Tag Archives: Love

Nothing’s Forever

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“Sometimes I don’t know how happy to be…”

I wrote this line nearly fifteen years ago in a song I titled “Nothing’s Forever.” I sing it at nearly every show, and it’s one of those lines that has popped into my head at different times in my life. I remember where I was when I wrote it, sitting on the hand-me-down leather couch in my grandma’s old ranch house. I had just moved back to the ranch with my husband and was in the in-between time of trying to decide what I wanted to do next—take a big girl job or keep on writing and singing. To figure it out I took to walking the hills daily, and on one of those walks, this little waltz came into my head.

“Sometimes I don’t know how happy to be,” was a line that came while alone in that ranch house. The world was changing all around me, with oil wells being punched in the hills and new roads being made and old buildings and barns and fences that had been fixtures of my childhood crumbling and losing their shine. The community I knew as a kid wasn’t going to look exactly the same for my kids, and there was a part of me mourning that loss, and then the other part was excited at the possibilities ahead.

Fast forward now to the possibilities ahead. We’re living them, with the kids we prayed for growing fast and the old barn still standing, but barely, begging us to make a decision about it. And the oil wells have turned to pumping units and the new roads are well worn and we keep moving.

“Sometimes I am scared I won’t know who I am, because nothing’s forever, baby.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” I think as I glanced at my oldest daughter looking out the window of our SUV on the way to school. Her hair is long and blonde and it waved so pretty under the brush this morning. She doesn’t like it. She wants it to be straight and slicked and I remember that feeling when I was her age. My hair was too poofy, too brown, my nose too big, my arms too long. I don’t want her to feel that way, I want her to love her long blond wavy hair and her face and her lanky limbs, and so I looked in the rearview mirror and told both my girls they’re beautiful, which seemed out of the blue to them as they sang along to the latest song they love. They looked at my eyes and smiled. I tell them this often, even though there’s conflicting parenting advice about it. But I say it anyway. And I tell them they’re smart too. And kind. And brave. I say it all. I have to, because, well, you know, nothing’s forever, baby.

When we got home that afternoon my daughters headed outside to shoot hoops on the cement slab. The weather has been so nice, we’re being tricked into doing spring things, like switching from basketball to mud puddle jumping. When my daughters came inside, they happily presented me with shoes and pants and boots and freshly washed town jackets all coated in mud. And, as it turns out, they’re not too grown up for giving themselves mud beards. I had been stressed about the amount of laundry that had piled up and was finally getting to the end of it, and so my initial reaction was “Good Lord, I just washed your jackets!”  It was a choice that quieted their giggles, and I regretted it instantly.

“Sometimes I don’t know how happy to be…” it ran through my head, and I changed course.

I’ve never cared about broken things really. Dirty things can come clean. Remember? Remember what will matter down the road.

And so, I laughed. “You girls are crazy, get together for a picture then get in the shower!”

“If you hold tight the water, it slips through your hands, the same goes for wild birds and hourglass sands. You can chase down the light of the last setting sun, but you will not catch it, no matter how fast you run. Of all of the wild things no one can tame, one thing remains, one thing still remains, My love is forever, baby.”

Owl song

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I woke up this morning to our owl hooting outside our bedroom window. I call it our owl because he lives in the trees where we live too. I see him sometimes when I pull down our drive at dusk, perched on the road or on the top of an old oak tree. It isn’t often, but when I get to witness his big wings spread and swoop silently away in the disruption of my headlights, I feel like a witness to a sacred thing.

And so, the declaration of the owl’s presence was the first thing I said to my husband when I woke up this morning. “The owl was hooting,” I declared before my eyes were even fully awake. He opened his arms up and I buried my head there for a few moments before pouring the kids their morning cereal.

I read somewhere that in many spiritual traditions, seeing an owl is a reminder to pay attention to your inner wisdom. In some cultures, an owl hoot is viewed as a sign of spiritual protection or a guide through personal transformation or spiritual growth. A little more digging into the symbolism of the owl uncovers a dozen differing and conflicting interpretations of the animal’s presence in your life, from a hoot at night signifying immanent death to an owl’s call predicting the gender of an unborn baby.

I don’t know what it means for me that I’ve been hearing the hoot of our owl more regularly lately, except maybe that I’m listening, and that it’s comforting to me somehow to be reminded we’re out here making our casseroles and snuggling under blankets alongside the wild things, especially when the world seems heavy.

When we built our house, we put in big glass doors that slide open to the tall hill and stock dam outside. Everyone that comes to visit will first take a stop by each door to look out, hands in their pockets, to see what might come over that big hill, or walk toward that water for a drink. They’ll press their faces closer to the glass and I’ll worry that they’ll notice how are deck needs to be redone, or the grill that needs to be cleaned, but they never do. They’re looking beyond that always, into the grass and the trees and the sky.

This morning the fog settled in the low spots and blocked the sunrise. The turkeys came down to wander through the swing set and pick at the old tomato plants in my garden.

Later a coyote will come up over that hill and slink down through the path in the oaks and ash. The doe and her two fawns will eat acorns by the tire swing and it’s warm today, so the squirrels will be out, fat and frantic and chattering in the treetops where our owl sleeps.

There was a time this was the only news a human could know, and in this they looked for more meaning. In all this evolution of language and technology, connectedness and schooling and travel and religion, still, where’s the answer?

What will become of us?I close my eyes and listen for the owl call.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

from The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems (Penguin, 2018)

Stories will save us

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Photo by Jessica Lifland | http://www.jessicalifland.com

I’m writing this from my hotel room in Elko where I’m here for the 41st Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I have made this trip to perform for several years now, but it feels like we need a gathering of storytellers now more than we ever have.

I spent the past few days traveling to schools to perform with a Utah rancher and cowboy  poet named Darrell Holden. A couple lovely volunteers drive us around to these schools in a mini-van with a sound guy and by the time it’s done we all fall in love with each other and the kids too.

In two days, we visited five schools, so the gig isn’t tough. The two of us shared in the 45-minute set where I explained how snot-scicles can form in thirty below temps and made them all sing “You Are My Sunshine” with me so loud they blew Darrell’s hat off. Darrell shared a poem about all the things he will NOT rope, and gave a succinct and funny presentation on why cowboys dress the way they do.

Anyway, every session was a bit different, but in one Darrell shared a story about how he used to ride to his grandmother’s ranch by moonlight when he was a kid. It was nearly 40 miles (with a little help by trailer from his dad in the rough patches). He recalls the tradition and the quiet and the way he felt when he rode up over the hill to see the lights on in his grandmother’s kitchen. She would always be up waiting for him, ready with a big meal of homemade bread and porkchops and gravy. It was their tradition, and one of the things I imagine makes him smile as big as he does and show up grateful in the world. He wished every kid to have a grandma like his and he wished it out loud to them as if it could make it true…

I remembered the lights of my grandmother’s house then too and the times I would come in from sitting shotgun with my dad when he fed cows in the dark after his day job. I remembered the smell of the dusty seats and the summer released into the winter air when the bale rolled out behind that old pickup. And the hum of the heater and the sweat that would form under my beanie as me and the pickup warmed up too much. He didn’t need my help, I would ride along just to be with him.

It’s why the smell of diesel exhaust makes me feel loved.

These stories we’ll share on and off stages this week are not big tragedies or sagas or dramas worth a novel. But they are ours and they might be yours too and lately all I can think is it’s our stories that will save us.

Photo by Marla Aufmuth | http://www.marlaaufmuth.com

I think it’s as good a time as any to share a new love song…

Honey, let the dogs in

Honey, let the dogs in, it’s two below
the wind’s blowing cold through that unset door
where the flies get in in the summertime
breeze in the spring, and the soft moonlight
Thank God for cracks sometimes

Speaking of cracks, are you ever gonna fix
The one in the drive, been there since ‘06
I never really minded the dandelions growing
until the kids got too big for picking, and blowing
Then they turned to weeds again

Sometimes it rains and shines all at once
Look around, it’s just the two of us
A pot of gold in a pile of dust
Come outside before it’s gone

Honey, stomp the snow off your winter boots
You smell like Marlboros and diesel fumes
Makes me wonder who we might be
Between the sidewalks and city streets
Probably just us, but clean

Sometimes it rains and shines all at once
Look around, it’s just the two of us
A pot of gold in a pile of dust
Come outside before it’s gone

You build these walls up nice and square
And put a piece of your heart in there
I love the blue walls and creaky stair
and the times we all fit in the big chair

Honey let the dogs in, you hear them whine
It was never money, it was always time
time that slips in through that unset door
how can forever leave you wanting more…

Where I’m From

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Veeder homestead shack

Recently I visited our assisted living facility to conduct a writing project as part of our arts programming in the community. Armed with a questionnaire and a sort of “Mad Libs” format we received from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, we came into their common room that day asking the residents to help us make their memories into a poem.

Now, I’ve been making memories into poems most of my life, but I know that sort of expression is not something that comes easy to everyone. I’ve been around long enough to know that telling a room full of midwestern women to share their very important stories is going to be met with a smattering of humble responses to the effect of, “Well, I don’t know. It wasn’t that interesting.” It’s a sentiment I’ve heard before and one I have strongly disagreed with since I first started begging for childhood stories from my family members around the kitchen table and coffee counter.

I started early

Our favorite thing was to hear how our dad crashed his Trail 90 in the coulee with his brother, or how my mom once drove all the way home from town on Halloween with the back hatch of her car flung all the way open and she didn’t notice. And she was dressed as a witch. We like the one about the Charolais bulls getting dumped out of the back of the pickup-box trailer in the yard and any story about dad’s pony Bugger bucking him off and eating his hat and on and on, tell them again. 

Dad and his favorite dog

I don’t know if every kid is like this, but I’ve noticed it in my children as well. They linger around the adult section of the party a big longer when the stories are flowing, hanging on to every glimpse into a world they’ll never get to visit. I know I felt like that, and I still do. Hearing childhood stories from our neighbors and our family made me feel like the loose threads that tie generations together was pulling tighter.  

Lately our youngest daughter Rosie has been requesting stories from my husband and I at bedtime. She is very specific with her requests—they must be something that happened to us as a kid, and they can’t be shorter than ten minutes (not that she’s timing us or anything). Reaching back for childhood stories on command is challenging. These stories don’t just sit on the top of your mind waiting to be shared at a moment’s notice, rather, they’re there for your recollection if the conversation turns the right corner, or the coffee is flowing right, or someone else’s story reminds you of yours. 

Rosie always requests memories of our pets. I’m glad this photo exists because the outfit should be memorialized.

And that’s what we aimed to do with the writing exercise we brought to the residents that day. We came to chat and to be the ears that wanted to listen with an activity that asks you to list things like an everyday item from your home, family traditions and habits, things you were told as a child, the family mementos and where they were kept. These simple questions make you imagine yourself there again, in your childhood home, or the home in which you raised your own children. And it makes you remember little pieces of the life attached to your mom’s good dishes or the stairway in the house you once met your father coming down for work, you just getting home from being out all night, and the words not spoken between the two of you. 

Where are you from? What do you remember? What was it like?  

I want to know. I want to know to know you. I want to know to know myself.

I helped guide the residents through the exercise and then I did it myself. 

My grandma Edie

Where I’m From

I’m from guitars and a living room cable box
from a deep freezer and Schwann’s ice cream. 

I am from a double wide trailer with cedar siding and green shutters
brown living room carpet and a patterned linoleum kitchen floor
 a big leather couch and flea market coffee tables and a back deck.

Kitchen table homework, mom’s lamplight and the screen door letting the cool air in.

I am from the wild oak and ash trees 
that have grown along the banks of the creek for a hundred years
And mom’s potted geraniums 
and dad’s vegetable garden with too many weeds 
and the cedar trees he transplanted and made us water with buckets

I am from pancakes on Christmas Eve and a good ear for music

from Gene and Beth
the Veeders and Linseths
the Blacks and the Blains.

I’m from front yard basketball games
 long drives to town, the tape deck in the minivan
People magazine, coffee with neighbors and stories from the old days. 

I am from “Up and at ‘em Adam Ant,” 
and “You’re a good kid” 
and “Be-Bop-a Lula, She’s my Baby” 

I’m from skipping school on shipping day 
and Minnesota 4th of Julys

I’m from Watford City and Norway and Sweden 
and Dad’s shrinking hamburgers and mom’s surfer square bars. 

From my little sister and her pony Jerry who would try to roll her right off his back 
and her ringlets 
and the tear that was always streaking her face. 

Old black and white photos of our grandpas on horseback 
sit on the antique buffet where she keeps her good dishes 
and Indian beads and arrowheads in old jars on the back shelf
guitar picks and pocket change in little bowls on his night stand 
the same way I keep mine

My dad and sister and me in the old trailer

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…

My favorite thing

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My favorite thing is the sound of little voices at Christmastime, singing out without restrain and all the confidence and innocence only a child holds. “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolf” sound the best when sung standing up in the bleachers of the elementary school gym, or on risers under lights at the holiday program. These songs were made to be sung by kids with boogers plugging their tiny noses, dressed in itchy sweaters and floofy skirts with at least one kid getting so entirely in the spirit of things with his dance moves that all eyes are inevitably on him, as they should be.

My favorite thing is the sound of voices together in a little country church after the lights have been dimmed and we have successfully lit one another’s candles without starting anyone’s hair on fire.  Your dad and mom make a sandwich of you and your sisters and maybe your gramma and grampa, aunts and uncles and cousins are within arm’s reach, if you’re lucky and need another lap to sit on. Your best friend is across the room with her family too and her hair’s fixed in curls and she looks beautiful, and so do you and we all know the words to “Silent Night” and so you sing together with confidence, and love and gratefulness and it feels like peace.

My favorite is wondering if the magic of Santa could truly be real and if you could hear the reindeer on the roof if you stayed up late enough and listened. My favorite is believing the story that your grampa told you of the hoofprints he found on the front lawn when he was a kid. And the bites those reindeer took out of the carrots you left, and the cookies you baked and frosted with your mom you’ve set out with the milk, even when you’ve grown old enough to know better, you do it anyway, for your parents and little sister, and maybe, just in case. 

My favorite is throwing the horses and cattle a few extra scoops of grain or cake in the crisp morning of the holiday and how, in some way, it always feels like those animals know it’s a special day too.

My favorite is the smell of caramel rolls when you come in with the cold on your coat, shaking off the snow, stomping your boots, your husband or your dad switching from work clothes to town clothes to stay in for the day….unless there is snow for sledding later. Then we’ll all go out again and then that is my favorite, because on Christmas we all to go the hill. On Christmas, even mom and gramma take a turn down. 


My favorite is the prime rib dinner served on the good dishes from the old buffet in the living room. And I like the broccoli salad the way mom does it, and I like to make the cheeseball in the shape of a snow man and everyone makes a fuss over it because there has to be a cheeseball in the shape of something or it’s not Christmas. My favorite is the sound of my dad’s guitar in the living room after the dessert has been served and we’re all full and sleepy and he asks the grand kids to sing along and he chooses “Go Tell in on the Mountain” just like we sang in Sunday School when he was young and we were young and you get a little lonesome for a time and place you can only go again because of the music. My favorite has always been the music. My favorite has always been the songs…   

The big chair and the tree

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Have you ever experienced a moment in your life where, in the middle of it, you’ve heard the voice in your head say, this is it, this is a memory now? 

I have several I go back to now and again, but the recent quietly falling snow has reminded me of this one—my husband and I sitting together, squished side by side in the big leather chair with the big leather ottoman that we had purchased second hand from our landlord the year before. We had only been married a couple years, and we moved that big piece of furniture into our very first house with the level of optimism and delusion you only really get when you’re in your early twenties. And we had it big enough to think that buying a repossessed house that needed to be completely gutted to be livable was a choice that was going to get us closer to the big dream. Little did we know that gutting a house, while trying and failing to start a family, would threaten to gut us too, like the big dream getting the best of us before we even really got started. 

But at night, after coming home from full-time, adult jobs to a house full of ripped up carpet, tools on the countertops and unusable spaces, we would tinker a bit on a project, maybe I would go for a walk with the dogs, we would feed ourselves and then we would sit on that big chair together under a blanket and it would all feel manageable somehow. 

It was in this timeframe in our lives I had my first and only Christmas tree meltdown. The winters we lived in that big, broken house were relentless. The snow never stopped falling and it would drift so high up against the south side of the house that our dog would climb the bank to sit on the roof of our garage and keep watch on the neighborhood. Over those two years, we lost six pregnancies while we worked to renovate about the same number of rooms on that godforsaken house. All this is to say, those rooms and the rooms in my mind didn’t seem well-kept enough to deserve a tree, and so I procrastinated the whole thing, though my husband insisted. We needed a tree. And so he took me down to the grocery store parking lot where they bring trees in from places that can grow trees and we picked one that was perfect and alive and full and we put it in the back of my husband’s pickup and we brought it to the not-done-yet house and we moved our big chair over a bit and we put that tree by the big picture window that faced the street and I put on the bulbs and lights I bought new from Walmart. And they were pretty enough. It was all pretty enough, and sweet and what you do on Christmas. 

And I hated it anyway. Like, I had a total disdain for this tree. I remember it clearly, the sight of it made me angry. It made me cry and it made me frustrated and I tried to blame it on the ornaments with no sentimental value or the fact that it was leaning a bit even though it wasn’t leaning at all. And I remember my husband being so patient with me, but I was not patient at all. I was irrational and at the time I didn’t know why. I just thought I was going crazy in this house with endless wallpaper to peel and sawdust to sweep and this tree, with it’s stupid glass bulbs and not one single baby-hand-print-ornament hanging on it, was just standing there in this mess, mocking me. 

But that night, despite my unreasonable attitude, my husband and I sat in that big chair, his right arm under my back, my head on his shoulder, and we watched the twinkle of the tree against the window while outside the big flakes were falling under the warmth of the street lights. Everything was quiet then, even the thoughts in my head. They stopped too to tell me, this is it. This is what matters, right here squished in this chair. Girl, this is what peace is. Remember it. 

Last weekend I watched our daughters pile out of my dad’s big tractor and plop their little snow-suited bodies in the piles of big snow that had fallen on the ranch the past few days. They rode along with him as he cleared a path for our pickup to drive out in the West pasture to find a Christmas tree to cut and decorate. The sun had just come out and the sky was as blue as it can look, making that fresh snow sparkle and our daughters just ran like wild animals across that pasture while we examined the spindly wild cedars in the hills.

The sight of them, with my dad and my husband and the laughing was closer to heaven than it was to that grocery store parking lot I stood in all those years ago.

The tree we picked? Way less beautiful by magazine standards. And it’s filled with candy canes now, and homemade ornaments and it will probably fall over at some point because these trees usually do. And the years will pass and I know I won’t remember that tree, but that day? It will be with me forever.

And, well, I guess I just wanted to tell you that. I wanted to tell you that in case you needed to hear it.

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.

Emma’s Dills

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I hope everyone has that one aunt or gramma or neighbor who has a coveted item they make and distribute to their loved ones that you all fight over.

In our lives, her name is Aunt Kerry and she comes bearing gifts. And those gifts are jars of her Aunt Emma’s Dills, a family recipe that she saved from being lost to the generations.

Aunt Kerry was out to the ranch last weekend to visit and make the delivery of her wares. She’s my dad’s big sister who married and relocated to a ranch near Lemmon, SD, but this ranch is where she grew up and learned to make those pickles from her aunt Emma or her mother in the tiny kitchens of the ranch houses where they raised kids and fed them and fed them and fed them.

I’m a woman who returned home, but growing up I wasn’t naïve to the fact that it was more likely I would become a visitor to the family ranch, rather than an inhabitant of it in adulthood. It’s because of the generosity of my extended family and their strong belief in this generational ranch that my husband and I get to raise our daughters out here. In my life, aside from the ten-or-so-year-stint-away during college and young adulthood, I’ve never really had to miss this place.

But I know Kerry has. And I’ve always been sort of taken by that kind of nostalgia and what that might be like for her, having grown into a young woman out here among these buttes and fields that shouldn’t have been fields, on the back of horses, in the milk barn and gardens and that tiny kitchen eating side pork and pancakes every morning with her little brothers until one day the time came and then suddenly she was just, away. I’ve never asked her if she thought she might return one day to live here. With two brothers behind her, I don’t think that was ever in the realm of thought the way it was allowed to exist in mine as the next generation. The story about a daughter taking over doesn’t happen as often, and less often still as the years tick and often split the family land. But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t always belong here.

I think back on my relationship with her, and I hope we’ve always made her feel like when she arrives home, she arrives to fanfare. And it’s not just because of the pickles and the homemade tomato soup and now, the gift bags full of stickers and candies and art projects she brings for her great nieces. It’s because, at least to me, and probably my dad too, it feels like a little missing piece of a puzzle comes with her too. Her mother’s good humor and warmth puts it back in its place for an afternoon. We feel the same way about their little brother too. Uncle Wade. A celebrity looking more and more like his father with each passing year.

I don’t know if this is going to come out right, but I’ve always believed we carry pieces of the landscape that raise us in our membranes. The dirt and the air and the pollen and the dust kicked up from the heels of horses and cows and fallowed fields become the very makeup of who we are.

Lately I’ve found myself homesick, not for this place, but for moments in time here. Ten channels on the TV and two on the radio. Summer days stretching long ahead of me. Oreos in the visor of grandpa’s feed pickup and grandma in her beanie with the ball on top driving as he shoveled grain out the back. Daily chores like rituals, like magic, like aces in our bike tires humming down the center line of the highway turning us into outlaws at only ten-years-old.

None of us can really stay. None of us can go back.

None of us can truly come home again.

I suppose that’s why we covet “Emma’s Dills” written in our aunt’s handwriting on the label of the Ball Jar, hand delivered with her laugh. I hope everyone has someone like that.
I hope you have it.

Who we were, who we are

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I took my husband with me on a long road trip to western Montana recently. I had a songwriter’s festival on a Friday, but booked another singing engagement the night before in Bismarck, so I needed a little help to make the mileage and the math work so I could show up on time.

My husband has been working long hours this summer as he expands his construction business and I haven’t seen much of him for the past four months. The timing to have him come along to help with the drive was terrible, as in, he didn’t really have the time. And also, we would be arriving home the day before school started and so we would be pushing it. But once we lived in Western Montana and it was the weekend of our 19th wedding anniversary and I thought maybe we could combine the work with a weekend spent actually away, just the two of us, with no real agenda after the singing was over. 

This is how you do vacations when you’re married to a traveling musician. It’s been happening since before we were married. Want to go to Northern Minnesota? Cool, I have a gig there, we’ll stay an extra night. Ever curious about Redfield, South Dakota population 2,214? Well, we’re going there for our honeymoon. We can stop in Fargo on the way home and get a fridge that’s way to big for the tiny farmhouse kitchen. 

Funny how nearly twenty years can go by and so many things just have not changed about who we are together and separate. At the little steak dinner we had with the kids on our anniversary, my husband asked me what I liked most about being married to him. I answered quickly. I’ve always felt safe with him. And he never makes me feel guilty for my weird schedule and the sort of unpredictable paths I’ve taken as a writer and musician. I’ve always just felt so certain that he can handle anything. 

“What do you like about being married to me?” I asked in return before our daughters chimed in, dying to know all our favorite things about them, naturally. 

“It’s that you haven’t really changed,” he said. 

And I didn’t know how to take that initially. Certainly, in so many ways I hope I have changed for the better. Age and tough life lessons and motherhood and marriage and illnesses have gotten me there. But what he meant was more like this: “Things that made you happy when I knew you as a kid, still make you happy. You laugh at the same things,” he began. And, probably because we just got back from a family ride on our dirt bikes up to the fields where I chose not to wear long pants and regretted every poky slap of the pig weeds and clover against my ankles, but persisted never-the-less, only to tip my dirt bike over on the bumpy trail on the way home, he continued. “You are up for things the same way you used to be.” 

And I’m not sure that statement is as true as it could be, but I like that his impression of this woman he’s known his whole life is that all those things that could have changed how I laugh and how I show up with joy, well, they haven’t. It felt nice to be seen that way.

So, I took the compliment. And then I took my guitar and my husband to the mountains, stopping at 2 am to take a sleep at a Super 8 Hotel just like our South Dakota trip all those years ago. And while we were there, we tried to remember what it was like for us when, briefly, we were mountain people.  But, for people with so much history together, the two of us have never been good at looking back. Maybe that’s why we like a road trip so much. 

And so, we spent the weekend wandering and eating, listening to music and obsessing over a 1980s fat-tire dirt bike my husband found at a garage sale in Phillpsburg 600 miles from home. Even though school was going to start. Even though his work kept calling. Even though I had deadlines and another gig to get back to. 

And it wasn’t overly romantic. There were no grand gestures of reconnecting. It was slow and it was only two days and it was just the two of us and we did what we wanted, which, turns out was getting cash out of the ATM so we could pick up that old dirt bike on the way home. Because yeah, if I haven’t changed, well, neither has he.