Tag Archives: family

Blisters heal, if you get a chance, dance away…

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Last week I danced until two puffy little blisters formed on the pads at the bottom of my feet. It was 1,000 degrees and 100% humidity. It was at least five hours past my bedtime and half-way through singing along to “Don’t Stop Believing” with the after-concert bar band before I realized that it was 1,000 degrees, 100% humidity, five hours past my bedtime and I had two puffy little blisters on the bottom of my feet.

And it might be time to go home.

Have you ever had one of those nights where time doesn’t really mean anything? Where you’re standing in a crowd of people singing along to your favorite songs coming from your favorite band and you know all the words and you’re sweating through your clothes, but it doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter because tomorrow you can be the responsible human, tomorrow you can be the other side of your personality that makes the sandwiches and keeps up with the laundry, but tonight your husband has the kids for a cousin sleep-over so you only have to worry about the business of eating, drinking and dancing along to good music.

My little sister and I, we had one of those nights. The Turnpike Troubadours were in the big town for the state fair and so I got dressed and then re-dressed and then I dressed her in the outfit I was going to wear (before I changed my mind) and we left our daughters home with a “Sleepover To-Do List” that included a “Chad Makeover” and “Mario Karts” and a “Movie Night” and for some reason, “Bird Watching.”

I’m not sure they got to the bird watching portion of the evening but judging by the way my closet looked when I returned, they definitely got to the makeover part of the program. (Also, there is photographic evidence of my husband wearing my floral skirt and a shawl with his feet crammed into my pink wedge heels that I will cherish for the rest of my life, indicating that maybe they all had one of those nights too…)

Anyway, my little sister and I, we didn’t plan on staying out all night. It’s very possible that we could have taken to the grandstands, sipped our drinks and tapped our toes, clapped at the encore and called it a night. But maybe the fact that we could pick the restaurant and not have to order a kids’ meal made us feel a little more free. That and the fact that we ran into some friends who called us down a bit closer to the stage to sing along and pretty soon the music moved us right into the front, standing up against the rails and chanting “One more song!” along with the hundreds of people behind us.

Who did we think we were? 22?

Apparently. Because after that one more song, we didn’t go home. Nope. We found another place to listen to music. And then another place to dance. And then, well, that’s about where the blisters started shouting “Hello up there,” and we decided to call it a night, but only after a quick stop at the corn dog stand. I had to trade shoes with my little sister to make the walk back to our ride, like Cinderella, I had run out of time…

But isn’t that what little sisters are for? To lend you their shoes in desperate times. To borrow your shorts and new shirt and belt. To obsess over a band together. To dance like dummies. To share a hotel room and get home too late and laugh off embarrassing moments and to really listen to the lyrics of the new song you love on the drive home. Like silently listen through the whole thing to understand why it means something to you. 

Anyway, I’m recounting all of this to remind you of that person you have in your life. You likely don’t need to be reminded; you likely talk every day. But maybe it’s been a while. Maybe you need to schedule a supper. Or a concert. And also, I want to  tell you that you can have nights like this. Maybe the late night-hot-and-humid-blister-feet version doesn’t appeal to you, but there is a version out there waiting for you to forget the bills and the broken air conditioner. There’s a version that you’ve been putting off because you don’t think you can be that person anymore. Or maybe it’s too much of a hassle. There’s a version that allows you the space to leave the kids with someone you trust and go be the version of yourself you used to so freely be, before you found all the reasons not to be her…

Even if it’s 1000 degrees and 100% humidity. Even if you stay up five hours past your bedtime.

And blisters? Well, they heal.

Wild flowers, wild onions

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The smell of wild onions seeps through the closed doors and windows of the pickup I’m driving pointing back west towards home. It’s the time of night in the summer where it’s too late to be light, but it is the kind of light that turns the clouds pink and gives the sweet clover halos. It’s the time of night in the summer where you wish it wouldn’t end, the day, the light like this, the colors, the cooling down of the air. The season.

I’m driving home with my daughters in the back seat of the pickup. They look out the window at the power lines and ditch sunflowers whizzing by and as they look their legs are getting longer, their skin is a new shade of brown, their hair lightened by days in the sprinkler. Little wildflowers.

I smell the wild onions and suddenly I’m a little wildflower too in the dog days of summer, digging up the sweet salty roots with the boys on the side hill over the barbed wire fence outside the yard of my country school. We’re fresh off summer break, called back to desks and times tables and drinking milk out of little paper cones from the big machine. Before that, every day was like recess.   

It’s 95 degrees and the air conditioning in our house can’t keep up and I’m an adult now and I am married and so we are the ones tasked to fix it. But we are hot and it’s July and maybe we could load up the kids and head to the lake, but instead I turn on the sprinkler so the water sort of hits my tomato plants and sort of hits the inflatable pool and sort of hits my bare legs as I sit in a lawn chair sucking on a red popsicle and flipping through a magazine. My daughters splash and slide and make game after game out of the running water. And occasionally a horse fly bites my ankles, and occasionally my daughters holler about a bug in the pool, but it’s summer on the ranch and we wave off these aggravations and carry on with basking and splashing away a Sunday afternoon.

I meet my husband in the shade cast by our deck in the slowly sinking sun. I plop in a chair next to him and the smell of diesel exhaust and sweat and it reminds me of all the good men who ever worked out here on this place in the heat. He’s one of them and the gratitude for that, well I carry it in my bones. He sips a beer and takes off his hat, leaving a band of sweat on his forehead and the salt and pepper hair around his head smashed down. We talk about the yard and the swather he worked on today. Tractors around this place, they don’t run for long, but it’s time to cut hay and so this is the task. Alfalfa and sweet clover  and all the tall grasses mixed in, we’ll roll it out in a few months when we find ourselves on a different planet, covered in white, dressed thick from head to toe to shield our skin from 20 below.

But that frozen place doesn’t exist today. Today it is summer, and the dogs are panting under our chairs and those loud grasshoppers are clacking in the tall grass and we slap at that horsefly again and discuss what to put on the grill. It’s too late to be light and we should wrap up the day, but we linger a bit longer and let the words slow between us because the breeze feels nice….

Which brings us back to the air conditioning as we watch our daughters play. We tell one another how they’ve grown as if we both haven’t been witnessing it together.

They run to us then, someone fell or someone’s cold. We wrap each one in a towel and the smell of their damp skin and the wet grass smells like our childhood too. Weren’t we just kids out here. Aren’t we still? Together under the sun, heading in. Heading home.

Ranching and Romance

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Want to know what romance is when you’ve been married almost eighteen years and you’re raising kids and calves on a generational ranch? 

Your husband taking time out of his summer checklist of fixing fence and rebuilding corrals to help you construct a new garden plot in the yard. Especially when that man says, and I quote, “Landscaping is just work to make more work.” 

And he’s not wrong. Out here when we look across our spread of endless big jobs, like barn building and pen building and water tank maintenance and figuring out why the bulls keep getting into the hay yard, lawn mowing and weed eating and tomato planting and pressure washing the driveway aren’t on the top of my husband’s June “to-do” list. 

But they are close to the top on mine, and I appreciated the help when I looked at the calendar and then the radar that indicated I might want to get the peas planted before the predicted torrential downpour and, also, before August. 

Summer is frantic around here. So frantic that major yardwork on a Sunday seems slow. 

Crocs: function and fashion collide

But I got those peas in thanks to him. At 10 pm before the sun set and right in time for the rain to pour later that evening. 

My husband’s love language is definitely “acts of service.” I’ve seen it in him since he was a much younger man. To be of use, to be helpful, to know how to do the thing that needs to be done is a quality that has saved us money and meltdowns plenty more than it has cost us both. (Because, let’s be honest, DIY isn’t a Zen experience). 

There was a time when I was younger and in love with him where I would imagine my future out here on the ranch with more walks hand in hand and picnics under the big oak tree where we got married. How dreamy. 

Our wedding tree

News flash. That’s never happened. Not even once.  

Romance looks more like getting off his horse to get the gate. And then I reciprocate by getting the next one.  

Tick checks, that’s also romance out here. And it’s tick season so, yeah, we’ve been getting romantic a lot lately. 

All joking aside though, I’m thinking about this today because the amount of love I felt for my husband watching him till that garden spot on Sunday knowing how much he was setting aside to do something for me was palpable. It sort-of caught me off guard the way a lump catches in your throat when a sentimental commercial breaks through your sitcom zone-out. My husband, he lives with a good-sized handful of intention when it comes to his close relationships. He’s a guy who’s never really rushing. He’s a guy who will have a long look at it. He’s a guy who takes his time, whether or not it might drive you and your tight schedule crazy. 

And he makes me wonder if I’m too caught in my own drive, letting worries and checkboxes sometimes consume me like the good student I keep striving to be. But no one’s keeping grades here. This is our life and I wanted to plant peas and so he helped me plant peas.  And I guess I just want to say, that’s a really sweet way to love someone. 

The order of things

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At night, in the summer, we sleep with the windows open and so the chirping of the birds wakes me up in the morning. It’s alarming how much they have to say, how loud they seem after so many months of quiet skies.

I’m listening to them right now as I type, the chirping of the birds and my cat on the deck making his presence known through the screen door. Last week he brought one of those birds to that door mat, reminding us of the order of things.

The order of things is ever present here at the ranch. A few days ago I took my daughters on a walk with me to the east pasture stock dam—out the front door and down through the swing gate, along the two track trail, past where we park the old cars and broken down equipment and through the tall brush that reaches their armpits before a quick stop to pick wild flowers to hand to me, to pick off a couple ticks and flick them to the dirt. I used to carry each one of my daughters on my chest in a pack when they were babies out here, just the two of us looking around, but only me, their momma, watching my step for the both of us.

And now look at them running! Look at their thin legs and stretched out bodies, listen to them jabber and make up stories. Listen to them laugh and ask questions about weather and the names of the grasses and the bugs, watch them throw dirt clumps into the dam and remember when we were back here on our horses, this place already drawn like a map on their beating hearts.

Recently my husband came down from the fields with news that he found a sick calf and he was headed to town for some medicine to try to save it. A few days before he had picked my dad up from that very same field after he came off a horse and needed to be treated for broken ribs at the local hospital. The calf didn’t live long enough for the hour it took my husband to get to town and back and dad was stuck in the house, slowed way down but able to give advice on how to help that momma cow who lost her calf become a mom to our bottle calf in the barn.

Things go wrong even when the sky is blue and the grass is green and there is no reason for it really except that things go wrong. I hopped in the passenger seat of the pickup next to my husband ready to be an extra set of hands to coax that calf the girls named “Little X” into the trailer and then to help introduce him, draped in the smell of the dead calf, to that momma cow. The clouds rolled in over the horizon and it started to pour on us, but that momma, she licked that little calf before he spooked and ran to the corner of the pen. And that little lick, it gave us enough hope that this new relationship might work with a some patience.

I think that’s all that ranching is really. Enough hope. Enough patience. Enough little triumphs to keep at it.

And so my husband worked multiple visits to that cow/calf pen into his daily schedule. Two times a day he loaded the cow into the chute and brought the calf to help him suck and each night when I came home from town I got the report. “He’s scared of the cow.” “He’s doing better.” “He’s getting the hang of it.”

Last night I came home late, frazzled from a long and stressful workday where I’ve been navigating my way through uncharted waters. I cried and complained and wondered if I was getting it right. Wondered if I have what it takes. My husband listened and then said, “Change clothes, we’re going to check that calf.” And I would have much rather put the covers over my head, but I went along to find Little X in the pen with his new mom, bucking and kicking and, look at that, sucking from that momma like the calf he was born to be.

And it might sound too simple, but I’m going to say it because it was true. In that moment I was just so proud and relieved about that little victory for those two animals and my husband that it made the impossible things that weighed on me that day seem a little more possible. The lump eased from my throat and I slept soundly that night until the birds woke me, singing because they’re in the business of being birds, not a question in their world if they’re doing it right.

Because that’s the order of things.

My sister’s bluebird

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Can you see the rainbow?” The text pinged my phone while I was on hour eight or twenty of laying in my bed with the flu. My husband and daughters had been gone all day for our niece’s graduation, but I had to skip it because, after months of dodging it, it was my turn to be sick.

But my little sister, Alex, who lives right over the hill on the other side of the barnyard, wasn’t going to let me miss an opportunity to see a rainbow, a good remedy for the pukes.

Earlier that day she snuck in to put cookies and fresh baked bread on my kitchen counter, trying to be sneaky, but forgetting that my phone dings every time she gets close to the house, a little hack in the form of an app that helps us with our morning kid pick-ups and evening kid drop-offs.

“Are you going for a walk?” she texted me the evening before, just as I was opening the gate and heading on my two-mile loop to the east pasture and back. “I’ll meet you!”

The ping on her phone told her I was leaving the house and she needed to escape too. Who knew that the tracking app would come in so handy for all sorts of non-emergencies?

But I was glad she caught up with me, a sentence I would have never uttered when I was twelve and she was seven and following me on my after-school walks up the creek. I used to turn around and yell at her to go home, now we coordinate our escapes together.

My little sister, she’s better at it than me. She’s always been the social one, the one to pick up the phone, the one to ask what we’re doing or how we’re doing and the one to make sure everyone knows what’s going through her mind at all times, an endearing feature of her personality that shines most in stressful or beautiful moments.

Which means we get the play-by-play of angst that occurs when she’s trying to get a fresh horse to cross a muddy creek, but then…“Oooo, look at those daisies!!” she squealed while riding through our calf crop with our uncle and dad against hurricane-force winds.

“I just love them, look at all of them,” she gushed as I continued to fight with my flighty pony and the wind, both seemingly out to kill me that day.

My uncle and I looked at each other and chuckled. What a very Alex thing to say. Then we looked over at my dad who sat horseback taking pictures of us because, “The sky is just so blue! It’s beautiful. I don’t want to forget it.”

What a very Dad thing to say.

Yes, it seemed both bluebirds on their respective shoulders were hanging on despite the wind, reminding me to invite mine back.

Reminding me to get up and look outside.

Reminding me that it can be better with company.

And fresh bread. When did she learn to make fresh bread?

Anyway, I’m feeling better now. If you need me, well, call Alex. She knows where I am.

When you look

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From my music video for “Northern Lights” produced by Ken Howie

I remember the first time I witnessed the northern lights. As memories so often go, I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember stepping out of my parent’s car in the driveway at the ranch and my dad telling me to look up. I was 9 or 10 or 11 or 12, one of those ages that blend into one another in childhood, and it was spontaneous, the way things like the northern lights used to be before we could predict them in the way we do now, announcing their arrival on an app or a website or a social media post to help others experience it. Which is a lovely perk of the modern age…

But maybe not the same as stumbling upon them in the way that we did that night, a little piece of magic we witnessed as mere humans who just happened to look up at the right time.

I found them again years later in the dead cold of January when my dad was recovering from a very close brush with death in a hospital bed in the big town. I think my husband was driving me home from a visit with him and I caught a glimpse of them out the passenger window, green and white and gold light dancing on the dark horizon reminding me how small we are here in the scheme of things. Reminding me that even the coldest night can be beautiful if we look up.

Last weekend I walked to the top of a big hill overlooking the ranch with my mom and both of my sisters. It was Mother’s Day and it was just the four of us. We stopped along the way to pick handfuls of wild sweet peas to lay on the spot where we placed my grandmother’s ashes just about a year earlier. We caught our breath when we reached the top, laughing at my big sister who always wears the most impractical outfits and footwear for the ranch. We put our hands on our hips and quieted, looking out across the neon green landscape, catching the scent of the plum blossoms on one of the most perfectly beautiful spring days. It occurred to me then that the four of us—our mom, and the daughters she raised spread across the decades—have likely never been alone like this together, out in the wilds of the ranch. No dads, no kids, just the women here, looking out. Looking up. We placed those sweet peas on the little stacks of rocks and remembered my mother’s mother and noticed a little yellow butterfly make its way through our gathering before heading back down that hill to share a meal and watch the kids play in the lawn.

Recently, my dad brought home a little black-white-face calf to the barn. He had been out checking cows and noticed it wet and left behind, potentially a twin to another brand-new calf nearby who was up and sucking. He placed a little “x-marks-the-spot” on his head to distinguish it from the other calves so he could come back and check on him to be sure he wasn’t claimed before taking him back to the barn to try him on a bottle. We rounded up our daughters to give the calf a proper welcome, glad he was found, and a little worried if he would ever figure out the bottle.

That night my oldest daughter fell off a pony we’ve been working on. She was fine but my husband and I, we felt terrible. “If only if only if only,” are the things we say when little accidents and close calls happen. We always think we should know better. She got back on and shook the scared off before we returned home right before dark to eat a cereal supper.

I missed the northern lights that night despite all the places and ways it was forecast so we could make plans to witness it. We laid our kids down safe in their beds, I said a quiet prayer of gratitude and fell asleep as the last bit of light fell under the horizon. While we dreamed, the lights danced around us and our friends and neighbors took to porches and lawns and parking lots to stand in awe. Turns out, magic happens, even when you’re not looking…

Photo by We 3 Bs Photography

But oh, when you do! Oh, when you do!

My music video for “Northern Lights”

Life in my car

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“The person who invented pants is really smart,” my oldest daughter’s voice chimed in from the way back seat of our Suburban.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I responded, not really that surprised that the comment came out of silence and, also, out of nowhere. She’s eight and that’s her resting state.

“Right because people used to just wear tiny chaps over their privates. And maybe not even over their butts!”

And that was her little sister’s contribution to the conversation as we rounded the corner to school drop off, just another Tuesday under a cloudy sky. Only this one was a little perilous because for some reason my phone had switched itself to Mountain time during the wee hours of the night, something that my husband didn’t bring to my attention until he noticed my level of calm strolling around the kitchen gathering breakfast and snacks and my thoughts for the day didn’t match the level of urgency 7:25 am warranted in our house.

Like we should be out the door in four minutes and all of us were still in our pajamas.

And so, of course I didn’t believe him or the kitchen clock that doesn’t ever change or the fact that it did, actually, look more like a 7:30 am sun situation than a 6:30 am situation, but honestly, I’m hanging by a thread here.

We shifted into warp speed then, but I didn’t have time to look in the mirror if we had a prayer of making it to school on time. And so I didn’t, knowing full well I have everything I need in my car to put myself together in a parking lot somewhere before heading into work. This is a special skill that rural women have. Well, maybe all women have it, but I can only speak from my own experience of living thirty miles from town for most of my life. Pair that with decades of working as a touring musician and I would guess the number of times I’ve applied my makeup in the visor mirror of my vehicle in a gas station parking lot might just outnumber the times I’ve used the one above the bathroom sink.

My husband pointed this out as he was putting the finishing touches on our new master bathroom. He has been making me a little vanity counter right in front of the window because natural light is the best light to illuminate all my flaws, something I’ve come to learn from that visor mirror. Indoor lighting can’t be trusted. I need nature to tell me the cold, hard truth.

He’s been working on a new closet for us as well, something much bigger and more convenient than the front seat of my car where I do quite a bit of my changing. I’ve been pushing my driver’s seat back to change in and out of tights and jeans and boots and dresses for so much of my life it’s a miracle that I haven’t created more embarrassing moments for myself and innocent pedestrians by now.

But then it’s hard to know how many people I actually traumatized in the McDonalds drive-through line as I removed my boots, belt and shapeware from under my dress while ordering a Big Mac for the hour drive back to the ranch.

If multitasking is the pillar from which I run my life, then my car is the sanctuary from which I carry out my last-minute tasks in the few quiet moments between drop off and workday, and workday and school pick-up line. Behind the dashboard is my desk, my phone booth, my five-minute nap space, my quick-bite kitchen table, my vanity, and, maybe most importantly, the place where I get to listen to my growing daughters ponder life as they count the power poles and trees zooming by their windows.

Anyway, if you happen to catch me deep in a rear-view-mirror-mascara situation, just kindly pass on by. The invisible-while-I’m-in-my-car façade is what I have to hold on to these days.

Peace, love and also, Big-Macs taste better when you remove your Spanx.  

Yellow Roses

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Listen to the podcast where we discuss our connection to heritage and changing times.

In 1915 my great grandpa Eddie staked his claim on this ranch where we’re now living. He got married and headed off to war. When he arrived back in Bear Den Township he proved up his claim, planting some trees, flax and wheat, building a barn and putting up fences.

Cornelia and Eddie’s Children

Over the course of his lifetime he would watch his crops grow, his wife die too young and his children make their own mark on the land he laid claim to. He would meet a couple grandchildren and serve them his famous buns, tell them jokes and scruff their hair before leaving them all behind in death to do what they would with the place he worked so hard to keep. The red barn, his old threshing machine and dozens of other little relics of his existence are scattered sparsely about the place now to remind us that 110 years ago is not long enough to rust the old equipment to dust, but it might as well be forever.

Great Grandpa Eddie standing in the doorway of his homestead shack

I didn’t know my Great Grandpa Eddie, but I think of him often and wonder what parts of his blood flow through mine. I think it might be the holding on part, just like those yellow roses his wife planted in her garden all those years ago before she died suddenly and only 36 years old, leaving her children, her husband and those roses behind to bloom without her. 

One day I want to write his story with the parts I know and then the way I imagined it could have been. But today I thought I’d share his story in the lyrics of the song I wrote about him. I’m honed in that sort of storytelling, so I started there…

Hear it wherever you get your music or head to www.jessieveedermusic.com to order the album. 

Yellow Roses

14 and 80 acres
A couple horses and two hands
Grind the gears and swing the hammer
Turn a boy into a man
His daddy was near blind then
His brother just 13
His mom, she swept the floors though dirt like that just don’t come clean

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

He built corrals and fences
And the family’s homestead up in time
Rode the river in the big draws
With the cowboys for a dime
But there’s something bout the work here
Made him want something of his own
Signed papers on a tar paper shack and called the land his home

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

Only North Dakota
Where the ground turns white to green
The rain, the snow the storms they blow in
like you’ve never seen

Right there we could have left it
His dreams sprouting from the ground
But if man can make a fortress
Only man can knock it down

But when the war was over
He found himself a bride
Yellow roses in the garden
And their children were her pride
Lost money on the cattle
Lost some on the grains
Lost her when she went to sleep and did not wake again

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

Only North Dakota
Where the ground turns white to green
The rain, the snow the storms they blow in
like you’ve never seen

Now a man cannot give up there
This man didn’t have the mind
He made biscuits in the morning
Taught all the babes to ride

When the neighbors fell on hard times
He lent a hand or bought them out
And watered yellow roses in the heat of summer droughts

Only North Dakota
Would make promises like this
Bring with you all your hope here
See what she can do with it

Only North Dakota
Where the ground turns white to green
The rain, the snow the storms they blow in
like you’ve never seen

Now I stand here with my children
One on my hip, one holds my hands
Another generation breathing life into this land
We count pennies and our blessings
And to the memories we cling
And down in the barnyard yellow roses bloom here every spring.

One of those days…

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After a long hiatus, we’re back on the podcast now that we’ve cleared the power tools off the kitchen table. And so we pick right back up at the things that are most pressing–Chad’s latest weird injury, coaching 2nd grade soccer and Rosie’s Tooth Fairy Shenanigans. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Have you ever had one of those days where the sun is shining, there’s nothing pressing on your schedule, your family is safe and home and together and the possibilities on how to spend  your waking hours are endlessly sweet and yet you can’t shake a foul mood. Like, yes, the sun is shining, but it’s shining through your smudgy windows and illuminating the dusty construction footprints on the floor and you’re hungry but you don’t want eggs until your husband makes eggs and then you do want eggs but you told him you didn’t twenty minutes ago so he didn’t make you eggs and the thought of making your own eggs is entirely too overwhelming for some reason and so you walk upstairs to faceplant on your bed and notice and grunt at the laundry that needs to be put away and resent the chores because you feel guilty about tending to them because you’d rather be outside because it’s a beautiful day and the sun is shining?

Ever had one of those days?

Maybe it was just me last weekend. I think, when I break it down, it might just be the consequence of overwhelm, or burn out, as I have been, as so many of us do, juggling about ten different pressing issues at once for the past three months and all of them have been covered in sheet rock dust.

And even when you think you have it all under control, these moods, they can sneak up on you sometimes. I was in great spirits the evening before when my husband waited for me after a work event so that we could take the kids’ horses out on their first ride of the season to make sure there were no kinks under their rapidly shedding winter coats. I chose to ride Cheerio, our little short-tailed, spotted-butt pony and Chad rode my trusty palomino, Gizmo, who Edie loves and who’s only real issue has ever been indifference to the entire human race in general. And so the girls hung with their grandparents and we took our mounts out to check on the new calves and the grass situation. And while Gizmo plodded along the way Gizmo always does, Cheerio, he was in full pony form that evening, prancing a bit, looking around, feeling sort of agitated by all the sites and a little annoyed he couldn’t stop and eat or run back to the barn at will. I laughed about it that night and enjoyed the ride, then let my husband have a turn with him before we beat the sunset home to unsaddle and tuck in for the night.

But then the morning came and I woke up a little like that pony—agitated, huffy and sorta annoying to anyone who crossed my path. The only plan I was sure of that day was to take our daughters and their cousins for their first ride in the arena. But let me tell you, in case you haven’t had to get four horses, four saddles, four bridles and four girls under the age of eight dressed and gathered and matched up and mounted for a ride, it’s far from a Zen experience.

But it turns out it was exactly what I needed even though it looked like driving four girls to gramma’s house, picking up a saddle and driving that over to the barnyard, saddling up three horses and riding them a mile to the arena, unsaddling three horses and then resaddling two horses and catching and saddling two more horses and fitting stirrups and telling four little girls to try not to run and don’t squeal and yes you can ride Gizmo and yes you can ride Cuss and yes you get Harmony and no you can’t ride Papa’s horse and ok just get off to pee in the weeds and no you can’t run at full speed around the barrel pattern right away and oh good job, you’re doing great, and look how Cheerio’s calmed down, look at him lope these perfect circles, what a good boy and look at those smiles, look at my smile, I feel like my face is breaking, what a nice day for a ride, it’s so warm, the sun is shining just right off manes and tails and ponytail fly-aways, aren’t we lucky, aren’t we lucky, what a beautiful day…

“Don’t Duck” and other rules for sports

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My 7th grade basketball photo. It only went south from there…

Listen. There is not an athletically gifted bone in my body. My entire childhood, my cousins called me “Tuck and Roll,” because I spent plenty of time falling off horses and breaking bones. I had to try hard to be considered for the C Squad when it came to my short-lived basketball career. My now-sister-in-law was my junior high volleyball coach and she likes to recall, at family dinners, how scared I was of the ball. Apparently ducking when someone hits a volleyball your way is not in the play-book. Also, having your boyfriend’s sister as your volleyball coach is not embarrassing at all, especially when you’re only there for the social scene…

Ask my husband the kind of team member I was during our one-season stint as a curling team and he will tell you I was more into visiting than sweeping…

Recently, when Edie wanted to play soccer through Parks and Recreation and they were looking for parents to help with all eight 2nd and 3rd grade teams, it was my husband I had in mind for the task. Even though he hadn’t played or watched a real soccer game a day in his life, unlike me, the man has excelled in sports in his lifetime.
And he’s coached.

Me? Once I volunteered to help with a 4-H STEAM program and accidentally swore in front of all the 4th graders. And when they called me out on it, I did the mature thing and denied it to all their innocent faces. They were confused, I was ill-equipped and so it’s my husband who signed up to coach Edie’s soccer team.

But, you know, I am who I am, so I said I would help. And by help, I meant I would do the communicating with parents and the remembering of names and the organizing of lines and treats and photo taking. Basically, I would do the admin. And so they put my name as coach under Chad’s on the roster and here I am. Coach Jessie. And let me put some generous quotations around the word “coach” for all the aforementioned reasons.

My dear husband knew about these generous quotations and yet, the first ten minutes of our first practice, he asked me to help him demonstrate a drill to the kids, by running and kicking the ball to him. Excuse me sir?  2nd and 3rd graders are not a forgiving audience. I am here for the paperwork and let me tell you, it showed.

Fast forward to the first game last week and more problems started to surface with this arrangement. Because I might not be a competitive player, but I am a competitive cheerer-on-er, much to the dismay of my daughter. Squealing “Ope, good try!” when they miss a goal is not necessarily helpful. Also, I’m embarrassed to admit this, but when we told the kids we were going to take the first game slow to help teach positions and the mechanics of the game, I tried to reassure our little team by telling them “It’s not about winning, it’s about learning!” which was met with blank stares and a correction from my husband. “Uh, we can try to win while we learn.”

Ok. Point taken. On to the reason I was there, to run the timer and sub kids in. Which I thought I could handle until chaos started to ensue on the field and my husband dared ask which kids belonged to which positions.

To which he was met with a blank stare of my own.

“I have no idea, but I finally got their names right! I just replaced Autumn with Calvin.”

And then, the ultimate question: “Coach Jessie, what’s the score?”

“I. Have. No. Idea. Aren’t we here to have fun?”

If you need me I’ll be watching soccer YouTube videos and wondering if I can change my entire personality at 40. Maybe, in the name of youth sports.

Peace, love and, in volleyball as in soccer, don’t duck.

Playing sports in 50MPH winds is the way we do it in ND