If you need a moment take it.
Make a promise and don’t break it.
Have an itch? Scratch it.
Want the setting sun? Go catch it.
I’ve seen that smile so bring it.
You know the song. Sing it!
You have dreams, go chase them.
Problems? You can face them.
Seeking beauty? The earth grows it.
And when you love somebody…
show it.
We’ve had a couple beautiful days at the ranch lately. Things are starting to blossom up around here, making way for the butterflies and bees and bugs. The birds have found their way home and so have the pair of geese that live in the dam outside our new house. I’ve been spending my evenings strolling through the coulees to see if I can break the record I set of 25 wood ticks crawling on my body at once.
It seems I’ve always known just where to find them.
But the wood ticks are pretty much the only black blotch on what is my favorite season. Wood ticks and the burdock weed, but I figure I can take a few heebie jeebies and invasive plants in exchange for wild purple violets,
horses with slick spring coats,
rhubarb and blue skies.
The thing about spring around here is that it moves fairly quickly, so you’ve got to catch it before the bluebells wither up in the heat of the day and those familiar birds fly south.
Against the backdrop of late spring everything seems to come alive, and with the windows open in the house I am invigorated and inspired. Because we wait for this warm sunshine all year and northern prairie people everywhere don’t take one “Goldie Locks” day for granted. No, we busy ourselves with lists of things to do before winter rolls around.
And in the summer around here that can mean chores and projects of course, but more than anything it means living out in it.
Because man could not build a better space for us to exist in. No roof can compare to the comfort and drama of the rolling clouds that threaten a few warm rain showers and promise a blue sky that always comes back to us. Families seem at ease here in the hills alive and buzzing with the sounds of life and change and growing things.
The wildflowers are a welcome home present that appear overnight, the grass our living, breathing carpet.
In the creek the minnows appear like magic and along the banks sprout blossoms promising fruit.
A prairie spring is a world that cannot be replicated. It is a world that is so far from the drastic howling winds of winter and the brown and sleeping earth, that you would swear you were living on a different planet just two months ago.
In those months I felt like a down coat and wool socks, steaming hot chocolate and melty white marshmallows.
A dumpling in warm soup.
Heavy blankets.
But today I feel like a garden. Like a picnic, a cold drink, a bratwurst on a lawn chair.
A warm breeze.
Bare feet.
The sun soaked queen of the barnyard.
I want to stand on the hills with the horses, facing the wind to keep the flies away, the only concern for the day.
I want to run close to the ground with the pug, smelling the things he smells, allowing my heart to pump hard, my tongue to hang out, my delusions of grace and agility to run rampant.
I want to jump in the dam with the lab when the heat gets too warm on my skin.
I want to taste what the bees taste.
I want to sit in the clouds and cast cool shadows all of it.
I don’t want to live in this season.
I want to be it.
Last week in the middle of a life that sent me down to the scary basement of this old house to search for things to throw away, I found something I didn’t know I had.
And that something might have turned into one of the most important pieces of my life.
See, among our snowshoes, highschool yearbooks, that old radio noone can throw away, games of Cranium and Catch Phrase, college text books and papers, canning jars and countless pairs of boots was a box I didn’t recognize.
And in this box filled with odds and ends that echoed the man who was outside trying to start our lawnmower– an old rope, a tarnished belt-buckle, a necklace made from deer antlers, a tupperwear dish full of shot-gun shells and two-dollar bills– were little pieces of paper, neatly folded and tucked away in a shiny cardboard package…
My 16-year-old handwriting telling our love story.
I would have missed it, the memories of a love that blossomed when we were much too young for things like love, if one of those neatly folded letters didn’t find its way out of the box and onto the dusty floor as I moved that box into the hallway in an effort to consolidate the neglected pieces of our lives. I tossed the box aside to retrieve the piece of paper that looked so familiarly intriguing. I squatted down on the floor and unfolded the page.
I recognized that handwriting.
I recognized the feelings.
But I didn’t recognize the words.
Up and down notebook pages, on typing paper and inside homemade cards were professions of my adoration toward a boy who used to meet me at my locker and walk with me to class. A boy who played football and had a yellow dog, whose hair was never right and neither were his parents. A boy who gave me my first kiss and drove a Thunderbird too fast on the highway to my house every Sunday to ride horses and teach my little sister to play chess…
A boy who received those notes, folded them back up, put them in his pocket only to tuck them away in a box to be saved and moved from place to place as he went off to college with the girl, drove her to Yellowstone National Park in the middle of July with no air conditioning, proposed to her under her favorite oak tree, married her there and proceeded to work on the happily ever after.
I didn’t know the boy kept the notes.
I didn’t know the man still had them.
I didn’t remember the girl who wrote them.
A quirky girl who made up stories about turtles stuck on fence posts in an attempt to make the boy laugh. A girl who unabashedly poured her feelings out on pages she hand delivered to the boy who would write her notes back with no notion that any other eyes would ever see…
I took those notes out one by one and on the floor of the grimy basement I was reminded of that girl with frizzy hair and a Ford LTD that guzzled oil and needed a jump start after school.
I was reminded of the boy who always had jumper cables waiting when the bell rang.
And as each page unfolded so did the memories of what it was like to be 16 and so in love.
We were all there once weren’t we? You can remember it can’t you? Your first car ride together. Your first kiss. Fight. Breakup.
Most people have gone through the process and then started it all over again with another first kiss, another first car ride, another first fight…a series of excitement and emotions that cycle through in different ways with different people until you find the one you choose to hang on tight to. And you may or may not have written love letters. And they may or may not be in someone’s basement, someone who is a stranger now, someone who remembers you with a scent of perfume or an old favorite song on the radio as they are driving down familiar roads.
If there is one thing in my life that makes me wonder about fate and choices and understanding the human connection, it is this relationship I have had with this boy who is now my husband. The familiar road? I never strayed. That favorite song? It has not stopped playing.
That first car ride together? We’re still driving.
And sometimes I’ll admit that I wonder if I knew anything back then. That hair? Are you kidding? Those high-water pants? Kill me. The decision to buy two baby turtles and raise them under a heat lamp in an aquarium in my dorm room? Not the most logical.
I admit there have been times I have wondered if I missed out on something, if I shouldn’t have gotten so comfortable, if I should have had my heart broken a few more times…kissed more boys…
But I read those letters last week, the ones I scrawled during study hall and math class when I should have been paying attention. My words were never chosen carefully and mostly I said nothing at all except something about a test that and a note to him about luck at a football game or singing on the weekend.
Then I came across a note with a drawing of a house with a chimney in the crook of a hill. Beside it I drew a barn and below it a creek that wound through a fenced in pasture. In the pasture I drew two horses, one for him and one for me. I also drew a pig and a goat, a cow and boat in the dam I built with the creek on the edge of the paper. There were two vehicles in the driveway: A pickup for him. A car for me.
Now, I had been looking for love stories lately, hunting them down and reading them, watching them on television, asking people how they met, opening my eyes to see one walking down the street, at a table next to me in a restaurant or in the line at the grocery store.
Lately I’d been feeling like maybe our story wasn’t enough.
Then I opened another letter and read: “If we can say we loved each other for a lifetime I will have lived my dreams.”
Now I didn’t know anything then about life and how hard it can be to live out dreams and make things like this work.
I still don’t.
But I have to give that 16 year old credit. She may not have known what she wanted to be, how far she wanted to travel or how to properly boil an egg.
But she knew what she was doing.
She knew what love was.
If I could pick for you a bouquet
from the windswept hills of spring,
from under budding oak groves,
and along the babbling creek…
I’d pick you bluebells for your table,
and sweet peas for your mom,
the mist from early mornings,
a meadowlark’s sweet song.
I’d throw in green, green grasses
and the chokecherry’s in bloom
to set upon your nightstand
and bring some springtime to your room.
And to that I’d add some sweet smells
and a horse’s tangled mane,
The dust from tires on gravel,
all the things we cannot tame.
Like the sound of insects buzzing
and a brown dog in the mud,
thorns that poke your fingers,
and dandelion fluff.
Then I’d find you ladyslippers,
a yellow violet hiding out,
prairie smoke and daisies…
all the pretty that’s about.
But I won’t forget the rainstorms
or the rocks that dot the fields,
the wood ticks and the slick mud,
all the things that make this real.
Because if I could pick the prairie,
put this earth into a vase
I’d take the sunshine with the hale storms
but leave the secrets in their place.
I think it’s time I address some things that have been making an appearance in my stories, walking past my camera lens, stomping at the pug, pooping in my yard, leaning up against the house and looking in my windows…
Yes, it’s time I explain…these guys.
There are five of them out here on this landscape. And they are the only cattle we have on this place through the winter until springtime when a whole mess of angus beef cattle arrive. Pops purchased these misfits from a neighbor who runs a herd for roping practice and rodeo events in the area. Before they stepped off the trailer and into the buttes of the ranch, they had spent their lives in arenas being chased by cowboys and cowgirls and moved around from pen to pen.
They are “the steers,” and they are here “for fun.”
See, we’ve always talked about having a small herd of cattle out here that look like the old west, and these “longhorns” fit the bill. Each day they are on the wild grass and alfalfa hay they grow a few inches…both their bodies and their horns. I have enjoyed taking their pictures and meeting them on the trail on a walk or a ride through the pastures, but that’s about as far as their worth goes…unless we, ahem…decide one of them might make a good cheeseburger….
Because, well, they are “steers” and “steers” lack the adequate parts necessary for, ummmm, shall we say, “growing a herd.”
But up until this week that was all we really needed from them: to look pretty, munch on grass and stay home. Once the other 100+ cattle arrive at our place in a few weeks it will be no big deal to have them run with the ladies. We were looking forward to it. But it turns out the steers couldn’t wait for the women to come to them. So they huddled up behind some bullberry bushes and made a plan to casually meander up the road and cross the cattlegard that has been filled in by the dust of the traffic to hook up with the hot momma’s grazing in our neighbor’s pasture on the highway. They all agreed that not only was the grass greener on the other side of the fence, but their chances of getting lucky increased by like 1,000%.
I mean, I can’t blame them. The only creature that has shown any interest in them in the past six months has been the pug, and, well, we can all agree that he’s generally confused…
what with the thinking he’s a momma cat thing and all…
Anyway, it turns out that just because a bovine is missing necessary reproductive parts does not mean his is missing any, uh…urges. And when Pops and I saddled our horses on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon to go retrieve them, we were sorely, sorely mistaken in our anticipation for a casual, laid-back ride. So much so that I let my stirrups hang a little long and my reigns a little too slack. By the time Pops and I made it to the cattlegard that was responsible for the possibility of an escape, we had settled into a comfortable ease, and so had our horses.
On the other side of the fence, just across the highway we spotted our white steer staring back at us from a black sea of cattle.He was nuzzling and sniffing and grazing close to his new-found lady friends. About 200 yards to the south one of the red guys was showing off, chasing a couple mommas around the pasture.
Figuring the other three couldn’t have strayed to far from the herd, we left White and Red to hang there while we searched for their brothers. The plan is always to get who you want together and then move them toward your destination. So we rode south around the tree row, down through our neighbor’s barnyard, in the creek bed, and back north across the highway again. We saw black cows and calves, a hawk, some oil-trucks, a few hundred birds…and no steers. Not too pleased with the outcome of our short hunt, we decided to chase the two located steers north toward home. Pops had me convinced it would be pretty easy, that they knew their way and we would just follow them up the road and put them in the corrals until we found the others.
We didn’t give much thought to the possibility that this plan had potential to turn into a shit-show. Because when two steers find themselves surrounded by 100 eligible and voluptuous women, they aren’t about to go home without a fight.
And fight they did.
The entire three miles.
After a strategic and high-speed move that separated the two steers from their girlfriends and sent them flying across the highway with Pops at their tails, I held my breath and prayed for a reprieve in traffic as Whitey veered back toward the road and toward his women before Pops cut him off from his plan and sent him through the gate of our pasture. I stayed back to close the gate as Pops continued following them toward the barnyard. I was thinking we were out of the woods, that they had been defeated and would get the hint to head toward home…pretty easy Tuesday afternoon ride. Just the right amount of excitement…
But as soon as I my head popped over the hill to discover Pops riding his sorrel at speeds we hadn’t yet hit on horses this spring to cut Whitey off as he escaped from the thick brush of the coulee and veered back toward the cattlegard of destiny, I regretted not shortening my stirrups and my reigns. This wasn’t going to be easy.
Now I’m not an expert in cattle maneuvering, and I sure as shit am not a cow-whisperer like my father, but from my experience once a couple stubborn cattle hit the brush in the middle of a roundup, you’d better cowboy-up. Because hitting the brush is a bovine’s way of giving you the middle finger. And I’ll tell you, the bovine middle finger was flying last Tuesday…
And this wouldn’t have been such a harrowing move on the steers’ part if the three miles that separates our barnyard from the neighbor’s wasn’t filled with some of the most gnarly, thick, bur infested, boggy, fallen-log-ridden brush in the county. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if the steers just walked through it and came out on the right side eventually. But that was not their plan.
Their plan involved an escape back to the south. Camouflaged by the now-budding trees and scrubby underbrush they figured they would get in the thick of it, and then when the cowboy on their trail was crossing a creek or leaning over to keep from being decapitated by a low-hanging branch they would turn on their heels and high-tail it towards the neighbor’s.
As for the girl on the paint? I guess I didn’t look too intimidating bouncing along after my Pops at high-speeds on the back of a horse that had different ideas about the situation. Ideas that included a fast trot through the trees regardless of whether there was a trail, a high jump across the creek and ignoring any signals received from her rider to stop.
Damn the stirrups.
Damn the reigns.
Damn the branch that just slapped me in the face…
And this is the way it went as I struggled and failed to keep up with Pops as he and those rebel steers weaved back and forth across 1,000 acres of land.
In one patch of brush and out the other, they zig-zagged their way toward the barnyard, the steers stopping only to hold still and try their luck at out-smarting the cowboy. But Pops is stubborn and those steers, those worthless runaways, weren’t about to get the best of him. Between tree branches snapping and black mud sloshing, I think I might have heard him wonder out loud whose idea it was to buy these damn things.
And from a quarter of a mile away I might have wondered out loud if Whitey would look good on the living room floor of the new house.
An hour and a half and seventeen brush patches later, the steers found themselves in front of the barn where Pops latched the gate and I dismounted to pick my wedgie. His horse was lathered and sweaty and I was questioning my cowgirl skills and wondering if I would get bypassed in the plan to go with him to find the rest of the small herd.We locked the steers in the corrals in front of the barn until we could get a handle on the cattlegard situation and go back for the others later on.
But it turned out that during the night those rebel steers put their heads together and conjured up another successful escape route. And when Pops got to the barnyard yesterday to saddle his horse and finish his roundup, he discovered that although those two steers lost the battle on Tuesday…
they sure as shit won the war.
My thoughts exactly…
Love. Lust. Romance. It always wins in the end.
Essential parts or, ummmm, no essential parts…
Oh, the river. So calm, so peaceful. So beautiful and serene. Take a look at this scene and you would never guess that during the first week of May the shore is filled with hundreds of rednecks, grilling bratwurst, pitching tents, sporting camouflage, making small talk and casting their fishing poles and hooks into the current on a hope that emerging from the surface will be one of the North America’s largest freshwater fish.
Husband was one of those lucky rednecks.
He pulled this from the river on Friday afternoon.
It’s a paddlefish. 74 lbs of a prehistoric, dinosaur-esque creature with fins and no scales, tiny eyeballs and a long flat nose from which it gets its name.
Husband’s smiling because he’s managed to snag one with a giant rod, reel and hook at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers where, ironically, the state’s biggest and brightest rednecks work to harvest a creature that supplies some of the best and most coveted caviar in the nation.
Who says hicks aren’t fancy.
I can say this because I’m one of them. And I am behind my camera-phone barely able to hold the thing up while my dearly beloved basks in his victory. Because I have been casting and whipping my giant fishing rod into the channel of the river for nearly three hours and I haven’t caught anything but a couple of logs, lots of sticks and my father-in-law’s boat.
Yup.
Caught that thing on the first cast.
But I was happy for husband. And so were the 20+ people down stream from him when he hollered “FISH ON!” and worked to keep the creature on the line. The other fisher men, women and kids who shared our sandbar came running toward where they saw the fish roll to the surface to assist with its capture. Two kids appeared with a gaff (a long stick with a hook on the end used to pull the giant river-dwelling creature to shore), a girl came over with her camera and muck boots, a couple older men chimed in with advice, our friend waded through the strong current to try to locate the thing and I screamed and started running toward it with my video camera fully engaged.
That’s the way it is out there during the few short weeks when these massive and strange creatures are up for catch. Sports-people from all over the region gather at the banks of the river, pitching tents, making little cities with their campers, revving the engines of their pickups, barbecuing, drinking beer and sharing fish stories. Depending on how the fish are moving fisher-people generally have less than two weeks to snag their fish before the limit is reached and the season is closed. So they move through campsites and shoot the breeze, asking about the catch-count so far, exchanging stories about the one that got away, the one that weighed almost 100 lbs, and the one their friend’s, sister’s grandmother caught yesterday up river from them…
Yup, if you happen to be down river from someone who snagged a paddlefish, their fish story becomes your fish story. Because one man cannot reel one of these creatures in on his own. It seems it takes a village of men and women in muck boots and ball caps cheering you on, offering advice, grabbing supplies, hollering, and leaning in toward the water to see what’s on the other end of the line that’s bending the pole and making the fisher-person attached to it sweat and squirm for a good five to fifteen minute fight.
If it sounds intense to catch one of these buggers, I tell you, it is.
But it doesn’t take skill.
I know because once upon a time I caught one myself. I was somewhere in-between the first verse and chorus of a Disney song as I cast that giant hook as far as I could throw it…(ahem…three feet in front of me)…into the current. I looked over my shoulder to my audience shaking their heads at me on top of the steep banks. I laughed and threw one of my arms in the air to really hit the punch line of Pocahontas’s “Just around the river bend” and just as I started in on my grand finale my hook caught something and jerked me dangerously close to the edge of the bank and ironically close to a literal image of the song I was performing. I gripped my pole and worked to regain my footing just as my brother-in-law came bounding down the riverbank to grab the back of my shirt to prevent me from becoming just another casualty of the sport.
It was the hardest I’d ever worked at the sport of fishing–a sport that usually involves me sticking my pole in the sandy banks of the river while I kick back with sunflower seeds and a brewsky and wait for the catfish to bite.
But it was exhilarating leaning back against the weight of the fish and the current of the river, reeling the beast toward shore as the party of people hanging by the river with me scrambled to help retrieve my catch with nets and gaffs and rules and superstition.
We got the fish to shore and, at 25 lbs, it wasn’t a whopper in paddlefish land, but it was the biggest fish I’ve ever caught. And ever since I stood on the banks of the river in the rain and my camouflage coat, channeling every red-neck fiber in my body as I held that fish up for the world to see, I’ve been itching to re-live that feeling.
And so have the hundreds of other fisher-people who flock to the banks of our rivers each year.
They come with their coolers and sleeping bags to hash out the game plan, meet up with friends, and re-live past year’s catches the same way we re-live my fish story every year when I meet my in-laws and friends from college and Canada at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone River at the beginning of May.
Yes, paddlefishing is a tradition for us that includes matching t-shirts, beer darts, barbecue, laughter, bad jokes and memories of each fish caught.
And this year husband gets the bragging rights as the only man in our party of twenty who actually pulled something living from that river.
Oh, it doesn’t matter if he only casted like seven times.
It doesn’t matter that me and two of my friends stood in ice-cold water up to our crotches casting and reeling in the current of the two converging rivers as the water and paddlefish floated on by for hours.
It doesn’t matter that we wanted it so bad we held our breath and made up our own superstitious chants as we pulled back our lines, visualizing, sending positive energy into the river as our bare legs turned raw in the deep mud of the river and our arms turned to noodles with each hefty cast.
We were not bitter when husband pulled that whopper of a fish right out from under our noses. Nope. We dropped our poles and went screaming toward him with cameras and hands clasped in delight.
We took his moment with him. We oooed and awwweed over the event that was to be a part of our story too. We shared our reaction: how S had jumped out of the boat and into water up to her knees when she heard husband holler. How L threw her arms in the air and grabbed her camera. How B and my father in law were convinced husband lost it when the fish didn’t reappear…
How husband stayed calm, cool and collected as I screeched and ran and jumped up and down…
How the clouds were fluffy and the sky was blue and the sun was so warm we could wear shorts and tank tops and walk around in bare feet…
How husband caught a paddlefish on his seventh cast…
and how I caught the boat on my first….
a log on my second…
the river bank on my third…
a buzz on my forth…
and fifty-seven sticks in between.
Paddlefishing.
It’s not a sport…
It’s a lifestyle.
I like it when the clouds do this.
It makes me feel like I am not so small after all, like I could reach up and pluck one out of the sky, put it on an ice cream cone and go walking through the pastures, taking licks and bites of the sweet fluff as I make my way to the hilltops.
Under clouds like this the horses get sleepy and relaxed, their ears twitching the flies away, four feet taking turns resting while the breeze blows through their manes and the sky provides intermittent sunlight and shade.
It’s a good day to be a horse and I’d like to imagine they are happy to see me as I come marching their way. They nuzzle my hand for a snack, check my pockets and sniff my hair as I bend down to take their picture.
I also imagine they think I’m strange, but they’re used to it. The woman in the plaid shirt always pointing and clicking and leaning across their backs.
But they humor me.
Between biting the tops off of new wildflowers and munching on the new green grass they lift their heads up and lean in close to pose.
To check out the camera.
And fight over the spotlight.
I like this time spent with horses. The time where I catch them in their element, but I don’t need to catch them. We don’t have work to do. I don’t have an agenda or a plan to bring them in and saddle them up. I just want to see what they’re up to scattered across the rolling landscape in their favorite grazing spot east of the corrals.
I like the way they look up there against the green and gold grass, the blue and white sky. They add something special to the painting I sometimes picture when I look out my kitchen window or through the windshield of the pickup as I come into the drive.
Is it wistfulness?
Peace?
Sentiment?
or just beauty…
I try to decide the words to describe what the sight of a horse has always done to my spirit as I scratch under the buckskin’s chin and he leans in a little closer.
But when I rub my hands down the sorrel’s back, brush the flies from under the mare’s belly and breathe in the familiar smell of dust and sunshine and grass and sky that our herd of horses keep under their skin I decide…
I may not be the best cowgirl and these might not be the best horses. We might not win buckles or keep the burs out of our manes. We might limp a bit or sport an attitude.
We may over-indulge, roll in the mud, stomp at the dogs and find holes in the fences so we can escape to the fields…so we might get away for a bit.
But we always come home.
Our home is the same.
And if I could I could be a horse I would wish for wild black hair and sound feet, a slick coat and pastures of sweet clover under blue skies filled with clouds.
If I were a horse I would want to run with these guys.
When I was ten years old Pops gave me a hard covered journal that he pulled out of the basement of his parent’s house. He retrieved it from a bookshelf and handed it to his middle daughter, the one who would scribble poems about dogs and horses and big prairie skies on notebook paper. He flipped through the blank pages of the journal, inspecting it for forgotten words, and then handed it to me. And told me to write.
I imagine the book was something my Pops picked up at a gift shop or got for Christmas from a family member, an object that could have been tossed or used for grocery lists, but instead sat stored away in that basement for years waiting for me.
I have a memory of when he handed that book over to me, one I’m not certain I didn’t make up in a dream or something. It’s a memory that is full of inspiration and imagination and possibilities. It was as if my father had handed me potential–blank pages that smelled of must and mothballs waiting for someone to write something brilliant and touching and moving.
Waiting for me to be brilliant.
I had those pages filled before my twelfth birthday with poems about the creek behind my house, rodeos, horses, wildflowers and not wanting to grow up. My handwriting was neat and loopy, slanting diagonally across the unlined pages, sentences about the colors in rainbows and wishes trailing right out of my adolescent head and down the center of the pages.
I didn’t know it at the time but that book is where my music career started. Those words I wrote turned to melodies when I picked up a guitar for the first time, practicing other people’s music, but spending most of my time creating my own. I would play with my words, ramble with the lines and phrasing for nobody’s ears but my own. And because I was the only one listening, I could say what I meant or make no sense at all.
It didn’t matter.
It was for me.
As I got older my dad convinced me to perform that music in public. And so I strummed my green guitar alongside him, a dorky, gangly girl in a Garth Brooks inspired western shirt baring her soul.
Besides my little sister who was sleeping with her door half-open across the hallway from my bedroom, my dad’s ears were always the first to hear my music.
I’m thinking about this today because I am in the middle of recording a new album. It’s an album of music I’ve been writing since I moved back to the place I grew up…back to the place where that ten-year-old tomboy scraped her knees and caught frogs and wrote it all down. I’ve done this studio thing before and I’ll tell you, it isn’t easy to introduce music that you’ve written on lazy Sundays, in the middle of the night or pulled over sitting in your car on the side of the road to a room full of musicians you respect and admire. Performing songs for the first time that only the walls and dogs have heard have been some of the most intimidating and emotional experiences in my life.
Because I believe in it. I know what I’m trying to say.
Or at least I think I do.
And when I make the decision to share it, to record it, to perform it, to get in the studio at long last, I second guess that decision about seventy to eighty times before I make the trip down the interstate with my Pops and our guitars.
See in a project like this you could work through logistics all day long. You could share ideas and swap stories and talk about music you like, your vision and who’s on board until the sun goes down.
But it comes down to one thing in the end.
The songs.
And the songs are mine. Soul-baringly mine. So eventually I’ve got to play them. It’s kinda the whole point.
So I start by plucking my guitar, closing my eyes tight and leaning in against the microphone, wondering if it’s possible to hold my breath and sing at the same time. The first note rings out and then the first verse and it’s just me exposed waiting for my father to pick up his guitar and add a rhythm, my dear and talented friend to lean over his dobro and fill in with a haunting lick, the bass to kick in a long lonesome note…the drums to find the heart beat.
And soon my song becomes their song and the room is filled with it. The guys I’ve trusted with the notes have given it a pulse and the music I wrote on my living room floor lends itself to a harmonica part, a guitar breath…a long pause.
And sometimes it happens that I’m in that studio, two days into laying down tracks about the landscape, my home, my love and maybe even a quirky song about a dog, and things are going well. I think I’ve almost made it through the hard part, if only I could skip through the song that scares me the most.
Because it’s the one that is so personal I am certain no one is going to understand. It’s the one that makes me cry big sobs before I reach the end.
The one that they are telling me to try. Just try it out.
It’s ok.
And so I take a deep breath and work to come down off a bouncy song I wrote about being happy and living in the moment.
I suppose living in the moment counts for hard stuff too, so I take my own advice…
play the notes on my guitar…and sing…
“I dreamed you on the prairie,
on mountain tops and oceans wide…”
I hear my voice waiver through my headphones but I’m ok. I decide I might get through it…until I hit the second breath and the sweet sound of my friend’s guitar part fills in the quiet spaces the exact way I have heard it in my head…if only I could play that way…
“I loved you before I met you…”
My voice cracks and it’s over before it started…but my band keeps playing, coming in with a low bass part and a quiet whisper of a drum.
So I keep singing and sniffling because the music’s just too beautiful to give in to an emotion I’ve pushed down so long that it became fed up.
I decide that if it’s time for this I might as well capture it. Isn’t this what music is about?
So the guitar lead pulls me into the chorus and I whimper the words behind the glass of my isolation booth. I wonder if the guys can see the tears streaming down my face behind the shield of the microphone…
The sound coming out of their instruments makes me feel less alone though, which touches me so deeply that more tears roll and no words come out.
But the guys keep playing, taking me through the bridge of my song as I sing it like I’m collapsing in on myself.
I close my eyes and breathe in the rhythm they have found for me as I gather myself for the ending note, the note that I squeak out but they let hang subtly and quietly in the air of the studio.
I wipe my eyes and apologize as I put down my guitar to step out of the room only to find the two men who have been the background to my music my entire life: my father and the sweet talented dobro man, with eyes red and teary too.
Supporting me.
Feeling for me.
Playing my music like it is their own.
So I’ll tell you this today as I sit in the middle of this music project and reflect on the weekend I spent lost in the music. When I moved back to the ranch as a grown woman with plans to make plans I wasn’t prepared to run into my ten-year-old self again. I wasn’t prepared to fall in love like her, to get the same flush in my cheeks, to embrace loneliness, celebrate life and morn losses the way I used to when I was so young and vulnerable and completely honest.
I didn’t expect that she would grab my hand, take me on walks, sit with me on hilltops and quietly push me to fill up some blank pages again…and then sing those songs out loud to the prairie sky.
But she did. And I open her book today and find poetry and stories that are innocent and awful and embarrassing. But I’ll tell you if I had to save something in a fire it would be that book. It has sat on my nightstand next to my lamp for nearly twenty years, a reminder of the girl who chose to fill it up with the stories about her world and everything that was inside of her.
And the only way I can think to thank her is to keep doing what she has done…
Curious about the new music coming from the red dirt roads?
Listen to me talk about life in oil country as I play my new song “Boomtown” live from my momma’s kitchen
Follow the progress of my new album at www.jessieveedermusic.com
Recording at Makoche Recording Company in downtown, Bismarck, ND
I live in a barnyard.
Literally.
I can walk out my door and, if I forget to look down, I will more than likely step in horse poop.
I can watch the steers graze from my bathroom window while I brush my teeth.
There’s more gravel and mud in my entryway than there is out in the corrals.
Somedays I think I am literally growing fur just to fit in.
But then I remember it’s been three weeks since I shaved my legs.
Civilized women shave their legs.
But what’s the point? Really? I mean I’ve been back home at the ranch nearly two years and it seems that whatever refinement I picked up while I was away living along city streets has slowly dissolved out here where the racoons help themselves to the cat food and pets show up at your door missing eyeballs.
I mean surrounded by characters like these, it’s only a matter of time until I start taking on their behavior and characteristics.
I’m afraid it’s already happening.
Because I’ve been known to show up to the hair salon or shopping mall with woodticks stuck to my head, find cockleburs in my bed and arrive at the office with horse hair on my jacket and mud on my fancy shoes. I’m afraid if I already smell like my barnyard friends, I might as well start rolling around in the grass…
chewing on sticks…
sneaking up on mice…
and howling in the kitchen….
Last night husband came home to the little ranch house in the buttes to find a woman hunched over, knees to her chest, pointing and clicking and squinting behind a giant computer screen.
He thought he heard her mumbling, so he said hello back, in case she might be attempting to greet him.
She wasn’t. She was talking to herself as she marveled at how she had somehow secured approval from herself and her dearly beloved to purchase this new machine with a screen the size of a television.
She was even more impressed she could fit it in the 3×3 cubby behind the recliner she likes to refer to as an office. But there was no time to really marvel, she had a big project and this spaceship of a computer was meant to help her accomplish this.
So there she sat with her coffee cup at 7 am learning how to scroll on a fancy mouse. At noon she opened the window when she noticed the temperature was climbing, inside & out.
She switched from coffee to Diet Coke at 1:00.
She got up to pee at 2:00.
She ate a cracker at 3:00.
But the hours between 3 and whenever her husband’s pickup pulled into the drive seemed to have slipped her mind as she got lost in photo edits, emails, music and words.
It wasn’t until her husband stepped through the door and said her name that she looked down to realize she had yet to change out of the tank top and shorts she slept in the night before.
And she couldn’t remember if she brushed her teeth, but could only assume that she skipped that essential step, as well as the hair brushing and shower and, uh, was that peanut butter on her shirt? Did she even have peanut butter today?
Does my hair really look like this?
It’s been close to two years since I moved back to the ranch with no job and a vague plan that included figuring out what it was I wanted to do here for the rest of my life. After the initial panic and a few weeks of manic cleaning and organization, I decided it would best serve me to strive to have the experiences I had as a child growing up in this wild place. I would climb the buttes, explore the coulees, ride horses, sing at the top of my lungs, spend time with my family and love with my arms wide open.
The way life was meant to be lived…
But between the mud sliding, dog chasing, berry picking, sledding, cooking, and a full on attempt at avoiding the laundry at all costs, life has found me two years later at a point where I need to say no to some things. Because it’s practical. And someone needs to make supper.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad thing. It means that I’m busy. It means that I am engaged. Sitting at the computer and losing myself in the hours actually means that I am working, and I do not take that for granted, especially these days.
But yesterday after I snapped out of my frenzy to catch a deadline that I realized no one had made for me except me, I found I was a bit disappointed in myself.
It was nearly 85 degrees on a perfectly absurd April day and I did not take a moment to really feel it on my skin. When husband got home he was giddy from a day driving with the windows open, the warm breeze pushing on his work shirt. He rushed in hoping to find a wife eager to get out in it, but instead he found her babbling to herself.
And possibly drooling.
He took one look at my outfit and the space around me cluttered with half-filled cups, napkins, papers and pencils and he high-tailed it out the door.
I think I might have heard him utter, “you’re a mess…” but I chose to believe that was a figment of my imagination.
Although it was a true statement.
I was a mess. I am a mess.
Always have been.
But those of you who have been following this little journey understand that this is not the place you go for house organization advice, but where you might land if you want to feel better about your sweeping schedule. I am not equipped to give tips on sifting flour, changing a car tire or how to make a man fall in love with you (come to think of it, following my lead with irregular grooming habits and a tendency to wander off into the hills and you might find yourself with the opposite results.) No, I can’t give you tips on parenting or how to impress at a party, unless of course your idea of breaking the ice is leading with a story about how you once got your head stuck in a ladder or how your dog peed in your husband’s boot. But if it is, and it worked, call me. I want to be in your group of friends.
Anyway, if I learned anything in the last few years about myself it’s that I’m not a real expert in anything. In the past several months I have been asked to speak at conferences, talk to students, sing and tell my story at various events. And each time I prepare for these appearances I am forced to evaluate what it is I am doing here out in the hills in the middle of my family’s history, in the middle of oil country.
And I can’t come up with anything to say except that I don’t know everything about anything and I don’t know the answer to most questions, but I know that to live a life with passion is the only way I know how to do it.
I am passionate.
Annoyingly passionate.
Like squeeze the puke out of a kitten because you love it so much passionate.
I was born this way.
Because my family’s this way.
And I blame them for the fact that I didn’t move my ass from that chair all day long yesterday because I was so engrossed in my work.
But I also blame them for the fact that my sister rolls her eyes when I point out every wildflower sprouting from the earth on a ride together or on a drive to town.
And the fact that I don’t get too worked up about her annoyance at my behavior, because she lives the same way…
Because we were raised with a father who couldn’t wait for the first warm spring day to climb to the top of a hill and find a sunny, dry spot and lay down. A man who would stop in the middle a cattle drive so he could get off his horse and retrieve a turkey feather for his daughter who collects them, or pick some wild raspberries because they are on his top ten list of favorite things in the universe.
We were loved by a mother who rarely takes a day off work, but when she does, throws the best damn party, makes the best appetizers, laughs the most and stays on the dance floor the longest.
With my parents there was never a question about who they were because I always knew what they loved.
So I’ve been compelled lately to reevaluate my situation, to make a ten-year plan, to focus my work and interests that swim out there randomly from a desire to study photography to an obsession with bright fingernail polish and all of the fluffy animals and wildflowers and music in between.
I can’t narrow it down and I just can’t give any of it up to create more space for the laundry or at least brushing my teeth.
Yet I can’t shake the feeling of being under some sort of pressure to accomplish something beyond squeezing kittens, canning vegetables, singing out loud and then telling someone about it.
And when I go to bed at night sometimes that little voice speaks to me quietly and asks me “What are you doing girl? Prepare for tomorrow. Tomorrow is coming. What are you going to do?”
I don’t know anything except to whisper back to her “Tomorrow is not certain.”
And it’s that thought that keeps me awake, that keeps me working, keeps me climbing those buttes, writing songs, making french toast for my husband on Sunday mornings and wishing for more hours in the day.
It’s that quite voice that pushes me to live for today, whatever that day has on the agenda.
And so I suppose I can’t be so hard on myself if that day requires sitting for hours in front of the computer screen, as long as what I am doing is backed in passion, I suppose I can find comfort in the fact that I am being true to myself.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 
