Tag Archives: family

The sister situation…

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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.

When you live with your parents…

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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.

Not because the land is mine…

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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.

A poem for the hot summer sun…

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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.

Improving my home improvement attitude…

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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…


The long way home.

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Sometimes in the middle of an ordinary weekday, one filled with spilled coffee, peanut butter toast on the run, meetings, missed phone calls and long-lost plans for supper, the world gives you a chance to throw it all out the window and just get lost.

Yesterday afternoon on my way out the office, heavy-overstuffed briefcase on my shoulder, water cup in my left hand, my list under my arm and a trail of papers flailing behind me,  I dialed Husband to remind him it was voting day and asked him if he wanted me to meet him at home so we could make the trek together.

Husband works a good thirty-plus miles away from the ranch. I work another good thirty miles away too…in the other direction.  And when you live in the middle of winding gravel roads, you do not vote in the town that you travel 30 miles to work in each day. No, you take the gravel to a smaller town sitting nice and neat  alongside the county road and cast your vote in a quaint community building as your neighbors from over the hill, across the creek and down the road filter in and ask you about your family, how the house is coming and what you think of the weather.

I thought about taking the fifteen mile detour to cast my vote on my own, but the idea of a little car ride with my husband and the opportunity to actually show up in public together sounded like a nice one. He agreed.

And so we met at home, dropped our piles of work at the door, and husband drove me north on the scoria road, past the substation, and our friends mailbox where the gravel turns to pavement,  right on the county road and into Keene, ND where we would greet the ladies who have been working the polls all day and follow their instructions to fill in the circles dark and complete, and for goodness sakes, don’t vote in more than one party column or you’ve gotta do it again.

I took their directions and my packet and followed Husband into the little gym where we played volleyball this winter and where I attended craft club last week. I waited for my neighbor to cast her vote and I took her place at the round table against the wall.

I read the directions thoroughly, wondered if Husband, who was at the table on the other side of the room, was canceling out my votes, finished my civic duty, closed the folder and fed my sheets through the fancy machine.

Husband followed close behind. I waited while he cracked a few jokes, said goodbye to the neighbors and then followed him to the door and back out into a beautiful summer evening in the hub of our little township: Keene, ND-Population 266?

We contemplated heading back home to grill some brats and finish up the laundry. We talked about how the lawn needed to be mowed and that fence that needed a good inspection. We thought we could maybe get some work done on the new house before it got too late.

We said we probably should go home…we really should…

But it was such a nice evening, the sun was shining through the fluffy clouds, the grass was green and fresh from the recent rain, the farmers were out and it smelled so sweet. We rolled down the windows and pointed our car north toward the lake where we heard the restaurant at the marina had just been renovated and is open for business. What’s another 30 miles when the lake is calling and you heard they might have walleye on the menu?

What’s another thirty miles along new green fields, under big prairie skies, next to a handsome man with lots of things to tell you with the windows open and your favorite songs in the speakers?

It’s nothing.

It’s everything.

And the food was good, the water was crystal clear and the sun was hitting the horizon with a promise of a show as colorful as the rainbow that had just appeared in the clouds to south.

Husband pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the county road. He headed toward that rainbow, toward the ranch and our chores…but then, without a word between us, he ignored the turn that would take us there and chose the long way home instead.

I didn’t object. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t say a thing unless it was to ask him to stop so I could take a photo of the clouds reflecting off the glass-like pond in a rancher’s pasture.

The country church reaching up toward the sky.

A family of ducks swimming in reeds.

The sun sinking below the horizon.

We drove this way for hours, tourists exploring the landscape we knew so well, seeing it again with eyes wider.

Hearts more open.

I was exploring our homeland and my husband was my guide, a man who just wanted a little more time to move through the world he loves…

patient with the clicking of the camera and my need to let the cooling air blow through the crack of the window in the passenger seat…

humored by my theory on coming back after my death as a duck…

happy to hear his tires hum along familiar roads…

content to sit next to me and hum along with the songs we love.

And relieved to forget about the things we should do…


and just live in the moments, under the sky, moving quietly and slowly along the landscape that made us…

Work and fishing

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I woke up this morning with a little krink in my neck, my back stiff and sore, my arms reminding me of muscles that hadn’t been used in a while. The sun was shining through my bedroom window, backlighting the lush green leaves that have come to our world to stay for a while. The cool breeze through the screen prompted me to pull the sheets up to my neck and scootch in closer to Husband.

It’s Monday morning and it seems like the workweek has come in with sparkle and style. I appreciate it.

But the weekend? Well, judging by the dirt hanging out under my fingernails and the size of the laundry pile it seems it was one of the good ones.

No, we didn’t have anything extravagant on our schedules, no vacation on the beach, no road trip to the mountains, no concert or festival, just a couple days spent inside a simple life that we’re working to create here. I wouldn’t even have much to mention about it really, except for somewhere between chasing the cows that got out into the fields with husband, planting Pops’ tomatoes, catfishing on the river with Little Sister and sitting on the porch with a vodka tonic and my mother as the sun began to set at the end of Sunday, I found myself wishing there was more time in my life for chores…and I think I might have realized why ranchers don’t take many vacations….

Because when the sun is shining on my back and the cool breeze moves through the sweaty tendrils of hair that have escaped from my ponytail, it’s hard to be too upset that the cows got out. In fact, sitting on top of a good horse watching so the cows and their babies don’t miss the gate as Husband moves back and forth behind them, gently pushing the pairs along, I find I’m glad for the work.

And glad that I got to push my horse to a full-out run as I raced to stop the lead cow from finding her way to the brush. Grateful I had that chance to cowgirl up, feel that wind in my hair and power of the horse beneath me.

Proud the two of us turned the herd around on our own and happy to be working alongside a man who loves this work as much as I do.

Summer weekends like this remind me of what it was like to grow up out here, a ranch kid with three months off and no driver’s license. Sure, I had the occasional coveted trip to town to swim in the public pool, but for the most part we were out here riding in the fencing pickup with Pops, chasing cows on sunny mornings trying to beat the mid-day scorching heat, mowing the lawn and eating summer sausage sandwiches for lunch. The work with Pops was never stressful or hurried, just constant and quiet and he was glad for the company…it didn’t matter if the ten-year-old and fifteen-year-old in the seat next to him were too uncoordinated to run the wire stretcher.

I remember the heat, the sweat, the horseflies and wood ticks we would find as we rode through the thorny brush on our way to find a stray cow. I remember the country station coming through the static and speakers of the old fencing pickup as Pops climbed out to fix a wire and I leaned my head on the sill of the window and watched the grasshoppers fling themselves to the sky. I remember taking my little sister to climb up the clay buttes while we waited for Pops to emerge from the mud underneath the stock-tank he was fixing.

I remember taking a break from the sun under the shade of the tree line and the way the cool grass felt under the pockets of my jeans.

I remember the smell of the wet dirt as Little Sister and I dug in the ground below our house on the hunt for worms…because the work was going to have to wait…Pops was going to take us catfishing.

When I think of early summer I think of these things. And this weekend it seemed I had an instinct to recreate and live life the way summers here were meant to be lived. So after the cows were rounded up on Saturday, the flowers were in their pots and Husband had enough tinkering with the plumbing on the new house, I called up my Little Sister who has just moved back to town and told her to bring her cooler.

We were going catfishing at the river.

The process is always the same: pack a bag full of sunflower seeds, bug spray, long sleeve shirts and something chocolate. Fill a cooler full of beer. Hunt unsuccessfully for all remaining pieces of the fishing supplies you haven’t seen together in one place for months. Patch together a mis-mash of fishing line, hooks, reels and poles and say it’s good enough. Search high and low for the missing camp chairs. Put on your short shorts and get in the pickup, roll down the windows and head south toward the Little Missouri where the water runs low and slow through the slick clay banks of the badlands.

Each year we debate about the location of our favorite fishing spot, wonder if we’ve missed the turn and discuss how the moisture from the previous winter has changed the trail. And we are reminded once we arrive of why we come here, the seclusion and quiet of the untouched banks makes us feel free and wild and capable of catching our own supper.

We kick off our shoes as they grow heavy with the mud of the banks. Little Sister and I cast lines that have been prepared for us.

We talk.

And then we’re quiet, our attention turned toward the calm flow of the river and the beaver who is working on tearing branches from a willow branch on the other side.

Then my line tips. We hold our breath. Someone says ‘reel’ and everyone stands up as husband runs toward the banks to ensure a safe arrival of this strange looking fish emerging from the muddy water of the river.

We laugh and celebrate. We brag. We take a picture and re-worm our hooks.

And wait.

Open another beer.

Change locations.

Sit on a rock.

Watch the clouds roll in.

Spit seeds on the banks.

Declare 8:00 pm to be the witching hour.

Wait for another tip to bend.

Leap up when Husband starts reeling. I jump and holler in excitement but do nothing to help ensure the fish makes it safely to shore. Husband moves toward the deep mud at the bank as the fish flops and struggles and the fisherman leaps to grab it…

But it’s too late…it’s escaped to the mucky water, a worm in its belly leaving two fishermen stranded in mud up past their knees.

I say I can’t believe it got away.

Little Sister laughs hysterically as she watches me snap photos of my dearly beloved sinking deeper and deeper by the second into the slick mud of the riverbank while he tries to hand me his pole so he can escape.

The sun sinks toward the horizon and the thunderheads move in, reflecting blue and gray on the surface of the murky river water.  We declare it time to reel up.

We let my catfish go, deciding it’s not enough fish worth the work of cleaning it. And besides, I have steaks waiting for us at home.

Muddy and tired and full of mosquito bites and bug spray, we head for the trail that leads us to the highway and then the pink gravel road that meets up with the ranch house. Husband fires up the grill. I pour something over ice.

We open the windows and we are us. Dirty and hungry and smelling of horse hair and sweat and fish.

It’s summer at the ranch and the tomatoes need to be planted. There is a house to finish, plumbing and wiring to be done, and corrals to be patched. The cows found an open spot in the fence and are heading down the road. We will know this tomorrow and we will saddle up to bring them home after coffee and bacon in the morning.

The sun will be shining, the breeze will be cool, the cows will be willing to move…

…and we won’t mind the work.

His favorite season

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Today is Pops’ birthday.

May 31st.

It seems like the perfect day for a man like this to be born, his arrival into the world coinciding with the arrival of the most beautiful things on the ranch: green grass and blue sky. Maybe that’s why he’s been in love with it all of his life, holding on tight to the memory of what blossoms and mud and wet prairie grass smells like through the rough winters and draughts. That promise that things will always get better. That summer will come again.

My Pops has always been an eternal optimist. Maybe I’ve figured out where that comes from.


 Yes, Pops is turning 50-somethingorother today. If you ask him how old he is he will tilt his head up a little and think about it, as if he can’t remember. Sometimes he can’t. Because he’s not really concerned about the business of age. It’s a cowboy thing I think. As long as his legs are moving and his arms are strong enough to finish the job, as long as he can show the young guys how it’s done, teach them a thing or two about what it means to really work, then he’s just the right age.

Old enough to have learned his lessons.

Young enough to remember them.

I joke with Pops about how his hair is turning white, a hereditary trait, like his nose, that he passed along to me. I look in the mirror and little pieces of him are reflected in my face: skin that turns brown in the sunshine, dark eyes and the laugh lines around them, unruly hair, that prominent nose.

That damn nose.

Yes, these are qualities I will keep with me my entire life, a reminder of the man who raised me. A man I’ve always been certain will never grow old. I can’t imagine it. I don’t think any son or daughter can.It’s like coming to terms with the fact my little sister is no longer 12 years-old and I am no longer 17…like time was supposed to stop ticking when I left home. Like things were supposed to stay the same and wait for me to return.

I’m back now and I see that it isn’t true. I have eyes that are opened a bit wider by life and the realization of what it takes to make something of yourself beyond the approach that leads into my parents’ driveway. I am back and I am living down the road from the people who loved me and raised me and gave me wings to get on out of here…and left me to make my own decisions about coming home.

I didn’t see myself at 28-years-old having my parents for neighbors. And if I did I couldn’t have guessed what it would be like for them to turn from caretakers and decision makers in my life to friends. I wouldn’t have known when I left at 17 that ten years later the best part of a trip to town would be visiting my momma at her new store and seeing her eyes light up with excitement about a new chapter in her life.

I wouldn’t have guessed that the best thing for my soul would be taking a ride on a good horse alongside my father in his favorite season.

I have tried to put my finger on what it means to be living as an adult so close to my parents. In Hollywood Land you have one scenario and it looks a lot like  “Everybody Loves Raymond.” But that’s not it for us. My parent’s have too many things going on in their lives to be walking into our house unannounced and making comments on my cooking.

In fact, I can barely catch them on a weeknight between their high-demand jobs, meetings, friends and Pops’ daily visits with his grandson. But when we do all get around the dinner table, there’s as sense of familiarity that goes along with it…and I find that ten-year-old version of me and work to make them laugh before spilling about the things that happened that week that might make them proud.

Then we clear up the dishes together, an adult woman finally realizing why helping with the dishes was so important all of those years I fought my mother on it.

My parents’ passion for life is inspiring and I am thankful I am their neighbor so I can witness it. I am afraid if I would have stayed away I wouldn’t have had the chance to understand my mother’s creative spirit and learned that you don’t stop taking risks just because you’re getting older.

If I wouldn’t have unpacked my bags in the house where my father grew up I may not have been capable of grasping the magnitude of his ties to this place and the pain that he must still feel every day from losing his parents at such a young age…only a few years older than I am today.

I think about this place without my father and it’s like taking out its heartbeat. Because you don’t outgrow your parents. And thinking about it today  I imagine how much he misses his every day he’s here fixing the fences his father wired, driving that old tractor they bought together, drinking coffee in his mother’s kitchen.

Especially on his birthday.

Yes, my father was born on this day fifty-some years ago, a child of the buttes and grasses under a blue sky that promises rain in the spring. He dug his hands in this dirt, planted the tree outside my window and knows every creek bend in the coulees and granite rock on the hilltop.

If you ask him what he wants to do today he would tell you he just wants his family around, his grandson especially.

I will buy him a bottle of whiskey. One of us will get him a bag of M&Ms. Mom will have a gift wrapped. We will write our names on cards and thank him for being the “best dad in the whole entire world.” And then he will sneak off into the pasture to catch a horse and take a ride.I will listen for the back door to creak and hope to catch him walking up the road to the barn.

Because it’s shaping up to be a beautiful day today, the kind that my Pops waits for all year, and I want to be out in it with him.

Happy Fiftysomethingorother Birthday Pops!

If you need a moment…

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If you need a moment take it.

Make a promise and don’t break it.

Have an itch? Scratch it.

Want the setting sun? Go catch it.

I’ve seen that smile so bring it.

You know the song. Sing it!

You have dreams, go chase them.

Problems? You can face them.

Seeking beauty? The earth grows it.

And when you love somebody…

show it.

Love letters from me

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Last week in the middle of a life that sent me down to the scary basement of this old house to search for things to throw away, I found something I didn’t know I had.

And that something might have turned into one of the most important pieces of my life.

See, among our snowshoes, highschool yearbooks, that old radio noone can throw away, games of Cranium and Catch Phrase, college text books and papers, canning jars and countless pairs of boots was a box I didn’t recognize.

And in this box filled with odds and ends that echoed the man who was outside trying to start our lawnmower– an old rope, a tarnished belt-buckle, a necklace made from deer antlers, a tupperwear dish full of shot-gun shells and two-dollar bills– were little pieces of paper, neatly folded and tucked away in a shiny cardboard package…

My 16-year-old handwriting telling our love story.

I would have missed it, the memories of a love that blossomed when we were much too young for things like love, if one of those neatly folded letters didn’t find its way out of the box and onto the dusty floor as I moved that box into the hallway in an effort to consolidate the neglected pieces of our lives. I tossed the box aside to retrieve the piece of paper that looked so familiarly intriguing. I squatted down on the floor and unfolded the page.

I recognized that handwriting.

I recognized the feelings.

But I didn’t recognize the words.

Up and down notebook pages, on typing paper and inside homemade cards were professions of my adoration toward a boy who used to meet me at my locker and walk with me to class. A boy who played football and had a yellow dog, whose hair was never right and neither were his parents. A boy who gave me my first kiss and drove a Thunderbird too fast on the highway to my house every Sunday to ride horses and teach my little sister to play chess…

A boy who received those notes, folded them back up, put them in his pocket only to tuck them away in a box to be saved and moved from place to place as he went off to college with the girl, drove her to Yellowstone National Park in the middle of July with no air conditioning, proposed to her under her favorite oak tree, married her there and proceeded to work on the happily ever after.

I didn’t know the boy kept the notes.

I didn’t know the man still had them.

I didn’t remember the girl who wrote them.

A quirky girl who made up stories about turtles stuck on fence posts in an attempt to make the boy laugh. A girl who unabashedly poured her feelings out on pages she hand delivered to the boy who would write her notes back with no notion that any other eyes would ever see…

I took those notes out one by one and on the floor of the grimy basement I was reminded of that girl with frizzy hair and a Ford LTD that guzzled oil and needed a jump start after school.

I was reminded of the boy who always had jumper cables waiting when the bell rang.

And as each page unfolded so did the memories of what it was like to be 16 and so in love.

We were all there once weren’t we? You can remember it can’t you? Your first car ride together. Your first kiss. Fight. Breakup.

Most people have gone through the process and then started it all over again with another first kiss, another first car ride, another first fight…a series of excitement and emotions that cycle through in different ways with different people until you find the one you choose to hang on tight to. And you may or may not have written love letters. And they may or may not be in someone’s basement, someone who is a stranger now, someone who remembers you with a scent of perfume or an old favorite song on the radio as they are driving down familiar roads.

If there is one thing in my life that makes me wonder about fate and choices and understanding the human connection, it is this relationship I have had with this boy who is now my husband. The familiar road? I never strayed. That favorite song? It has not stopped playing.

That first car ride together? We’re still driving.

And sometimes I’ll admit that I wonder if I knew anything back then. That hair? Are you kidding? Those high-water pants? Kill me. The decision to buy two baby turtles and raise them under a heat lamp in an aquarium in my dorm room? Not the most logical.

I admit there have been times I have wondered if I missed out on something, if I shouldn’t have gotten so comfortable, if I should have had my heart broken a few more times…kissed more boys…

But I read those letters last week, the ones I scrawled during study hall and math class when I should have been paying attention. My words were never chosen carefully and mostly I said nothing at all except something about a test that and a note to him about luck at a football game or singing on the weekend.

Then I came across a note with a drawing of a house with a chimney in the crook of a hill. Beside it I drew a barn and below it a creek that wound through a fenced in pasture. In the pasture I drew two horses, one for him and one for me. I also drew a pig and a goat, a cow and boat in the dam I built with the creek on the edge of the paper. There were two vehicles in the driveway: A pickup for him. A car for me.

Now, I had been looking for love stories lately, hunting them down and reading them, watching them on television, asking people how they met, opening my eyes to see one walking down the street, at a table next to me in a restaurant or in the line at the grocery store.

Lately I’d been feeling like maybe our story wasn’t enough.

Then I opened another letter and read: “If we can say we loved each other for a lifetime I will have lived my dreams.”

Now I didn’t know anything then about life and how hard it can be to live out dreams and make things like this work.

I still don’t.

But I have to give that 16 year old credit. She may not have known what she wanted to be, how far she wanted to travel or how to properly boil an egg.

But  she knew what she was doing.

She knew what love was.