Tag Archives: humor

The Play

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Once upon a time there was a hired hand named Chad. He worked for a farmer and the farmer’s wife. One day the farmer was looking for Chad because he needed him to help buy a horse, but the farmer had to wake Chad up from a nap.

“Chad, wake up! I know how important naps are to you, but you need to help me buy a horse,” said the farmer when he found his hired man snoring on the couch.

So Chad woke up and set off to find a horse, only to return to the farm with a lama.

“Chad, that’s not a horse,” declared the farmer. “Take that thing back and get me a horse!”

And so, Chad took the llama back and returned with a cow.

“Chad, that’s not a horse,” declared the farmer.

“I’m a talking cow,” said the cow.

“A talking cow!! I need a horse!” yelled the farmer.

The talking cow wandered away and Chad set off to look for a horse. While he was gone, the farmer’s wife told the farmer some exciting news.

“I’m pregnant!” she yelled.  

“I brought you a horse,” said Chad, who arrived then, finally, with the correct order.

“It’s too late,” said the farmer. “You’re fired!”

One year later…

“Welcome to the Scofield ranch,” said the rancher to Chad as he reached out to shake his hand. “We only raise pigs here.”

The end.

This is the plot of the newest play that celebrated its opening night on Sunday in the basement of the Scofield house. Performed to a crowd made up of an aunt, an uncle, a mom, a dad, a grandma, a grandpa and a small dog that kept getting in the way, the laughs were big and as heartfelt as the performances by the 8-year-old birthday party sleepover guests. Costuming was done exceptionally well, with authentic clothing pulled from the bottoms of the drawers and off the entryway racks owned by an actual cowboy, rancher, and a rancher’s wife. The llama, although just a large llama-shaped pillow, was as realistic as it gets, as was the horse, played by a horse-shaped baby bouncer. But the star of the animal show truly was the talking cow, performed by a little cowgirl who would know what a cow would say if a cow could talk. It was quite an authentic performance by all.

This play was written and directed by the same troop that recently performed a piece about making noodles and crunchies on the Fourth of July in a more popular venue—the upstairs livingroom of the Scofield residence. This critic couldn’t help but notice the extra effort that went into relocating the director’s mother’s Cuisineart stand mixer into the venue and the determination put into realism by opening a brand-new bag of noodles and dumping them, along with one full cup of flour and two tablespoons of water into a bowl on the coffee table. Just the right amount of flour and water was spilled on the carpet to make the audience believe that these were indeed children cooking a complicated heritage dish for an Independence Day Celebration.

The only criticism of this first offering was the rage in which an audience member was met with after mistaking the set’s microwave for an ordinary cardboard box and choosing to toss it off the chair he planned to sit in. This was remedied in the next evening’s performance by bringing in a new chair on set in which to place the microwave, but the decision was only made after the same mistake happened again by a new member of the audience, who also received a stern scolding by the director. These small mishaps are to be expected when the cast and crew are all under the age of ten, but they did not distract from the charm one can find in a production put on by kids with the time and space to create something together. My only regret is that I wasn’t actually recording the show when I thought I was recording the show. We can only hope that we will continue to enjoy many more performances featuring authentic costuming, passionate and overbearing directors and a tiny dog that tries to steal the show for years to come.

Five stars.

Hamster Cake

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Dear Cashwise Bakery,

Please see the attached photo of my daughter’s hamster to use for her custom birthday cake order this weekend.

Sincerely,

A mom who never thought a hamster photoshoot was going to be a thing in her life

Welcome to birthday party week at the ranch. Both of our daughters turn another year older within a week of one another and this year, I’m packing both of their parties into one weekend. By the time you read this, I’ll be knee deep in parties for two daughters who are turning ten and eight, which really, in the timeline of things, is a peak time for birthday parties.

After ten years of motherhood, honestly, emailing a photo of Rosie’s pet hamster isn’t the weirdest thing I’ve done, but it’s up there with the time I found myself apologizing to the neighbor who walked into the yard to witness my oldest, a three-year-old at the time, naked and drinking from a water puddle.

“I’m glad I don’t live in town,” my eight-year-old said as we drove through Watford City the other day.

“Why’s that?” I asked, curious to hear her version of the perks of country living.

Turns out it was directly related to having the space to run naked through the sprinkler and play wild girls in the trees.

And riding horses. That was in there too.

I have to say, the eight-year-old version of me would have agreed with her wholeheartedly. And honestly, so does the middle-aged-mom version. I don’t think you’re ever too old to appreciate the sentiment around space to run wild.

And while I scratch out the birthday grocery list that includes five racks of ribs the girls requested their dad make for them and their tiny friends, I can’t help but do the thing that all moms do when facing another year—I wonder where the time has gone.

This morning, I ran into one of my high school friends, as you do when you live back in your hometown. I asked her how she was, and she said busy. And then I asked how the kids were doing, and she said it’s going too fast.

“I have a sixteen-year-old,” she reminded me. “I keep thinking, what have we been doing!? We haven’t done all the trips, all the plans I had for us! We haven’t done it all.”

To me there couldn’t have been a more relatable exclamation spoken. Could there be a more terrifying image than my oldest daughter, at sixteen, driving a car alone down the highway someday? Except that someday is only six short years away now, about the same amount of time we’ve spent procrastinating fixing that wonky, crooked board on the deck.

“I’d take a messy house over a quiet house,” another friend of mine said to me as we walked back with our Styrofoam cups full of lemonade at Turkey Bingo. She has four daughters, her youngest is now the only one at home with her for another couple years. She’s facing down an empty nest and I’m rolling out sleeping bags for little girls on the basement floor.

I think about her moment in motherhood as I hit send on the email with the hamster photo attached. My daughter helped me conduct a regular photoshoot for her pet the night before, complete with decent lighting, carrot stick bribes and my big, professional camera. Turns out getting a decent picture of a rodent is harder than it looks.

 Anyway, I suppose I could have just said no to her custom hamster cake request. Parents my age tend to feel guilt around being too indulgent. But how many years do I have left humoring these silly ideas? Isn’t that what parenting’s about in some ways? I mean, maybe I can’t take them to Disneyland, or buy her the $1,000 drone she thinks she wants for some reason, but dang it, I can get this hamster’s photo on a cake and we can invite your friends over and you can play wild girls in the trees. Now! While you’re eight and nine and ten. Hurry, drag the dirt in while you’re at it. Before it’s too late.

Kelly’s Peak

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“Summer is over!” my dad called to me from on top of his sorrel mare. I was dressed from head to toe in my fall gather clothing—long underwear, jeans, chaps, sweater, vest, coat, neckerchief, gloves and a wool cap—because this is the outfit you wear when it’s early fall and it’s early in the morning and the wind is working to blow you off at 50 miles per hour. I was riding beside him as we pushed our cows from the flat up through a rough draw next to a big, steep butte we call “Perkin’s Peak,” likely named after a family who once owned the land whose last name was Perkins, but I guess I never really asked.

Once, when I was a kid, we were moving cows in this exact spot, at this exact time of year, and neighbor Kelly was along during his ‘bull whip’ phase. Kelly lives just up the hill and down the highway a bit. His daughter is my childhood best friend, and for a good chunk of that year, whenever I would go visit, we would find him in the driveway between his barn and the house trying to crack the thing like The Man from Snowy River. Turns out learning to crack a bullwhip isn’t as easy as it looks, but he seemed to finally master it on the ground after several weeks of encouragement from his daughters. And so, of course, the next step was to take it on a ride to his neighbors’ to move cows.

And it’s not like any cowboy on the North Dakota plains really needs a bull whip for any particular reason except to be cinematic about it. And that crisp fall day, after we pushed those cows from Pederson’s, through Alton’s and across the road and onto the flat and through that draw along Perkin’s Peak toward the west pasture, over the “hyas” and the “whoops” and the “hey cows” we all hear the crack of that whip coming from the sky above us.

And you could probably guess it—neighbor Kelly couldn’t resist his own Man from Snowy River moment in time. Very quietly and unassumingly, so as not to ruin the dramatic moment for his audience, he had taken his horse up that sheer, rugged peak and from 500 feet in the saddle he cracked that whip. And then he cracked it again. And then he cracked it again against that slate blue, western sky, his neckerchief, like the fringe of his chaps, blowing in the wind.

Or something like that.

And I don’t really know how legends are made, but if the fact that we have remembered and rehashed that moment every single time we’ve passed by that peak for the last thirty years means anything, then I think neighbor Kelly might qualify. Maybe it’s time to see who I can talk to about getting the name changed to commemorate it. Maybe Kelly’s Cliff? Bull Whip Butte? I’m still workshopping it…

Yes, that day we remembered the bull whip. And then we remembered the time all those years ago when a horse disappeared from right under our other neighbor into the big ravine that no one warned him about. And then we laughed, and our fingers froze and we fixed on a water tank and an old gate and let the cows into their new pasture only to find them in with the neighbor’s cows about thirty minutes later.

Yes, summer is over but the new season and the landscape hold tight our stories and what a joy it is to hear them again against the wind. 

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.

No lizards on my table

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Have you ever stood in the kitchen and worked to untangle a lizard from your nine-year-old’s long hair while trying to remain calm in the face of company?

“It’s fine mom, he likes to hide up in there,” my daughter reassured me as I smiled nervously at my brother-in-law who had stopped in for a visit and consequently was thrust into meeting our daughters’ new pets.

“Uh, ok, but, well, he’s really tangled, I don’t want him to get hurt,” I replied as I tried gently to unwind his little scaly legs from her blonde strands without freaking us both out, the lizard and me, that is.

The rest of the people in the house? Completely unphased, especially my brother-in-law, who, along with my husband, has probably had every creature imaginable live in their childhood home at some point, including a baby skunk, a racoon, a potty-trained rabbit, snakes, birds, rats and a hand-me-down hamster named Boomer.  

Memories of Boomer have come up a lot lately as my youngest, Rosie, made plans to buy a hamster of her own with that $77.50 she earned at her lemonade stand last month. If you thought, like I hoped, that she would move on from that wish, we were all mistaken. If my youngest is anything, it’s relentless and I’m not exaggerating when I say that she has asked me about hamster shopping every day since I put that $77.50 in an envelope. And so, three thousand and forty-six inquiries later, none of us could take it anymore—Rosie was getting her hamster, which meant Edie was getting her lizard which means, along with the cats and the goats and the dogs and the frogs and the horses and the cows and the chickens over the hill, we have also become the caretakers of a rodent and a reptile and the 500 live mealworms living in the fridge.

And, in order to become those caretakers, we had to take a round-trip journey of nearly 400 miles, half of those miles spent anxiously awaiting and the other half spent anxiously hoping that I won’t have to extract an on-the-loose lizard or hamster from the bowels of my SUV. (Although, according to Rosie, a hamster could probably live a pretty good life in our car, you know, with the bounty of crumbs and all.)

“We’re suckers,” my husband whispered to me as he looked over the pet store receipt and I pushed the cart full of bedding and food and enclosure essentials across the parking lot. He had just spent the past twenty minutes interrogating the poor pet shop employee about habitat requirements, temperature regulations and, ‘per ounce to weight of the hamster’ food ratios. To which the employee replied, “we give them a scoop.”

Ok then. A scoop for Popcorn the one-eyed hamster and a pinch of mealworms for the gecko who, upon further research, looks like he will live until Edie’s grandkids have grandkids and then she can experience for herself what it’s like to say, “get the lizard off the kitchen table!”

But I’m not sure she’d mind at this rate. I walked into her room yesterday and the lizard was with her in her bed, just hanging out on her arm as she hunkered down and read a book.

Meanwhile, in Rosie’s room, she’s got Popcorn walking right into her hands when she opens the door of her cage. I’ve never seen a faster bond form between an animal and a human. She feeds that hamster right out her little fingers, piece by piece. I must admit, it’s adorable.

And we are suckers.

But no hamsters in the bed, ok?

Or on the table.

And no more lizards tangled in hair.

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.”

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…

Rain Goats

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“What are you doing?” I asked my husband in the dark of our bedroom. He had his face nearly pressed up against the screen of the open window at the head of our bed. That day in May had reached record-breaking temperatures of over 90-degrees and we soon found out that our air conditioning was on the fritz. We had just switched off the heat a few days earlier, but there we were, laying on top of the covers under the ceiling fan before spring had even officially arrived. 

“I’m counting the seconds between thunder and lightning,” he said as another loud clap shook the house, bringing only noise and not a drop of rain.

As a volunteer fireman for a rural department, he’s found himself dropping everything and rushing to the pickup to answer a neighborhood call more than ever these days. With the high winds and dry conditions and the things he’s seen go up in flames, he understands that it could be us at any time. 

Down the road my dad still doesn’t have a rain gauge. He spends his mornings checking the calving pasture and worrying about the status of our springs and the levels of our dams and grass. You can have everything out here, but you have nothing if you don’t have the rain. And if dad ever buys himself a rain gauge, he’s certain it will never rain again. I feel the same way about umbrellas.

And it turns out, maybe there is some validity to those silly superstitions. Because what came next has been over a week of soaking rain that has left us with muddy roads, rushing creeks, full dams, green grass and nearly five inches of moisture and counting. And, when I needed to run with my daughter a quarter mile through a busy parking lot in a sideways downpour to get to my niece’s graduation ceremony, of course, I didn’t have an umbrella. 

Dad, who usually relies on us for the rain report was likely a bit smug to find that the bottom fell out of our gauge this winter. Maybe that’s all it took to open the skies, the absence of rain gauges and umbrellas on the Veeder Ranch. Could we be that powerful? 

“A God send,” Dad sent me a text along with photos of water rushing through the culverts in the Pederson pasture and the creek swollen to the size of the Little Missouri River. My daughter and I sat happily soaked in our seats, our hairdos wrecked, a little shivery but smiling as we waited to watch my niece officially become a teacher that morning.  

I texted our neighbor to see how much rain they had down the road, officially turning into my father right then and there. 

A few weeks ago we brought home two little goats to feed up and get ready for the fair. On the warm days we brushed them and shined them up. On the hot day we hosed them and shampooed them.

Yesterday, after looking at the extended forecast and their soggy little bodies, we decided their shelter wasn’t going to cut it anymore as the rain and chill continues. And so my husband and I arranged a goat transfer to the big barn that sounds simple enough in theory but looks like an hour of locating and moving hog panels, an unsuccessful crash course in halter breaking, two crying goats, one who just three minutes ago, successfully outran and outwitted a mom, a dad and a kid in the pen but is now suddenly unwilling to take another step, one kid standing on the road in the rain crying, one mom yelling “It’s ok! The goats are ok!” one dad yelling “Hurry up. Come here and help us!” to the other girl who, while splashing nonchalantly in a mud puddle got her boot so completely stuck that she had to take her foot out and use both hands to pry it free, which resulted in the sort of timber into the soggy ground that you can imagine before she gathered herself to sit with those two muddy, stinky goats in the side-by-side for their mile-long trip down the road to their new digs where we set up new troughs, a water bucket and a heat lamp that, oops, broke along the way, have to go get a new one, be right back…

And while I’d prefer that this debacle doesn’t make the 4H record-keeping books, I will tell you, even in the muddiest and soggiest of the situation, we never once cursed the rain. And the goats? Well, they perked up right away in that warm and cozy barn and I stand by my assertion that I’ll happily trade fire danger for goat transfer any day. 

If you need us, we’ll be standing next to the window saying things like “I wonder how much we’ve got?” and “We needed this,” like the middle-aged, superstitious cattle (and goat?) ranchers we are…