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Trick rider or bronc rider?

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We headed to a rodeo in our town a few weeks ago. The blizzard that was forecast hadn’t fully set in yet, and so we put on our going to town boots, I curled the girls’ hair for under their cowboy hats and we all hit the not-yet-icy-road. This particular rodeo promised a set of cowboys and bucking horses that are the best in the country, and we wanted to watch one of our favorite cowboys ride. But Rosie, if you recall, declared confidently into the microphone to the entire pre-school graduation audience that she was going to be a trick rider when she grows up, so when we learned that this rodeo was bringing one in, well, nothing could have stopped us from the chance to see the brave woman in sparkly outfits flying around the arena completing death defying acts off the backs of horses on purpose. More commonly we find ourselves dragging off the side of a horse on accident around here, so we were intrigued. 

Rosie, who recently lost a couple teeth, was feeling grown up and rich and so she raided her piggy bank and declared that she put $32 whole dollars in her purse so that she could buy candy. Edie didn’t pack a cent because she didn’t want to waste her own cash, but was totally fine with her little sister offering hers, confirming that there are two types of people in this world and I’m afraid I’m Rosie.

But when it comes to watching a woman in sparkly spandex standing on top of two horses racing through five flaming torches, I’m more like Edie—holding my hands over my eyes refusing to watch. The empathy that girl possesses for what other people might possibly be enduring is borderline debilitating. Turns out it also translates to the boy dancing with the rodeo clown in front of hundreds of people without shame or reservation, dropping down to do the worm in the dirt no less. Edie watched the entire thing through the crack in her hands, embarrassed for the boy who possessed not one slight inhibition.

Oh, I love taking my daughters out in the world. I love seeing what they pick out to wear and I love fixing their hair. I love to watch them experience something new and how they hold my hand in the parking lot on the way in, skipping along. I love when they see a friend of theirs or a teacher out in the wild and the questions they ask. I love that we all belong together and they seem proud of that, sharing popcorn and sitting on our laps. I know soon enough they’ll be borrowing the pickup to go to rodeos or basketball games or dances on their own, and Rosie will be driving and Edie will be covering her eyes and I will know it and so I’ll be worrying…

Because listen, on the way home we were playing “Would you Rather,” and I asked the girls if they would rather be a bronc rider or a trick rider.

Edie said neither.

Rosie said both.

So if you need me, I’ll be planning our next outing. I think this knitting class looks like a good idea…

Let us be bored.

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Last night while I was folding laundry, my daughters wandered out into the living room on a pretend mission to escape something. Edie, my oldest, was dressed in overall-shorts with a little toy fox stuffed into her front pocket. Rosie, well, she was dressed as a granny, complete with big glasses, a bun, sensible shoes and a stick horse as a walking cane. I listened to their conversations a bit to see where the game was going, laughing to myself at Rosie’s grandma voice and her commitment to her character. When I asked her if they could stop for a minute so I could take their picture (they were so stinkin’ cute) Rosie replied, “Well, make it quick deary, my back is killin’ me!” Which tracks, I guess, for a granny.

So did the extra pair of underwear, flashlight and cardigan that Rosie packed for their pretend adventure. But what really put the whole thing over the top was when I looked to where they were playing in the kitchen to find Rosie snoring, eyes closed, standing up. Because, well, grannies get tired.

When these girls play, I tell you, they play. And it’s the best.

Because it’s their job.

When my first daughter was just a baby, I heard one of my more seasoned mom-friends say this in a conversation we were having about parenthood. In all the expectations we have laid out for our children, the schedules and the lessons and the homework and the chores, their number one priority should be to play. It’s a sentence that runs through my head when I’m feeling overwhelmed with the variety of choices for after school activities and completing extra homework, wondering now, especially as the kids are getting older, if I’m failing them by not putting them in travel basketball or hauling them to every youth rodeo in the region. It’s not how we were raised, but that was in the olden days. What are we supposed to be doing for our children now that we have access to a world full of expert and non-expert opinions?

Well, I have an opinion too I suppose, and it’s that the very best thing we can do for our children is to let them be bored.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a scheduled play date and paid-for weekly activities as much as the next mom. There’s a place for this on the schedule too. But the most fun I had as a kid arose out of no schedule at all, just an endless afternoon stretched out before me, with nothing but my imagination to fill it. But that was back before there was a choice otherwise. We had a handful of channels on TV and, gasp, we had to watch the commercial interruptions in our 30 minute after school episode of “Garfield and Friends”. Might as well just go outside and see what’s floating in the crick.

It happened fast, in less than one generation, but here we are raising kids in a world, where, if we allow it, they can be thoroughly entertained at every turn of a moment. I mean, has anyone ever found the bottom of Netflix or YouTube? Never. It’s up to us to turn it off so they can tune into that part of their little spirit that guides them toward an interest or a passion or, heck, just the opportunity to learn how to turn inward and rely on themselves in the quiet moments. More than my daughters’ basketball career or math grades, boredom is the thing I worry about failing them most.

Taylor Swift Concert…..

Now, I’m not saying that I turned into a professional fallen log fort-maker because of all the time I spent at the crick when I was a kid, but I did hone my songwriting skills singing at the top of my lungs pretending I was in a Disney movie where I had to learn to survive in the North Dakota wilderness alone. I learned that I like making up stories. And I liked performing, even if my audience was the squirrels I was terrifying and my little sister who was following a quarter mile behind me. And I learned it meant a lot to me to be there to witness every quiet turn of the season. It taught me gratitude. It taught me how to be alone and be ok with it.

Anyway, I realize I’m reflecting on this from a parenting perspective, but maybe even more importantly it’s a reminder to do the same for myself now that I’m a full-blown adult with adult responsibilities. Because in this season of life and parenting, boredom doesn’t exist. But it should. We should demand it of our lives as much as we demand anything else. I am saying that here to remind us all. If a kid’s job is to play, who said we had to take a promotion?

In a few weeks the weather will turn and I am going to put “wander the hills” on my to-do list. Because, like my daughters last night, I need the opportunity to escape in my mind once in a while. And lucky for me I was a kid in the ‘90s, so I know how to do that.

Chad and I are working to get our “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” podcast back in circulation now that the house project is a bit more under control. Until then, take a listen to an interview I did about music and ranching and motherhood while I was in Elko with “The Art Box”

Forever’s in the Saw Dust

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Us, in the olden days…

When my husband and I were freshman in college at the University of North Dakota, I used to
visit him in his small, stinky dorm room in Walsh Hall and he would make me tuna salad
sandwiches.

This seems like a silly way to start things off, but every single one of us is living in the ordinary,
everyday moments here, and February has drug on and left us with March and more routine
and I think there’s something to say here…

Recently, our little routine has been intercepted by a home remodeling project. Our plans,
homework and furniture are covered in a layer of sawdust as the girls and I help my husband
where we can between work and school, laying flooring, handing him tools, holding boards and
picking playlists heavy on the Taylor Swift. He’s been working hard to finish a project that, for
so many reasons, some in and some out of our control, has drug on through years. It’s finally
the time to wrap it up and so here we are working supper around hammers on the kitchen
table, and evening snuggles next to the table saw.

Take note of the fireplace ‘decor’

This house of ours seems to be a structure changing and growing along with our lives together.
Maybe only a poet could draw the comparison eloquently, but when it was just the two of us,
new in our marriage, it stood as a brand-new cozy cottage in this valley full of hand-me-down
furniture and the dreams we had for our lives here. I remember the first night we spent
together in this house. The waterline hadn’t been dug yet and our upstairs bedroom still had
walls to put up, so we lived downstairs in what was going to be the guest room and we just laid
there, side by side, looking up at the stars out the new window with no blinds.

Fast forward through the years and those two extra bedrooms are now home to dozens of
stuffed animals, puzzles, games, art supplies, night lights, baby dolls, twenty to twenty-five
Barbies, a couple Kens, one Christoph and their dream wardrobe/house/barn/car/camper.
When we were in the planning phases of this house, we didn’t have children and I wondered if
we would regret the staircase or the hardwood flooring if they arrived. Then my friend
reminded me that they would only be babies for a blink of an eye, and that you make your
space what it needs to be along the way. And so here we are taking that phrase quite literally,
adding an entryway to catch the mud, cow poop and the occasional bottle calf at the pass. And
we’ve added a pantry too, because out here so far from the grocery store you need to have
more on hand.


Which led us to where we are now, expanding our living and dining room so we
have more space to host gatherings and holidays, putting our bedroom back on the main floor
and turning that old bedroom loft into an office space for all the paperwork that piles up when
you find yourself smack dab in the middle of middle age.


It seems ridiculous and over the top when I lay it out here, our little cottage in its first form
would have worked perfectly fine for us through any stage. But looking back, I doubt we could
have helped ourselves given my propensity to dream and his to make things. And that’s how
we’re in what is turning out to be, after all these years, a quite beautiful sawdust covered
predicament.

Which brings me to the tuna-salad-sandwich my husband made last weekend during a break
between laying the floor and me taking the girls to 4-H. I sat at the kitchen counter and talked
with him about grocery lists and schedules and mundane things you only say out loud to
someone you’re married to because they listen in a way that’s sort of not listening and that’s
just what you need sometimes. While I chattered, he made his way around the kitchen
gathering ingredients and carefully chopping and mixing—the tuna, the celery and then the
onions, followed by the mayo, the mustard the salt and pepper and some other things I’m sure I
didn’t catch. I looked up and joked, “you sure make a big fuss over a sandwich,” to which he
replied, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.” And it was that ordinary moment
in the middle of February in the middle of marriage in the middle of our lives that flipped the
mundane to affection and then to deep gratitude.

He handed me a plate with two slice of toast, and offered, as he always does, for me to serve
myself first before he stirs in the jalapeños and I guess what I’m trying to say right now is that
sometimes we look for love and forever in heart shaped boxes when maybe the best of all of it
is hidden among the years of tuna fish sandwiches and saw dust.

That’s all. That’s all I wanted to say. If you need me I’ll be sweeping and then vacuuming and
then sweeping again…

Us, these days…

Thank you for listening

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Happy New Year from the ranch. And happy longest month of the year in North Dakota. Or is that February? I can’t remember. Winter up here sometimes is like childbirth, you forget the horrors when you’re in the middle of those beautiful June days.

I sent my daughters off to school for the first time after their break and now I’m alone with my thoughts for the first time in weeks. And so it seems like a good time to announce that my new album “Yellow Roses” is set to release everywhere on January 11th. I think it’s a proper way to ring in a new year, with new music.

The truth is, I didn’t think I had another album of original music in me. I’ve been at this since I was sixteen years old, writing songs about the people and landscape of a place and life pretty obscure to most of the world. My last original release was over eight years ago, songs written before motherhood and performed and released when I was pregnant with my first daughter.

It was a time in my life that held so much hope and promise, tangled up with no guarantees in that complicated way that hope and promise always seem to be.

And it feels like all our real life has been lived in that space between that last album and now. Between working on raising babies and cattle, we’ve faced the near loss of my dad, a job layoff, a new business endeavor, keeping a non-profit afloat and my cancer diagnosis during a pandemic and my slow recovery figuring out how to live a life with pain that just won’t let up. And we’ve put that all up against the promise to love each other forever and make sure our young kids don’t figure out too soon that life can be scary.

Pregnant with Rosie, playing “Sunshine” with Edie

I’m looking back at that list right now and am fighting the urge to delete it all. I don’t want to be the person that lists the struggles, mostly because I can’t carry on there. I prefer and thrive in the spaces in between: the slow walks to my sister’s with the kids stopping every few feet to pick up a rock or dig in the dirt, the quiet times at night laying next to my husband and telling him the funny things Rosie said, my favorite horse and teaching the girls to ride, wildflowers on the kitchen table, new calves trying their legs in the fresh green grass, watering my tomato plants, walking a cattle trail, the way the evening light hits the Blue Buttes, watching Edie catch and love all the frogs, a small stage in a small town, making you a cup of coffee while you tell me about the old days, sitting in the passenger seat of the pickup while he drives…

These spaces in between, that’s where the songs are for me. And that’s what this album is. It is a finishing up of the ideas that have been sitting in pages on the shelves for years and it’s the songs the tall grass knows that I can finally hear. It’s the retelling of old stories to a new melody. It’s the sound of kids growing up and the generations before us and the weight of the holding on. It’s the hum of April blizzards and frustration and potential of changing times. It’s the sound of Nashville players behind the words of a ranch kid all grown up now.

And so on January 11th, I hope you’ll take a listen. I hope you’ll find these songs wherever you are and I hope you find yourself in them somehow, even if it’s just in the rhythm of your toes tapping. People like me, for whatever reason, live our truest lives by telling about it. Thank you for listening.

Watch for tour dates coming in early spring, where I’ll take the songs to you.

Buy a signed “Yellow Roses” CD at www.jessieveedermusic.com today, pre-save it on Apple Music and get three of the twelve tracks right now or get the full album on January 11th wherever you get your music.

Thank you for listening.

After Christmas Poem

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Happy New Year! It’s the kids’ first day back at school after Christmas break and I’m already behind and this is why…

Two days after Christmas

We’re two days after Christmas and all through the house
Wrapping and boxes are scattered about
And slime kits and Barbies and polymer clay
Card games and dollies and Lego all day

Except when they’re science experimenting
On the table we’ve stretched out with all of its leaves
To accommodate Christmas Eve pancakes and bacon
To kick-off ten days of school vacation

Spent inside the walls of the home that we built
And outside on sleds racing down the slick hills
Or snuggled up under the blankets we found
For moments like this when we’re home safe and sound

And I’ve been interrupted writing these lines
About ten thousand eight hundred seventy times
To open a toy or be asked to explain
Directions on how to play this new board game  

But don’t ask me to check in their rooms, please take pity
I know what I’ll find and it won’t be pretty
Because I’ve left them alone to be young and create
The magic of childhood Christmastime break

So maybe they’ll clean up or maybe they’ll play
Princesses under the fort that they made
And leave it up as a place to sleep for the night
The rules, I’ve decided, don’t have to be tight

Because there’s plenty of time for them to be grown
Now is the time for their dreams to be sown
And it might drive me mad, they might make me crazy
All the glitter and mayhem flying off my sweet babies

But time, it’s a flash when the children are young
Just when I’ve got it, that phase, it is done
Goodbye to the dollies, goodbye to the slime
Goodbye to the Lego will happen in time

I tell myself this as I step on a crayon
And scrape paint off the kitchen table again
And argue my case for brushing their teeth
And rubbing their backs to lull them to sleep

Soon enough they’ll be choosing their own Christmas trees
And packing up car trunks to come home to me
Oh that is the cusp of my every ambition
That my kids, once they’re grown, will hold tight to tradition

And remember the presents? Ok, that’s just fine
But mostly I hope they remember the time
We all spent together being fully ourselves
No store in the world holds that on its shelves

Yes, two days after Christmas, the calendar says
But holds nothing of how we should spend these sweet days
So we’ll take it slow, take a break, take our time
If you need us we’re probably making more slime…

The Magic of Christmas

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Greetings from under the giant Christmas tree where Rosie and the Elf on the Shelf are laying because both got the three-day flu for Rosie’s sixth birthday and I’m feeling the impeding sense of doom that comes with knowing I’m probably next.

My husband just walked in from hauling hay in the balmy 50+ degree December weather and I know I’m supposed to feel grateful, especially this time of year, but I am also feeling a bit overwhelmed. I told him, after spending my entire morning moving between promoting a new music release, meeting a deadline and trying to decide if I should take my daughter to the doctor, that my creative energy is running low.

And I’m feeling like I’m falling a foot or two short at about everything I’m working at right now. And he said, “Well, why don’t you write about that?”

So then, because I was in an honest mood, I confessed that two nights ago I might have wrecked the spirit of Christmas for our oldest when she caught me scrolling through “Elf on the Shelf Ideas for Parents” on my Pinterest feed.

“Mom,” she piped up timidly, surprising me in the quiet. “Does the elf move itself or is it the parents?”

Oh no…oh no…oh no.

“What do you think?” I asked softly.

“Well, I saw what you were looking at on your phone. Now I think it’s the parents.”

Oh no again.

In my defense I thought the child was already asleep while I scrolled and snuggled in the dark of her room. And also I forget that she can read now. She is eight but I forget that sometimes too. Because it all goes so fast and in my mind she’s still three and pudgy and twirling in that oversized quilted blue dress she wouldn’t take off for a year.

Eight? Is that an age where a kid might stop believing? She has been skeptical of this Christmas magic Santa thing since she could express it. She’s a practical kid and the details of a man who delivers presents to every child in the world in a flying sleigh pulled by an animal that doesn’t even fly in real life just doesn’t line up with the things she’s come to know about how the world works. And so that’s why we told her that to believe is part of the magic.

And so that’s what I told her the night I got caught planning that felt elf’s next move. I told her I think she could still choose to believe. And then I added something stupid trying to explain the Pinterest feed, like the pictures were of other families’ elves that moms share for fun. And the kid, bless her, I think she just pretended to buy it.

Now that I think of it, it was the same way I pretended to buy it was I was about her age, old enough to know better, but aware of what it meant to choose reality over magic. To me it seemed too close to the fire of adulthood, and I was still young enough to know I wasn’t ready for that yet.

So that night I tiptoed out of Edie’s room and moved the elf to the windowsill, wrapped her in a little washcloth and propped her up against a bottle of cough syrup in solidarity with the youngest member of the family who hadn’t lifted her head off the couch for 24 hours.

On the long list of things to worry about, the idea that my oldest daughter might become wise and ruin the magic for our youngest didn’t occur to me until it was time to locate that sickly little elf in the morning. But Edie woke up surprised and happy to see the elf and Rosie was still sick and I had a deadline and appointments to reschedule so I could stay home and care for her, and my husband had a calf to find and hay to haul and Edie had a computer test she was worried about and it was just another day in reality, the way the days come at all of us regardless of the season, the traditions or the size of your Christmas tree. Except on Christmas especially, it’s nice to have a little magic help us along. Hopefully that magic is currently working as a disinfectant…

Stay healthy out there!

Listen to the new single “Whiskey in the Winter. New full length album out everywhere January 11!

Oh, Christmas Tree

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Thanksgiving weekend we completed the great Christmas Tree hunt tradition at the ranch. Nature melted the snow away but held on to its cold and wind and so we thought we better get out in the hills before we needed to borrow the neighbor’s snowmobile. So we bundled up the troops and headed out to a spot in the home pasture where we spotted a cedar we thought might work on one of our rides this fall.

It didn’t take long to find it again out there stretching toward the sky among the scrub brush and thistle, the bottom three feet of its trunk rubbed bare by the deer.

Now I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a potential Christmas tree out in the wild is not the same size as a potential Christmas tree in the house. My daughters, standing under the boughs of the 12-foot tree standing in its natural habitat declared the tree “tiny” before helping running up a tall butte after their cousins and sliding down on their butts.

I’ve been in this same situation for years now, so I knew to save my argument about it being too big to fit in the door. And I didn’t say a thing about how it will take up our entire living room. And not a word was spoken about how we need to work on getting the house addition done just to display this tree. It’s not worth it and it doesn’t matter to my husband anyway. If he thinks the tree will fit the tree will fit.

And so, with the help of my dad and the tarp straps that my husband always magically seems to have in every nook and cranny of every vehicle and every pocket of every jacket he’s ever owned, we strapped the world’s-most-perfect-Christmas-Tree on to the back (and top) of our ATV and puttered on home to the house where we nearly pulled the front door off its hinges dragging it into the entryway to thaw out.

But, alas, the hinges stayed put and the neighborhood (a.k.a my parents and my little sister’s family) filed in a few minutes later to get in on the spectacle of getting that thing through the house, propped up in the tree stand and screwed to the wall without any of us, tree included, losing any limbs.

And yes, you heard it right, after all these years as adults who cut wild Christmas trees from the wild prairies, and one year where the tree nearly took out my oldest daughter while she spun innocently in her Elsa dress in the living room, we have learned to skip past the hazard and just screw the tree to the wall right away. 

Is it weird that our giant Christmas tree ritual has become a spectator sport for the rest of my family, complete with bloody marys and snacks? I don’t know what’s normal anymore.

At any rate, the tree is up and it smells beautiful, the way a cedar tree should and not like wild cat pee like that one unfortunate year we only speak of when we have the tree thawed out inside and can guarantee it hasn’t happened again. These types of issues don’t occur with the plastic tree sane people take out of storage year after year says my mother over her first sip of bloody mary. Since her kids have been out of the house for years, she’s been basking in the Martha Stewart Magazine tree that she’s always wanted. Tinsel, coyote pee and abandoned bird nest not welcome.

Also, kittens. Kittens are not welcome, which is a problem because we happen to have one and that was stupid timing and also another good reason to put a few more screws in the boards connected the tree trunk to the wall.

Anyway, Merry Christmas. I hope your traditions are bringing you as much joy as they are hassle. If you need me I’ll be looking for that dang elf…

November at the Ranch

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November is a busy month at the ranch. Not only are we getting ready for the impending (or continuing) winter, but November is the month for roundup, working and checking our cattle and selling our calves. It’s one of my favorite times of the year because it’s one of the rare times that I allow myself to drop everything and focus on the ranch.

One of my jobs is to make sure that the people (who also drop everything to help) get fed. And that there is hot coffee and cookies out in the pens so we all have an excuse to take a few minutes to break between tasks. This is about as important to me as anything because it forces a slowdown during a moment in time that makes everyone who owns these cattle a little anxious. Because a day like shipping day is the culmination of all the work the family has put into caring for these animals–rolling out hay in the winter, fixing water tanks and fences in the spring, watching for and tending to trouble during calving season and keeping them on the best grass in the summer, free of hoof rot and pink eye.

This year we lucked out with a couple nice weather days where you could only see your breath until about noon and then we could take off a layer or two. My sister and I keep our daughters   home from school on the day we ship and sell calves so they can be a part of the grand finale. They ride along to the sale barn with a bag full of coloring sheets and snacks to sit next to Papa and our old neighbor and watch our calves go through the ring. I wonder what they’ll remember more, the sale or eating the pizza buffet and playing in the arcade in the big town after?

Unfortunately, for Rosie and everyone around her who she scared to death, it will be falling off her pony during roundup, an unpredictable incident that left me questioning all my parenting decisions. Things like this don’t happen to kids who live in the suburbs. And kids in the suburbs don’t go to the arcade smelling like the sale barn.

Maybe all we’re doing when we bring them along is solidifying the idea that marrying or becoming a professional YouTuber or a computer programmer is a safer life choice. Because is there a YouTuber or computer programmer in the history of the world who makes small talk with the community vet for two hours while he puts his arm down the backside of 120-some cattle to confirm they’re bred and then invites him over for lunch only to discover that your new kitten has somehow got herself stuck INSIDE THE WALLS OF YOUR HOUSE!!!??

Not a good look for that specific house guest.

But seriously. Anyone ever had to cut open a wall in your house to retrieve a live animal? I don’t want to admit this, but in the history of my life on this ranch, it wasn’t the first time.

Turns out that kitten was just after the dead, rotting mouse that had somehow also discovered the secret wall portal. When I tell you that feline stunk, I cannot stress it enough. And when I tell you that squirmy little barn cats don’t like baths, I also, cannot stress it enough.  

Yes, life on the ranch is messy and volatile and this time of year can make us as grateful for it as we are anxious about it. Because we can control the calf market about as much as we can control the weather and that pony trotting across the field with his reigns dragging…

What are we doing here? Well, all I can say is we’re doing our best, and learning plenty of lessons along the way.

Next up? December and keeping that kitten off the Christmas tree.

What’s in an hour

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I remember when moving the clocks back meant moving the hand on an actual clock. I look around my house and I realize I don’t have an actual clock anywhere. Our clocks blink blue numbers on stove tops and microwaves, on telephones and digital temperature gauges and cellphones, computers and iPads that are smarter than us. They don’t need a human hand to remind them to change, they already know.

They do the same when we cross the river into Mountain time, switching swiftly and we gain an hour. Switching back and we’ve lost it.

I’ve spent that last few days looking at those clocks, the one on my phone and the one on the stove I haven’t managed to change yet, and saying ridiculous things like:

“What time is it really?”

“So, it’s 9 o’clock but it’s really 10 ‘o’clock?”

“It’s 6 am but it’s really 7 am?”

“Man, it gets dark early.”

“Man I am tired.”

“Man, I miss that extra hour of light at the end of the day.”

But what’s in an hour anyway? It’s not as if the changing of the clock changes time. There are still 24 hours in the day and the sun still does what it will do up here where the earth is stripping down and getting ready for winter.

Daylight Savings Time, moving the clocks, adjusting the time, is just a human’s way to control things a bit. Moving time forward in the spring months means daylight until nearly 11 pm. Moving the clocks backwards in the fall means we drive to work in the light and get home in the dark.

It means a 5 pm sunset and a carb-loaded dinner at 6. It means more conversation against the dark of the windows, more time to plan for the things we might get done on the weekends in the light.

It means I went to bed last night at 9 o’clock and said something ridiculous like “It’s really 10.”

But it wasn’t. It was 9.

Because we’ve changed things. (Although I still haven’t changed that stove top clock).

I lay there under the covers and thought about 24 hours in a day.

10 hours of early-November daylight.

If I closed my eyes now, I thought, I would get 8 good hours of sleep.

I wondered about that hour and what I could do with 60 more minutes. A 25 hour day? What would it mean?

Would it mean we could all slow down, take a few more minutes for the things we rush through as we move into the next hour?

Five more minutes to linger in bed, to wake each other up with sweet words and kisses, to talk about the day and when we’ll meet back at the house again.

Three more minutes to stir cream into our coffees, take a sip and stand in front of the window and watch the sun creep in. A couple seconds to say, “What a sight, what a world, what a morning…”

An extra moment or two for the dogs and the cats, for a head pat or a scratch to go along with breakfast.

Four more minutes in the shower to rinse away the night.

Two more moments to brush my daughters’ long hair, to make it style just right while they wipe the night from their sleepy eyes..

Six more minutes on my drive to town singing with them while trailing a big rig without cussing or complaint. What’s six more minutes to me now?

Fifteen more minutes for lunch with a friend, a friend I could call for lunch because I have sixty more minutes now and the work can wait.

Five minutes more for a stranger on the street who asks for directions to a restaurant and then I ask her where she’s from and she makes a joke about the weather and we laugh together, a little less like strangers then.

Then, when I get home, eight more minutes on my walk to the top of the hill, to go a little further maybe just sit on that rock up there and watch it get darker.

Four extra minutes to spice up the supper roast or stir and taste the soup.

One more minute to hold on to that welcome home hug.

Three more minutes to eat, for another biscuit, to listen to a story about their day.

And four more minutes to say goodnight. To lay there under the blankets again, under the roof, under the stars that appeared and to say thankful prayers for the extra time.

So what’s in an hour really? Moments spent breathing and thinking and learning. Words spilling out that you should have said, or should have kept, or that really don’t matter, it’s just talking.

Sips on hot coffee cooling fast.

Frustration at dust while you wipe it away, songs hummed while scrubbing the dishes or washing your hair.

Broken nails, tracked in mud, a decision to wear your best dress tonight.

Laughter and sighing and tapping your fingers on your desk while you wait.

Line-standing, hand-shaking and smooches on friends’ babies as you pass at the grocery store.

Big plans to build things. Small plans for tomorrow.  

It’s not much, but the moments are ours to pass. And those moments, they move on regardless of the clock and the hour in which it’s ticking.

Although not many people have clocks that tick anymore. I suppose that’s just one of the many things time can change…

Why do we live here?

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Winter field.jpg
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Well, winter arrived here in full force, and I got to be one of the first to welcome it as I packed the kids into the SUV to drive 40 mph for 30 miles through sideways-falling snowflakes and atop icy, snow-covered roads while cussing under my breath. It’s not like I was surprised, I expected it. It comes every year.

And it turns out the first blizzard of the season fell on “Hawaii” day at school. And if stuffing the tropical dresses and plastic leis under winter coats and snowpants that are too small because you’ve been in winter denial and haven’t gone snowpants shopping doesn’t scream North Dakota kids, then come and see how we dress for Halloween. When it’s cold enough I don’t have to convince my daughters that cheerleaders and fairy princesses wear snowsuits, too.

It’s days like these, I understand why there are towns and why so many people live in them. 

My 7-year-old daughter and I have been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “The Long Winter” before bed every night, and you know what? Even that beloved homesteading family moved to town in October. They figured it might be the right thing to do when Pa and Laura had to free cattle with their noses frozen to the ground after a fall blizzard. Figuring they could be next, they packed up for their version of civilization.

Why do we live up here? If you asked me last week while I was riding horseback with my family through trees lit by the golden autumn sun, I would have answered with a love song. Ask me today, and it’s a threatening breakup song.

But it’s only a threat. We’re stuck here come hell or high snowbank.

Anyway, this morning while I was plowing through the dark space-scape of blinding snow trying to stay between the invisible lines on my way to get the kids to school before the last bell, I was reminded of an epic winter school bus ride I had when I was in third or fourth grade. It was over 30 years ago now, so I figure the statute of limitations is up. And plus, it was the ’90s.

Once upon a time, I was an elementary school kid who went to a country school only 15 miles from the ranch. Every morning, I rode the school bus with about 10 of the neighbor kids, our house being the first to pick up and the last to drop off, which is the same as our parents saying, “I walked to school five miles uphill both ways,” but I digress. 

This particular morning was especially brutal. I think it was early spring or late fall, one of those times when the winter weather still surprises you. Our bus driver, as seasoned as he was, was struggling to navigate his route on roads completely slick with ice. But he diligently made his rounds, nice and steady and slow, to finally arrive at the last house at the bottom of the final long stretch of hill with only a half-mile to the school to go, only to find that he couldn’t get the bus to move another inch.

After several failed attempts at backing the bus up and taking a run at that big, icy hill with all 10 kids breathing down his neck and sending prayers up to the almighty for miraculous traction, something inside him shifted and he made a decision that, if it worked out, would be regarded as a ranch-y type of heroic that would be recorded in infamy in the Bus Driver Hall of Fame.

Turns out the move did become infamous, but only because no other bus driver in the entire history of the universe would have decided to take his attempt to cross the ditch and then rev the bus into the stubble field where he figured he could get more of that almighty traction. And so off he went, us 10 praying kids now wide-eyed and bouncing around and up and off our seats while our gallant driver slammed the pedal to the metal to keep the vehicle in motion past one tree row and on to the other before Little Yellow School Bus #25 finally sunk into the snow up to its floorboards a quarter of a mile off the highway.

It was silent then as we all took inventory of our new situation. Our bus driver reached for his CB. “Breaker, breaker, ‘Operation Go, Go Gadget snow tracks’ failed us.”

That SOS call would result in my very first ride in a four-wheel-drive SUV when an area superhero mom came down that icy hill to the rescue. I can only imagine what she was thinking as she spotted that bus, bright and yellow and stuck out of place in a white and gold sea of winter stubble field, all 10 of us kids trudging, with backpacks, snowsuits and confused looks through the snow to pile in the back hatch of that 1993 Chevy suburban, a shiny new beacon of hope that we’d make it to school at last.

Making it home would be another story, which is what I’m thinking now, a mom with my own four-wheel-drive SUV, watching the snow drift another inch outside the door.

If you need me, I’ll be checking the radar and ordering the girls snowpants that fit. Because winter’s here, just like it comes every year.