Tag Archives: Love

Work and fishing

Posted on by
9

I woke up this morning with a little krink in my neck, my back stiff and sore, my arms reminding me of muscles that hadn’t been used in a while. The sun was shining through my bedroom window, backlighting the lush green leaves that have come to our world to stay for a while. The cool breeze through the screen prompted me to pull the sheets up to my neck and scootch in closer to Husband.

It’s Monday morning and it seems like the workweek has come in with sparkle and style. I appreciate it.

But the weekend? Well, judging by the dirt hanging out under my fingernails and the size of the laundry pile it seems it was one of the good ones.

No, we didn’t have anything extravagant on our schedules, no vacation on the beach, no road trip to the mountains, no concert or festival, just a couple days spent inside a simple life that we’re working to create here. I wouldn’t even have much to mention about it really, except for somewhere between chasing the cows that got out into the fields with husband, planting Pops’ tomatoes, catfishing on the river with Little Sister and sitting on the porch with a vodka tonic and my mother as the sun began to set at the end of Sunday, I found myself wishing there was more time in my life for chores…and I think I might have realized why ranchers don’t take many vacations….

Because when the sun is shining on my back and the cool breeze moves through the sweaty tendrils of hair that have escaped from my ponytail, it’s hard to be too upset that the cows got out. In fact, sitting on top of a good horse watching so the cows and their babies don’t miss the gate as Husband moves back and forth behind them, gently pushing the pairs along, I find I’m glad for the work.

And glad that I got to push my horse to a full-out run as I raced to stop the lead cow from finding her way to the brush. Grateful I had that chance to cowgirl up, feel that wind in my hair and power of the horse beneath me.

Proud the two of us turned the herd around on our own and happy to be working alongside a man who loves this work as much as I do.

Summer weekends like this remind me of what it was like to grow up out here, a ranch kid with three months off and no driver’s license. Sure, I had the occasional coveted trip to town to swim in the public pool, but for the most part we were out here riding in the fencing pickup with Pops, chasing cows on sunny mornings trying to beat the mid-day scorching heat, mowing the lawn and eating summer sausage sandwiches for lunch. The work with Pops was never stressful or hurried, just constant and quiet and he was glad for the company…it didn’t matter if the ten-year-old and fifteen-year-old in the seat next to him were too uncoordinated to run the wire stretcher.

I remember the heat, the sweat, the horseflies and wood ticks we would find as we rode through the thorny brush on our way to find a stray cow. I remember the country station coming through the static and speakers of the old fencing pickup as Pops climbed out to fix a wire and I leaned my head on the sill of the window and watched the grasshoppers fling themselves to the sky. I remember taking my little sister to climb up the clay buttes while we waited for Pops to emerge from the mud underneath the stock-tank he was fixing.

I remember taking a break from the sun under the shade of the tree line and the way the cool grass felt under the pockets of my jeans.

I remember the smell of the wet dirt as Little Sister and I dug in the ground below our house on the hunt for worms…because the work was going to have to wait…Pops was going to take us catfishing.

When I think of early summer I think of these things. And this weekend it seemed I had an instinct to recreate and live life the way summers here were meant to be lived. So after the cows were rounded up on Saturday, the flowers were in their pots and Husband had enough tinkering with the plumbing on the new house, I called up my Little Sister who has just moved back to town and told her to bring her cooler.

We were going catfishing at the river.

The process is always the same: pack a bag full of sunflower seeds, bug spray, long sleeve shirts and something chocolate. Fill a cooler full of beer. Hunt unsuccessfully for all remaining pieces of the fishing supplies you haven’t seen together in one place for months. Patch together a mis-mash of fishing line, hooks, reels and poles and say it’s good enough. Search high and low for the missing camp chairs. Put on your short shorts and get in the pickup, roll down the windows and head south toward the Little Missouri where the water runs low and slow through the slick clay banks of the badlands.

Each year we debate about the location of our favorite fishing spot, wonder if we’ve missed the turn and discuss how the moisture from the previous winter has changed the trail. And we are reminded once we arrive of why we come here, the seclusion and quiet of the untouched banks makes us feel free and wild and capable of catching our own supper.

We kick off our shoes as they grow heavy with the mud of the banks. Little Sister and I cast lines that have been prepared for us.

We talk.

And then we’re quiet, our attention turned toward the calm flow of the river and the beaver who is working on tearing branches from a willow branch on the other side.

Then my line tips. We hold our breath. Someone says ‘reel’ and everyone stands up as husband runs toward the banks to ensure a safe arrival of this strange looking fish emerging from the muddy water of the river.

We laugh and celebrate. We brag. We take a picture and re-worm our hooks.

And wait.

Open another beer.

Change locations.

Sit on a rock.

Watch the clouds roll in.

Spit seeds on the banks.

Declare 8:00 pm to be the witching hour.

Wait for another tip to bend.

Leap up when Husband starts reeling. I jump and holler in excitement but do nothing to help ensure the fish makes it safely to shore. Husband moves toward the deep mud at the bank as the fish flops and struggles and the fisherman leaps to grab it…

But it’s too late…it’s escaped to the mucky water, a worm in its belly leaving two fishermen stranded in mud up past their knees.

I say I can’t believe it got away.

Little Sister laughs hysterically as she watches me snap photos of my dearly beloved sinking deeper and deeper by the second into the slick mud of the riverbank while he tries to hand me his pole so he can escape.

The sun sinks toward the horizon and the thunderheads move in, reflecting blue and gray on the surface of the murky river water.  We declare it time to reel up.

We let my catfish go, deciding it’s not enough fish worth the work of cleaning it. And besides, I have steaks waiting for us at home.

Muddy and tired and full of mosquito bites and bug spray, we head for the trail that leads us to the highway and then the pink gravel road that meets up with the ranch house. Husband fires up the grill. I pour something over ice.

We open the windows and we are us. Dirty and hungry and smelling of horse hair and sweat and fish.

It’s summer at the ranch and the tomatoes need to be planted. There is a house to finish, plumbing and wiring to be done, and corrals to be patched. The cows found an open spot in the fence and are heading down the road. We will know this tomorrow and we will saddle up to bring them home after coffee and bacon in the morning.

The sun will be shining, the breeze will be cool, the cows will be willing to move…

…and we won’t mind the work.

His favorite season

Posted on by
8

Today is Pops’ birthday.

May 31st.

It seems like the perfect day for a man like this to be born, his arrival into the world coinciding with the arrival of the most beautiful things on the ranch: green grass and blue sky. Maybe that’s why he’s been in love with it all of his life, holding on tight to the memory of what blossoms and mud and wet prairie grass smells like through the rough winters and draughts. That promise that things will always get better. That summer will come again.

My Pops has always been an eternal optimist. Maybe I’ve figured out where that comes from.


 Yes, Pops is turning 50-somethingorother today. If you ask him how old he is he will tilt his head up a little and think about it, as if he can’t remember. Sometimes he can’t. Because he’s not really concerned about the business of age. It’s a cowboy thing I think. As long as his legs are moving and his arms are strong enough to finish the job, as long as he can show the young guys how it’s done, teach them a thing or two about what it means to really work, then he’s just the right age.

Old enough to have learned his lessons.

Young enough to remember them.

I joke with Pops about how his hair is turning white, a hereditary trait, like his nose, that he passed along to me. I look in the mirror and little pieces of him are reflected in my face: skin that turns brown in the sunshine, dark eyes and the laugh lines around them, unruly hair, that prominent nose.

That damn nose.

Yes, these are qualities I will keep with me my entire life, a reminder of the man who raised me. A man I’ve always been certain will never grow old. I can’t imagine it. I don’t think any son or daughter can.It’s like coming to terms with the fact my little sister is no longer 12 years-old and I am no longer 17…like time was supposed to stop ticking when I left home. Like things were supposed to stay the same and wait for me to return.

I’m back now and I see that it isn’t true. I have eyes that are opened a bit wider by life and the realization of what it takes to make something of yourself beyond the approach that leads into my parents’ driveway. I am back and I am living down the road from the people who loved me and raised me and gave me wings to get on out of here…and left me to make my own decisions about coming home.

I didn’t see myself at 28-years-old having my parents for neighbors. And if I did I couldn’t have guessed what it would be like for them to turn from caretakers and decision makers in my life to friends. I wouldn’t have known when I left at 17 that ten years later the best part of a trip to town would be visiting my momma at her new store and seeing her eyes light up with excitement about a new chapter in her life.

I wouldn’t have guessed that the best thing for my soul would be taking a ride on a good horse alongside my father in his favorite season.

I have tried to put my finger on what it means to be living as an adult so close to my parents. In Hollywood Land you have one scenario and it looks a lot like  “Everybody Loves Raymond.” But that’s not it for us. My parent’s have too many things going on in their lives to be walking into our house unannounced and making comments on my cooking.

In fact, I can barely catch them on a weeknight between their high-demand jobs, meetings, friends and Pops’ daily visits with his grandson. But when we do all get around the dinner table, there’s as sense of familiarity that goes along with it…and I find that ten-year-old version of me and work to make them laugh before spilling about the things that happened that week that might make them proud.

Then we clear up the dishes together, an adult woman finally realizing why helping with the dishes was so important all of those years I fought my mother on it.

My parents’ passion for life is inspiring and I am thankful I am their neighbor so I can witness it. I am afraid if I would have stayed away I wouldn’t have had the chance to understand my mother’s creative spirit and learned that you don’t stop taking risks just because you’re getting older.

If I wouldn’t have unpacked my bags in the house where my father grew up I may not have been capable of grasping the magnitude of his ties to this place and the pain that he must still feel every day from losing his parents at such a young age…only a few years older than I am today.

I think about this place without my father and it’s like taking out its heartbeat. Because you don’t outgrow your parents. And thinking about it today  I imagine how much he misses his every day he’s here fixing the fences his father wired, driving that old tractor they bought together, drinking coffee in his mother’s kitchen.

Especially on his birthday.

Yes, my father was born on this day fifty-some years ago, a child of the buttes and grasses under a blue sky that promises rain in the spring. He dug his hands in this dirt, planted the tree outside my window and knows every creek bend in the coulees and granite rock on the hilltop.

If you ask him what he wants to do today he would tell you he just wants his family around, his grandson especially.

I will buy him a bottle of whiskey. One of us will get him a bag of M&Ms. Mom will have a gift wrapped. We will write our names on cards and thank him for being the “best dad in the whole entire world.” And then he will sneak off into the pasture to catch a horse and take a ride.I will listen for the back door to creak and hope to catch him walking up the road to the barn.

Because it’s shaping up to be a beautiful day today, the kind that my Pops waits for all year, and I want to be out in it with him.

Happy Fiftysomethingorother Birthday Pops!

If you need a moment…

Posted on by
8

If you need a moment take it.

Make a promise and don’t break it.

Have an itch? Scratch it.

Want the setting sun? Go catch it.

I’ve seen that smile so bring it.

You know the song. Sing it!

You have dreams, go chase them.

Problems? You can face them.

Seeking beauty? The earth grows it.

And when you love somebody…

show it.

Love letters from me

Posted on by
13

Last week in the middle of a life that sent me down to the scary basement of this old house to search for things to throw away, I found something I didn’t know I had.

And that something might have turned into one of the most important pieces of my life.

See, among our snowshoes, highschool yearbooks, that old radio noone can throw away, games of Cranium and Catch Phrase, college text books and papers, canning jars and countless pairs of boots was a box I didn’t recognize.

And in this box filled with odds and ends that echoed the man who was outside trying to start our lawnmower– an old rope, a tarnished belt-buckle, a necklace made from deer antlers, a tupperwear dish full of shot-gun shells and two-dollar bills– were little pieces of paper, neatly folded and tucked away in a shiny cardboard package…

My 16-year-old handwriting telling our love story.

I would have missed it, the memories of a love that blossomed when we were much too young for things like love, if one of those neatly folded letters didn’t find its way out of the box and onto the dusty floor as I moved that box into the hallway in an effort to consolidate the neglected pieces of our lives. I tossed the box aside to retrieve the piece of paper that looked so familiarly intriguing. I squatted down on the floor and unfolded the page.

I recognized that handwriting.

I recognized the feelings.

But I didn’t recognize the words.

Up and down notebook pages, on typing paper and inside homemade cards were professions of my adoration toward a boy who used to meet me at my locker and walk with me to class. A boy who played football and had a yellow dog, whose hair was never right and neither were his parents. A boy who gave me my first kiss and drove a Thunderbird too fast on the highway to my house every Sunday to ride horses and teach my little sister to play chess…

A boy who received those notes, folded them back up, put them in his pocket only to tuck them away in a box to be saved and moved from place to place as he went off to college with the girl, drove her to Yellowstone National Park in the middle of July with no air conditioning, proposed to her under her favorite oak tree, married her there and proceeded to work on the happily ever after.

I didn’t know the boy kept the notes.

I didn’t know the man still had them.

I didn’t remember the girl who wrote them.

A quirky girl who made up stories about turtles stuck on fence posts in an attempt to make the boy laugh. A girl who unabashedly poured her feelings out on pages she hand delivered to the boy who would write her notes back with no notion that any other eyes would ever see…

I took those notes out one by one and on the floor of the grimy basement I was reminded of that girl with frizzy hair and a Ford LTD that guzzled oil and needed a jump start after school.

I was reminded of the boy who always had jumper cables waiting when the bell rang.

And as each page unfolded so did the memories of what it was like to be 16 and so in love.

We were all there once weren’t we? You can remember it can’t you? Your first car ride together. Your first kiss. Fight. Breakup.

Most people have gone through the process and then started it all over again with another first kiss, another first car ride, another first fight…a series of excitement and emotions that cycle through in different ways with different people until you find the one you choose to hang on tight to. And you may or may not have written love letters. And they may or may not be in someone’s basement, someone who is a stranger now, someone who remembers you with a scent of perfume or an old favorite song on the radio as they are driving down familiar roads.

If there is one thing in my life that makes me wonder about fate and choices and understanding the human connection, it is this relationship I have had with this boy who is now my husband. The familiar road? I never strayed. That favorite song? It has not stopped playing.

That first car ride together? We’re still driving.

And sometimes I’ll admit that I wonder if I knew anything back then. That hair? Are you kidding? Those high-water pants? Kill me. The decision to buy two baby turtles and raise them under a heat lamp in an aquarium in my dorm room? Not the most logical.

I admit there have been times I have wondered if I missed out on something, if I shouldn’t have gotten so comfortable, if I should have had my heart broken a few more times…kissed more boys…

But I read those letters last week, the ones I scrawled during study hall and math class when I should have been paying attention. My words were never chosen carefully and mostly I said nothing at all except something about a test that and a note to him about luck at a football game or singing on the weekend.

Then I came across a note with a drawing of a house with a chimney in the crook of a hill. Beside it I drew a barn and below it a creek that wound through a fenced in pasture. In the pasture I drew two horses, one for him and one for me. I also drew a pig and a goat, a cow and boat in the dam I built with the creek on the edge of the paper. There were two vehicles in the driveway: A pickup for him. A car for me.

Now, I had been looking for love stories lately, hunting them down and reading them, watching them on television, asking people how they met, opening my eyes to see one walking down the street, at a table next to me in a restaurant or in the line at the grocery store.

Lately I’d been feeling like maybe our story wasn’t enough.

Then I opened another letter and read: “If we can say we loved each other for a lifetime I will have lived my dreams.”

Now I didn’t know anything then about life and how hard it can be to live out dreams and make things like this work.

I still don’t.

But I have to give that 16 year old credit. She may not have known what she wanted to be, how far she wanted to travel or how to properly boil an egg.

But  she knew what she was doing.

She knew what love was.

Words and music and getting it down

Posted on by
13

When I was ten years old Pops gave me a hard covered journal that he pulled out of the basement of his parent’s house. He retrieved it from a bookshelf and  handed it to his middle daughter, the one who would scribble poems about dogs and horses and big prairie skies on notebook paper. He flipped through the blank pages of the journal, inspecting it for forgotten words, and then handed it to me. And told me to write.

I imagine the book was something my Pops picked up at a gift shop or got for Christmas from a family member, an object that could have been tossed or used for grocery lists, but instead sat stored away in that basement for years waiting for me.

I have a memory of when he handed that book over to me, one I’m not certain I didn’t make up in a dream or something. It’s a memory that is full of inspiration and imagination and possibilities.  It was as if my father had handed me potential–blank pages that smelled of must and mothballs waiting for someone to write something brilliant and touching and moving.

Waiting for me to be brilliant.

I had those pages filled before my twelfth birthday with poems about the creek behind my house, rodeos, horses, wildflowers and not wanting to grow up. My handwriting was neat and loopy, slanting diagonally across the unlined pages, sentences about the colors in rainbows and wishes trailing right out of my adolescent head and down the center of the pages.

I didn’t know it at the time but that book is where my music career started. Those words I wrote turned to melodies when I picked up a guitar for the first time, practicing other people’s music, but spending most of my time creating my own. I would play with my words, ramble with the lines and phrasing for nobody’s ears but my own. And because I was the only one listening, I could say what I meant or make no sense at all.

It didn’t matter.

It was for me.


As I got older my dad convinced me to perform that music in public. And so I strummed my green guitar alongside him, a dorky, gangly girl in a Garth Brooks inspired western shirt baring her soul.

Besides my little sister who was sleeping with her door half-open across the hallway from my bedroom, my dad’s ears were always the first to hear my music.


I’m  thinking about this today because I am in the middle of recording a new album.  It’s an album of music I’ve been writing since I moved back to the place I grew up…back to the place where that ten-year-old tomboy scraped her knees and caught frogs and wrote it all down. I’ve done this studio thing before and I’ll tell you, it isn’t easy to introduce music that you’ve written on lazy Sundays, in the middle of the night or pulled over sitting in your car on the side of the road to a room full of musicians you respect and admire. Performing songs for the first time that only the walls and dogs have heard have been some of the most intimidating and emotional experiences in my life.

Because I believe in it. I know what I’m trying to say.

Or at least I think I do.

And when I make the decision to share it, to record it, to perform it, to get in the studio at long last,  I second guess that decision about seventy to eighty times before I make the trip down the interstate with my Pops and our guitars.


See in a project like this you could work through logistics all day long. You could share ideas and swap stories and talk about music you like, your vision and who’s on board until the sun goes down.

But it comes down to one thing in the end.

The songs.

And the songs are mine. Soul-baringly mine. So eventually I’ve got to play them. It’s kinda the whole point.

So I start by plucking my guitar, closing my eyes tight and leaning in against the microphone, wondering if it’s possible to hold my breath and sing at the same time. The first note rings out and then the first verse and it’s just me exposed waiting for my father to pick up his guitar and add a rhythm, my dear and talented friend to lean over his dobro and fill in with a haunting lick, the bass to kick in a long lonesome note…the drums to find the heart beat.

And soon my song becomes their song and the room is filled with it. The guys I’ve trusted with the notes have given it a pulse and the music I wrote on my living room floor lends itself to a harmonica part, a guitar breath…a long pause.

And sometimes it happens that I’m in that studio, two days into laying down tracks about the landscape, my home, my love and maybe even a quirky song about a dog, and things are going well. I think I’ve almost made it through the hard part, if only I could skip through the song that scares me the most.

Because it’s the one that is so personal I am certain no one is going to understand. It’s the one that makes me cry big sobs before I reach the end.

The one that they are telling me to try. Just try it out.

It’s ok.

And so I take a deep breath and work to come down off a bouncy song I wrote about being happy and living in the moment.

I suppose living in the moment counts for hard stuff too, so I take my own advice…

play the notes on my guitar…and sing…

“I dreamed you on the prairie,
on mountain tops and oceans wide…”

I hear my voice waiver through my headphones but I’m ok. I decide I might get through it…until I hit the second breath and the sweet sound of my friend’s guitar part fills in the quiet spaces the exact way I have heard it in my head…if only I could play that way…

“I loved you before I met you…”

My voice cracks and it’s over before it started…but my band keeps playing, coming in with a low bass part and a quiet whisper of a drum.

So I keep singing and sniffling because the music’s just too beautiful to give in to an emotion I’ve pushed down so long that it became fed up.

I decide that if it’s time for this I might as well capture it. Isn’t this what music is about?

So the guitar lead pulls me into the chorus and I whimper the words behind the glass of my isolation booth. I wonder if the guys can see the  tears streaming down my face behind the shield of the microphone…

The sound coming out of their instruments makes me feel less alone though, which touches me so deeply that more tears roll and no words come out.

But the guys keep playing, taking me through the bridge of my song as I sing it like I’m collapsing in on myself.

I close my eyes and breathe in the rhythm they have found for me as I gather myself for the ending note, the note that I squeak out but they let hang subtly and quietly in the air of the studio.

I wipe my eyes and apologize as I put down my guitar to step out of the room only to find the two men who have been the background to my music my entire life: my father and the sweet talented dobro man, with eyes red and teary too.

Supporting me.

Feeling for me.

Playing my music like it is their own.

So I’ll tell you this today as I sit in the middle of this music project and reflect on the weekend I spent lost in the music. When I moved back to the ranch as a grown woman with plans to make plans I wasn’t prepared to run into my ten-year-old self again. I wasn’t prepared to fall in love like her, to get the same flush in my cheeks, to embrace loneliness, celebrate life and morn losses the way I used to when I was so young and vulnerable and completely honest.

I didn’t expect that she would grab my hand, take me on walks, sit with me on hilltops and quietly push me to fill up some blank pages again…and then sing those songs out loud to the prairie sky.

But she did. And I open her book today and find poetry and stories that are innocent and awful and embarrassing. But I’ll tell you if I had to save something in a fire it would be that book. It has sat on my nightstand next to my lamp for nearly twenty years, a reminder of the girl who chose to fill it up with the stories about her world and everything that was inside of her.

And the only way I can think to thank her is to keep doing what she has done…

Curious about the new music coming from the red dirt roads?
Listen to me  talk about life in oil country as I play my new song “Boomtown” live from my momma’s kitchen

Jessie Veeder’s Boomtown 

Follow the progress of my new album at www.jessieveedermusic.com 

Recording at Makoche Recording Company in downtown, Bismarck, ND

To live with passion.

Posted on by
11

Last night husband came home to the little ranch house in the buttes to find a woman hunched over, knees to her chest, pointing and clicking and squinting behind a giant computer screen.

He thought he heard her mumbling, so he said hello back, in case she might be attempting to greet him.

She wasn’t. She was talking to herself as she marveled at how she had somehow secured approval from herself and her dearly beloved to purchase this new machine with a screen the size of a television.

She was even more impressed she could fit it in the 3×3 cubby behind the recliner she likes to refer to as an office. But there was no time to really marvel, she had a big project and this spaceship of a computer was meant to help her accomplish this.

So there she sat with her coffee cup at 7 am learning how to scroll on a fancy mouse. At noon she opened the window when she noticed the temperature was climbing, inside & out.

She switched from coffee to Diet Coke at 1:00.

She got up to pee at 2:00.

She ate a cracker at 3:00.

But the hours between 3 and whenever her husband’s pickup pulled into the drive seemed to have slipped her mind as she got lost in photo edits, emails, music and words.

It wasn’t until her husband stepped through the door and said her name that she looked down to realize she had yet to change out of the tank top and shorts she slept in the night before.

And she couldn’t remember if she brushed her teeth, but could only assume that she skipped that essential step, as well as the hair brushing and shower and, uh, was that peanut butter on her shirt? Did she even have peanut butter today?

Does my hair really look like this?

It’s been close to two years since I moved back to the ranch with no job and a vague plan that included figuring out what it was I wanted to do here for the rest of my life. After the initial panic and a few weeks of manic cleaning and organization, I decided it would best serve me to strive to have the experiences I had as a child growing up in this wild place. I would climb the buttes, explore the coulees, ride horses, sing at the top of my lungs, spend time with my family and love with my arms wide open.

The way life was meant to be lived…

But between the mud sliding, dog chasing, berry picking, sledding, cooking, and a full on attempt at avoiding the laundry at all costs, life has found me two years later at a point where I need to say no to some things. Because it’s practical. And someone needs to make supper.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad thing. It means that I’m busy. It means that I am engaged. Sitting at the computer and losing myself in the hours actually means that I am working, and I do not take that for granted, especially these days.

But yesterday after I snapped out of my frenzy to catch a deadline that I realized no one had made for me except me, I found I was a bit disappointed in myself.

It was nearly 85 degrees on a perfectly absurd April day and I did not take a moment to  really feel it on my skin. When husband got home he was giddy from a day driving with the windows open, the warm breeze pushing on his work shirt. He rushed in hoping to find a wife eager to get out in it, but instead he found her babbling to herself.

And possibly drooling.

He took one look at my outfit and the space around me cluttered with half-filled cups, napkins, papers and pencils and he high-tailed it out the door.

I think I might have heard him utter, “you’re a mess…” but I chose to believe that was a figment of my imagination.

Although it was a true statement.

I was a mess. I am a mess.

Always have been.

But those of you who have been following this little journey understand that this is not the place you go for house organization advice, but where you might land if you want to feel better about your sweeping schedule. I am not equipped to give tips on sifting flour, changing a car tire or how to make a man fall in love with you (come to think of it, following my lead with irregular grooming habits and a tendency to wander off into the hills and you might find yourself with the opposite results.) No, I can’t give you tips on parenting or how to impress at a party, unless of course your idea of breaking the ice is leading with a story about how you once got your head stuck in a ladder or how your dog peed in your husband’s boot. But if it is, and it worked, call me. I want to be in your group of friends.

Anyway, if I learned anything in the last few years about myself it’s that I’m not a real expert in anything. In the past several months I have been asked to speak at conferences, talk to students, sing and tell my story at various events. And each time I prepare for these appearances I am forced to evaluate what it is I am doing here out in the hills in the middle of my family’s history, in the middle of oil country.

And I can’t come up with anything to say except that I don’t know everything about anything and I don’t know the answer to most questions, but I know that to live a life with passion is the only way I know how to do it.

I am passionate.

Annoyingly passionate.

Like squeeze the puke out of a kitten because you love it so much passionate.

I was born this way.

Because my family’s this way.

And I blame them for the fact that I didn’t move my ass from that chair all day long yesterday because I was so engrossed in my work.

But I also blame them for the fact that my sister rolls her eyes when I  point out every wildflower sprouting from the earth on a ride together or on a drive to town.

And the fact that I don’t get too worked up about her annoyance at my behavior, because she lives the same way…

Because we were raised with a father who couldn’t wait for the first warm spring day to climb to the top of a hill and find a sunny, dry spot and lay down. A man who would stop in the middle a cattle drive so he could get off his horse and retrieve a turkey feather for his daughter who collects them, or pick some wild raspberries because they are on his top ten list of favorite things in the universe.

We were loved by a mother who rarely takes a day off work, but when she does, throws the best damn party, makes the best appetizers,  laughs the most and stays on the dance floor the longest.

With my parents there was never a question about who they were because I always knew what they loved.

So I’ve been compelled lately to reevaluate my situation, to make a ten-year plan, to focus my work and interests that swim out there randomly from a desire to study photography to an obsession with bright fingernail polish and all of the fluffy animals and wildflowers and music in between.

I can’t narrow it down and I just can’t give any of it up to create more space for the laundry or at least brushing my teeth.

Yet I can’t shake the feeling of being under some sort of pressure to accomplish something beyond squeezing kittens, canning vegetables, singing out loud and then telling someone about it.

And when I go to bed at night sometimes that little voice speaks to me quietly and asks me “What are you doing girl? Prepare for tomorrow. Tomorrow is coming. What are you going to do?”

I don’t know anything except to whisper back to her “Tomorrow is not certain.”

And it’s that thought that keeps me awake, that keeps me working, keeps me climbing those buttes, writing songs, making french toast for my husband on Sunday mornings and wishing for more hours in the day.

It’s that quite voice that pushes me to live for today, whatever that day has on the agenda.

And so I suppose I can’t be so hard on myself if that day requires sitting for hours in front of the computer screen, as long as what I am doing is backed in passion, I suppose I can find comfort in the fact that I am being true to myself.

Flannel shirts and wild plum blossoms

Posted on by
9

When I grow up I want to be the kind of woman who lets her hair grow long and wild and silver. When I’m grown I hope I remember to keep my flannel shirts draped over chairs, hanging in the entryway and sitting on the seat of the pickup where they are ready and waiting for me to pull them on and take off somewhere, the scent of horse hair on the well-worn sleeve.

When I grow up I want to remember every spring with the smell of the first buds blooming on the wild plum trees what this season means to me. When I grow up I pray I don’t forget to follow that smell down into the draws where the air falls cooler the closer you get to the creek, where the wind is calm.

When I grow up I hope I don’t find I have become offended by a bit of mud  tracked from my boots onto the kitchen floor. I hope I keep the windows open on the best summer evenings with no regard for the air conditioning or the dust…because a woman can only be so concerned with messes that can be cleaned another day, especially when she needs to get the crocuses in some water.

When I am older and my memory is filled to the brim, I hope that the smell of damp hay will still remind me of feeding cows with my father on the first warm day of spring when the sun had warmed the snow enough to cause small rivers to run on our once frozen trail. I hope it reminds me how alive I felt wading in that stream while my dad rolled out the bale and I tested the limits of the rubber on my boots.

And when my hair turns silver I hope I remember that my favorite colors are the colors of the seasons changing from brown to white to green to gold and back again. I pray I never curse the rain, that I don’t forget the rain is my favorite color of them all.

Yes, when I am an old woman and my knees don’t bend the way they need to bend to get me on the back of a horse, I hope I am still able to bury my face in her mane, to run my hands across her back and lean on her body while I remember the way my spirits lifted as she carried me and my worries away to the hilltops.

I hope I recall how the first ride of spring made my legs stiff, my back creak and my backside sore, even as a young woman with muscles and tall boots.

Yes, boots! When I am an old woman I hope I will wear my red wedding boots every once in a while and recall how I stood alone in them out in the cow pasture at 22-years-old waiting for the horse-drawn wagon to come over the hill and take me to the oak tree where my friends and family gathered and the man I loved was waiting to marry me.

My red boots will remind me, so in all of the shuffle and lost things that become our lives, I hope I remember to save them.

And as I watch the lines form on my husband’s face, little wrinkles around his eyes from work and worry and laughter, I hope I remember to say something funny, to tease him a bit, so I might be reminded again how he got the most important ones…the ones that run the deepest.

Yes, when I am old and my hair is silver and long and wild, I hope I feel it was all worth it.

But more than anything I hope that those things that made me– the dirt under my fingernails; mud on my boots; a good man’s laughter; the strong back of a horse; the rain that falls on the north buttes and the scent of summer rolled up in a hay bale at the end of a long winter–I hope they remain here on this place so that another spirit living along this pink road might one day find herself in flannel shirts and wild plum blossoms.

If I weren’t these things…

Posted on by
5


I sit on the love seat in the back room of my parent’s house. It’s 9:30 on a Wednesday evening. I’ve finished my slice of pizza. My mother brought it home from town. I’ve had my glass of wine and we’ve had our visit about the weather and the traffic and the pizza and the fact that my little sister is back home tonight on her pursuit for a job here.

My little sister might be moving back home.

I close my eyes at the thought as her shoulder touches my shoulder. This love seat is small, so my other shoulder is not free either. It’s smashed up against my husband’s leg as he leans back, sprawled out on the arm of this overstuffed piece of furniture.

The three of us, we are a sandwich, and I am the lettuce, the cheese, the pickle, mayo and turkey. They are the bread and we are everything you need for a good bite.

We close our eyes and listen to Pops blow the air from his lungs through the harmonica he wears around his neck. We hear a lonesome sound, one that is familiar and sad and haunting and beautiful and home. We lean in closer…to one another. To him.

We taste his words…

I live back in the woods you see 
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me...

We don’t say it, but it seems those words might have been written for this man sitting in front of us, his hair more silver than it was yesterday, his fingers callused, his voice ringing with those pieces of gravel that dug their way in from years of playing songs like this in bar rooms.

I’ve got a shotgun a rifle 
and a four wheel drive…

It’s quiet tonight. The dogs are asleep and the trucks have taken a different route or maybe they finally called it quits for the day.

I know the stars are out.

And a country boy can survive 
Country folks can survive…

In the kitchen the warm scent of brownies my mother is frosting fresh from the oven drifts back to us smooshed together, the sandwich, on the love seat. I can’t see her from my position as the lettuce, the cheese, the pickle and mayo and turkey, but I know my mother is sipping wine and running her long fingers along the pages of a new magazine.

We grow good ole tomatoes and homemade wine…


Everything I ever knew for certain is filling my lungs and my ears, touching my shoulders and swaying along to all of the things I am on the inside.

And a country boy can survive


I am his lungs and heart and pieces of his gravely voice.

I am her fingers and worries and holidays.

I am his goodnights and kisses. His battles and wishes.

I am her blood, her memories…her shoulder.

Country folks can survive…

We breathe in the air of this house, the air Pops uses to push through the next verse, and I think that if I were not these things,  I might not exist at all…

*Lyrics from “A Country Boy Can Survive” by Hank Williams Jr. 

Falling out of the sky…

Posted on by
12


So you might have noticed there hasn’t been much news from the ranch lately and I have some explaining to do. See, in the last week the world has kept turning out here, the steers have been grazing, the trees have been budding, the crocuses have been blooming and the dogs have been running away…and so have we. All the way to South Padre Island to meet up with some of my favorite people on the planet.

Sometimes after months of dangling from ladders, chasing the damn dogs, climbing around in the hills, cooking casseroles, trudging through the mud in muck boots and  waiting for spring you just have to throw your hands in the air and go find a place where summer never leaves.

So we closed up the house and pointed our car toward the plane that would take us to South Padre Island, TX. A place where the ocean crashes on white sand,  the air is just the right type of damp, leaving my hair in that scary place between chia pet and Bride of Frankenstein, and our friends were waiting for us with open arms and giant glasses full of tequila.

I have been planning this trip for months, looking forward to the warm sunshine and an ocean swim, but mostly anxious to wrap my arms around this group of friends who squeezed their way into my heart six years ago with their crazy sense of humor, open-minds, open arms, and just the right amount of grace and intelligence mixed in with a willingness to look and act absolutely ridiculous for the sake of a good belly laugh.

The truth is, I could go anywhere with these people, we could do anything, from scaling the tallest mountains to grinding out paperwork in a cubicle, and we have always have fun…as long as someone has the sense to provide appropriate hats.

And on this agenda we would need them because our days were filled with things like ocean swimming,


cocktail sipping,


pool floating, hot tub soaking, fishing for our supper,

sunset sailing, beach walking…


lawn chair lounging,

 and skydiving.


Yup. You heard me.

Sky. Dive. Ing.

This landlocked woman from the prairie who gets woozy from looking over the edge of an anthill, who just a week ago was hyperventilating about her husband’s location on the top of a ladder signed up for an activity that sent me flinging my body out of a questionable airplane and plummeting to my inevitable death at 150 miles per hour strapped to a laid back man with bad-ass tattoos and even more bad-ass dreadlocks.

I don’t know what was going through my mind when I responded “Yes, Yes, Yes!” to my friend’s email request for company as he attempted this death-defying activity. I am not sure what compelled me to make the decision to be his companion on this adventure except I couldn’t think of anyone else I would rather jump out of an airplane with. This friend, he’s always made me feel like I could do anything. And I believe him.

So we greeted one another with hugs and tequila and made our plan to face death.

Friday at noon.

It only took a nod of my head to get husband on board with the idea. Skydiving? Why the hell not?

And so we were off. I contemplated my outfit carefully that morning, wondering what would look best on me as a flattened corpse on the beaches of the island. Wondering what would be less appetizing to the sharks if I were to land in the ocean. I chose a pair of blue shorts and an unassuming black tank top. A classic and easy look for someone looking death in the face, and all of the paperwork that goes with it.

It turns out though, that when you are harnessed up and huddled at the back of an airplane that reminds you of a really loud VW bus, the last thing you are thinking about is your wardrobe.

No. As you stare into the face of the adventurous friend who got you into this predicament just moments before he launches his body out of the buzzing and bouncing aircraft, you wonder if maybe you should have peed first.

And as the VW plane reaches the inevitable 11,000 feet, you think about your husband who just moments before you was sent spirling through the air. You think how pissed you will be if he became a sand pancake…you wonder who will unclog the drain and finish fixing the deck…

then you think of how pissed his momma will be when you explain to her whose idea this was…

Your mind snaps back to your immediate situation when your instructor pulls you toward his lap, the plane bouncing well above the fluffy clouds. You notice that you can see the curvature of the earth. You think you might be able to see the ranch from here. You wonder if you’ve gone crazy. You remember that you belong down there, on the prairie, with the animals that graze the grass, the ones who don’t swim or fly or launch themselves out of the sky.

As your traveling companion latches up and secures your body to his own, connecting the two of you together by only a few, in your opinion, inadequate straps and hooks, the thought enters your mind that this man’s instructions to arch your back and lift your arms could be the last voice you will ever hear. Then you ask him if maybe you should have had dinner or coffee first…you know, to get to know one another…

But it’s too late, he laughs as the door of the plane flies open and a rush of air hits you like a slap across the face. He feels your body tense up and tremble as you watch your most adventurous and lovely friend swing his legs over the side of the plane and then drop out of sight.

You wonder if you’ll ever see him again.

You wonder if you ever told him that you liked his new haircut.

You hope he peed before he got in the plane.

You wish again, that you would have done the same…

Then suddenly the man who strapped himself to you is moving toward that very same door and you discover you are moving too. You think, “Wait, I don’t even know your last name!” but before you can ask what it is, or what his tattoos mean, or what his father does for a living, where he’s from, what is his favorite food, animal, plant, color, he is sitting in the doorway of the plane at 11,000 fricking feet above the tiny strip of island surrounded by ocean and really tall, sharp buildings and he is telling you to put your left leg out there on the ledge. And because you’re strapped to this man and your life is literally in his hands dangling out of an airplane you are compelled to listen. The air coming into the open door of the plane is so strong that you have to help your leg move with your hand.

You think about this for a second, about how the universe might be telling you something, that maybe, maybe…may…

And then…

I supposed you guessed the outcome, that I survived and so did my two companions. I have never been so happy to feel the sand between my toes, to hear the cheers of my best friends in the world screaming my name, to see the sparkling ocean and finally catch my damn breath already.

And I’ve never been in love with another man, but I think I might now be in love with this guy, the dreadlocked, tattooed, hero from South Padre Island that nearly killed me and saved my life all in the matter of ten minutes.

When they asked me about my favorite part of jumping out of a plane, I am pretty sure I said “when it was over.”

And then I breathed “I’m alive!” and ran into the arms of my friends, the friends who make me feel more alive in their presence, more capable, more free and loved and hilarious and beautiful than I will ever feel jumping from a plane.

But  I wouldn’t have anyone else there waiting for my crazy ass to touch down. And for them I would jump out of a plane, climb a cactus, sing in an opera, climb Mt. Everest, run a marathon, swim with the sharks, dance like Lady Gaga, backflip off a cliff, and grow wings and fly…because they make me believe it’s possible.

Peace and love from the solid ground of the ranch!

*All photos from Skydive South Padre Island. Thanks for the adventure guys! And thanks for bringing us safely to earth!

The boy on the hill…

Posted on by
14

Most Sundays we get together with mom and pops for dinner. After a week of work and crazy schedules followed by a weekend of chores and projects or travel, one of us decides that someone should cook a decent meal, pour some wine in a glass and make us all sit down.

I admit, with the house and my weird schedule, it has been momma making the meals lately.

But it’s one of the things I think we both look forward to, and now that the sun stays out a little longer and there’s no snow in sight, I pull on my shoes, whistle for the dogs and follow the winding creek to my parent’s house over three big hills, nestled in the oak groves. Husband, usually busy putting in the last nail for the day, meets me over there in his pickup and soon we’re settled the kind of easy talk that comes only with the people you’re closest to.

We complement my mother’s cooking, tease her about her bottomless wine supply, talk about work and weather and my stupid dogs. Usually I whip out a story that requires use of an accent and pops laughs and squeezes his eyes tight as he throws his head back. It’s my favorite look on him for so many reasons…

But my favorite is when we start talking memories. It usually always comes to this, a story about my father’s childhood in the very spot we’re building a house. A revelation about how my mom was forced to run track by her cheerleading coach, so she did it…in ballet slippers. Husband’s confessions about the punishment dealt out after fighting with his brother that included holding hands with him on the couch for as long as his father saw fit.

There’s something about being a room with people who you know the best in this world, people who know you in the same way, and still being able to learn something about them. And it doesn’t matter if we’ve heard the same story a few times, there is always something to add, a question to ask that reveals more character, more memory, sheds a different light on this person.

Last night pops shared a story about his childhood that I’m sure I’ve heard before, possibly dozens of times. But it doesn’t matter, I could hear it a thousand times and be transported.

I want to exist in this story, in this ten minute vignette of my father at four years old that somehow sums up everything he became here on this landscape as a child, growing into a man with white hair and a wife who he transplanted from city sidewalks and dance studios to a house at the end of a dirt road in the coulee with party-line phones and a bull snake in the shed.

I love the way he tells it, sitting at the end of the table, plate pushed forward, arms folded, coffee brewing for dessert. He looks to the ceiling as if up there he might catch a glimpse of that little boy, four-years-old with curly black hair riding bareback on a paint pony alongside his father. It’s fall or summer, he can’t remember. But I imagine the leaves were just starting to turn as the pair trotted out of the barnyard, the little boy on his father’s trail moving east toward the reservation where the cattle graze in the summer.


He’s not sure why his father took him along for an almost seven-mile-one-way cross-country trip. At four-years-old, he thinks now that it might have been a little extreme for such a youngster. But ask him then and it was all he wanted to do. Leave him behind? He would have tried to follow anyway.

The pastures out east, even today with an increase in activity, are some of the most isolated and untouched places out here. The rolling buttes rise and fall for miles between fences into creek bottoms with black mud and cattails, creeks that are difficult to cross with a horse, even in the late summer. The oak groves, bordered by thorny bull berry brush and thistle, begin to blend into one another and look the same. I’ve seen them play tricks on even the most familiar cowboy, getting him mixed up on what draw he’s in or where he is when he emerges from ducking and cutting through the narrow cattle trails along the banks.

So there he was, a little boy, clinging tight to that pony as it jumped over the creek and raced up the side hills to keep up with the big horse. And it was at the top of one of those rocky hills that his father told him to stay and wait.

“Don’t move,” his father said as he made plans to check the creek bottoms, to find cows that have been milling in there to stay cool and get away from the flies. “I will come back and get you.”

So on top of that hill sat my father on his pony. He shakes his head now and laughs as he tells it and we take a sip of our coffee, shift in our seats and imagine him as a little boy, wind flopping his hat and moving fluffy clouds that made shadows on the buttes.


He can’t remember if he was scared or nervous now. He searches for a recollection of that feeling in his coffee cup and then rests his chin on his fist. All he can remember is that he was told not to move and so he didn’t. He didn’t move as he scanned the hills and squinted into the oak trees for any sign that his father might be on his way back to him.

And while he was peering into the horizon, holding his breath and the reigns of his pony, someone did come over that hill. But it wasn’t his father in his saddle and cowboy hat, but a Native American girl with long black hair and legs dangling on each side of her bare backed horse under the late summer sky.

“Can you imagine what she thought,” my father chuckles at the memory of this girl, who he recalls was a teenager, but was probably only about ten or eleven years old, so young herself. “Here she found this little boy on a pony all by himself out there on the hill.”

He goes on then to tell us the part of the story we remember from last time it was told here at this kitchen table. He recalls how she asked him if he was ok and if he was lost. He told her that he wasn’t supposed to leave this spot. That his dad was coming back for him.

My father doesn’t remember many of the details of conversation, what she looked like, what they said, but he remembers she stayed with him, she stayed with that little boy with curly hair and a hat flopping in the prairie wind, on that hilltop, more than likely holding her breath and scanning the horizon for any sign of a cowboy coming back.

Now he pulls at his napkin and says though he doesn’t remember how long she sat with him, but when you’re four years old ten minutes can seem like hours. And I can relate, remembering my own time spent on hilltops waiting for this father of mine to come back for me. It could have been hours. It could have been minutes. But she stayed until that little boy had an escort through the valleys and over the creeks, back west to the barnyard and to his momma and big sister waiting with canned meat and biscuits and for a report of the day’s events.
And so he told it to his mother, the story about the girl. And for years to come around their dinner table this would be one of their family’s stories, one of the memories they would share over Sunday meals about a little boy who was my father who had found a girlfriend out east in the hilltop.
And as my father protested, they would throw back their heads and close their eyes and laugh…