Tag Archives: Fargo Forum

Sunday Column: Hometown/Boomtown

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Last Friday I helped play host to one of the biggest community events in Boomtown, the  Best of the West Ribfest Street Fair and Car show.

We had been planning the event for months and were relieved to wake up under sunny skies and a forecast that was perfect for strolling the sidewalks, listening to music, shopping, and tasting the ribs seasoned and cooked to perfection by local  organizations and businesses.

For almost twenty hours the committee and I ran up and down Main Street organizing teams, taking photographs, making announcements, moving chairs, washing tables, talking to guests and generally making sure everyone was having a good time.

My feet are still recovering, but the blisters were worth it. It was a great event, the kind that makes you proud to be from a small town, even though that small town is growing and changing right before our eyes.

Yes, every year this event gets bigger and bigger because every year our town gets bigger and bigger, growing and bursting at the seams to accommodate and welcome the evolving oil industry barreling down our gravel roads.

Last month we celebrated the grand opening of a giant new grocery store.

This fall we’ll have a Chinese Restaurant.

We have two stoplights.

We are planning a new hospital, a new daycare, a new school and a new way of thinking about change and what it means to us.

It hasn’t been easy on everyone and that’s a truth I can speak without hesitation.

It hasn’t been easy.

But it has been interesting. And exciting. And overwhelming and at times and in many ways really wonderful.

Like Friday, when families, both new to town and natives to the area, strolled down a street smoking with the smell of summer cooking, stopping to listen to their hometown band or to grab some free ice cream or take a shot at dunking their favorite teacher in the dunk tank.

We were having fun. We were slowing down. We were spending time with one another and continuing a tradition.

And we were all neighbors eating ribs on a summer afternoon in our town.

In Boomtown.


Coming Home: No standing still in Boomtown
By Jessie Veeder
8/11/13
Fargo Forum
www.inforum.com

Sunday Column: The road

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I’ve had some pretty great adventures in the name of music. This summer almost every weekend has been filled with some sort of gig that takes me away from this place for a bit.

I’ve loaded and unloaded my car and pickup dozens of times.

It’s been months since I’ve completely unpacked my bag.

Please don’t look in my closet.  I don’t even want to look in my closet.

Anyway when you live in the middle of nowhere, pretty much everywhere you need to go involves a road trip.  So it’s a good thing  I’ve had years to master hours of car time. Sunflower seeds. Coffee. An updated play list on my iPod. A mental list of the most convenient places to stop for fuel. Not a bit of hesitation about singing at the top of my lungs, even when pulling up next to you at a stoplight. Windows open when the weather’s nice and the time is right.

The road to and from this place is early mornings, peaceful and dewy, running-late afternoons and evening sunsets where I don’t really feel like it but I’m going.

Some of my most creative times have been behind the wheel of my car, alone out there somewhere on a road in the midwest.

Some of my scariest have been out there too. Blizzard and tornado watches, black ice, flooding and miles and miles of antelope and sagebrush fields with an emptying tank and not a gas station for miles.

In the last few weeks my road trips have involved the men from my hometown band. It’s nice to have a pickup full of voices and stories about the old days playing in bar bands and bowling alleys. I welcome the company in the car and beside me playing guitar.

And it’s nice to have a crew that understands the life of a musician is mostly just an absurd train of events that involves setting up on flatbed trailers as a thunderstorm rolls through town, hauling around and hooking up sound system after sound system, laughing off requests to play “Smoke on the Water, ” to turn it up, to turn it down, to play something faster, or slower or something we don’t know. It’s good to know that this group won’t mind if a gig doesn’t quite turn out the way we planned, or the night drags on into morning, or we have to haul our guitars through a foot of mud to the stage. It’s alright. Because sometimes it’s great, and the harmonies are on and the audience is swaying and singing along and you know that they know that there’s more to music than the miles we’ve put on to get here and home in one piece.




So when you get back to the ranch at 3:30 in the morning only to wake to a call that the cows are in the neighbor’s wheat field, you don’t complain, you just take a swig of coffee, pull on your snap shirt and boots and head out the door to saddle a horse and bring them home.

Because it’s the life I chose. The one I write about and sing about and bring with me when I go.

Coming Home: Freedom sometimes means settling down
By Jessie Veeder
August 4, 2013
Fargo Forum
www.inforum.com 

Music and miles, late nights and cows with terrible timing…

And it’s good.

Sunday Column: Some days the Bakken ain’t so Rockin’

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On Friday evening we took a ride through the east pasture checking cows. The sky turned from blue to pink in front of our eyes and a small storm pushed through.We caught the breeze but didn’t get caught in the rain.

We caught the juneberries and the raspberries before the birds.

We caught Pops over the hill filling his mouth and his pocket and we were caught in one of the greatest things about living on this place.

Today I will attempt Juneberry pie because Husband packed his saddlebags and the breeze is blowing nice through the kitchen windows and it’s Sunday.

This is the kind of life I like to talk about. The kind of things I moved back here for. Sunsets and wildflowers and the sleek back of horses and fat happy cattle and Sundays and family.

These are all part of my reality.

But so is the dust kicked up by trucks tending to the oil well a mile down the road and the slick mud they make when it rains.

Sometimes I get stuck on my way out of this place.

Sometimes my car breaks down and so does our pickup on the way to get it all fixed. Sometimes the price of progress means you won’t possibly make it to your appointment on time.

And sometimes, after all that, one of those big trucks kicks up a big rock and you get another big chip to add to the 27 you already have in your windshield.

Sometimes I use my middle finger and think, hell, it’d be easier to just ride my horse out of here.

Sometimes it rains like hell and I’m reminded that I’m not perfect and neither is this place.

Sunday Column: Some days the Bakken ain’t so rockin’
By Jessie Veeder
7/21/13
Fargo Forum

I’m not perfect and neither is this place.

Sunday Column: Showing love with rhubarb

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It’s Sunday and I might get to it this afternoon. The row of canning jars lined up on my counter top,  bags of frozen strawberries preserved in the freezer

and stalks of rhubarb waiting for me in Pops’ garden,


waiting for me to stay home long enough to cut, measure thaw and put together a few jars of strawberry rhubarb jam.

It’s Sunday so it’s possible, if the rain keeps falling, hiding the blue sky that means we should go out and work.

Ride my horse.

Chase some cows.

Cut some weeds.

Cut some wildflowers.

Cut some rhubarb…

Because in this weather where the planting was done late and the vegetable seeds are working to break through the ground, the presence and plethora of the ever hearty rhubarb plant sitting out there in the dirt or hiding under the berry bushes makes me feel guilty for failing to reap the benefits.

Rhubarb should be appreciated, made into something, tasted, tested and shared. And because I haven’t had a moment to pick and put some sugar on it, I wrote about it.

Coming Home: Showing love with rhubarb
by Jessie Veeder
6/23/13
Fargo Forum
www.inforum.com 

So I think I’ll make time for the jelly today. I owe it to the plant and my Pops who keeps reminding me, there’s rhubarb growing out back…

 

Sunday Column: Rooted

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My dad is a man who is rooted.

He knows what he loves and he loves it wholeheartedly. He showed us how to stay planted while finding our wings. He taught us how to sing and how to ride a horse.


He taught us that sometimes the best idea is to take a moment to sit on the hilltop, look around and say “wow, isn’t this something.”

His outlook on life has been his greatest gift to me. His love for place flows through our blood.

Happy Father’s Day to a man who worked hard to make this my home.

Coming Home: Discovering history, past and future
by Jessie Veeder
6/16/13
Fargo Forum
www.inforum.com 

Sunday Column: More misadventures.

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My goodness it’s absolutely gorgeous out here these days. The rain has turned to sun and everything’s green and fresh, I want to soak it all in so badly that not even the “little hangover” I caught from the Miranda Lambert concert last night was going to deter me from showing up a “little late” to get in on the action of at our neighbor’s branding.

Now I’m smelly and sweaty and sunburned and just kinda, still a little hungover.

Ah well, as you’ll read in this week’s column, I always seem to find a way to make life a little more difficult.

But mostly, really truly, seriously, pretty much I most definitely, almost always have fun. And I don’t care what you say, you can never have too much of that.

Too much to drink? Well, that’s another issue…

Coming Home: Mishaps provide plenty of stories
By Jessie Veeder
June 9, 2013
Fargo Forum
www.inforum.com

Hope your weekend was free of mishaps.

Or full of them, you know, depending on your definition of the word.

 

Sunday Column (on Monday): When the chokecherry trees bloom

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Well, my favorite day of the week, Sunday, got hijacked yesterday for an impromptu trip to the big town to get new tires for Husband’s pickup. And a funny thing happened on the way. He got a flat tire.

So the quick trip turned into a long trip and while we were at it we thought we might as well load up on supplies to finish up the master bedroom, and, most importantly the closest.

I’m going to have an entire shelf for my shoes people.

An entire shelf.

It only took a good hour or so of discussion,  planning and negotiation in the closet organizing section of Menards to come up with that plan, but it’s happening.

My life will never be the same.

And so that’s what I was doing yesterday. I was closet planning and waiting for tires and checking off the last of our supply list and sitting next to Husband as we drove home into the sunset and into the evening to unload doors and shelves and trim boards and laundry detergent and a little gift for Little Man and tools and screws and the rest of the things we need into the house in the middle of the pitch black night.

And that’s why you didn’t get my Sunday post. I know you were worried. I even got a worried email, so thanks for that.

But it was a good weekend all in all, one that kicked off with a birthday party for Pops and rolled on into Saturday where I played music for a beer festival in a neighboring college town and ended with my dream of an organized closet one step closer to realized.

And now it’s Monday and the rain is pouring down again, filling up the stock dams, sending the river out past its banks and women running from their cars to the nearest building with newspapers and magazines and jackets and briefcases covering their hairdos.

In the last month we’ve had all the rain we can handle. The grass is green and the chokecherry blossoms are in full bloom.
Everything is alive and another day more beautiful.


Another day older.

Pops turned fiftysomethingorother last Friday and this week’s column celebrates him and how fitting it is that he was born in during the best of the seasons.

Coming Home: Chokecherry blooms signal special time
by Jessie Veeder
6/1/13
Fargo Forum

Enjoy your week. Enjoy the rain, the smell of the chokecherry blossoms, and  God willing, let’s enjoy some sun too.


If you need me, I’ll be picking wildflowers and organizing my boot collection…

Sunday Column: Wildflowers

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Happy Sunday. It’s a beautiful one here at the ranch. It’s raining, the trees are turning green right before our eyes, the flowers are blooming and I have my nose to the ground, inspecting, documenting and making sure I don’t miss a single bloom.

Wildflower season is my absolute favorite time of year, an obsession that started with a 4-H project and has continued throughout my life.

This week’s column attempts to explains that fascination a bit.

Coming Home: My love of wildflowers started young
By Jessie Veeder Scofield
Fargo Forum
Sunday, May 19, 2013

Lord, when I die, bring me back as a wildflower on the North Dakota Prairie. 

Sunday Column: On Mother’s Day.

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My momma and me, the day we first met.

Long time followers of “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” may have seen this before, but I wanted to share it again this Mother’s Day because it’s important to remember to celebrate the special women in our lives for all that they are.

Happy Mother’s Day to my momma and to all the mommas out there who share the best parts of themselves with their children.

Coming Home: Imagining mom before she was mom
By Jessie Veeder Scofield
Fargo Forum
Sunday, May 12, 2013

Sunday Column: When the right words fail us.

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It’s a beautiful weekend. The sky is blue, the wind has chilled out and the crocuses are in full bloom.

Words don’t do justice to the way 70 degrees feels after a long winter. And as a woman always searching for the right language, this week’s column is about how, when it comes to beauty, our words sometimes fails us.

Enjoy whatever sun you can find today!

Coming Home: Finding right words not always easy
By Jessie Veeder
May 5, 2012
Fargo Forum