, a bag of painting supplies, electrical boxes, a roll of wire for something, thirty-seven thousand plumbing parts and a bag of licorice onto the trailer, covering it with a giant tarp while the wind blew the thunderheads in.
I don’t want to talk about the monsoon that tore through that tarp on the way home in the dark or the fact that Pops may or may not have hit a small tree with a trailer full of soggy supplies as he slid sideways in the sticky mud outside the garage and proceeded to get stuck up to the floorboards.
I won’t mention the words he used to explain his emotions or the fact that we had to get the tractor to lift the trailer away from the tree and then hook it up to the front of the pickup to pull it out of the mud.
We don’t want to talk about it.
And I don’t want to talk about the grumbling that occurred the next day when I was sent to town again because there was a missing piece in the bag of 3,000 plumbing supplies we picked up in our life-altering journey.
Nope.
I won’t go there.
But I do want to tell you that when our supplies were accounted for and we got line out, after I painted the ceiling and the walls, organized our area and brought over some beer and snacks, someone did give me a tool.
A hammer.
And I was elated to be thought capable enough to help lay the wood floor.
So excited that in approximately 3.4 minutes of weilding that hammer, I forgot about moving my thumb out of the way.
And I do want to tell you that even though my thumb print is forever altered, Husband gave me a second chance and trusted me to learn the art of tiling.
And I thought I was doing ok, really. I mean, after two full days of being left alone to mix mud, haul and cut heavy tiles, space them out and skip the parts where I actually had to use math skills to measure, I still had a few places on my body that weren’t completely crusted in mortar.
I was focused, I was sweaty, I was becoming a tiling expert intent on getting the project complete in a timely manner. There was no time for breaks, no rest for wicked and apparently no room for manners, which I quickly learned was something that remains important in my handyman’s world no matter the time constraints and focus placed on the project.
Because when he came to check on my progress at the end of two days of laying tile he took one look at this woman with sweat dripping down her back, wild hair escaping from her two-day pony tail and arms and legs covered in mortar only to be greeted with an order to go get her a rag.
Apparently there was something about my request that didn’t sit well with my husband. Perhaps it was the tone of voice, or the fact that I didn’t look him in the eye or use the words or any form of synonym for “please” or “thank you”. Whatever it was, Husband couldn’t contain his disdain for this version of his wife morphed into some kind of intense and ragged construction obsessed animal. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t the calm, cool and collected species he becomes in this sawdust and testosterone infused environment.
He was confused.
He had to express himself.
I glared up at him from my place among the tiles and wet mortar.
“Where’s my rag? I need my rag? I’m almost done!!! Did you hear me?!!!”
He took two steps backwards, looked down and pointed at me, wagging his finger up and down to emphasize his disappointment as he said…
“Look at you. You’re bossy, you’re a mess and I don’t know if I like working with you…”
He took two more steps backward and stood still for a moment waiting for my reaction.
I looked down at my jeans, unrecognizable at this point as anything but pants made out of mortar. I ran my dirty hand through my hair and pulled out a glob of crusted mud.
Sweat trickled down my back and into my butt crack as I took in the words this kind and patient man has never before uttered to me.
I took a deep breath as the stress and worry of the past two weeks came unglued from my insides and out of my lungs in a fit of laughter that I couldn’t contain.
Husband stared at me as I worked to apologize through my giggles and belly laugh.
He shook his head and lifted his cap up to run his fingers through his hair, his lips curled up in a reassuring smile as he turned on his boot heel and left the crumpled, ornery and unnecessarily intense version of his wife to consider improving her home improvement attitude.
And I was left with the conclusion that I’d better shape up, because for the next few weeks while we finish this house I’m living in this man’s world, and if I ever want to cook a meal in this kitchen in our lifetime, I’d better whistle while I try to avoid hammering my arm to the wall and do what I can to keep him around…
Because I break things.
And he fixes them…
When summer sets in out here among the clay buttes and tall grasses it’s like nothing else.
It’s like our world could not be further away from the one we know in the middle of January when the windswept snow drifts outside our door and the cold is so cold it actually hurts.
But in mid July the air swelters. It settles on the top of the water in our stock dams and grows creatures we haven’t seen for months. It pools up under our cowboy hats, drips down the back of our work shirts and moves with us in the slow motion effort we use to make it through the day.
The people and animals of the north were not meant for 90+ degree weather. We see it coming and run for a canopy of trees, find refuge inside the ice cold of a sparkling drink and on the other end of our lawn hoses. We watch our garden grow and wait for the sun to retreat to do the weeding or to check how the radishes are coming along.
We swat horseflies and search in our houses for the summer cutoffs we wear five times a year to sit by the fan and say “Geesh, it’s a hot one.”
Our skin turns from white to red to brown as the wild sunflowers growing in road ditches reach their petals toward the sky.
We know who we are here inside the smells, sounds and sites of a season we wait all year to indulge in. We know what it looks like and what it means.
It means foxtails sweeping and bending in the draws, horseflies biting at our necks, hard cracked earth and tall wild grass that scratches our bare legs.
It means sweaty brows and an alfalfa crop, a sky with no clouds in site and dust hanging in the air kicked up by neighbors and big trucks heading out somewhere.
Summer means rain puddles left in the sun to dry, dragonflies and pink sunsets and a sky twinkling so bright you can’t tell the difference between fireflies and stars.
And we hold this under our skin, the pieces of the hard dirt, the swish of a horse’s tail, the sweet smell of cattle and summer grass and the trails we wore down to dust, we keep this with us as we move through the season, grow tired of the heat and welcome the cool down.
And come January when the ground is white we will say to one another “Can you believe it was ever green out here?”
Then we will close our eyes and dream of a summer that held heat under our hats and sent it trickling down our backs.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 