Tag Archives: life

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…

Who I am here (in this small town diner)

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When my husband and I take road trips together we have an unspoken rule that has developed over the years that we continue to abide by: when it’s time to eat, and if we have the time, we search for a local diner. Or the local diner, depending on what size of town we’re passing through.

It’s my informed opinion as a road warrior that nearly every small town, if they’re lucky, has one they’ve held on to through the ebbs and flows of economic booms and busts. Not necessarily the tiny towns, but the small ones. If you’ve spent any time on the highways and county roads in America, you’ll know the difference. And then you’ll also know that sometimes they’re attached to truck stops on the edge of town or along the interstate or major highways, but a lot of times you’ll find that diner serving country fried steak and BLTs downtown tucked among two bars and renovated buildings standing shoulder to shoulder that used to be theaters and Five and Dime stores back when they were new.

Throughout my twenty-plus years on the road as a musician, I have made small towns my preferred stop. Because I like the way the storefronts line up. I like those old diners. I like the flower shops and drive-throughs that have been painted and repainted and still have the best burgers. I like the quiet little rivers that run through them or the surprise fishing pond I might find. I liked the almost antique playground equipment and the walking paths and the old men who meet for coffee at the Cenex Station.

Each small town manages to be uniquely its own flavor while simultaneously reminding me of the last one I visited, or the one I grew up in—houses repainted standing behind tall and neatly placed trees, fresh pavement outside the old Tastee-Freeze or, if they’re fancy and the economy’s good, kids riding their bikes to the new Dairy Queen, or swimming pool or school.

If I have time when I’m on my own, I like to drive through the residential streets and admire the freshly cut lawns and imagine what my life would be like if I lived there by a small lake in Minnesota, or the one in the middle of a field in Nebraska or in the heat at the edge of Texas. There’s a weird sort of wistfulness that happens when you find yourself alone in an unfamiliar but familiar town so far from home. You catch yourself thinking for a moment that you could stay there and become a whole new person in a place that will wonder where you came from. I think that feeling is where songs come from sometimes, the wondering what it could be, or who these people are inside those houses with the paint sort of peeling.

But when I’m with my husband we contemplate this together while I navigate him to the Mable’s Café or the truck stop diner that someone recommended on our way through Montana. If it’s breakfast time I will order a caramel roll as big as the plate and the server will bring it out with my coffee. “It’s her appetizer,” my husband will explain as he orders chicken fried steak and I get my eggs over easy with hash browns. I like my coffee out of their heavy brown ceramic cups. I like their paper placemats. I like the caddy of jelly packets and the sugar dispenser and the plastic water cups and the pie menu sketched in a waitress’s handwriting even though I never get the pie. I like how all of this is generally the same as the old Chuck Wagon Café that used to be on the corner of Main Street in my hometown when I was growing up. I like how it’s the same at the Little Missouri Grill today, the busiest restaurant in Boomtown. I went there three times last week because it’s always the right place to go with the girls when we have time to kill between school and soccer practice and they feel like a pancake at 4:30 pm. And it’s also the perfect place to go when your in-laws are in town to watch their granddaughter play soccer on Saturday morning and they feel like a hot cup of coffee and I feel like a burger and fries and the girls get the nuggets because is it lunch yet? And then, it’s the perfect place to go with your husband after a late night dancing and the kids are with those grandparents and we have a moment to just be the two of us in a diner. Well, the two of us and the relatives and neighbors that I inevitably run into because it’s there favorite place too.

“Wait until I tell your girls that you had your caramel roll before your meal,” she stops to poke fun.

“It’s her appetizer!” my husband laughs.

And I may never know who I would be behind those manicured lawns in a small town surrounded by Nebraska corn fields, but I know who I am here, opening tiny cream packets into black coffee sitting across from my husband and his chicken fried steak at the diner. And I like it. I like it here.

When my husband and I take road trips together we have an unspoken rule that has developed over the years that we continue to abide by: when it’s time to eat, and if we have the time, we search for a local diner. Or the local diner, depending on what size of town we’re passing through.

It’s my informed opinion as a road warrior that nearly every small town, if they’re lucky, has one they’ve held on to through the ebbs and flows of economic booms and busts. Not necessarily the tiny towns, but the small ones. If you’ve spent any time on the highways and county roads in America, you’ll know the difference. And then you’ll also know that sometimes they’re attached to truck stops on the edge of town or along the interstate or major highways, but a lot of times you’ll find that diner serving country fried steak and BLTs downtown tucked among two bars and renovated buildings standing shoulder to shoulder that used to be theaters and Five and Dime stores back when they were new.

Throughout my twenty-plus years on the road as a musician, I have made small towns my preferred stop. Because I like the way the storefronts line up. I like those old diners. I like the flower shops and drive-throughs that have been painted and repainted and still have the best burgers. I like the quiet little rivers that run through them or the surprise fishing pond I might find. I liked the almost antique playground equipment and the walking paths and the old men who meet for coffee at the Cenex Station.

Each small town manages to be uniquely its own flavor while simultaneously reminding me of the last one I visited, or the one I grew up in—houses repainted standing behind tall and neatly placed trees, fresh pavement outside the old Tastee-Freeze or, if they’re fancy and the economy’s good, kids riding their bikes to the new Dairy Queen, or swimming pool or school.

If I have time when I’m on my own, I like to drive through the residential streets and admire the freshly cut lawns and imagine what my life would be like if I lived there by a small lake in Minnesota, or the one in the middle of a field in Nebraska or in the heat at the edge of Texas. There’s a weird sort of wistfulness that happens when you find yourself alone in an unfamiliar but familiar town so far from home. You catch yourself thinking for a moment that you could stay there and become a whole new person in a place that will wonder where you came from. I think that feeling is where songs come from sometimes, the wondering what it could be, or who these people are inside those houses with the paint sort of peeling.

“Wait until I tell your girls that you had your caramel roll before your meal,” she stops to poke fun.

But when I’m with my husband we contemplate this together while I navigate him to the Mable’s Café or the truck stop diner that someone recommended on our way through Montana. If it’s breakfast time I will order a caramel roll as big as the plate and the server will bring it out with my coffee. “It’s her appetizer,” my husband will explain as he orders chicken fried steak and I get my eggs over easy with hash browns. I like my coffee out of their heavy brown ceramic cups. I like their paper placemats. I like the caddy of jelly packets and the sugar dispenser and the plastic water cups and the pie menu sketched in a waitress’s handwriting even though I never get the pie. I like how all of this is generally the same as the old Chuck Wagon Café that used to be on the corner of Main Street in my hometown when I was growing up. I like how it’s the same at the Little Missouri Grill today, the busiest restaurant in Boomtown. I went there three times last week because it’s always the right place to go with the girls when we have time to kill between school and soccer practice and they feel like a pancake at 4:30 pm. And it’s also the perfect place to go when your in-laws are in town to watch their granddaughter play soccer on Saturday morning and they feel like a hot cup of coffee and I feel like a burger and fries and the girls get the nuggets because is it lunch yet? And then, it’s the perfect place to go with your husband after a late night dancing and the kids are with those grandparents and we have a moment to just be the two of us in a diner. Well, the two of us and the relatives and neighbors that I inevitably run into because it’s there favorite place too.

“It’s her appetizer!” my husband laughs.

And I may never know who I would be behind those manicured lawns in a small town surrounded by Nebraska corn fields, but I know who I am here, opening tiny cream packets into black coffee sitting across from my husband and his chicken fried steak at the diner. And I like it. I like it here.

Here to have tea

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I am behind on my column posts and the only excuse I have is that I dropped my computer in Arizona and that created a certain chain of events that have made things like posting here annoying but mostly work has been relentlessly busy in the way that has been good but also all-consuming to the point where I’m starting to miss the part where I actually climb a hilltop and find perspective every once in a while.

Good thing coaching a 4-year-old soccer team also gives me some of that.❤️🥰

And also, opportunities like the one I wrote about a few weeks ago in this column.

HERE TO HAVE TEA

Recently I spoke and sang at a local women’s event in my hometown. It was a tea party and the room was full of ladies dressed in their best seated around sweetly decorated table settings. I stood on the stage in front of them and imagined how much needed to be arranged and rearranged on their schedules to get them in these seats on a Saturday morning. The sitters or the kid’s sports runners. The newborn baby holders so she could get a shower in. The grammas leaving early for the grandkid’s birthday party they wouldn’t miss for the world. And so I said it out loud into the microphone. I said that I understand how much is going on in their lives and the schedules each one of those women had going on in the back of their minds.

 

I had just dropped my oldest daughter off at soccer camp on the way to the event and we almost didn’t make it to town because I forgot to fill up with gas on my way home from a late event the night before. Miraculously Jesus took the actual wheel and I made it the thirty miles without the assistance of a gas can. And while I sat and enjoyed my tiny sandwiches and tarts and coffee I was checking the clock to make sure I could get out of there in time to get back home and change clothes, grab a bite to eat and bring the girls back to town for a rodeo I was working.

 

My low-on-gas Chevy might have been a metaphor for my life at the moment. Also, the pile of laundry I was trying to tackle in between, and the fact that I realized for the past two-weeks I have been using dishwashing tablets instead of proper detergent in the washing machine. I suppose that’s what I get for buying the fancy, no plastic, good for the environment product with the tiny label that keeps popping up in my feed, beckoning me to be a better person the same way all the creams and exercise programs are trying to convince me my skin’s not smooth enough and I’m not lifting weights enough for my age because I’m not lifting any weights because I can’t even remember to get gas for crying out loud. 

Needless to say, I think I needed this little two-hour women’s tea as much as anyone in the room.  And, as the hired-speaker, if they were looking to me for inspiration on how to balance it all, how to make it all work together and not wake up at 2 am worrying, that’s not what I brought with me. It’s never what I bring with me. 

A bag of lettuce from my little sister’s and the bag with my daughter’s peep she’s supposed to be treating like a baby but keeps leaving in her aunt’s minivan? That I’ll bring with me…


I did, however, bring with me reminders of why living with gratitude tucked quietly in our pockets can help when we feel like we’re drowning. And probably that explains the tears that kept welling up in my eyes as I looked out at that community of women, some my dear friends, some my relatives and some I had yet to meet. I needed to hear own my words the same way I was asking them to hear the story about my dad and how he used to take us along to work cattle when we were kids, and no matter the rush we were in, he always stopped and got off his horse to pick up a fallen feather to put in our hats. With us along, he never passed up an opportunity to pick a ripe raspberry or point out a deer or pick the first crocus of spring. I know now, as an adult raising young kids in the middle of my life in the middle of a family ranch, how busy he was.  I didn’t realize then how easy it would have been for him to rush past all of the special things on the way to get work done. 

But instead, he picked up the feather. 

A picture of the first crocus my dad sent me last week, still doing the noticing for me into my adulthood
And a picture of our first calf he sent the day before

Scheduling time on a Saturday to have tea and tiny sandwiches was that feather for so many of these women in that room. Turns out, they were way ahead of me.

And I might forget the gas, and I might not take the time to read the labels, and I might have found Rosie’s lost earring by stepping on it, post up, with my bare foot last night, but I’m trying hard not to miss the tiny things that make all of this worth it. Because we are not here getting older and more wrinkly in the name of the freshest laundry. We’re here to notice that bald eagle sitting in the dead old tree every morning on our way to school. We’re here to hear the song our seven-year-old is writing in her new notebook.  We’re here to sit in a room together and talk and listen. We’re here to cry a little bit because it’s hard and we all know it but also because it’s beautiful too. 

We’re here to have tea.

To be wild with us…

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When I was a little girl, my favorite book of all time was “My Side of the Mountain.” It’s a classic, about a boy who finds himself living away from home in the wilderness of the mountains inside of a giant hollowed out tree. I can’t remember the exact story now or why he was alone out there, funny how those details escape me no matter how many times I went over the pages and marked my favorite parts. The parts where there were diagrams of how to build a fire with no supplies and something about a windmill and making a spear for fishing.

I still have the book buried somewhere deep in the rubble of the basement. It was one I could not give up to charity or to my younger sister. It’s sitting there among the books about horses and misfit dogs, prairie children and my other favorite, “Misty from Chincateague,” about two siblings who save money to save a rescued wild horse from an island.

I wanted to be these kids. I wanted to be the free-spirited girl who broke the free-spirited horse. I wanted to break the rules. I wanted to tame a wolf puppy, train a wild falcon to hunt, catch fish with a spear I sharpened out of a tree branch and exist in a faraway time where those things were necessary for survival.

Forget microwave popcorn and video games, I wanted adventure!

I’m sure I wasn’t unlike most kids at 9 or 10 or 11 years old. At that age most of us were lost in some sort of fantasy with little more confidence than we had experience at the real world. So I’d like to think that it wasn’t that unusual that as a kid who already lived about as far out in the middle of nowhere as anyone could live, I had convinced myself that I could survive out in the wilderness alone. Without a house. Or a toilet. Or my mom’s cheeseburger chowder.

In the evenings I would step off the bus from a day at country school, grab a snack, and head out up the creek behind our house. For months I would work on building what I called “secret forts” all along the creek that winds through our ranch. Looking back on it now, these forts weren’t that secret at all, in fact, you could probably see one from the kitchen window, but I was deep in my own imagination as much as I was in the oaks and brush that grew along the bank. I would identify just the right tree and use it as a frame to create a sort of tent-like structure out of fallen logs. And then I would begin the tedious process of locating and dragging fallen branches out of their place under overgrown vegetation and fallen leaves back to my tree to hoist them up to rest next to the last one I had managed to maneuver. And when it was complete I would lay down inside of it. And under the flawed “shelter” of fifty logs leaning on a tree and plan my next move. I would need a door. Yes. I could make it the way I imagined Huck Finn made his raft. I would need some rope. And a knife. I wonder if dad had an extra knife in his dresser drawer. I need some sort of blanket. Oh, and a fire. Of course!

I would be scouring the creek bottom for granite rocks to arrange in a fire circle when the sun sink down below the banks and I would decide I wasn’t quite ready to spend the night. Besides, I forgot to bring a snack and the wild raspberries weren’t quite ripe yet. Taking one last look at my creation and deciding to reevaluate the next afternoon, I would turn my back to it and follow the cow trail back toward the house where my little sister was likely lurking in the shadows, having found my path again, begging me to let her help next time. Begging me to let her in the fort as the sun gave off its last light and we argued and grappled until we could smell dad’s steaks on the grill or mom’s soup on the stove.

This was my daily ritual for months and one of my signature childhood memories. Eventually I gave in and helped my little sister build her own fort. A much smaller fort. Across the creek. Out of site. I thought I wanted to be alone out there, left to my own survival skills, but it turned out that having company was a nice addition, no matter how stubborn and annoyingly curious that company might be. So we built a tin-can telephone that stretched from my fort to hers and brought down old chair cushions from the shed, searched for wild berries, tried to catch frogs and minnows in the beaver dam and spent our evenings planning our next move: spending the night.

But we never did it. We never spent the night. Summer gave way to fall, and the leaves fell and covered the floor of our paradise. We would pull on our beanies, mittens and boots and trudge down the freezing creek to clear out the fire ring we weren’t yet brave enough to use. And then the cold set in and the snow came, and the neighbor girls called us to go sledding and our dream of being wilderness women collected snow and waited on a warmer season.

I can’t help but think about those girls on days like these when the warmer weather finally gives in and releases the snow to flow as wild water in the draws and you can smell the dirt again at long last. I get a call from my little sister. She’s driving our daughters home from town. “Can I steal your girls and bring them to the crick? The water is running, I want to take them to follow it.”

Ten-year-old me would be happy to know it, our little sister still just over the hill, a tin-can telephone call away, still following that crick and begging to be wild with us…


How we survive the deep freeze

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Full disclosure, I am posting this from my perch for the week in Arizona, where I am performing and hanging out in the Author’s Tent at the Art of the Cowgirl event in Wickenburg. And since this week’s column is all about getting ourselves out of the deep freeze that was -40 a week ago, the temperature shift I experienced upon landing and walking out to my rental car yesterday damn near sent me into shock. Like, my body was suddenly 125 degrees warmer than last Monday. What a time to be alive!

Anyway, I’m beyond excited to be included in Art of the Cowgirl and am looking forward to performing and meeting these wonderful women, horsewomen, authors, entertainers and guests all gathering in the name of some of the best things. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi! Here’s my schedule.

Anyway, back to the great white north, which is melting now. The girls are thrilled to be following the creek rushing as the thaw hit. One more month and there will be baby calves and crocuses and it can’t come soon enough!

How we survive the deep freeze

By the time you read this we will have pulled ourselves out of the deep freeze that lingered over us in North Dakota in February. This morning, at 8 am, the temperature on my SUV read -35. On Monday it ready -40.

I don’t recall that I’ve ever seen -40 in my life up here, but that seemed like a perfect time for our furnace to go out. So it did.

When it’s this cold, things just break. Sometimes that also includes our spirits, which seem to be dangling by a thread lately. But I tell you, my kids, they’re really trying.

On our drive to school, I heard my oldest explaining how much of a relief it’s going to be when it hits 20 degrees on Friday. Her cousin wasn’t convinced and so she reassured. “Twenty degrees? That not even chilly. That’s pretty much, like, warm. Probably won’t even need your hat.” Considering it will be a sixty-degree temperature shift, these kids up here will be coming to school in shorts.

Edie gave Rosie a spa day. Self care is important when the cold is trying to kill you.

Because they haven’t had recess in weeks, the busses aren’t running properly, water pipes freeze and tractors refuse to start. We drove by the cows and horses this morning and they’re covered in frost, sparkling and chewing and laying in the hay, surrounded by the turkeys and pheasants picking at the leftover cake. Edie thought we should build them a big dome to keep them warm, but they seemed ok laying in the morning sun. They were bred to be this hearty, as long as my dad comes every day to feed that hay and cake in a protected spot out of the wind and break the ice on the water tanks. It seems contradictory, but when snow sits on the backs of the cows, that’s a good indication that they’re retaining thier body heat, well insulated against the cold weather.

The same goes for horses and the wild animals too, like that young, orphaned deer that dad says comes in to feed with the herd almost every day.

This place seems to hold plenty of little secrets like that on survival and adaptation, in particular. That little deer, when he lost his herd, he found a new one. Those turkeys have been storing up fat all year for these cold temperatures, fluffing up their feathers to create air pockets that trap the heat and roosting in the thick and protected brush at night. The pheasants have been saving too and find shelter in the thick grass and cattails in the draws.

It’s hard to believe in a month or so the crocuses will poke their heads out to the sun, growing best in rocky soil, using the warmth from nearby stones to thrive in the early chill of spring.

I think in the deep freeze of winter is when us humans need to take a cue from these animals and lean on our ancestral instincts the most. Even with the most modern amenities and the many ways we work and entertain one another, amid a deep freeze like this, we need to simply be together. We may not technically need this coping skill to keep one another warm (unless you’re like us and your furnace fails you) but just as importantly we need to remind each other of the promise of spring.

“Remember when it was 100 degrees are our air conditioning went out and we had company coming?” I ask my husband as he tinkered with wiring in the furnace room. 

I don’t know if that was as helpful as Rosie planning our trip to Florida.

“We’re going to have to dig our shorts out of the bottom of the drawers!” she exclaimed bundled in the back of the car with a blanket tucked up under her chin.

“And we’ll go to the beach. I’ve never been to the beach!” Edie added.

“Yeah!” my niece chimed in. “It’s going to be so fun. And so warm!!”

Look at us, just like the crocuses, using the warmth of our surroundings to pull us through. Look at us, just like that little deer, relying on our heard. Look at us, like the wild birds, fluffing our feathers, pulling through…

Stage Stories, Home Stories

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This morning, I opened a manilla envelope I had stored in my backpack to take back from Nevada to my home in North Dakota.

A few weeks ago I was standing on a variety of stages in Elko for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering’s 40th Anniversary Celebration. I sang songs about ranch life and “You Are My Sunshine” at the top of my lungs to an auditorium of 900 elementary school students and then I did it all again the next hour. I sang my “Happy” song and charged those kids with writing a list or a poem of all the things that made them smile.

I stood in a bar with my dad and guitar player and pulled out all the toe-tapping songs we could think of while people hugged and cheered and danced and visited.

I told a story about my great-grandfather’s life and the yellow roses that still bloom in the barnyard on a small stage in front of an audience so still and attentive and close you could hear them sniffle.

I shared the stage with Carnegie Hall performers, Western folklorists, a Grammy award winner, viral music sensations and the yodeling cowboy from Montana who’s the voice of the “Yahoo” commercials.

Andy Hedges, Dom Flemmons, Dad, Seth and Katelyn (Buffalo Kin) and Mike
Watching Wylie and the Wild West from backstage
Adrian Brannon rehearses backstage before our set
Margo Cilker, her husband Forrest VanTuy and her band
Ed Peekeekoot shows us the head of his guitar he hand carved

I sat in the audience at an open mic session for kids where 50 or so aspiring performers recited, read or performed cowboy poetry or music that they wrote or memorized. I obliged when a 10-year-old cowgirl behind a guitar asked us to sing along to “Home on the Range” while she played.

Jessie Veeder listens to a young fan recite his cowboy poetry.

I met new people from all over the world curious about ranch life and eager to hear the stories. And then I swapped tales about ranch kids with fellow ranch moms and dads. I met unbelievably talented musicians and poets from across the country and reunited with those I’ve come to love over the years.

Clara Baker, Margo Cilker, Lara Manzanares

I ate, drank, told stories, shopped, talked, barely slept, and sang and sang and sang until it was time to point our car back north in a blizzard warning, slowly through Nevada, then Idaho and then Montana and then finally to our home state, where the wind sent the fresh snow skidding across the interstate.

I took the wheel in the last stretch of the trip so my dad could log into a bull sale and make his virtual bids while we drove toward the Badlands, rolling us back into our real life before we even parked the car. What a very modern-day-ranching thing to do after a week of talking about it.

Back home, my husband kept the cows, horses, kids, cats and dogs fed. He fixed a faulty furnace and wrapped up work on a big shop project. He practiced spelling words with our daughters, and when I caught him on Facetime during breaks in my schedule, he was snuggling our oldest on the chair watching YouTube videos on how to install fascia on steel buildings, and I thought, “Well, look at how much she loves him — little Edie enduring the drone of a how-to construction video just to be in the crook of her dad’s arm.”

When you’re home at the ranch the way we are in our everyday lives, you don’t think much about how most of the rest of the world is living — and that breaking ice on water tanks and rolling out hay bales in negative temperatures is Hollywood-esque to some who have never or will never live this way.

I dress up in my felt cowboy hat, pressed dark jeans and a bright pink satin blazer behind my guitar to tell the audience in Elko about the time, when I was a kid, I attempted to get the horses in by riding my sorrel mare bareback with baling twine for a bridle. They laugh at the part where I question my dad’s parenting instincts, recalling how he hollered “Bail off, Jess!” And I did, only to break my wrist and leave it dangling off my arm.

Back home, my husband is in Carhartts and a wool cap. He smells like diesel exhaust and his beard is scruffy. He packs snacks in backpacks and makes sure our daughters have snow gear for school, he takes out hamburger from our deep freeze stash for supper and stands by the stove smack dab in the middle of our decision to raise our kids out here alongside those horses, tucked into the hills while I’m a thousand miles away singing about it.

I pull the SUV into the drive and drag my suitcases and guitar inside. I flop down on the couch and lay my head on my husband’s lap. I’ve been gone a week, but there’s no big fuss about that. He gives me a kiss, then launches into the report on those spelling tests and on Edie baking cookies all on her own and Rosie’s newfound master of the stove. I notice a log burning for the first time in our new fireplace. I say a few things about the crowds and who I got to see.

We get up and take out elk for a stir-fried supper. Our youngest gets sick at bedtime and throws it all up on my husband lying next to her. Welcome home, here’s the flu.

This morning, I emptied my bag to find that manilla envelope. I thought it was going to be a big thank-you card with signatures from the kids in Elko, but it was better. Twenty or so pages from Mrs. Wine’s Southside class with handwritten reasons these kids are happy.

The big ‘ol auditorium full of elementary school kids

To: Jessie: I want to say hi to your daughters. I know one is from the name Rosey? But I want to say thank you for singing us the songs but I love how you and your dad and your friend sang it almost made me cry.

Dear Jessie, I like when I was dancing, only for 15 sec…Sunshine made me remember the old times.

Dear Jessie, what makes me happy is going and seeing my dogs and cats and my mom and dad and what I love is coming home and smelling supper.

Dear Jessie, my dogs make me happy because they make me laugh when ther licking me. My teacher is my first thing that makes me happy.

Dear Jessie, Songs make me happy Jessie. Things that make me happy are dogs, chicken, horses and cowboy poetry week…

And I think, same here kids. Same. Same. Way up here.

For more photos from The Gathering, click here

The miles, they sing

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Hi from the ranch! We back from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV after one big week away and two days of driving north under a blizzard warning. I have lots to say about the experience, which I’m drumming up for next week, but for now, here’s the column I wrote in the back seat of my SUV while my dad drove him, me and my guitar player, Mike, through Idaho.

Greetings from somewhere in the middle of Montana. As I write I’m on the second day of driving through this massive state on our way south to Elko, NV for the 40th anniversary of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. There’s no easy way to get to Elko from Western North Dakota. You can drive two hours to take three tiny airplanes and hope you don’t miss your one 11 pm connection from Salt Lake to Elko so you don’t have to take the additional three-hour van ride to finally get you there.

Or you can load up your car with guitars and pray the blizzards are at your back or already through as you wind through fifteen hours of desserts and big mountains.

That’s the current choice we’re in the middle of, seeing so much of this America out the windshield of the SUV I usually use to take the kids back and forth from school every day. The amount of ranch mud and snack wrappers I removed from the floors of this ride to get ready for this trip was alarming. But here we are, cruising at 65 MPH through a sagebrush sea with the mountains ahead of us and behind us and the next tiny town fifty miles away. To see North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada this up close and personal gives a sort of perspective that only comes on a long stretch of highway with only the promise of more and more highway to come. I’ve spent a good portion of my life behind the windshield traveling for music. When you head in the same directions you’re reminded of the past trips by little landmarks or gas stations or favorite restaurants you’ve frequented years before.

 If you haven’t done the miles this direction it would surprise you how desolate it is. And I use desolate not with a negative connotation but with a lack of a better word for lack of people. Lack of porch lights or streetlights. We’re following the highway parallel to the powerline. “Coyote,” dad just pointed out. About sixty miles back I was the first to spot a bald eagle landing on one of those power line poles. We saw some deer. Some cows. I’m traveling with dad and our musical friend Mike who has been playing dobro and guitar with me since I was just a kid. The fact that he continues to take these long trips with me year after year to stand on stages so I can tell ranching stories to rooms and theaters full of people who want to hear ranching stories is a testament to how much we regard one another and the music.

Inside all of these miles, between pointing out elk tracks and that one big feedlot we just passed, humming along to old tried and true favorites of ours and making them listen to my new favorite (I am every trips’ DJ and navigator and chooser of hotels and restaurants) Mike will come out with a thread of a memory from playing in bands for fifty or so years and dad and I become the audience for a story that never ends the way we thought it would when it started. And you would think after all these years traveling together (here I pause to calculate just how long it’s been? I’m forty-one. Been playing out with dad and him since I was fourteen or fifteen or younger. How long really? Could it be 27 years now? Aren’t I still sixteen?) you would think I would have heard every one of his recollections, that there would be repeat shenanigans I could tell back to him, but that’s not Mike. He has memories for as many miles as we have driven, so there’s always a new one.

“These school busses have a long ways to go between houses,” dad remarks as we bend and weave on ID Hwy 33. It makes the ranch seem downright urban.

We’ll be in Elko before it’s dark. And tomorrow we’ll be on stages telling North Dakota stories in my now foreign accent. And all these miles we’ve driven between here and there, the mountains, the high desserts, the small blips of towns and ranch houses and barbed wire and wide open, their poets and musicians who live and work and call it home will gather to tell its story.

It’s the wide open. It’s the vastness of it all. Miles and miles of it. If you didn’t know any better, desolate could sound lonesome. But in Elko, it sings.

Five ways to love January

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Yesterday the girls Facetimed my in-laws to show them their new rooms. Their grandparents are spending the first three months or so of 2025 in the desert, away from the frigid temperature that is North Dakota. As their granddaughters pointed the phone toward their new purple walls, their grandparents talked to them about the pool and the nice weather and the hikes they are going on.  This weekend they will meet up with other North Dakotans who have fled to the south to survive the winter.

Meanwhile, back at home, we’re in the middle of the hardest three months. Between the dark and the cold, the taxes, the constant little illnesses and my husband working outside in the volatile weather, these are the days convincing the kids to get out of their warm beds and out the door is a bit more challenging.  One day on our drive to town we watched the temperature fall as the sun rose, a whole ten degrees in a matter of minutes. From 2 to -8.  No outside recess this morning, Rosie declared.

Anyway, the goal here isn’t a public complaint about North Dakota in January. If you’re reading this, you likely know what we’re in for and have long accepted it like the rest of us. But lately I’ve been thinking about the little ways I can make our already pretty good lives better and more bearable during these cold months when escaping to Arizona isn’t an option for us.

And maybe it’s more of a resolution thing, like how can we love one another better? Who doesn’t need a little extra dose of it these days, no matter the weather. If I were a magazine writer I would come up with a tidy little “How to love January” list for you, but honestly, I don’t think there’s anything tidy about my life, so I’ll just start with

Number 1: The Cooking. Lately I have had cravings for fresh vegetables and new seasonings, which is the opposite of the usual noodles and cream I want to hunker down with in the cold months. But these cravings have sent me to the kitchen with a little more enthusiasm to try a new recipe and to the grocery store to purchase ingredients I don’t keep in my cupboard. In the past few weeks of this month, between my oldest daughter’s interest in her new cookbook and my online searches, we’ve tried out five or six new recipes. Some were wins. Some were too spicy for my Midwestern pallet, and, well, our new brownie recipe was a downright flop. But it has been fun. The reward is always to see what my husband thinks. And to give him a hot meal after a long day in the cold makes me feel valuable and helpful and makes him feel cared for. Bonus is that he does the dishes and that he always gives everything a thumbs-up. Except the brownies, no one could stand behind those things. 

Chopped Thai-Inspired Chicken Salad was a hit. Here’s the link to the recipe on Pinterest
https://pin.it/5Yx57mDil

Which brings me to Number 2: The games. Over the Christmas break the girls got a few new board and card games and so we’ve tried them out only to be reminded that the only thing our daughters want in the entire world is to play games with us. Honestly. It’s as simple as that. So we’ve taught them how to play Spoons and they taught us how to play “Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza.” And if we have time for nothing else, we whip out the trivia at supper time and they’re plum happy and so are we. Games are love.

And so is snuggling, which is my number three. Intentional lingering in a hug and more of them. Movies picked out together instead of watched on separate screens in separate rooms. Sitting closer in the house. Sometimes, for someone like me who is just fine with having a wide swath of space around me, I need to be more intentional with the affection, for my family and for myself.

And then sometimes, when it’s not twenty below, we need to get our butts outside together, not just for work, but for play too. Over break I helped the girls build a couple snowmen in the yard. I had plenty of shoveling to do, but I skipped that to roll giant snowballs with them instead and it was great, of course, because building a snowman is always great. And then I took off for a walk in the hills to fill my lungs with cold air and get the blood pumping. Which is my number four. Getting my butt moving. Seasonal depression is a real thing for me and that’s why I have a treadmill and the hills. My husband and I have a loose goal of running a little race this spring (and when I say run, I mean more of a slow jog. And when I say loose, I mean we’re not aiming for any marathons here.) The two of us haven’t had a shared couple goal outside of family and business in our almost twenty years of marriage, so overcoming our shared hatred of running feels like a little thing that can connect us. How romantic.

Which brings me to the sweetness. Which is number five and maybe the most important. I have enough hustle in my life, deadlines and goals and the day to day we’ve built that keep me up at night. Stress. We all have it. And it sucks more when you can’t have a backyard barbeque or get vitamin D from the sun. So I am going to try to dig a little more gentleness out of myself to see what comes back to me in the next few months. In my tone of voice and the way I brush their hair, making his coffee and fixing their meals. Our meals. It’s for me too. The tenderness.

Except maybe when we’re playing Spoons. All bets are off then. Who needs the desert when you have a kitchen table card game and better brownies in the oven? 30 below zero, you don’t stand a chance.

The little shops that make us a town

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My mom, who has owned a clothing store on our Main Street for over 12 years, is officially closing the doors on that chapter of her life this month. An end of an era, we’re calling it.

This store has been in the community for decades, under different management and ownership throughout the years, a staple in town for finding the perfect outfit for your wife or a holiday party.

One of my first memories of Meyer’s Department Store would have been when I was around 8 or 9 when our neighbor, Shirley, owned it. My best friend and I would try on the high-heeled shoes in the middle room and walk up and down the carpeted ramp to the green tile floor, pretending to be models.

I wouldn’t have imagined at that time that my own daughters would be doing the same thing all these years later, growing up between the pretty outfits hanging on the walls, pulling clothes from the racks and trying them on in the four-way mirror, picking candy from the dish and playing with the toys set up for the kids in various corners throughout the years.

Meyer’s Department Store is set to be a core memory for my oldest daughter. But don’t ask her to talk about it. She’s too heartbroken. Turns out her plans were to work there one day, when she became a teenager, which can’t happen soon enough in her opinion. What is she supposed to do now, she wonders out loud at the kitchen table through tears. How could Gramma possibly sell it?

She’s too young to understand what it means to be a 69-year-old small business owner so I just tell her she’ll have more time with Gramma now, which will probably mean more shopping with her, too.

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Mom purchased Meyer’s Department Store after a career as a social worker and at the height of the western North Dakota oil boom.

My little sister and I both worked at the store at different times in its life, before our mom took it over and during the economy that was small-town North Dakota in the 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, we were the only clothing store in town and the talk about rural North Dakota business was going the way of combating outmigration and aging communities.

I was 16, sitting behind the counter watching my friends drag Main Street, selling blouses and jeans that fit women so well they traveled miles from neighboring towns to try them on. I learned that customer service wasn’t always about the sale, but maybe more importantly about just being there, being open, being available and reliable, and remembering names.

Our mom bought Meyers when she was almost 60. It was at the height of the oil boom in our community, a big transition for our small town as well as for a woman who spent the majority of her career in social work. I remember admiring her ability to shift and visualize her life in a different way. She didn’t have a roadmap to retail management, but she did have a handful of people who helped her learn and get acquainted and comfortable enough so she could do things her way.

And great customers and employees she loved.

That was her favorite part, hands down: the people. We always joke with her that her generosity wasn’t helping her make a profit, but the social worker in her couldn’t be changed. So many of her employees, past and present, thank my mom for her kindness and the open-minded environment in which they were able to learn and thrive enough to move on to the next phase of their lives successfully.

With the end of this era, it has become even more clear to me just what places like Meyer’s, or your hometown pharmacy, grocery store, café or hardware store can mean to a community like Watford City, through all the phases of its life. These days, we are seeing transitions in leadership in many businesses in our community — some in generations taking over and some with closures and, of course and thankfully, new ideas and services popping up on the corners and in reconstructed buildings and storefronts.

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Mom holding baby Rosie with Edie nearby in the early days of owning the store. 

In the age of online shopping and virtual connection, I argue that storefront, although more challenging than ever, is more important, not less, for our community. Doors open for business and faces behind counters not only reflect the flavor of a community, but these are the places that support your basketball teams and 4-H livestock shows, special events and big ideas.

But most significantly — and I saw it so vividly with Mom’s store — these are the places where people remember your name and your size and your coffee order and your prescription. These are the grocery stores that will order the special cheese for you, that cater your weddings and baby showers and funerals. They employ your teenagers. These are the places where you meet your local friends to catch up and take your out-of-town friends and family to learn about you and where you come from. They are the places you go to be seen.

Singularly, you might not notice what it means to have these little shops there for you to feed you, clothe you and send you flowers, remember your name and your size and your coffee order. But put together, it’s everything that makes us a town and who we are in it.

And with that, I say congratulations to my mom on her retirement and this new phase in her life. Give her a minute for a celebratory glass of wine and she’ll make the move to envision her life in a new and wonderful way once again, which will probably find her spending more time in her coffee shop. She might even learn to make a latte. Stop in and say hi if you’re in town. Tell her what you’ve been up to, she’ll be so happy to host you.

Give it a few years and I’m sure you’ll find my daughter there, too, serving up coffee as the teenager behind the counter where she’s always wanted to be.

May you find what you need in this construction phase of life

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For the past six months, every time we visited our local Cenex store, my daughters would pick out a color swatch from the paint section and ask to re-paint and redecorate their rooms. I would tuck the swatches, bright purple and dusty pink, inside the folds of my purse and tell them, yes, we’ll put it on the schedule, and then dread the day they would ask again.

The task of a redo — a cleanout — always feels so daunting to me. When you live in a house long enough with children, things seem to pile up in the corners and crevices of every room, stacks of papers and tiny pieces of their imagination, creations and childhood spread all about waiting for you to come digging or looking for that lost piece of paper or the most important Lego part in the world. It takes diligence to contain it and to help teach them how to do the same. Truthfully, I’m not so good at it.

While my daughters have been on winter break, I’ve done my best to focus on them in a way I don’t do as much anymore now that they are 7 and 9 and much more independent. I used to sit with them and color. I used to coordinate art projects. I used to have to supervise every outdoor excursion, cut up every meal.

I woke up sometime this year and realized I sort of miss them in a way that feels sneaky, like it would be easy not to notice. I’m nostalgic for their baby faces and their baby voices that I’ll never hear again.

And that imaginary red thread that connects me to them, it used to be close and tight, but slowly, surely, inevitably, it’s unspooling, and I’m not sure what to do with all that slack.

I suppose these are the types of musings many of us are doing at the cusp of the new year between planning the dip for the party and undecorating the Christmas tree. I want to say something profound about how the past 365 days have taught me lessons and I’ve abided, but after I am done typing this, I’m taking my daughters to town and we’re picking up a few gallons of paint and I’m doing what I’ve done all year — the next thing there is to do.

Surprisingly, lately, I don’t feel much like pontificating.

Yesterday, in preparation for painting over nail holes, scuffs and the occasional crayon mark on their walls, my oldest daughter and I unloaded the clothes from her pink hand-me-down dresser drawers and repainted them a dusty blue to match the new bedding she picked out on a recent shopping trip. She helped me unscrew the glass knobs and sand and scuff the bright pink paint, sang along with every word of every Taylor Swift song on the speaker, and made the funniest little digs and jokes as she worked, and I thought, oh yes, this girl, like me, like her father, she likes a project.

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A project. I suppose that’s it right there, the word to sum up a year if it doesn’t sum up a life. What are we doing if it isn’t project after project?

Specifically, this year featured an album release, a music video, art classes and events, and a new retail store for our non-profit, taking care of cows and bottle calves, teaching the girls about horses, a new garden spot, fences and water system fixing, and wrapping up the loose ends of a five-year-long house renovation. I just bought the toilet paper roll holder for the new bathroom last weekend, finishing one thing so we can move on to getting that wall the right lavender color for Rosie’s room.

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Putting the floor in in our new addition

Anyway, I wanted to find a way to make this New Year’s note to you inspirational even though you are all probably running into as many encouraging quotes as you can handle this time of year.

Regardless, I think I’ve finally come to what I want to say since the winding journey from the Cenex’s paint section where we started. My husband and I, when we were young and first married and searching for where to land, or where to go next, made ourselves a life motto that has carried us through this year, and all the years since, for better or for worse: Our life is a series of choices, and you’re allowed to make a new one anytime you want. If you don’t have the tools, if you don’t have the muscle, someone you know does. Replace those old knobs. Build a new wall. Take one down. Ask for help to undo the hinges.

I’m realizing now, with my daughters growing up, that I don’t want to say “right before my eyes” at the end of it all, but more “right by my side.” That red thread, when you’re building something together, it seems to tighten up a bit. That’s always been the case for my husband and me, so of course, why wouldn’t it be for our relationship with our children?

Happy New Year to you and yours. May you find what you need in the construction phase.