Tag Archives: family

Rain Goats

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“What are you doing?” I asked my husband in the dark of our bedroom. He had his face nearly pressed up against the screen of the open window at the head of our bed. That day in May had reached record-breaking temperatures of over 90-degrees and we soon found out that our air conditioning was on the fritz. We had just switched off the heat a few days earlier, but there we were, laying on top of the covers under the ceiling fan before spring had even officially arrived. 

“I’m counting the seconds between thunder and lightning,” he said as another loud clap shook the house, bringing only noise and not a drop of rain.

As a volunteer fireman for a rural department, he’s found himself dropping everything and rushing to the pickup to answer a neighborhood call more than ever these days. With the high winds and dry conditions and the things he’s seen go up in flames, he understands that it could be us at any time. 

Down the road my dad still doesn’t have a rain gauge. He spends his mornings checking the calving pasture and worrying about the status of our springs and the levels of our dams and grass. You can have everything out here, but you have nothing if you don’t have the rain. And if dad ever buys himself a rain gauge, he’s certain it will never rain again. I feel the same way about umbrellas.

And it turns out, maybe there is some validity to those silly superstitions. Because what came next has been over a week of soaking rain that has left us with muddy roads, rushing creeks, full dams, green grass and nearly five inches of moisture and counting. And, when I needed to run with my daughter a quarter mile through a busy parking lot in a sideways downpour to get to my niece’s graduation ceremony, of course, I didn’t have an umbrella. 

Dad, who usually relies on us for the rain report was likely a bit smug to find that the bottom fell out of our gauge this winter. Maybe that’s all it took to open the skies, the absence of rain gauges and umbrellas on the Veeder Ranch. Could we be that powerful? 

“A God send,” Dad sent me a text along with photos of water rushing through the culverts in the Pederson pasture and the creek swollen to the size of the Little Missouri River. My daughter and I sat happily soaked in our seats, our hairdos wrecked, a little shivery but smiling as we waited to watch my niece officially become a teacher that morning.  

I texted our neighbor to see how much rain they had down the road, officially turning into my father right then and there. 

A few weeks ago we brought home two little goats to feed up and get ready for the fair. On the warm days we brushed them and shined them up. On the hot day we hosed them and shampooed them.

Yesterday, after looking at the extended forecast and their soggy little bodies, we decided their shelter wasn’t going to cut it anymore as the rain and chill continues. And so my husband and I arranged a goat transfer to the big barn that sounds simple enough in theory but looks like an hour of locating and moving hog panels, an unsuccessful crash course in halter breaking, two crying goats, one who just three minutes ago, successfully outran and outwitted a mom, a dad and a kid in the pen but is now suddenly unwilling to take another step, one kid standing on the road in the rain crying, one mom yelling “It’s ok! The goats are ok!” one dad yelling “Hurry up. Come here and help us!” to the other girl who, while splashing nonchalantly in a mud puddle got her boot so completely stuck that she had to take her foot out and use both hands to pry it free, which resulted in the sort of timber into the soggy ground that you can imagine before she gathered herself to sit with those two muddy, stinky goats in the side-by-side for their mile-long trip down the road to their new digs where we set up new troughs, a water bucket and a heat lamp that, oops, broke along the way, have to go get a new one, be right back…

And while I’d prefer that this debacle doesn’t make the 4H record-keeping books, I will tell you, even in the muddiest and soggiest of the situation, we never once cursed the rain. And the goats? Well, they perked up right away in that warm and cozy barn and I stand by my assertion that I’ll happily trade fire danger for goat transfer any day. 

If you need us, we’ll be standing next to the window saying things like “I wonder how much we’ve got?” and “We needed this,” like the middle-aged, superstitious cattle (and goat?) ranchers we are…

And I never wanted to leave again

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My husband and I spent a brief time living in western Montana when we were first married almost twenty years ago now. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I reach back for a memory there of us and our big brown lab who was just turning from puppy to real dog, maybe sort of like our marriage. 

We chose the mountains as a challenge to pick a spot to live and that sounded adventurous before we completely settled down at the ranch. We had been married the year before and my husband needed to finish his college degree after spending as much time as a man needed as a roughneck in the oil fields. I had been touring up and down the Midwest, particularly the interstates and state highways of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. I would take my husband with me when his four days off aligned with my time on the road. Our honeymoon, for example, was spent in Redfield South Dakota, a tiny town of 2,000 just south of Aberdeen. I had been hired to perform at a company picnic and so off we went for four hundred miles, nearly running out of gas when we miscalculated the distance between towns. 

We could have been in Jamaica like normal newlyweds, but on our way home, we stayed at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo to be fancy and bought a new refrigerator and microwave at with our wedding money only to discover they were much too big to fit in the tiny ranch house where were living. So, we sold them to his parents. 

Living together as husband and wife in my grandma’s tiny house next to the red barn on the ranch where I was raised when we were so young made us feel uneasy, I think, only because we wondered if it might be too good to be true. We couldn’t possibly be here already; with jobs and bills and the brown lab puppy I bought for him for his birthday. If we stayed here for the rest of our lives, would we grow to resent it? Would we blame every mistake and wrong turn and unsettled argument on the fact that we never spread our wings too far together? What if we became unhappy? Would there be a way we dared blame it on the ranch and the small town that raised us and pulled us back? 

And so, we narrowed it down to two choices. Wynona, Minnesota because once I sang there and brought my husband along and we visited a cute coffeeshop and walked along the river and climbed to the top of a bluff and we liked how it looked like a movie scene from far away, even in the ugly and brown part of March. And then we went to Wabasha and watched the bald eagles and toured the famous restaurant and places that inspired the 90s movie Grumpy Old Men. We got a kick out of all of it. And Wynona had a college with the right program.

And so did Missoula. We hadn’t been there before, but as prairie kids we romanticized the mountains and so that’s what won. Seems like the mountains always win. Who could argue with a college credit in snowboarding and professors who wore Birkenstocks before every teenage girl in the country wore Birkenstocks. We brought our dog, and I brought my guitar and I doubt we had too much else. Maybe a bed and my mom’s old leather couch. We found a cheap place to live, and I found a job and he went to school and we looked for places to find ourselves in the mountains every night and every weekend and we wanted to love it. And maybe we did a bit. But looking back on it now it seems like we spent most of our time trying to climb out so we could see the horizon and the weather coming. So we could get away from the endless swarm of people looking to be found too. 

My favorite hiking spot was the bald face of a mountain outside of town where nothing but prairie grass grew and the trail was cut like a switchback the way the cows and deer and elk would do it at home. There were no surprises there. I could see the sky. 

I lost my first pregnancy in that little condo in Missoula. My husband had already moved back to North Dakota to take a job offer and I stayed behind with the dog and nothing but an air mattress and a suitcase left in the space. It wasn’t time for us to be parents. We were not ready. But it didn’t feel that way when I was alone and wailing. My dad came to get me, my husband couldn’t leave. I protested. I’m like that lab, when I’m hurt I want to hide out under the deck and be alone. 

And that was that. We gave it a year for the mountains to enchant us. But nothing compared to the place that loved us first. After the long trip home, I climbed to the top of my own hill. It wasn’t a mountain, but the view was better. I cried the cry of someone who had lost something. I cried the cry of relief. I cried the cry of uncertainty. I cried the cry of being loved. I cried the cry of being home. 

And I’ve cried that cry a thousand times since, but I’ve never wanted to leave again…

 

Spring things

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We’re in the thick of calving these days on the ranch. Little black specks on the hillsides and in the draws are arriving like little beacons of hope with the crocuses. 

For several years we have calved mostly pure black animals, but with the addition of Herford bulls in the program this year we have more black-white-face babies than we’ve had since I was a kid.

My dad, who is out in the pastures several times of day keeping an eye on things, will occasionally text me photos of the new arrivals proving that he’s as delighted as the children are about the speckled faces and, also that you can be an almost-70-year-old rancher and still be enamored with the process. He took my daughters out for a side-by-side drive through the herd and gave them an in-depth genetic lesson about color patterns and recessive genes. They catch on quickly to those sorts of things, their little minds like sponges ready to memorize. I wish I had retained that skill, mostly to remember all the names they have given the new arrivals. Because when you have black-white-faced calves instead of the standard pure black, you can suddenly tell most of the babies apart! And so, naturally, they all get names. 

And so we have “Tippy” because he has a white tipped tail. And “Goggles” because he has two black rings around his eyes. And then “Patch” and “Spot” and so on and so forth. 

This weekend we will be building a little pen close to the house, down where my failed garden used to sit under the shade of the oak and ash trees. The girls are getting a couple of goats to show at the county fair, and we know nothing about goats except what we learn when our friend Brett comes over for a beer. We’re entering into real 4-H territory these days as it’s my oldest daughter’s first year being what we call a “real 4-Her.” No more Cloverbud rainbow ribbons. We’re pulling out the big books now and learning the rules. 

For her first assignment, before the goats arrive, she and her best friend are doing a demonstration on how to make homemade Play-Dough. They’ve spent a couple days after school making their poster board and rehearsing their lines. And, thanks to her friend’s mom, they will also be dressed the same–in matching t-shirts with the signature 4-H clover. And if you know anything about 8-year-old girls you know that the matching is the most fun part.   

Anyway, I saw the run-through last night and it’s the cutest thing, honestly. Key rural kid memory-making right there. We’ll see if they maintain the same level of squirrely-ness and giggles when there’s an audience present. 

Spoiler alert, they got a purple ribbon!

After the presentation is complete Edie will then move on to the most uncharted territory of all: The Clothing Review.  And if you don’t know what the Clothing Review is, don’t worry, neither do I. But I know it involves sewing. And modeling. Two things I am not built for. 

Because I have experience in the horse show, and I have wood-burned and latch-hooked and picked and identified every wildflower on the ranch in the name of a 4-H ribbon. I even completed an entire information board about beaver habitat that won me a trophy and sat in the office of soil conservation for a bit. But I have never touched a needle and thread without it making me want to bang my head against the wall. It’s only natural then that I gave birth to an aspiring fashion designer. So we’re making an outfit. From scratch, like we’re in Project Runway or Little House on the Prairie, depending on how it all turns out. And when I say “we” I mean Edie and her Nana Karen, who I cornered on Easter at the ranch, right before she was walking out the door. I had Edie ask her, “can you help me sew a skirt for 4-H?” And I’m so glad I was there to see the reaction on my mother-in-law’s face because it was clear that sewing a skirt with her granddaughter was absolutely the very thing she wanted to do most in the whole world.

“We could do a top too!” she responded immediately before declaring that she’s bringing over a sewing machine. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to give it to you!” 

If you need us, we’ll be at the fabric store. And the feed store. And calling Brett with goat questions. And up in the calving pasture naming new babies. A text just came through from my dad, we had a red one this morning and he is glorious. Wonder what they’ll name him? 

How we survive the deep freeze

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Full disclosure, I am posting this from my perch for the week in Arizona, where I am performing and hanging out in the Author’s Tent at the Art of the Cowgirl event in Wickenburg. And since this week’s column is all about getting ourselves out of the deep freeze that was -40 a week ago, the temperature shift I experienced upon landing and walking out to my rental car yesterday damn near sent me into shock. Like, my body was suddenly 125 degrees warmer than last Monday. What a time to be alive!

Anyway, I’m beyond excited to be included in Art of the Cowgirl and am looking forward to performing and meeting these wonderful women, horsewomen, authors, entertainers and guests all gathering in the name of some of the best things. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi! Here’s my schedule.

Anyway, back to the great white north, which is melting now. The girls are thrilled to be following the creek rushing as the thaw hit. One more month and there will be baby calves and crocuses and it can’t come soon enough!

How we survive the deep freeze

By the time you read this we will have pulled ourselves out of the deep freeze that lingered over us in North Dakota in February. This morning, at 8 am, the temperature on my SUV read -35. On Monday it ready -40.

I don’t recall that I’ve ever seen -40 in my life up here, but that seemed like a perfect time for our furnace to go out. So it did.

When it’s this cold, things just break. Sometimes that also includes our spirits, which seem to be dangling by a thread lately. But I tell you, my kids, they’re really trying.

On our drive to school, I heard my oldest explaining how much of a relief it’s going to be when it hits 20 degrees on Friday. Her cousin wasn’t convinced and so she reassured. “Twenty degrees? That not even chilly. That’s pretty much, like, warm. Probably won’t even need your hat.” Considering it will be a sixty-degree temperature shift, these kids up here will be coming to school in shorts.

Edie gave Rosie a spa day. Self care is important when the cold is trying to kill you.

Because they haven’t had recess in weeks, the busses aren’t running properly, water pipes freeze and tractors refuse to start. We drove by the cows and horses this morning and they’re covered in frost, sparkling and chewing and laying in the hay, surrounded by the turkeys and pheasants picking at the leftover cake. Edie thought we should build them a big dome to keep them warm, but they seemed ok laying in the morning sun. They were bred to be this hearty, as long as my dad comes every day to feed that hay and cake in a protected spot out of the wind and break the ice on the water tanks. It seems contradictory, but when snow sits on the backs of the cows, that’s a good indication that they’re retaining thier body heat, well insulated against the cold weather.

The same goes for horses and the wild animals too, like that young, orphaned deer that dad says comes in to feed with the herd almost every day.

This place seems to hold plenty of little secrets like that on survival and adaptation, in particular. That little deer, when he lost his herd, he found a new one. Those turkeys have been storing up fat all year for these cold temperatures, fluffing up their feathers to create air pockets that trap the heat and roosting in the thick and protected brush at night. The pheasants have been saving too and find shelter in the thick grass and cattails in the draws.

It’s hard to believe in a month or so the crocuses will poke their heads out to the sun, growing best in rocky soil, using the warmth from nearby stones to thrive in the early chill of spring.

I think in the deep freeze of winter is when us humans need to take a cue from these animals and lean on our ancestral instincts the most. Even with the most modern amenities and the many ways we work and entertain one another, amid a deep freeze like this, we need to simply be together. We may not technically need this coping skill to keep one another warm (unless you’re like us and your furnace fails you) but just as importantly we need to remind each other of the promise of spring.

“Remember when it was 100 degrees are our air conditioning went out and we had company coming?” I ask my husband as he tinkered with wiring in the furnace room. 

I don’t know if that was as helpful as Rosie planning our trip to Florida.

“We’re going to have to dig our shorts out of the bottom of the drawers!” she exclaimed bundled in the back of the car with a blanket tucked up under her chin.

“And we’ll go to the beach. I’ve never been to the beach!” Edie added.

“Yeah!” my niece chimed in. “It’s going to be so fun. And so warm!!”

Look at us, just like the crocuses, using the warmth of our surroundings to pull us through. Look at us, just like that little deer, relying on our heard. Look at us, like the wild birds, fluffing our feathers, pulling through…

Stage Stories, Home Stories

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This morning, I opened a manilla envelope I had stored in my backpack to take back from Nevada to my home in North Dakota.

A few weeks ago I was standing on a variety of stages in Elko for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering’s 40th Anniversary Celebration. I sang songs about ranch life and “You Are My Sunshine” at the top of my lungs to an auditorium of 900 elementary school students and then I did it all again the next hour. I sang my “Happy” song and charged those kids with writing a list or a poem of all the things that made them smile.

I stood in a bar with my dad and guitar player and pulled out all the toe-tapping songs we could think of while people hugged and cheered and danced and visited.

I told a story about my great-grandfather’s life and the yellow roses that still bloom in the barnyard on a small stage in front of an audience so still and attentive and close you could hear them sniffle.

I shared the stage with Carnegie Hall performers, Western folklorists, a Grammy award winner, viral music sensations and the yodeling cowboy from Montana who’s the voice of the “Yahoo” commercials.

Andy Hedges, Dom Flemmons, Dad, Seth and Katelyn (Buffalo Kin) and Mike
Watching Wylie and the Wild West from backstage
Adrian Brannon rehearses backstage before our set
Margo Cilker, her husband Forrest VanTuy and her band
Ed Peekeekoot shows us the head of his guitar he hand carved

I sat in the audience at an open mic session for kids where 50 or so aspiring performers recited, read or performed cowboy poetry or music that they wrote or memorized. I obliged when a 10-year-old cowgirl behind a guitar asked us to sing along to “Home on the Range” while she played.

Jessie Veeder listens to a young fan recite his cowboy poetry.

I met new people from all over the world curious about ranch life and eager to hear the stories. And then I swapped tales about ranch kids with fellow ranch moms and dads. I met unbelievably talented musicians and poets from across the country and reunited with those I’ve come to love over the years.

Clara Baker, Margo Cilker, Lara Manzanares

I ate, drank, told stories, shopped, talked, barely slept, and sang and sang and sang until it was time to point our car back north in a blizzard warning, slowly through Nevada, then Idaho and then Montana and then finally to our home state, where the wind sent the fresh snow skidding across the interstate.

I took the wheel in the last stretch of the trip so my dad could log into a bull sale and make his virtual bids while we drove toward the Badlands, rolling us back into our real life before we even parked the car. What a very modern-day-ranching thing to do after a week of talking about it.

Back home, my husband kept the cows, horses, kids, cats and dogs fed. He fixed a faulty furnace and wrapped up work on a big shop project. He practiced spelling words with our daughters, and when I caught him on Facetime during breaks in my schedule, he was snuggling our oldest on the chair watching YouTube videos on how to install fascia on steel buildings, and I thought, “Well, look at how much she loves him — little Edie enduring the drone of a how-to construction video just to be in the crook of her dad’s arm.”

When you’re home at the ranch the way we are in our everyday lives, you don’t think much about how most of the rest of the world is living — and that breaking ice on water tanks and rolling out hay bales in negative temperatures is Hollywood-esque to some who have never or will never live this way.

I dress up in my felt cowboy hat, pressed dark jeans and a bright pink satin blazer behind my guitar to tell the audience in Elko about the time, when I was a kid, I attempted to get the horses in by riding my sorrel mare bareback with baling twine for a bridle. They laugh at the part where I question my dad’s parenting instincts, recalling how he hollered “Bail off, Jess!” And I did, only to break my wrist and leave it dangling off my arm.

Back home, my husband is in Carhartts and a wool cap. He smells like diesel exhaust and his beard is scruffy. He packs snacks in backpacks and makes sure our daughters have snow gear for school, he takes out hamburger from our deep freeze stash for supper and stands by the stove smack dab in the middle of our decision to raise our kids out here alongside those horses, tucked into the hills while I’m a thousand miles away singing about it.

I pull the SUV into the drive and drag my suitcases and guitar inside. I flop down on the couch and lay my head on my husband’s lap. I’ve been gone a week, but there’s no big fuss about that. He gives me a kiss, then launches into the report on those spelling tests and on Edie baking cookies all on her own and Rosie’s newfound master of the stove. I notice a log burning for the first time in our new fireplace. I say a few things about the crowds and who I got to see.

We get up and take out elk for a stir-fried supper. Our youngest gets sick at bedtime and throws it all up on my husband lying next to her. Welcome home, here’s the flu.

This morning, I emptied my bag to find that manilla envelope. I thought it was going to be a big thank-you card with signatures from the kids in Elko, but it was better. Twenty or so pages from Mrs. Wine’s Southside class with handwritten reasons these kids are happy.

The big ‘ol auditorium full of elementary school kids

To: Jessie: I want to say hi to your daughters. I know one is from the name Rosey? But I want to say thank you for singing us the songs but I love how you and your dad and your friend sang it almost made me cry.

Dear Jessie, I like when I was dancing, only for 15 sec…Sunshine made me remember the old times.

Dear Jessie, what makes me happy is going and seeing my dogs and cats and my mom and dad and what I love is coming home and smelling supper.

Dear Jessie, my dogs make me happy because they make me laugh when ther licking me. My teacher is my first thing that makes me happy.

Dear Jessie, Songs make me happy Jessie. Things that make me happy are dogs, chicken, horses and cowboy poetry week…

And I think, same here kids. Same. Same. Way up here.

For more photos from The Gathering, click here

Five ways to love January

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Yesterday the girls Facetimed my in-laws to show them their new rooms. Their grandparents are spending the first three months or so of 2025 in the desert, away from the frigid temperature that is North Dakota. As their granddaughters pointed the phone toward their new purple walls, their grandparents talked to them about the pool and the nice weather and the hikes they are going on.  This weekend they will meet up with other North Dakotans who have fled to the south to survive the winter.

Meanwhile, back at home, we’re in the middle of the hardest three months. Between the dark and the cold, the taxes, the constant little illnesses and my husband working outside in the volatile weather, these are the days convincing the kids to get out of their warm beds and out the door is a bit more challenging.  One day on our drive to town we watched the temperature fall as the sun rose, a whole ten degrees in a matter of minutes. From 2 to -8.  No outside recess this morning, Rosie declared.

Anyway, the goal here isn’t a public complaint about North Dakota in January. If you’re reading this, you likely know what we’re in for and have long accepted it like the rest of us. But lately I’ve been thinking about the little ways I can make our already pretty good lives better and more bearable during these cold months when escaping to Arizona isn’t an option for us.

And maybe it’s more of a resolution thing, like how can we love one another better? Who doesn’t need a little extra dose of it these days, no matter the weather. If I were a magazine writer I would come up with a tidy little “How to love January” list for you, but honestly, I don’t think there’s anything tidy about my life, so I’ll just start with

Number 1: The Cooking. Lately I have had cravings for fresh vegetables and new seasonings, which is the opposite of the usual noodles and cream I want to hunker down with in the cold months. But these cravings have sent me to the kitchen with a little more enthusiasm to try a new recipe and to the grocery store to purchase ingredients I don’t keep in my cupboard. In the past few weeks of this month, between my oldest daughter’s interest in her new cookbook and my online searches, we’ve tried out five or six new recipes. Some were wins. Some were too spicy for my Midwestern pallet, and, well, our new brownie recipe was a downright flop. But it has been fun. The reward is always to see what my husband thinks. And to give him a hot meal after a long day in the cold makes me feel valuable and helpful and makes him feel cared for. Bonus is that he does the dishes and that he always gives everything a thumbs-up. Except the brownies, no one could stand behind those things. 

Chopped Thai-Inspired Chicken Salad was a hit. Here’s the link to the recipe on Pinterest
https://pin.it/5Yx57mDil

Which brings me to Number 2: The games. Over the Christmas break the girls got a few new board and card games and so we’ve tried them out only to be reminded that the only thing our daughters want in the entire world is to play games with us. Honestly. It’s as simple as that. So we’ve taught them how to play Spoons and they taught us how to play “Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza.” And if we have time for nothing else, we whip out the trivia at supper time and they’re plum happy and so are we. Games are love.

And so is snuggling, which is my number three. Intentional lingering in a hug and more of them. Movies picked out together instead of watched on separate screens in separate rooms. Sitting closer in the house. Sometimes, for someone like me who is just fine with having a wide swath of space around me, I need to be more intentional with the affection, for my family and for myself.

And then sometimes, when it’s not twenty below, we need to get our butts outside together, not just for work, but for play too. Over break I helped the girls build a couple snowmen in the yard. I had plenty of shoveling to do, but I skipped that to roll giant snowballs with them instead and it was great, of course, because building a snowman is always great. And then I took off for a walk in the hills to fill my lungs with cold air and get the blood pumping. Which is my number four. Getting my butt moving. Seasonal depression is a real thing for me and that’s why I have a treadmill and the hills. My husband and I have a loose goal of running a little race this spring (and when I say run, I mean more of a slow jog. And when I say loose, I mean we’re not aiming for any marathons here.) The two of us haven’t had a shared couple goal outside of family and business in our almost twenty years of marriage, so overcoming our shared hatred of running feels like a little thing that can connect us. How romantic.

Which brings me to the sweetness. Which is number five and maybe the most important. I have enough hustle in my life, deadlines and goals and the day to day we’ve built that keep me up at night. Stress. We all have it. And it sucks more when you can’t have a backyard barbeque or get vitamin D from the sun. So I am going to try to dig a little more gentleness out of myself to see what comes back to me in the next few months. In my tone of voice and the way I brush their hair, making his coffee and fixing their meals. Our meals. It’s for me too. The tenderness.

Except maybe when we’re playing Spoons. All bets are off then. Who needs the desert when you have a kitchen table card game and better brownies in the oven? 30 below zero, you don’t stand a chance.

The little shops that make us a town

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My mom, who has owned a clothing store on our Main Street for over 12 years, is officially closing the doors on that chapter of her life this month. An end of an era, we’re calling it.

This store has been in the community for decades, under different management and ownership throughout the years, a staple in town for finding the perfect outfit for your wife or a holiday party.

One of my first memories of Meyer’s Department Store would have been when I was around 8 or 9 when our neighbor, Shirley, owned it. My best friend and I would try on the high-heeled shoes in the middle room and walk up and down the carpeted ramp to the green tile floor, pretending to be models.

I wouldn’t have imagined at that time that my own daughters would be doing the same thing all these years later, growing up between the pretty outfits hanging on the walls, pulling clothes from the racks and trying them on in the four-way mirror, picking candy from the dish and playing with the toys set up for the kids in various corners throughout the years.

Meyer’s Department Store is set to be a core memory for my oldest daughter. But don’t ask her to talk about it. She’s too heartbroken. Turns out her plans were to work there one day, when she became a teenager, which can’t happen soon enough in her opinion. What is she supposed to do now, she wonders out loud at the kitchen table through tears. How could Gramma possibly sell it?

She’s too young to understand what it means to be a 69-year-old small business owner so I just tell her she’ll have more time with Gramma now, which will probably mean more shopping with her, too.

Mom's Store 1.jpg
Mom purchased Meyer’s Department Store after a career as a social worker and at the height of the western North Dakota oil boom.

My little sister and I both worked at the store at different times in its life, before our mom took it over and during the economy that was small-town North Dakota in the 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, we were the only clothing store in town and the talk about rural North Dakota business was going the way of combating outmigration and aging communities.

I was 16, sitting behind the counter watching my friends drag Main Street, selling blouses and jeans that fit women so well they traveled miles from neighboring towns to try them on. I learned that customer service wasn’t always about the sale, but maybe more importantly about just being there, being open, being available and reliable, and remembering names.

Our mom bought Meyers when she was almost 60. It was at the height of the oil boom in our community, a big transition for our small town as well as for a woman who spent the majority of her career in social work. I remember admiring her ability to shift and visualize her life in a different way. She didn’t have a roadmap to retail management, but she did have a handful of people who helped her learn and get acquainted and comfortable enough so she could do things her way.

And great customers and employees she loved.

That was her favorite part, hands down: the people. We always joke with her that her generosity wasn’t helping her make a profit, but the social worker in her couldn’t be changed. So many of her employees, past and present, thank my mom for her kindness and the open-minded environment in which they were able to learn and thrive enough to move on to the next phase of their lives successfully.

With the end of this era, it has become even more clear to me just what places like Meyer’s, or your hometown pharmacy, grocery store, café or hardware store can mean to a community like Watford City, through all the phases of its life. These days, we are seeing transitions in leadership in many businesses in our community — some in generations taking over and some with closures and, of course and thankfully, new ideas and services popping up on the corners and in reconstructed buildings and storefronts.

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Mom holding baby Rosie with Edie nearby in the early days of owning the store. 

In the age of online shopping and virtual connection, I argue that storefront, although more challenging than ever, is more important, not less, for our community. Doors open for business and faces behind counters not only reflect the flavor of a community, but these are the places that support your basketball teams and 4-H livestock shows, special events and big ideas.

But most significantly — and I saw it so vividly with Mom’s store — these are the places where people remember your name and your size and your coffee order and your prescription. These are the grocery stores that will order the special cheese for you, that cater your weddings and baby showers and funerals. They employ your teenagers. These are the places where you meet your local friends to catch up and take your out-of-town friends and family to learn about you and where you come from. They are the places you go to be seen.

Singularly, you might not notice what it means to have these little shops there for you to feed you, clothe you and send you flowers, remember your name and your size and your coffee order. But put together, it’s everything that makes us a town and who we are in it.

And with that, I say congratulations to my mom on her retirement and this new phase in her life. Give her a minute for a celebratory glass of wine and she’ll make the move to envision her life in a new and wonderful way once again, which will probably find her spending more time in her coffee shop. She might even learn to make a latte. Stop in and say hi if you’re in town. Tell her what you’ve been up to, she’ll be so happy to host you.

Give it a few years and I’m sure you’ll find my daughter there, too, serving up coffee as the teenager behind the counter where she’s always wanted to be.

May you find what you need in this construction phase of life

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For the past six months, every time we visited our local Cenex store, my daughters would pick out a color swatch from the paint section and ask to re-paint and redecorate their rooms. I would tuck the swatches, bright purple and dusty pink, inside the folds of my purse and tell them, yes, we’ll put it on the schedule, and then dread the day they would ask again.

The task of a redo — a cleanout — always feels so daunting to me. When you live in a house long enough with children, things seem to pile up in the corners and crevices of every room, stacks of papers and tiny pieces of their imagination, creations and childhood spread all about waiting for you to come digging or looking for that lost piece of paper or the most important Lego part in the world. It takes diligence to contain it and to help teach them how to do the same. Truthfully, I’m not so good at it.

While my daughters have been on winter break, I’ve done my best to focus on them in a way I don’t do as much anymore now that they are 7 and 9 and much more independent. I used to sit with them and color. I used to coordinate art projects. I used to have to supervise every outdoor excursion, cut up every meal.

I woke up sometime this year and realized I sort of miss them in a way that feels sneaky, like it would be easy not to notice. I’m nostalgic for their baby faces and their baby voices that I’ll never hear again.

And that imaginary red thread that connects me to them, it used to be close and tight, but slowly, surely, inevitably, it’s unspooling, and I’m not sure what to do with all that slack.

I suppose these are the types of musings many of us are doing at the cusp of the new year between planning the dip for the party and undecorating the Christmas tree. I want to say something profound about how the past 365 days have taught me lessons and I’ve abided, but after I am done typing this, I’m taking my daughters to town and we’re picking up a few gallons of paint and I’m doing what I’ve done all year — the next thing there is to do.

Surprisingly, lately, I don’t feel much like pontificating.

Yesterday, in preparation for painting over nail holes, scuffs and the occasional crayon mark on their walls, my oldest daughter and I unloaded the clothes from her pink hand-me-down dresser drawers and repainted them a dusty blue to match the new bedding she picked out on a recent shopping trip. She helped me unscrew the glass knobs and sand and scuff the bright pink paint, sang along with every word of every Taylor Swift song on the speaker, and made the funniest little digs and jokes as she worked, and I thought, oh yes, this girl, like me, like her father, she likes a project.

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A project. I suppose that’s it right there, the word to sum up a year if it doesn’t sum up a life. What are we doing if it isn’t project after project?

Specifically, this year featured an album release, a music video, art classes and events, and a new retail store for our non-profit, taking care of cows and bottle calves, teaching the girls about horses, a new garden spot, fences and water system fixing, and wrapping up the loose ends of a five-year-long house renovation. I just bought the toilet paper roll holder for the new bathroom last weekend, finishing one thing so we can move on to getting that wall the right lavender color for Rosie’s room.

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Putting the floor in in our new addition

Anyway, I wanted to find a way to make this New Year’s note to you inspirational even though you are all probably running into as many encouraging quotes as you can handle this time of year.

Regardless, I think I’ve finally come to what I want to say since the winding journey from the Cenex’s paint section where we started. My husband and I, when we were young and first married and searching for where to land, or where to go next, made ourselves a life motto that has carried us through this year, and all the years since, for better or for worse: Our life is a series of choices, and you’re allowed to make a new one anytime you want. If you don’t have the tools, if you don’t have the muscle, someone you know does. Replace those old knobs. Build a new wall. Take one down. Ask for help to undo the hinges.

I’m realizing now, with my daughters growing up, that I don’t want to say “right before my eyes” at the end of it all, but more “right by my side.” That red thread, when you’re building something together, it seems to tighten up a bit. That’s always been the case for my husband and me, so of course, why wouldn’t it be for our relationship with our children?

Happy New Year to you and yours. May you find what you need in the construction phase.

May your kitchen always be too small for all the people you love

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Baby me in my grandpa’s arms with my cousins in my grandparent’s kitchen

There’s a joke I always make on stage during my performances. It involves holidays in my grandma’s tiny house on the ranch and how, looking back, we managed to pack three families with young kids in a 600-square-foot house for Easter dinner or Christmas mornings and sleepovers.

It seems magical that the house never felt small to us cousins, at least not until we grew up and realized that small space packed with six extra adults and eight kids under the age of 12 probably explained why Grandma always kept the kitchen window cracked even in the middle of winter and forgot the Jell-O salad in the fridge.

When we see holiday movies (and I’ve watched a lot of them this season), we see the giant houses with the big wreaths and the grand staircases, a table stretched out for miles with matching settings and a picture-perfect fireplace standing regal as the backdrop of every kind of predictable storyline that all works out in the end.

Cousins on a couch

But weren’t most of us more like a “kid’s card table in the living room and two or three attached to the end of the kitchen table” sort of family?

And maybe we took out the matching dinnerware if we had it handed down or saved from a wedding, but only once a year and only enough for six or eight of us.

And raise your hand if you spent the afternoon with your cousins making up an elaborate group dance or play in order to hold your family hostage for a performance at the end of the night, with aunts and uncles and grandparents piled on the living room couch, your grandpa’s easy chair and the floor.

And did the tree look a little chaotic, donning handmade paper and pipe cleaner ornaments among the antique bulbs and garland and the star that was always a little worse for the wear but it’s tradition?

Did everyone always linger in the kitchen by the olive and pickle tray even if the house was big enough to send everyone to the basement or living room and out of the way?

And wasn’t it always a little hot, a little sleepy in that house even though it was also a little loud?

The cutest picture of little Edie opening a hair brush at Christmas

Each Christmas, we spend a weekend at my in-laws’ beautiful home in a neighboring town. If there ever was a woman made to host a holiday, it’s my mother-in-law, and if ever there was a house built for three Christmas trees and an extended family weekend together, it’s theirs.

In fact, they built it just for moments like these, from the ground up actually, all on their own after their kids were grown and they moved on to the next chapter of their lives, with a pretty staircase that leads to two bedrooms on the upper level and then another on the main floor for guests, a pool table in the basement that also works for family pingpong tournaments, a hot tub room, a sewing room, a couple cozy living rooms.

A little montage from Christmas at the in-laws, including modeling our jammies from the PJ exchange.

Still, I walked up the stairs and — you guessed it — everyone, all 15 of us plus the dog, were huddled together in the kitchen.

Isn’t that beautiful?

I think about my grandma in that tiny house and I wonder, if she would have been given the years she needed to watch her grandkids grow, would she have planned a larger home with a more accommodating layout?

She was a woman born to an immigrant family, one of 12 kids raised on this prairie. I imagine she was used to close quarters, but I also imagine she had a dream home in mind, as we all do.

In fact, we just finished up an addition on our own home in the name of hosting Christmas Eve pancake suppers and Easter dinners and branding day lunches. We added a wide-open living room and a dining room with enough space to extend the table. This is the first Christmas we’re hosting with the new layout and more room, but we’ve been living with it long enough to realize what we already knew: they will gather in the kitchen.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas and I hope you had to crack the kitchen window and I hope you forgot the Jell-O salad in the fridge and I hope you are lucky enough to have a kitchen too small for all the people you love.

How to survive the final push to Christmas: Fudge

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Greetings from the ranch, where I’m sitting next to the Christmas tree and am happy to report that it’s still standing despite blatant disregard for the no-cartwheels-in-the-living-room rule.

The elf is making a snow angel in a pile of flour on the kitchen table, and since you last heard from me, I’ve had to come clean about the whole situation, at least to my 9-year-old, who got pretty suspicious when the thing only moved once while we were in Vegas for four days and the grandparents were in charge.

Turns out I forgot to add “move elf for the love of Christmas” to the thanks-for-helping-us-out note.

We’re still standing, too, after those four days in Vegas, where I performed some music and we met up with my Texas family to watch my uncle rope in the World Team Roping Championship.

We were all there for the National Finals Rodeo takeover in Sin City, where thousands of ranch and rodeo families struggle to navigate taxi and Uber rides and try not to get lost or broke among the craps tables and slot machines. I lost $60, my sobriety and my dad at a bar in the Venetian all in a matter of 20 minutes.

In times like these, I would usually just look for the cowboy hat, but when the big rodeo comes to Vegas, everyone in the city is dressed like my dad. Turns out that tracking app we convinced him to put on his phone came in handy when he wandered off to put $20 in the slots only to lose all $20 and his bearings.

It only takes 20 minutes to be reminded that cowboys don’t do well in crowds.

But man, a sea of cowboy hats among the bright lights and sparkle of Vegas has always been the most fabulous juxtaposition to me, and where they house all those horses was a mystery unlocked when my husband and dad were invited to walk among the 2,000+ stalls filled with some of the country’s best equine professionals below the cling and clank of the casino, restaurants and hotel.

What a time to be alive! And what a far cry from the whipped frozen plains at the ranch, our horses haired up and tucked cozy among the oak groves.

We’re home among those frozen buttes now, and whatever time we borrowed from sleep in Vegas, we will be making up for in this final push to Christmas (she whispers as she frantically types to submit this before bedtime and on deadline). Just today, my husband and I made record time finishing the last of the Christmas shopping and errands in time to dress and fluff up Rosie for her Christmas program.

Now all I have left is another grocery store run because I forgot a few things, another shopping trip because I forgot a few gifts, all the wrapping, all the baking, a trip to the elementary school to sing carols with 500 kids, and a Christmas party or two to top it off before we can all kick back and enjoy the holiday.

But first, per tradition, the fudge!

Below I share the recipe, just like I do every year, a small gesture of thanks for following along and for sharing some stories of your own. I have so much gratitude for the opportunity to reflect with you here week after week.

May you find all the joy there is to find this holiday season standing tall and strong against all odds, like our Christmas tree and all the cowboys in Vegas.

Mom’s Famous Fudge

  • 1 12-oz package of semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1 12-oz package milk chocolate chips
  • 3 teaspoons vanilla
  • 4 1/2 cups of sugar
  • 1 pound of butter
  • 1 12-oz can evaporated milk

OK, onward.

Butter an 8-by-12 baking dish.
Bring sugar and evaporated milk to a boil, stirring constantly. Continue to stir and boil for 7 minutes.
Remove pot from heat and stir chocolate chips, vanilla and butter.
Stir until smooth and pour into the buttered baking dish.
Refrigerate until set.

Muster up your incredible strength to cut the fudge into squares and serve it on cute little platters or in festive tins for your friends.

Become the favorite.