Tag Archives: humor

A city girl would never…

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“There’s always a price,” my little sister chirped from the passenger seat of my SUV. Sweat was dripping down her face and soaking her body, which was covered in sand in every conceivable and inconceivable area. She looked at me laughing the sort of laugh you laugh when you want to cry and then laughed harder when she realized that however bad the sweaty, sandblasted look was on her, it was worse on me.

It was a Wednesday afternoon in late July, the temperature reading on the dash said 104 and the decision the two of us made to play hooky from the rest of our responsibilities backfired in the way that was funny and sort of harmless, but also has you questioning why you didn’t pick the suburbs.

“City girls would never!” our friend said as she was lugging a cooler, swim bag, a floatie we couldn’t deflate, a heavy denim blanket and two lawn chairs (one she couldn’t figure out how to collapse)  a quarter of a mile through rocks and sand, a trail of reeds and black biting flies in the middle of a wind storm that was blasting our bodies with sand in 100 + temps  with 1000% humidity, because a storm was coming, of course, but not the kind that comes with rain to cool you off.

The thing is, once we get to the end of July everyone in the upper Midwest starts panicking a bit about summer being over, visualizing the seventeen months of winter that are ahead of us. And because we were in the middle of a relentless heat wave I suggested that instead of shirking our responsibilities to hit the public pool, we should try for the beach on Lake Sakakawea thirty miles north of town because we hadn’t been to the big lake yet this year and you have to go to the big lake at least once or it’s not a summer. So, I packed a swim bag and a big cooler full of drinks, some snacks and sandwiches, towels, beach chairs, floaties, a worthless air pump and our puppy and swung by to grab my sister and her daughters, who all packed the same things (minus the puppy). And along the way a friend called to see if we wanted to join her at the pool and somehow we convinced her that lugging all of the stuff I just mentioned, plus five girls, a half mile from the car to the beach in 104 degrees was a better idea. She said she’d meet us there in a jiff.

Now in case you’re reading this and you’re picturing a lake situation where you drive right into a nice paved parking lot facing a groomed public beach with those little barricade buoys marking out a safe swim zone complete with restrooms, garbage cans and a shower, this is not the case here. This beach, in our childhood, used to be a two track trail off a gravel road with a flat spot on the prairie for parking and a skinny, sandy walking trail through the weeds that leads down to the water, which, depending on how high the lake is that summer, can be quite a hike. These days they’ve made it a little more accessible, with a nice road and a groomed parking area, but it’s still pretty rustic and that’s why we love it.  In my memory though, the hike wasn’t so cumbersome, but that’s probably because I’m reaching back from when I was a teenager, ripping off my clothes and running for the shore after my shift at the clothing store in town. Now, we are moms with four young girls between us, two who had to poop immediately upon arrival in that little makeshift parking lot. “No worries,” I said, “I forgot ice. We will just head to the marina store and take care of it.” So back we went, about three miles, to the marina store only to find that the marina store is closed on Wednesdays and so are the bathrooms. Knowing we could live without ice, I remembered the vault toilets that existed in the campground and headed there for what was the world’s stinky-est sauna experience.  With that task done, we were on our way to cool off, no thanks to the luke-warm beverages in the cooler I discovered was way too heavy to drag to the beach anyway. And also no thanks to the crappy portable air compressor that we packed that couldn’t inflate a balloon in forty minutes, let alone four big floaties. I grabbed the puppy, a pool ring and the inflatable banana the girls couldn’t live without, along with all the other essentials, but not the cooler, and we finally headed toward the beach to plop our lawn chairs in the water and watch the girls swim while we sipped on the cold beverages our friend brought in her reasonably-sized cooler which she remembered to stock with ice. And it was fun. The water was cool. The views were pretty. The puppy dug a hole under our umbrella and sat in the shade. The girls ran up and down the beach collecting rocks and sticks to float. I spent twenty minutes blowing up the pool ring and my sister spent fifteen blowing up the banana. I spit sunflower seeds into the sand between dips in the water and we gabbed, enjoying being girls on the beach for a good hour and a half, until…

The wind started to pick up, blowing the little umbrella where the puppy sat across the shore. I got up to chase it (and the puppy), looked down the beach and saw a wall of sand heading right for us. Oh. No. I turned to watch the girls chasing the run-away banana floatie deeper into the lake. “Leave it!!!!” I yelled as I grabbed the pup. “Come back to shore!” My little sister went in after them, carrying the half-inflated pool ring like her life depended on it. Our friend started frantically gathering all the things we lugged down to the shore while the sand whipped at our squinty eyes and stung our sweaty skin. Our daughters tried to help, following behind us dragging whatever item their little bodies could carry, trying not to blow away while shlepping through the sand and swatting the black flies, all of us puffing and sweating and whining up the hill and to the car. My sister, still clinging to that pool ring (trying to compensate for the lost banana I guess,) arrived at the car behind me and declared that while I survived two bouts of cancer, if she died carrying a cooler, chair, kid and pool ring through that sand storm in 104 degrees it would have been an embarrassing obituary. She was close. And then we proceeded to frantically throw every single thing, plus the soggy, itchy kids, puppy, and the forty-five pounds of sand that came with it in the back of my SUV and peeled out of the there so fast that I didn’t realize the back hatch was wide open until a mile or two down the gravel road.

“Next time we’ll just go to the pool,” we all laughed, only half meaning it, because a country girl would never… 

A gecko at the county fair

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So, Edie showed her lizard at the county fair. 

I think this might be something worth telling you all about because a county fair of our modest size doesn’t get many leopard gecko entries. Rabbits, chickens and an occasional duck or turkey usually round out the small animal category, but we’re in the business of pushing it a bit, and so there we were at 7 am loading the trailer with a goat named Beef and another named Noodles and a visibly annoyed Tango the lizard and his cozy terrarium in the back of my SUV to get to town for the show. 

When we made this sort of reptile commitment, it was a month or so before the big event and we thought it would be fun to bring Edie’s pet into town and show it off as an exhibit. Not having a history of showing small animals at the fair, I thought that the judging process would look like a visit to the cage to interview about the proper care and feeding of a lizard, and maybe a chance to take him out quickly to show him off, and that would be it. 

I was wrong, as you can imagine. Turns out, I am wrong plenty when it comes to 4-H. 

Because showing a lizard at the fair also means filling out paperwork that includes a pet portrait, pet raising highs and lows, a feeding schedule, a cost analysis and future goals for you and your pet lizard. (Turns out it costs $8 a month to keep a lizard alive.) 

Question: What do you hope to gain from this project? 
Can keeping him alive be an answer? 

No. When Edie was interviewed about her record book that morning after she’d discussed her Lego set, ceramic and the jeans she painted for her birthday, she said she hoped to learn all she could learn about leopard geckos. Which was a cute and responsible answer, one that helped her win a blue ribbon for her bookkeeping and reptile knowledge. So that was cute and, most importantly, done.

We set the glass terrarium up on a back table in the barn next to a beam where we could hang Tango’s heat lamp. That little scaly lizard looked a bit out of place among the big, beautiful bunnies munching hay in their cages. I told Edie to throw him some worms while we figured out what was next for the guy. And let me tell you when I realized that what came next was her holding that little lizard in her hands in line between a bunny and a little chicken in the show ring, I about had a heart attack. 

“You mean she actually SHOWS it?” I panicked to my husband. “Like, set it on the little carpet in front of the judge SHOWS it?” 

“Appears so,” he replied after asking around to the fellow 4-H moms, one who had a similar experience with her son and a bearded dragon a few years back. 

“I don’t know if I want to do this,” Edie whispered to her dad while I was off somewhere declaring my own discomfort to anyone who would listen. “Nobody shows lizards here.” 

And with that my husband pulled out all the ways in which being the girl with a lizard at the fair is going to give her street cred and her attitude shifted as she pulled her pet from his cage and cupped it in her hands.

“Are you sure you don’t want to bring him out to the ring in his cage?” I asked, envisioning a scenario in which the lizard leaps from the carpet and off the table and into a ring covered in wood chips never to be seen again.

“No, I got it mom,” my daughter replied confidently. 

“Ok, I could get a little box,” I tried again, wondering if domestic chickens have a taste for gecko.

“Mommmmaaa, I. Got. It.” 

And with that my daughter was off in her little green 4-H shirt and ponytail, placing her pet reptile on the carpet, keeping him safe, and telling the judge all about it with a big smile. 

In fact, everyone watching that judge try to figure out how to place three bunnies, a chicken and a lizard in the pet showmanship category was grinning as big as Edie that afternoon. What a funny little display and such a testament to what it means to be at a small-town county fair. 

“It was a tough job,” the judge declared on the microphone. “A rabbit, a chicken and a gecko don’t have much in common, but it came down to how confident and knowledgeable each kid was about their animal today. I give this boy with the rabbit on the end here a grand and the lizard comes in with reserved.” 

Well, that make me unclench my jaw a bit to grab my own smile as I watched Edie shake the judge’s hand and walk out of the arena with that lizard unscathed and her head held high. It clenched right up again at the gate when she and that lizard were swarmed by every little 4-Her that could get close. 

“Is that a lizard?”  “You’re the lizard girl!” “Can I hold him?” “What’s his name?” “Will he bite me?” “How old is he?” and on and on it went, the girl and her gecko like rock stars all the way back to the cage, where Tango got an extra worm and a chance to hide. Turns out the only spotlight he likes is a heat light. But in that moment, Tango made Edie a brave, 4-H star. I couldn’t have been more proud. 

And that is what you get when you take a lizard to the county fair. 

Hamster search and rescue

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“Mom, uh, I need your help,” a little voice chirped from the living room.

I was sitting at my computer at the corner of the kitchen counter, my perch and work desk for when one of the kids is home sick, which was the case today. Rosie had a suspicious runny eye that required antibiotics, so we thought best to keep the infection quarantined at home, but otherwise, she felt perfectly fine, which was a problem. Because the girl was bored.

Rosie is the second born and doesn’t do solo playing very well and so after she was done bouncing the basketball all through the house, and then the football, she decided to go get her hamster for a little snuggle on the couch while she watched a show. I had forgotten about the un-caged rodent, and apparently so had she, until she felt it maneuver out of her hand and watched his little nub of a tail disappear into the cracks of the couch.

“What do you need?” I asked, barely looking up from my laptop.

“Uh, my hamster’s, uh, in the couch.”

I popped up, panicked.

“What do you MEAN he’s in the couch?” I responded as calmly as a mom possibly could when presented with the possibility of yet another missing hamster situation.

“I mean, I was holding him and then, well, I think he’s in the cushions…”

Slowly and surely, I removed the cushions from the couch, while directing Rosie to stand by, hoping to the rodent gods that Rocket would just be waiting in the corner to be rescued.

He wasn’t.

But do you know what was waiting for us under those couch cushions? Sixty hair ties, a half-eaten sucker, twenty-seven candy wrappers, a bouncy ball, a squishy frog, a half a cookie, a million crumbs, a couple coloring pages and a partridge in a pear tree. If the hamster was indeed loose, at least he could come back to the couch to for supplies and a buffet.

“Rosie, start searching everywhere!” I declared as I ran my hands along the edges of the couch searching for any cracks he might have descended into before tilting the piece of furniture on its side.

“Oh noooo!!!! I can’t do this again!!! I should have gotten a lizard,” my daughter wailed.

Turns out our couch is sealed up on the bottom and so there was still hope that Rocket was contained. I was in the process of tilting the couch on its side when my husband returned from chores and assessed the scene. I’ve never been so happy to see another adult, honestly.  And I swear, he didn’t say a word about any of it, because that’s his superpower—to keep the judgement of his family’s actions locked up for eternity so he can focus all his energy on problem-solving. I put my ear up to the couch to listen for signs of life. My husband got down on his hands and knees in the under-the-couch rubble and shined the flashlight through the semi-transparent mesh stapled on to the bottom of the couch. Rosie held her hands to her chest and whimpered “Oh, not again. Please, not again.”  I poked my right eye through the crack next to the arm rest and spotted the bandit.

“Get the carrots!” I whispered to her. “He’s hiding behind the arm, I think we can lure him out.”

Chad whipped out his multi-tool-plier, clearly made for emergencies exactly like this one, and started pulling the staples securing the mesh from the edges under the couch, I stood guard on the back side and, after one failed attempt, Rocket was returned via carrot sticks back into Rosie’s little hands.

“I think I’ll put him back now,” she declared with relief.

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” I agreed.

And that’s just one way a day can be derailed around here. I swear, between the cows and horses, the lizard, dogs and cats, I think the hamster even has the goats beat in the drama department.

If you need me, I’ll be cleaning under all the furniture because, apparently my superpower isn’t keeping up with the vacuuming.

Basketball Season

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January is settling in in rural North Dakota and my husband and I have found ourselves in a new season of our lives–and that season is called basketball.

Now anyone who grew up in a Class B school is familiar with the amount of passion a little town can put into their sports teams. And while Watford City has grown out of their Class B status, when it comes to who chooses to sit in the stands game after game, I would say the passion is still there.

4th Grade Girls hanging with the Varsity team last week

Our daughters started practicing for the first time with a little travel ball team in December. My husband picked up a hand-me-down basketball hoop for the driveway this fall in anticipation for this turn of athletic events, and we spent a fair number of evenings teaching the girls to dribble and competing in games of Lightning and PIG. When I was a kid in the summer this was a regular after-supper activity and so it’s bringing back some fun memories of shooting hoops with my little sister and my dad on our driveway—the only paved spot on the 3,000 acres.

In the fall my sister and I were taking a walk down the creek behind our childhood home with our daughters. We were admiring the changing leaves and watching our kids float sticks down the trickling stream when we came across a faded and severely deflated basketball about a half mile away from the house.

“I guess this is what happened to the ones we couldn’t get to,” my sister laughed, remembering the way that the hoop was positioned meant that every single air ball you threw was guaranteed to roll through a barbed wire fence into a gnarly patch of burdock, down the steep hill of the coulee and, if you didn’t make it in time (you never made it in time) land, splash, in the creek.

Oh, it made a good shot out of my little sister, who was the athlete of the family. Competitive by nature, basketball was her sport. So much so that I was able to watch her play in the state tournament in the big town next to my mother who was dressed head-to-toe in Wolves gear, complete with a cow bell and face paint. I would have laughed at her enthusiasm if I wasn’t siting there right next to her with an “Alex’s Sister” t-shirt and a temporary wolf paw tattoo on my face. So I guess I should have seen it all coming…

Last week our two daughters and my niece played in a huge tournament in our hometown. Over 80 teams participated in games over the course of two days, which meant that, counting parents, siblings and a smattering of extended family, there were probably like seventy-thousand fans in the building, all emotionally invested in every point, steal, pivot and play these elementary school kids were pulling out on the court.

The me that existed before motherhood, the one who didn’t understand that having children changes your DNA or something, would have been surprised to witness the back-and-forth commentary that went on between my husband and I as we stood between the courts trying to watch both kids play at the same time. As if a choir girl and a former wrestler had anything constructive to say about playing defense. At one point my husband had to stop me from just yelling “Hey! Hey! Hey” over and over at Edie, because I was nervous and I didn’t even realize I was even yelling anything at all.

What. Has. Happened. To. Me…

“The heart-rate-spike a mom gets watching her kids play sports equals a full workout.” My friend sent this to me after she too had spent that day in the gym going through the physical and emotional turmoil that is being a parent of a kid that plays elementary school sports.

“So that’s why I had to lay down on the heating pad when I got home,” I responded.

And let me be clear here, I’m not advocating for the yelling. Nothing good comes from sideline instructions from an over-anxious parent. But being there to witness the big beaming faces of our daughters’ looking into the crowd for us after making a basket or stealing the ball, well, that’s where the cheering comes in. And I’m a big promoter of that part. Apparently, it’s part of my DNA now.

Anyway, If you need me, I’ll be in some bleachers somewhere. You’ll probably hear me…

‘Tis the Season for Christmas Songs (Even the Traumatic Ones)

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WATFORD CITY, N.D. — For the past few weeks, I’ve been turning on the Christmas music for our drive to and from town with our daughters. ’Tis the season, of course, and also, we were looking for just the right song to sing together at church on Christmas Eve.

These girls of mine are tough DJs and make quick judgments about whether a song is worth a complete listen. I know, typically, what is going to land well with them at this point.

Rosie likes a little rock and R&B, and Edie loves a female powerhouse voice, preferably one singing about keying her ex’s car or (gasp!) offing him entirely. Maybe I would be more concerned about it if I wasn’t singing along at the top of my lungs to Reba’s “Fancy” and The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” at her age like these songs weren’t about the darkest of female experiences. Turns out “Goodbye Earl” transcends generations as one of Edie’s top 10 go-to car ride requests.

Knowing this, I thought I would be safe to have a little fun with our Christmas song mix this morning, so I cranked it when “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” came up on the stream. “Have you heard this one?” I asked, looking back at them from the rearview mirror.

“Oh, my dad loves this song,” replied my sweet little niece.

And then, after the first verse rolled through, I heard Edie’s distraught voice: “Did the grandma die?!”

“Uhhhhh,” I said, pausing to think about it. “No, I think she just got hurt.”

Cue the second verse where I find out that indeed, the grandma died. And consequently, the grandpa was taking it well because he got to drink his beer uninterrupted with the only concern being whether to open her gifts or send them back.

“Well, yeah, I guess she does die,” I admitted after the song revealed itself.

“This song is TERRIBLE!” Edie exclaimed.

“What kind of CHRISTMAS song is THIS?!” Rosie demanded.

“My dad sings this one loud,” my niece chimed in.

I flipped the mix to a Carrie Underwood Christmas mix and we all calmed ourselves, because apparently these girls do have limits.

Anyway, by the time you read this, we will have practiced our version of “Little Drummer Boy” about 6,000 times, and I will have had to break up a dozen or so arguments about the whole ordeal, because is it really Christmas without a couple sister fights while the elf is watching from his recent perch, probably on top of the fridge, because he’s running out of ideas?

I hope you’re all settling into the season and looking forward to your celebrations. If you need me, I’ll be looking for that gift exchange T-shirt I bought for my niece’s boyfriend that somehow disappeared into the black hole that is our house.

The missing hamster is probably using it as bedding, so I hope she likes it. (Although I have a suspicion one of the girls will be opening it on Christmas Day because I let my husband loose on the gift wrapping job …)

Oh, and we’ll be making this fudge. You should, too.

Merry Christmas!

Mom’s Famous Fudge

Ingredients:

  • 1 12-oz package of semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1 12-oz package milk chocolate chips
  • 3 teaspoons vanilla
  • 4 1/2 cups of sugar
  • 1 pound of butter
  • 1 12-oz can evaporated milk

Directions:

Butter an 8-by-12 baking dish.

Bring sugar and evaporated milk to a boil, stirring constantly. Continue to stir and boil for 7 minutes.

Remove pot from heat and stir chocolate chips, vanilla and butter.

Stir until smooth and pour into the buttered baking dish.

Refrigerate until set.

Muster up your incredible strength to cut the fudge into squares and serve it on cute little platters or in festive tins for your friends.

Become the favorite.

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.