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Hamster drama

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Ok, I’m just going to cut to the chase. I was not prepared for the amount of drama owning a hamster would bring upon our house. You’d think as a ranch kid raising my own ranch kids, I have seen it all when it comes to ways things can go sideways between animals and humans, but sometimes no matter how tight you string that barbed wire, the bull still finds a way to the neighbors’. And although I’ve never intentionally invited a rodent into my home, I figured we could handle Popcorn, a couple ounces of fluffy house pet with one eye.

I was wrong. 

And because I know some of you were making guesses as to how long it was going to take before that hamster went missing, I will tell you now that the dust has settled a bit—it took five days.

Five. Days.

And the way in which we discovered Popcorn had vanished just had to be when Rosie’s friend came over specifically to meet the pet they’ve been talking about all week only to be greeted with a completely empty cage.

There were tears. There was panic. There was confusion. How in the world did she escape a cage that looked completely buttoned up? It was a mystery. I turned the house inside out, flashing a light in every nook and cranny, frantically decluttering every closet, looking under every bed, behind any appliance or piece of furniture I could move, and with each passing moment sinking into a deeper depression about the cleanliness and tidiness of my home. A real adult would never leave these corners unvacuumed! A real adult would have brought this pile of clothing to the thrift store last month! A real adult WOULD HAVE NEVER AGREED TO THE HAMSTER IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!

And when the searching and staying up late to listen for hamster noises in the dark didn’t yield any results, I went to Tractor Supply to purchase a couple live traps for my pantry and hoped for the best.

And you would think this would be my lowest hamster moment, baiting a loose house pet with peanut butter and nightly prayers. But it wasn’t.

Because, as of now, I must be honest here, we have not found Popcorn. I’ve concluded she’s either living her best life in my walls, or outside, uh, hibernating. And I hate it.  My mom felt so bad about this, likely from the pet Lizard Incident of 1995, that she purchased a new hamster, Rocket, for Rosie, on her way home from Minnesota a couple weeks ago. And besides the fact that Rocket nearly bit Rosie’s fingertip off in the first two days of life with us, he also posed a significant risk to our house hamster population given his presumed gender. If he escapes too, the results could be dire.

But that wasn’t going to happen. We buttoned the cage up tight. We took every precaution to check and double check when Rosie interacted with him. We put his cage in another cage at night and closed the door just to be sure. Things were going great. Rocket stopped biting and settled in to the bonding part of the relationship. Popcorn was a fluke, surely.

Until I woke up last Thursday, ready to take a trip with the girls to Minnesota, and, you guessed it, the cage was buttoned up, yet empty. Again.

S.O.S.

The panic search commenced once more and so did the guilt and the shame. This poor hamster. Our poor daughter. She did everything right as a pet owner, and yet, we’ve been duped again.  I’ve never seen my husband so defeated.

“We’re idiots,” he whispered. “We got outsmarted by not one, but two rodents.”

I packed the kids and my mother in the SUV and wished him luck.

“I guess we’re just not hamster people,” Rosie sighed as we headed east and left my husband with the search. “Maybe we should just stick with dogs and cats and goats.”

“And lizards!” Edie chimed in. “My lizard is chill.”

Now, I wasn’t going to tell this story if it didn’t have an ending we could all feel ok about. And so here it is. Two days into our trip I got a text from my husband. “I found Rocket. But I can’t catch him.” We were rolling down the road from Bismarck to Fargo. My heart skipped a beat, so I called to put him on speaker because the man wasn’t going to get away with so few words on this topic.

“Did the hamster have one eye or two?” Rosie chimed in from the back seat.

“One,” my husband replied.

“Did he look suspicious? Like he found a girlfriend?” Rosie asked.

My husband did not reply.

Turns out while we were gone, Chad slept on the couch to listen for hamster sounds, which this time he heard coming from the deepest, darkest, messiest closet in the house. And so at 2 am he wandered toward the noises and proceeded to empty our entryway closet of all of my sound equipment and supplies, merch and CDs and microphone stands plus piles upon piles of hunting gear and old shoes and boots and coats we don’t wear but can’t get rid of and then when the whole closet was empty and the entire entryway was full he Still. Couldn’t. Find. The. Hamster!

“I thought I made a big mistake,” he explained. “I thought I let him out with all the stuff.”

And so, he carefully went through all of the closet wares one more time with no hamster appearance.

It was now 4:30 in the morning. 

Figuring the little fluff ball had to still be in the closet, he put his cage back in there, full of food and water, and hoped for the best.

“Who’s the man?!” my husband texted me with the news that afternoon.

Turns out Rocket realized the err of his ways and had happily returned to the scene of the crime, all full of food and snuggled up in his bedding like a fluffy little angel that didn’t just give us all heart palpitations and sleep deprivation.

On our way home the next day we stopped to purchase a new and larger and more secure cage, bringing our hamster bill to around six million dollars to date. Girl’s gonna have to put up a few more lemonade stands.

Anyway, maybe there’s still hope for Popcorn, Lord knows we have enough crumbs in the house to sustain her for a while.

In the meantime, we’ll be watching Rocket like prison wardens and, well, hoping for the best, as you do when it comes to hamsters.

Bullseye Season

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It’s bullseye season here at the ranch. The leaves start changing, the air cools down, the black flies find their way into my kitchen to make me crazy and my husband and daughters take out their targets and bows and get to practicing shooting arrows.

My husband has been into archery since he was a young kid. His most shared stories of his childhood are of him sitting alone in a hunting blind for hours without anything but those swarming flies to entertain him. The flies and the snacks and lunch he always finished eating well before noon. When the girls dare say they’re bored around here, the hunting blind stories are the stories he pulls out.

Yes, archery is a sport of patience and calm and, most of all passion. It takes a special kind of mindset to stay completely still and quiet for hours on end, often in the freezing cold or wild wind, or, my nightmare, way up high in a tree stand.

I’ve accompanied my husband on bow hunting excursions around the ranch in the past, before the kids arrived. It was one of my favorite things to do with my him because I could get out in the hills, photograph some wildlife, get some air in my lungs and get in quality time while he scoped the draws and skyline for bucks.

 And if you’re planning on doing the same with your husband, may I suggest not wearing swishy pants and only humming the song that’s in your head in your head. Turns out unwrapping a candy bar while he’s glassing the horizon isn’t good protocol either. 

But, what do you call a man who isn’t a comedian, but doesn’t take anything too seriously?  Like, oh well, you swish-swish-swished your way across two miles of pasture and scared everything wild and living away within earshot, but I’m glad you’re here and glad you wore enough warm layers and glad you brought snacks. That’s the guy I married. Turns out being married to me was just preparing him for a lifetime of raising daughters.

He’s unflappable, that man. And our daughters adore him. And I love to see it because when they’re out there shooting bows at that target with him or leading the way on a dirt-bike excursion to the alfalfa fields, it reminds me so much of the reasons I adored my dad as a little girl. The way he continued to enjoy life and pursue his passions even in the thick of the responsibilities of middle age and ranching and professional obligations somehow wasn’t lost on me, even as a kid. He liked deer hunting? I was going along, rain or shine. Playing guitar? I’m sitting at his feet watching his fingers. Training horses? Put me on the next one.  The same didn’t apply to him teaching me to drive a stick shift, but I would like to continue to repress that memory.

From the archives

We’re in the season of parenting where our kids are getting older and beginning the phases of coming into their own. When they were babies, it was fun to dream about the interests they may have or the talents they would develop, and now, here we are, watching who they are becoming right before our eyes. There have been many times in the past year or so that I have second-guessed if we are doing enough to help them cultivate their passions. We’re in the generation of parenting where there is a lot of pressure to sign kids up for extracurriculars at a younger and younger age to help them hone skills as early as possible. But if I’m being honest, my instinct has always been to try to give my kids more free time, not less. Now, all the sudden I’m feeling like maybe my almost eight-year-old and almost ten-year-old should be mastering more skills and honing in closer on their passions. Is it this age where they start becoming a little obsessed with things they love? Would they ever be obsessed enough to sit in a hunting blind for eight hours with nothing but the flies and the bag of snacks to entertain them?

I don’t know. And, honestly, I don’t know if obsession/extreme passion for rodeo or goats or basketball or archery or hockey is always the ultimate goal for every kid. Maybe for some it’s just about doing it and having fun and learning something, although I have tried to sell that concept to my youngest and most competitive daughter and it didn’t land well.

In the meantime, it’s bullseye season at our house and a reminder that the best thing we can do for our kids is to show them what it looks like to enjoy something and to work at it and how to learn and improve.

And then, when it comes time for them to accompany their dad on a hunt, I will remind them to skip the swishy pants, although I doubt he would mind, as long as they’re coming along.

And to me, well, that’s what I call a parenting bullseye.

The bull curse

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This spring toward the end of calving season I remarked about how well things seemed to be going after my father himself remarked how well things seemed to be going. And then, even though I knew better, I dared to add, “No bottle calves yet,” and he told me, quite seriously and repeatedly that I had cursed the entire ranch.  

My dad, in case you missed it, is one of those superstitious ranchers.

What was I thinking?

Fast forward a few months and we had a nice young Angus bull go missing, as bulls tend to do. Dad finally caught up with him in our neighbor’s pasture hanging out with his pretty black cows and enlisted the help of my sister to go round him up. Now, if you have any experience in the art of chasing cattle, you know that trying to break one lone male bovine away from a herd of females is not a task for the armature or the faint of heart. It usually never, ever goes well or smoothly or without cussing and sweat, prayers and thorns and then more cussing and in that order. But that evening, my dad and my little sister hit the trail horseback, miraculously found the stray bull and even more miraculously were able to walk the big guy back to the adjacent pasture so he could finish off breeding season with his betrothed cows. The plan in Dad’s head had come to fruition, things went smoothly and from what was reported there was no swearing and no praying and no thorns.

The other miracle? The fact that, after years of being traumatized in her childhood by helping Dad chase bulls, my little sister actually agreed to go along.

It was a brag-worthy experience and we all heard about it that evening. What a great bull. Can’t believe it. He worked so nicely. Went smooth. Easy as could be.

But the rancher’s dream was cut short when Dad went out the next morning to find the bull was gone again.

Vanished.

And so, this time Dad enlisted the help of my husband and me (because my sister had fled to Arizona, probably to avoid this very situation). Off we went with horses, back to the neighbor’s pasture to, sure enough, find that bull hanging out with his preferred herd of ladies. As we approached him, Dad talked through about ten difference scenarios and tactics we could employ to get this bull back into his rightful spot. Again. We could take him with a small group of cows to the pen by the road and then load him into the trailer. We could take him with the herd toward the gate and then break him off. We could go take what we could get with him to the northeast gate or we could just… ope…there he went, walking right at that bull and breaking him from the cows who went running in all directions. And so that’s the plan we landed on, all three of us pushing that bull alone, up over the hill and through a school section alley, slow and steady and easy in one gate and then another and to our pasture, all the while Dad saying, “This is great! What a nice bull. This is how easy he went with Alex. I can’t believe it. Look at how nice he is.”

And me? Well, I didn’t say a dang word. Because I knew better, having cursed the entire ranch and all. And I know from experience that, with bulls, well, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

But that experience has shown us that once you get a bull in with all the cows it is over. That’s the task. Uniting/Reuniting is the goal. And so, once we successfully achieved that, we all sort of sat back and carried on with the next mission of pushing those cows and that bull into the next pasture.

But it turns out Dad’s out-loud-positive-affirmations was going to do a number on us as I suspected, because I looked over to right to notice that bull veering from the herd suspiciously. So, I followed him with the plan of turning him back, which should have been easy, but the veering continued. I sent the dog in, which made the veering continue faster toward the kind of thick and thorny brush patch on a cliff that bulls tend to love. Cue my husband and dad flying in from both sides hollering, “We have this Jess, go watch the cows.” And so, I did what I was told but found a perch nearby to see if I could watch how this was going to play out.

It was about fifteen minutes into peering from the hilltop down into the winding, deep creek that cuts through the big brush in the corner of that pasture, the absolute worst place to find an animal or yourself for that matter, when I finally got eyes on them. My husband, off his horse on the edge of a brush patch rubbing his hand and my dad standing next to the fence staring over at the bull on the other side who was standing up to his neck in the water, staring back.

“Well, it’s over now,” I thought to myself as the two men came riding back toward me and the cows.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” my dad exclaimed. “The thing jumped off a cliff and into the water and then swam under the fence!”

“I thought I heard a splash,” I said.

“He actually went under the water!” my Dad said as we retold the story to my mom and the girls over a 10 pm supper when we finally got home. “I can’t believe it!”

“I didn’t know bulls could hold their breath,” Rosie said.

“I wonder if it was my curse or yours that will keep that bull at the neighbor’s for all eternity?” I asked my dad between bites of casserole.

Anyway, if you need us, well, my husband will be digging the thorn from his hand, Dad will be looking for that bull and I’ll be keeping my mouth shut…

Lucky Unlucky Us

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I’m not sure if I’ve seen a July like this in Western North Dakota. It feels like we’re living in an entirely different climate, waking up every morning to new puddles on the gravel road and a bit of a mist in the air. Most days in July have been greeted with or ended with a thunderstorm or shower, it simply won’t stop raining.  And this is just fine news for us. The stock dams are full, the alfalfa is lush, and the grass is as green as can be. It makes timing getting the hay crops off the fields a little tricky, but I think any rancher up here will take the rain with the inconvenience.

The consistent threat of a storm has also made our North Dakota outdoor engagements a bit harrowing, although we persist of course because we only get like four full seconds of outdoor picnic weather up here. And so, we just swat the mosquitos and hold tight to our potato chips and paper plates so they don’t blow away and catch on the neighbor’s barbed wire fences. 

Last week, after a trip to the dentist to find out I might need a root canal, and a visit to the mechanics where I found out my car needs a few new $800 parts, I brought my dad and my daughters to play music on the shores of Lake Sakakawea at this cute little campground along a sandy beach called Little Egypt. Along the way I learned that Dad had also just found out about a few hefty bills for repair on misbehaving equipment that day and so we agreed that playing some music was going to soothe our broke and toothachey souls that night. 

It was a perfectly hot and muggy 80 degrees when we pulled in with our guitars, picnic supper and girls in the back seat of dad’s pickup. And while there were no chances of rain on our weather apps that day, the blackening sky told another story. “Looks like it’s going to head north,” we said to each other while we plugged into the system and sat down to perform to a crowd slowly gathering with lawn chairs and coolers in front of the stage. 

My daughters had taken off to check out the sand on the beach and we sang “Love at the Five and Dime” and a couple ranching songs and watched those clouds get darker and darker behind the growing gathering of people. I looked over at the beach to get an eye on my daughters and then back behind the crowd and clocked a flash of lightning. Still hoping for the “heading north of us” theory to materialize, I informed the crowd that we may have to take a break for the weather to pass and just as that statement left my lips, the stillness of the afternoon turned into a huge 60 MPH gust that swept across the campground and across our stage, blowing my set list, merch, hat and dust across that campground. “Ok then! That’s it!” I think I said into the mic, or maybe just in my head as I grabbed my guitar and headed to get my kids who suddenly found themselves in a furious sandstorm. I clocked the boom of a speaker blowing over, set my guitar in the backseat of the pickup and joined my dad and my soaking, sandy daughters in the front seat while dad moved the pickup away from the stage, you know, just in case it blew over. 

I had played an entire 20 minutes of my two-hour set. 

The sirens wailed. 

Rosie sniffled.  

The rain dumped harder and blew sideways. 

Then came the hail stones. 

“This should pass soon,” we said to one another as only true Midwesterners do. And it was logical, we could see the edge of the clouds opening to a clear sky, but we were still on the inside of it. And so, it hung on for another half-hour or so, just long enough to fill the guitar case I left under the stage with a half inch of water and soak the stage as well as anyone’s desire to carry on with the whole idea of outdoor entertainment that evening. We may be persistent, but our nerves can only handle so much. 

 When the storm finally dissipated, we helped clean up the stage and pick up the things that went flying. Luckily, I brought an extra set of clothes for the girls, and so they got dried off and as de-sanded as we could get them. 

“That was scary!” Rosie declared. “Yeah, we’ve sort of had a rough day,” I replied, “With the storm and the broken tooth and the broken cars and equipment. Glad it’s over!”

 “I shouldn’t have opened that umbrella in Alex’s house this morning,” Rosie chirped from the back seat.

“I guess superstition is hereditary,” my dad laughed as we headed toward home with my caseless guitar sitting on my lap in the front seat, chasing the rainstorm headed east to wreak a little more havoc on Friday night picnics and campfires, outdoor music and hay moving operations.

A rainbow appeared in front of us as the girls recounted their harrowing story so they could get it right for daddy when we got home. We stopped in New Town to gas up and take the girls for a bathroom break. As we were walking out the door, Dad stopped. “Ice Cream Drumstick?” he asked, a tradition we have kept on our way home from almost every outdoor summer concert we’ve done throughout my life. “Of course!” I replied. “Lucky us.”

The Lemonade Stand

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I came home from town yesterday to find that my daughters and their cousins had set up a lemonade stand on the ranch-approach facing the gravel county road. They had been there for an hour or so waving and yelling “Get your lemonade!” to the big blue sky and the wind and the cows munching on sweet clover in the pasture on the other side of the road.

They had big dreams of making enough money for each one of them to get a new pet. As if four dogs, eight cats, two goats and a pasture full of horses between the four of them isn’t enough, we need to add a hamster and a lizard to the mix. We’re dreaming big out here.  They even brought their plastic cash register.

Country kid lemonade stands are the epitome of patience and rural acceptance. There are just some things that aren’t as successful out where the cows outnumber the people by like 3,000 percent. Well-manicured lawns, rollerblading and getting away with sneaking out to a party are some other examples, among others.

Anyway, the lemonade stand, it was impromptu, as most kid-run businesses are. As a result, my sister didn’t have time to rally the neighbors to casually drive by and discover the oasis of slightly chilled refreshments, a variety box of single serve chips and four girls waving handmade signs and spouting unreasonable prices. This is when grandparents and dads on their way home from work come in handy. The girls made $15 off their family.

A text just chimed on my phone. “Ada made chocolate chips cookies. She wanted to make sure you don’t make the same thing.” It’s my little sister. Today the girls are going to head back out there, this time with better treats, bigger signs and a chance for us to call my brother-in-law who works on the oil sites out here, to bring cash and call his people.

On Sunday I took my daughters to the home pasture to check on the wild raspberry crop, a tradition that can’t be skipped this time of year. But, much like a lemonade stand on a rural road, planning and timing is everything when it comes to raspberry picking. Get there too early and they’re not ripe. Get there too late and the birds beat you to them. My summers of experience and all the rain that’s fallen this July gave me the hunch that we were going to have some success in finding raspberries (and horseflies) that day, and boy, was I right. And boy, there is nothing better than a ripe wild raspberry picked out under a big prairie sky. A tiny, delicious little treasure hunt. I looked over and my oldest was neck deep into the thick brush, putting three berries in her mouth for every one she put in her ball cap to “save for dad.” As you can imagine, that ball cap was empty by the time we moved to the next brush patch and the only one saving any for dad was me, his loving, selfless wife with willpower of steel, which is what you need in order to leave any wild raspberry uneaten.

We caught up with my husband moving dirt with the backhoe on our way back to the yard and surprised him with my cap full of berries. The way the grown man transformed into the ten-year-old version of himself, popping those treats in his mouth five at a time, well, it made my sacrifice worth it.

Anyway, the raspberry-picking was impromptu, like most of the best memories are, and, unlike the lemonade stand, it’s one activity that does work best out in the hills where the cows out number us. After their dad had his fill of raspberries, the girls climbed up in the buttes to sing and throw rocks. Then, coming from another butte about quarter mile away they heard tiny voices yelling, “Hello! Hello!.”  It was their cousins of course, news travels fast out here where the wind carries giggling and chattering voices.

“Hello!” they yelled back, waving their arms, thrilled to have been discovered. “We love you! Can we come oveerrr?!!!”

“YEESSS!!! Come ooovvveeerrrr!!!” replied the tiny voices far away.

And so they did.

This is summer on backroads and I just don’t think you can beat it.

UPDATE

Since this column published the girls did indeed have their lemonade stand, but this time next to the highway for better visibility. As planned, we called in my brother-in-law and he called his staff who work on the well sites near us on Wednesdays and they showed up for these girls in waves. And so did the rest of the community traveling that highway to get to work, or an appointment or to go visiting (and the neighbor girls, who made a special trip, bless them.) They would pass by from every direction, check the center counsel or the glovebox or a wallet or purse to see if they had cash and then hit the next approach to turn themselves around if necessary.

The girls quickly got into their respective roles and routine, one at the cash register, one pedaling free cookies, one scooping ice and one organizing and putting stickers on the cups. Between my sister and I we had to go back to the house twice to refill lemonade, ice and the cookie stash!

When I tell you there’s nothing more wholesome than a lemonade stand on a hot summer afternoon, well, this experience proved it.

“What are you raising money for?” one man asked the girls lined up by the window of his pickup.

“A hamster,” said Rosie

“A lizard,” said Edie

“A puppy,” said Ada

“A big Lego set,” said Emma.

“Here’s my wallet!,” replied the man, shifting his cookie to his lemonade-holding hand. “Take all the cash out of it. It’s yours!”

And that was the sentiment for a good three hours that afternoon, before it started to sprinkle and just as they ran out of cookies.

So anyway, if you need us, we’ll be shopping for tiny pets, which may or may not be the worst idea we’ve had yet.

Thank you brother-in-law and crew and to everyone who stopped for the girls that day. You truly made a sweet memory for all of us.

Sweet Clover Season

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I wish you could smell the sweet clover out here this time of year. I step outside and I’m flooded with a wave of memories of all that I used to be, summer after summer growing up out here. It smells like work and evenings spent sliding down hills on cardboard boxes with my cousins. It smells like ingredients for mud pie and playing house in the lilac bushes by the red barn. It smells like bringing lunch to dad in the field above our house, horseflies and heat biting our skin.

It smells like my first car and the windows rolled down, taking back roads with my best friends as passengers, kicking up dust as we tested the limits of teenage-dom.

It smells like my leaving, bittersweet. My last summer as a kid here before it was time to go and grow up already. Be on my own.

And it smells like coming home, take a right on the pink road, stop at the top of the hill and look at it all before heading down and turning into mom and dad’s for a glass of wine and a steak on the deck that looks out toward the garden and up the crick bed where I used to play everyday.

This summer my daughters and their cousins have lived on this landscape, on this ranch, the way kids should. Spinning on the tire swing, hiking up to the top of Pot and Pans, trying to catch fish in the fishless stock dam, zooming on dirt bikes, pushing baby doll strollers in the tall grass and skinning knees on the scoria roads. There was a time when it was quiet out on this homestead place, back when my sisters and I left for the big towns and didn’t dare turn to look back over our shoulders, leaving my parents here to wonder what happens next to the place that has raised us when there is no one left for it to raise.

Fast forward twenty years and the ranch, well, now it’s buzzing, laughing, full of life like I remembered it when I was growing up and our grandparents were alive and serving us push-up pops from the small front porch of their small brown house. Weren’t we all just five years old running through the clover, itching our mosquito bites, begging for popsicles and just one more hour to play outside?

Now we are the ones on the other side of the supper bell. As I type this my daughters are over the hill at their aunt and uncles’ lighting leftover 4th of July smoke bombs on the gravel because it rained. I needed a few minutes to collect my thoughts and it is mid-summer and the smell of that clover makes me lonesome somehow for a life that I am currently living. Do you understand what I mean? That feeling of knowing that it’s fleeting? The clover reminds us and so do the limbs of my daughters stretching up and reaching closer to the sky every minute now. The chubby gone from their rosy cheeks. How many more summers will that clover feel magic? 

All of the summers I hope.

Because I know being here like this, reflecting at my kitchen counter while our children stay up past any reasonable bedtime because it’s summer on the prairie and the light lingers, I know it didn’t come without a cost for our family, keeping it here for us…

I know that we did nothing but be born to people who know the value of the land, not in dollars, but in something that is hard for me to find words for right now.

Pride?

Work?

Home?

A place to belong?

My uncle Wade stops in on his way back to Texas and I live to hear the two brothers remember what it was like to be young out here. Young Wade always found hanging back on a roundup, eating on a Juneberry bush. Dad as a kid getting bucked off on the road when his little brother popped over the hill on his tricycle. Milking cows and riding broncs and chasing girls and growing up together out in these same hills…

How many gloves and hats and scarves have been left dangling in these trees, scooped off heads and hands of little cowboys and cowgirls rushing on the backs of horses running through the trees?

How many wild plum pits have been spit at one another?

How many mud pies have been made in this barnyard, topped off with little pieces of sweet clover.

I’ll take that clover. I’ll breathe it in, and I will remember when it itched our bare little legs in the summer while we searched for kittens in the nooks of the red barn. And I’ll be thankful it itches my legs still… because they’ll grow up too fast you know. Just like we did, out here among the clover.

All the questions that will never be answered

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“Have you ever accidentally brought your ranch dog to town?” I asked the lady getting out of her horse trailer next to me at our county fairgrounds. I had just arrived to enter the girls and goats in their very first open livestock show and when I got out of the pickup, I realized that the goats weren’t the only animal that hitched a ride to Watford City that afternoon.

“Well, ugh, no, my dog just comes with me I guess,” she replied sort of confused while I realized that she was the entirely wrong audience for this self-deprecating banter. She probably had a corgi. Our eleven-year-old cattle dog, who has only been to town on vet visits, stood at my feet just staring up at me as confused as I was as to why he was there. His tail was wagging so hard it moved his whole body, because, while he knew he had made a mistake, there were also cattle here. And kids. And pigs and goats and sheep and all the interesting things he didn’t expect when he chose to leap into the back of the pickup on our way out of the yard, thinking we were going to do some ranch work.

“Well, his trip wasn’t planned,” I laughed and then dialed my husband to see if he had any ideas as to what to do with the dog now. “I’ll come and get him,” he replied, totally unphased but knowing the disaster this dog would be around fancy animals.

Photo by LG Photography (Look how fancy they are)

Have you ever received a text from that same husband on a sunny Sunday morning when you thought everything was going just fine so far, but then it quickly wasn’t? Because the text read, “You wrecked my pickup.”

Turns out pulling a little bumper-pull horse trailer with the tailgate down doesn’t end well, even if you were just moving it a few feet out of the way of the garage so you could go deliver the kittens to new homes in town before we leave on vacation in a few days.

Have you ever finished a complete two-hour set of music on a patio on a beautiful evening only to look down during load-out and realize the zipper on your jean skirt was down.

Was it down the entire time? Like, all the way down? Was my guitar at least covering it please Jesus? Did anyone notice?

These are questions that will never be answered, but they can be re-lived for the rest of my life at 3 am.

Have I reached a phase in my life where I’ve been the supervisor for so long that I’ve forgotten to supervise myself? Like, I forgot that I am the one who needs the most supervising, and that didn’t change necessarily with motherhood. But the responsibilities are greater. And the pickup, well, it’s a little more expensive.

I’m not going to lie here, when I assessed the tailgate damage, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I cried anyway. My level of being distracted is a bit out of control lately, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this working-mom-in-the-summer situation.  I think adding the cost of a new tailgate to camp fees and snack bills might have just sent me over the edge. I faceplanted on my bed. But I couldn’t stay there long because I had a gig in Medora that night and I had to get myself together (note to self: quadruple check my zipper).

On my way my little sister called me. “I have some bad news,” she declared. “Rosie had an accident on the trampoline and she broke her arm.”

“No!” I yelled in the Jimmy John’s parking lot.

“No, I’m just kidding,” she laughed. “The girls put me up to it.”

And then I laughed too. I guess it could always be worse.

But girls? We need to talk about what’s an acceptable prank around here. This mom’s nerves are shot.

I used to take photographs

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I used to take photographs. Not just with my phone, but with a big camera I would tote around almost nightly on my walks through the hills or on rides through the pastures. I would sling it across my body as a constant reminder to stay on the lookout for the way the evening sunset makes the tops of the trees glow or creates a halo around the wild sunflowers if you get down low enough in the grass. There was something about having that camera in my hand that automatically transformed me back into the little girl I used to be out here. To have the task on hand to capture it  reminded me to look out for the wonder. 

I’m not sure exactly when I put my camera back in the bag and then up on a shelf to collect dust, but I’m pretty sure it was around the time the babies came. I documented my first-born’s every move with that big camera up until her ninth month or so. I know because I have a hundred-page hardcover book to prove it. But then technology turned my phone into a more convenient and quality option and then Rosie arrived and then the wandering changed to carrying one baby in a pack and pulling the other in a wagon down the gravel road. 

How fast this sight has changed

Lately I’ve been feeling farther and farther away from myself. Usually, this sort of ache is reserved for long winter nights, but for some reason, it’s creeping up on me in the change into summer, which has been notorious for snapping me back to myself. I haven’t planted a single tomato plant. The garden isn’t tilled. The horses need about a hundred more rides. My calendar is dinging with deadlines that feel impossible to meet and I find I’m feeling a bit frantic about making sure this summer teaches my daughters some things about responsibility with as much room for play as possible. 

Responsibility and play. I think that might be the never-ending battle we’re all up against. Can they possibly exist together in balance? If you have any sort of roots in ranching or agriculture, I can see you nodding your head along when I say there is never a time where you can relax without thinking you should be doing something more productive. 

Because there is always something to be done here. The barn needs to be torn down and rebuilt this summer and so does the shed. The siding needs to be put on the house and the deck needs to be rebuilt. The old equipment needs to be moved off the hill and we need to resurface the road to the barnyard. We need to rebuild the corrals and spray the burdock plants and ride fences and move cows, and also, we have that day job and softball practice for the kids and the county fair next week. We’re getting none of it done in the process of trying to do all of it. The feeling of being fragmented and frazzled and underprepared for everything is one I can’t shake. A walk to the hilltop to document the wildflowers is the least productive thing on the list. But maybe the thing we need most. 

Last week in our efforts to get the kids ready for the county fair, I took that old camera off the shelf and out of its bag. My sister and I signed our oldest daughters up to enter a photography project and it was time we got it done. We walked out into the yard and bent over the little patch of prairie roses in the front yard. I did a little speech about focus and timing and patience and light and looking around for things worth photographing. My niece pointed out how it would be best to crop out the cowpie under the wildflower photo and I said she was right. There is beauty growing right alongside the poop. We just try to focus on the beauty when we’re behind the camera. 

After the wildflower lesson we set our new kittens up in a little basket out on the lawn for a little photoshoot. Those four little fuzz balls were the star of the show for a good fifteen minutes while we worked on catching their best angles and fawned over how sweet they were.

The lawn was long and needed to be mowed. The tomato patch needed to be tilled. My office work was waiting, but I was too busy saying “oh how cute!” and “get a little lower, focus on their eyes,” and “oh my goodness the sweetness,” to think about anything else. I liked the way the world felt to me in the yard that day. 

I think I’ll leave that camera out and within reach this summer…

Kids in the Branding Pen

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Every year at the beginning of June a group of our friends from Bismarck and Dickinson load up and come to the ranch to help us brand our calves. It’s become a tradition for them to help in the pens as a way to say thank you for allowing them to hunt turkey and deer on the place throughout the years. The gesture and the help are thoughtful and appreciated, but it’s not an expected exchange. We would gladly have them out anytime for whatever reason. But every year for nearly ten years or so, they have been making it work, no matter how much or how little notice we give them. They wake up early, load up their kids and make the drive to sort, wrestle, ear tag and stand ready for whatever other task we might throw at them. And then, when the work is done, all ten or more of the kids run wild on the dirt piles and in the trees collecting ticks and dirt on their jeans, I serve up cookies and a couple big roasters of beef and then we take the kids for their favorite part: a ride on our horses. 

This year was no different. We called last minute, and our friends were there standing by the pens waiting for us at 8 am when we finally got the cattle gathered. Which means that a pickup-load from Bismarck had to leave their houses at 5 am and our friends from Dickinson cut their weekend fishing at the lake short and then, before they left that afternoon, they handed over a big bag of walleye that we fried up and devoured on Tuesday.

I was standing in the pen next to my friend who was running the ear tagger while her eight-year-old daughter, Olivia, was charged with marking the calves who received a vaccination. Her two sons were in the pens too, one spraying antiseptic on the castrated calves and the other now big enough to wrestle. My own daughters had abandoned their post of sorting ear tags and counting calves for some sort of game of pretend in the hills with the other kids and I had just looked up long enough to realize it. I told my friend that her daughter should join them. “She can go play, she’s helped plenty already,” I said, now embarrassed that our friends’ kids were busting their butts while ours ran wild.  

“I told the kids that this is our church this morning,” my friend replied. “Helping our neighbors, acts of service, this is what it’s about.”  

Her kids have been coming to the ranch for years, to help or to hunt or to play, since before her sweet eight-year-old daughter could walk and her boys were toddling around, fascinated by the trees and the wildlife, reminding us every time how special this place is and how lucky we are. At almost every visit our kids have wandered together to places on this ranch that my own kids barely frequent—the thick trees on the banks to the north of the house, the muddy patch of cattails in front of the dam, the old equipment on the top of the hill. When the boys were younger, after every visit we were left with a big pile of old bones and cool sticks and rocks as a collection on our front drive, little treasures they couldn’t keep their hands off. And when it comes to the animals, the horses and the baby kittens, and now, the goats, Olivia has never been able to get enough. She would outlast my daughters’ capacity for sitting horseback by hours, her smile stretched from ear to ear, falling in love with every horse on the place. This year it was no different, even in the heat of the day as we watched these growing kids navigate themselves in the saddle more independently than ever.  I looked at Olivia and wondered how we could fit one of these horses in her backyard in town. And if they would finally agree to take a kitten home. 

It might be the kids getting older, changing so much since the last time I saw them, that got me thinking how grateful I am for the reminder they provide us to not take this for granted. Eventually I got my own kids back in the branding pens for a bit to help, but the magic of the work doesn’t hit them the same way it does for these kids coming in from town once or twice a year. My hope is that I can raise them to appreciate it, to know how rare and important it is to care for a place like this, to stand side-by-side and share in the work, to bring out the big roaster of beef to feed our friends after they’ve put in the sweat alongside us at the end of the day, even if my youngest daughter eventually does run away to New York like she’s been threatening since she could talk and my oldest heads to the ocean. 

In the chaos of the branding pen I don’t know if my kids got the lessons they needed from us this year, but I hope they learned something from our friends about what it means to be there, to be reliable and to be good neighbors, happy to help.  

And I never wanted to leave again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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