Sunday Column: Getting lost in my hometown

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I’ve sort of been doing the North Dakota, small town tour lately. I’ve been hired to speak and sing at some special events, touching on topics like ranch living and what it’s like in Boomtown.

It’s been fun, hitting the open road and taking the exists on familiar highways that I’ve driven by but never turned fully discovered.

But it’s also been nostalgic in a way. Because I’m reminded in these small towns what my small town used to be like. Actually, I’m reminded that not all small towns are bursting at the seams, under constant construction and constant growing pains.

I’m reminded that some places stay the same. Quiet. Quaint. Full of people who know one another, their children and their children’s children.

The funny thing is even after watching my small town boom from 1,200 people to over 12,000 or more, I still think of my town the same way as I thought of it growing up. And, in a way, I see it that way too. I mean, I’m not blind to the changes, but the way it was seems to sort of be ingrained in me.

Like, I still call the hardware store Hardware Hank, even though it hasn’t been called Hardware Hank since I was in junior high.

And when I give directions or talk about the new developments, I base locations off of where things used to be…like the old Chuckwagon cafe that closed when I was in high school or the where the bakery used to be…or where Larson’s used to live…

Funny how memory works. Funny how we connect to place in different ways and at different times. Funny how, in my mind, time sort of stopped for my hometown fifteen years ago…

Funny how this causes major issues when a new resident is trying to give me directions to a new development (that used to be a field next to my friend’s house) based on street signs…

Funny how annoyed I was at the reality of getting lost in my hometown…

Coming Home: Getting Lost in my quickly changing hometown
by Jessie Veeder
4-26-15
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com

Sunday Column: A song about you

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I spend my life telling stories. Most days it’s my own, but much of the time I’m looking for inspiration in others, whether it’s from behind the lens of my camera, my guitar or my computer screen, it’s the people out here who have things to say.

Things to teach us about the human condition.

Boomtown video

In this part of the country there are so many stories moving in and out of this place at a rapid pace. Each day in my booming community, something changes, a new house goes up, a new road is built, a restaurant opens its doors. It’s hard to keep up. Everything’s moving so fast.

A few years ago, when we were still living in the little old house, I sat down on the bed with my guitar while Husband cooked soup in the kitchen and I wrote a song called Boomtown, a song that attempts to tell the story of the different souls who have made their way to my hometown in the face of a the oil boom for a second chance, a job, a way to be home. A true folk song, the closest I could get to the ones I was raised on.

I’ve written about this place, this Boomtown, multiple times. The song has been the backdrop in documentaries and stories around the country, and even over seas.

This summer I decided it might be time to show you what it looks like here, in a different way.

So a few weeks ago we gathered the band and hashed out a plan to make Boomtown into a music video.

I can’t wait to show you these people, the heartbeat of a community that is hope and worry and chaos and relief, dreams-come-true and dreams shattered all in one place.

This week’s column is about the video and the people of Boomtown.

Coming Home: Listening to the stories of Boomtown
by Jessie Veeder
9-7-14
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com

Stay tuned…

Buy Boomtown and the rest of my album, “Nothing’s Forever” on iTunes or at www.jessieveedermusic.com

Sunday Column: Be careful with this place…

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I write about this beautiful place. I write about how it grew me up and sent me out and welcomed me back home again. I write about the cows grazing on the sunny side of hills and what it means to me to step outside and smell the first clover of summer as it reaches and stretches to the sky.

I write about it and I photograph it–the red barn and the horses’ fuzzy ears.

The creek and her banks, the horizon and her sunrises and sunsets. The tall grass and flowers.

The buttes and the red road that cuts through it all.

And then I write about the impact the booming oil industry is having on our home, about how the big trucks kick up dust and throw rocks at my windshield on their way to punch holes that extract the fuel that this country relies on for more things than we care to remember when we curse that dust.

I talk about the people it brings with it, those persistent, resilient people with stories to tell, because there are jobs. Countless jobs being created and recreated every day. Jobs that brought us here, my husband and I, back to this ranch to make our lives. We likely wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for those jobs.

Neither would my sisters.

Because it used to be much harder out here, you know, to make ends meet.

To make a living.

So there are things that I can manage. Things that go along with looking for ways to make the most out of this land we stand on, like the dust and the traffic and the noise over the hill that wasn’t there yesterday, and maybe won’t be tomorrow. Much of this impact is fleeting.

Much of it is forever.

But I don’t want it to fail.

I read in the papers the words of reporters sent out to tell the story of what’s happening around me. If there are mistakes out here, they will be written down. If there are questions, they will be asked. If there is something to say about how this is ruining a place, making it better, making it harder, making it easier, making us mad or happy or richer or poorer or crazy, the air too dusty, too noisy, too much, not enough, too damn good to be true, not what it was, not like it will ever be again…

It will all be said.

Somedays I don’t know what to make of it.

This is what I have to say about it all today…

Coming Home: We’re not all reckless in oil country
by Jessie Veeder
March 23, 2014
Fargo Forum
http://www.inforum.com

Sunday Column: One, two, cha cha cha…

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

What do you do when the longest, coldest, most bone chilling, miserable winter you can remember on the North Dakota prairie finally turns into March–a month you previously considered to contain some sort of promise of a thaw –only instead of that whole lamb thing, it slaps you in the frozen face with the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy behavior of twenty below zero?

You put on that leotard,