Tag Archives: Love

I used to take photographs

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I used to take photographs. Not just with my phone, but with a big camera I would tote around almost nightly on my walks through the hills or on rides through the pastures. I would sling it across my body as a constant reminder to stay on the lookout for the way the evening sunset makes the tops of the trees glow or creates a halo around the wild sunflowers if you get down low enough in the grass. There was something about having that camera in my hand that automatically transformed me back into the little girl I used to be out here. To have the task on hand to capture it  reminded me to look out for the wonder. 

I’m not sure exactly when I put my camera back in the bag and then up on a shelf to collect dust, but I’m pretty sure it was around the time the babies came. I documented my first-born’s every move with that big camera up until her ninth month or so. I know because I have a hundred-page hardcover book to prove it. But then technology turned my phone into a more convenient and quality option and then Rosie arrived and then the wandering changed to carrying one baby in a pack and pulling the other in a wagon down the gravel road. 

How fast this sight has changed

Lately I’ve been feeling farther and farther away from myself. Usually, this sort of ache is reserved for long winter nights, but for some reason, it’s creeping up on me in the change into summer, which has been notorious for snapping me back to myself. I haven’t planted a single tomato plant. The garden isn’t tilled. The horses need about a hundred more rides. My calendar is dinging with deadlines that feel impossible to meet and I find I’m feeling a bit frantic about making sure this summer teaches my daughters some things about responsibility with as much room for play as possible. 

Responsibility and play. I think that might be the never-ending battle we’re all up against. Can they possibly exist together in balance? If you have any sort of roots in ranching or agriculture, I can see you nodding your head along when I say there is never a time where you can relax without thinking you should be doing something more productive. 

Because there is always something to be done here. The barn needs to be torn down and rebuilt this summer and so does the shed. The siding needs to be put on the house and the deck needs to be rebuilt. The old equipment needs to be moved off the hill and we need to resurface the road to the barnyard. We need to rebuild the corrals and spray the burdock plants and ride fences and move cows, and also, we have that day job and softball practice for the kids and the county fair next week. We’re getting none of it done in the process of trying to do all of it. The feeling of being fragmented and frazzled and underprepared for everything is one I can’t shake. A walk to the hilltop to document the wildflowers is the least productive thing on the list. But maybe the thing we need most. 

Last week in our efforts to get the kids ready for the county fair, I took that old camera off the shelf and out of its bag. My sister and I signed our oldest daughters up to enter a photography project and it was time we got it done. We walked out into the yard and bent over the little patch of prairie roses in the front yard. I did a little speech about focus and timing and patience and light and looking around for things worth photographing. My niece pointed out how it would be best to crop out the cowpie under the wildflower photo and I said she was right. There is beauty growing right alongside the poop. We just try to focus on the beauty when we’re behind the camera. 

After the wildflower lesson we set our new kittens up in a little basket out on the lawn for a little photoshoot. Those four little fuzz balls were the star of the show for a good fifteen minutes while we worked on catching their best angles and fawned over how sweet they were.

The lawn was long and needed to be mowed. The tomato patch needed to be tilled. My office work was waiting, but I was too busy saying “oh how cute!” and “get a little lower, focus on their eyes,” and “oh my goodness the sweetness,” to think about anything else. I liked the way the world felt to me in the yard that day. 

I think I’ll leave that camera out and within reach this summer…

And I never wanted to leave again

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My husband and I spent a brief time living in western Montana when we were first married almost twenty years ago now. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I reach back for a memory there of us and our big brown lab who was just turning from puppy to real dog, maybe sort of like our marriage. 

We chose the mountains as a challenge to pick a spot to live and that sounded adventurous before we completely settled down at the ranch. We had been married the year before and my husband needed to finish his college degree after spending as much time as a man needed as a roughneck in the oil fields. I had been touring up and down the Midwest, particularly the interstates and state highways of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. I would take my husband with me when his four days off aligned with my time on the road. Our honeymoon, for example, was spent in Redfield South Dakota, a tiny town of 2,000 just south of Aberdeen. I had been hired to perform at a company picnic and so off we went for four hundred miles, nearly running out of gas when we miscalculated the distance between towns. 

We could have been in Jamaica like normal newlyweds, but on our way home, we stayed at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo to be fancy and bought a new refrigerator and microwave at with our wedding money only to discover they were much too big to fit in the tiny ranch house where were living. So, we sold them to his parents. 

Living together as husband and wife in my grandma’s tiny house next to the red barn on the ranch where I was raised when we were so young made us feel uneasy, I think, only because we wondered if it might be too good to be true. We couldn’t possibly be here already; with jobs and bills and the brown lab puppy I bought for him for his birthday. If we stayed here for the rest of our lives, would we grow to resent it? Would we blame every mistake and wrong turn and unsettled argument on the fact that we never spread our wings too far together? What if we became unhappy? Would there be a way we dared blame it on the ranch and the small town that raised us and pulled us back? 

And so, we narrowed it down to two choices. Wynona, Minnesota because once I sang there and brought my husband along and we visited a cute coffeeshop and walked along the river and climbed to the top of a bluff and we liked how it looked like a movie scene from far away, even in the ugly and brown part of March. And then we went to Wabasha and watched the bald eagles and toured the famous restaurant and places that inspired the 90s movie Grumpy Old Men. We got a kick out of all of it. And Wynona had a college with the right program.

And so did Missoula. We hadn’t been there before, but as prairie kids we romanticized the mountains and so that’s what won. Seems like the mountains always win. Who could argue with a college credit in snowboarding and professors who wore Birkenstocks before every teenage girl in the country wore Birkenstocks. We brought our dog, and I brought my guitar and I doubt we had too much else. Maybe a bed and my mom’s old leather couch. We found a cheap place to live, and I found a job and he went to school and we looked for places to find ourselves in the mountains every night and every weekend and we wanted to love it. And maybe we did a bit. But looking back on it now it seems like we spent most of our time trying to climb out so we could see the horizon and the weather coming. So we could get away from the endless swarm of people looking to be found too. 

My favorite hiking spot was the bald face of a mountain outside of town where nothing but prairie grass grew and the trail was cut like a switchback the way the cows and deer and elk would do it at home. There were no surprises there. I could see the sky. 

I lost my first pregnancy in that little condo in Missoula. My husband had already moved back to North Dakota to take a job offer and I stayed behind with the dog and nothing but an air mattress and a suitcase left in the space. It wasn’t time for us to be parents. We were not ready. But it didn’t feel that way when I was alone and wailing. My dad came to get me, my husband couldn’t leave. I protested. I’m like that lab, when I’m hurt I want to hide out under the deck and be alone. 

And that was that. We gave it a year for the mountains to enchant us. But nothing compared to the place that loved us first. After the long trip home, I climbed to the top of my own hill. It wasn’t a mountain, but the view was better. I cried the cry of someone who had lost something. I cried the cry of relief. I cried the cry of uncertainty. I cried the cry of being loved. I cried the cry of being home. 

And I’ve cried that cry a thousand times since, but I’ve never wanted to leave again…

 

Here to have tea

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

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

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

HERE TO HAVE TEA

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

 

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

 

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

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

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


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

But instead, he picked up the feather. 

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

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

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

We’re here to have tea.

Memories in the closet

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My husband and I spent an entire Sunday cleaning out the closets and drawers and nooks and crannies of our bedroom in our loft in an effort to officially move into the new bedroom he built for us on the main floor of the house. This room was part of a home addition project that went on longer than…well…let’s just say babies have been born and have had their first day of school in the time it took us to finally paint the walls.

But the fact that I won’t have to climb the stairs to our bedroom with my laundry when I’m 90 and my knees are bad is something I will thank us for when I’m 90 and my knees are bad.

For over ten years we’ve been working on and living in a house that we have no plans to ever move from. And so, unlike other families, we haven’t had the whole “moving house” excuse to force us to sort through my husband’s 30-year t-shirt collection or deal with my need to have two or three pairs of boots in every color. I think the last time we tackled that project was when we moved into this house over ten years ago.

Anyway, since it should be obvious that absolutely none of my boots need to be given or thrown away, let’s talk about my husband’s inherited traits that beckon him to save things like tiny little washers and screws, bits of wire, one thousand stray plumbing parts, non-working batteries and every feed store and oil company ball cap he was ever gifted throughout his entire adulthood. The instincts he has to fight when presented with the idea that maybe he isn’t a polo-shirt kind of guy even though he owns four to five perfectly good polo shirts is distressing.

Dear Husband, you never wear these. Well, ok, maybe that one time we went on a cruise fifteen years ago. But maybe it’s time to let them go. They have collected literal dust while hanging in this closet. Maybe give the shirts to someone who spends his weekends golfing instead of fixing fences, water tanks and tractors. You are more of a snap-shirt kind of guy. Which is a good thing, because you currently own 325 of them.

Anyway, when it comes time for a great-closet-clean-out, I have implemented a system to help the poor, tortured soul. And it basically looks like me pulling out shirts and jeans so worn you can practically see through them, holding each item up so he can get a good view, giving him a beat to process his attachment, and then forcing him into a decision. Keep? Give? Toss? It’s easier if I’m the one with the garbage bags. And I don’t give him any pushback if he says keep. I have to remain an ally.

But truly, I must hand it to the man. He is as loyal as they come in the world, and that loyalty applies everywhere –even t-shirts. Which you can argue is a result of his low-key sentimentality, especially when you realize that he still has the one I bought him for his sixteenth birthday. Ask me someday about the pair of underwear he kept for long enough that the holes finally connected to turn them into a skirt.

Sentimental to the core. And a bit superstitious? Maybe.

Chad and the cat he doesn’t like

Anyway, lately my husband and I don’t spend long stretches of time together. With both of us working two to three jobs and running after our rapidly growing daughters, our idea of a date has turned into me riding along in the side-by-side to check water tanks without the kids.

And last Sunday, on a perfectly beautiful fall day, one of the last things I wanted to do was sort through piles of decisions and problems of our own making. But I caught my husband in a weak moment where he thought cleaning out the bedroom was a better option than cleaning out 85 years of stuff that has accumulated in the ranch shop, and so he joined me up there in my pursuit of a normal, tidy life.

And who knew moving dressers, throwing away three generations of cell phone boxes, flipping through half-read books and, eventually, piles and piles of t-shirts, would turn out to be a fun little exercise in reminiscing. We excavated that weird and worn “bear with the antlers” shirt he got from a thrift store in 1999 and suddenly we were back driving backroads in his Thunderbird. Two vintage camo-t-shirts that were his dad’s and he was twelve, bored in a hunting blind, waiting on a deer to walk by. Even I couldn’t let him part with those. Oh, there were plenty of plain ‘ol shirts in the pile, but when we came across one from a music festival or a band we loved, or a trip we took, we both agreed to keep those shirts, and we remembered to be grateful for it, this little mess of our own making…

Does this mean closet-cleaning qualifies as a date? In our world, probably.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be tackling the bathroom closet, for the rest of my life…

Serenity now…

Ranching and Romance

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Want to know what romance is when you’ve been married almost eighteen years and you’re raising kids and calves on a generational ranch? 

Your husband taking time out of his summer checklist of fixing fence and rebuilding corrals to help you construct a new garden plot in the yard. Especially when that man says, and I quote, “Landscaping is just work to make more work.” 

And he’s not wrong. Out here when we look across our spread of endless big jobs, like barn building and pen building and water tank maintenance and figuring out why the bulls keep getting into the hay yard, lawn mowing and weed eating and tomato planting and pressure washing the driveway aren’t on the top of my husband’s June “to-do” list. 

But they are close to the top on mine, and I appreciated the help when I looked at the calendar and then the radar that indicated I might want to get the peas planted before the predicted torrential downpour and, also, before August. 

Summer is frantic around here. So frantic that major yardwork on a Sunday seems slow. 

Crocs: function and fashion collide

But I got those peas in thanks to him. At 10 pm before the sun set and right in time for the rain to pour later that evening. 

My husband’s love language is definitely “acts of service.” I’ve seen it in him since he was a much younger man. To be of use, to be helpful, to know how to do the thing that needs to be done is a quality that has saved us money and meltdowns plenty more than it has cost us both. (Because, let’s be honest, DIY isn’t a Zen experience). 

There was a time when I was younger and in love with him where I would imagine my future out here on the ranch with more walks hand in hand and picnics under the big oak tree where we got married. How dreamy. 

Our wedding tree

News flash. That’s never happened. Not even once.  

Romance looks more like getting off his horse to get the gate. And then I reciprocate by getting the next one.  

Tick checks, that’s also romance out here. And it’s tick season so, yeah, we’ve been getting romantic a lot lately. 

All joking aside though, I’m thinking about this today because the amount of love I felt for my husband watching him till that garden spot on Sunday knowing how much he was setting aside to do something for me was palpable. It sort-of caught me off guard the way a lump catches in your throat when a sentimental commercial breaks through your sitcom zone-out. My husband, he lives with a good-sized handful of intention when it comes to his close relationships. He’s a guy who’s never really rushing. He’s a guy who will have a long look at it. He’s a guy who takes his time, whether or not it might drive you and your tight schedule crazy. 

And he makes me wonder if I’m too caught in my own drive, letting worries and checkboxes sometimes consume me like the good student I keep striving to be. But no one’s keeping grades here. This is our life and I wanted to plant peas and so he helped me plant peas.  And I guess I just want to say, that’s a really sweet way to love someone. 

The Yellow Boat

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Winter visited us again this past weekend, but spring teased us a bit the week before, so we know it can happen. This got me thinking about spring cleanup and all the little relics that are often left behind in the draws of ranches like ours, waiting to be repaired or picked up by the junk guy, but more likely just staying there for years reminding us of the time when we were younger and it ran.

Which got me thinking about my husband’s yellow boat.

The Yellow Boat

Lake Sakakawea

A few days of warm weather will get the plans rolling. And the smell of the thaw, the sound of the water, the blue sky and sun and things uncovered by melting snow had me poking around the place, in search of projects and things I could accomplish.

And in my search I stumbled upon one of the ranch’s most unique relics. Sitting next to the shop covered loosely by a blue tarp and snow turned to ice water is Husband’s yellow boat, the one he brought with us to the ranch when we were first married.

I want to talk about this boat because it’s almost April now and it’s time to start making plans to cast a catfish line, pull on some cutoffs and grill something already.

I want to talk about this boat because I want to talk about boy I once knew who spent hours in the garage with his dad, sanding, scraping, painting and turning the remnants of an old wood and fiberglass flat bottom custom junkyard find into a 11 by 6 foot piece of bright yellow marine-time dream come true with a 40 horse Johnson, quite a mighty motor for a boat that small.

A boat they were planning on turning into a legend, buzzing around Lake Sakakawea and turning heads.

And as soon as the yellow paint dried, that’s exactly what they did.  Father and son proudly loaded it up in the trailer and headed to the big water, visions of speed and notoriety bouncing between them in the pickup before they plopped that boat in the water and squeezed in side-by-side, shoulders squished together, chins nearly resting on their knees, reaping the benefits of the many hours spent on dry land turning a relic into a masterpiece.

They pushed it to its limits, testing what it had, wondering if they never slowed down if they might just keep going forever, out toward the buttes that hold the lake in place, to the river and then into the ocean, a man and a boy in a tiny yellow boat they made together after the sun went down on their real lives and that boat turned into all that mattered between them…

But boys need to become men on their own time, so they brought that boat to shore so that boy could drive his old Thunderbird out of the driveway to the highway that would take him away and back again to live on a ranch by that lake with a girl who used to sit beside him in that old car when he drove too fast and played his music too loud.

But I never sat beside him in that yellow boat until one day I came home to find my new husband holding a fishing pole and a tiny cooler full to the brim with beer and a container of worms.

“We’re going fishing,” he said.

And off we went on a hot July evening, the windows rolled down on the little white pickup as we followed the prairie trail down to our secret spot on the lake below the buttes. The place without a boat ramp, a picnic table or any sign of human life…

My new husband and I pushed that little boat in the water, navigating the deep mud on the banks of the lake before we jumped in and sat back-to-back with our poles in the water, the little cooler on my lap, trolling the shores for hours without a bite before the sun threatened to drop below the horizon, convincing us to call it a night.

Funny how fast night came then when my husband, in an attempt to hook up that little boat and pull us all back home, backed up just a bit too far, and, well, there we were in our secret fishing spot stuck in the mud up to the floorboards, miles from the highway, cell phone reception, or any sign of human life.

And there are many relics on this place, old tractors, used up pickups, tires and spare parts that need to be hauled away and given new life. But over the hill in the barnyard, covered by a tarp and a fresh dusting of spring snow sits a little yellow boat on a little trailer that was never meant for fishing…in fact, now that I think of it, that boat might not have been made for anything really, except to be made.

I will be playing music and telling stories March 28 at 7 PM at the Fargo/Moorhead Community Theater in The Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead, MN. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door or in advance at www.jessieveedermusic.com/shows Hope to see you there!

Prairie People Hit the Beach

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Do you know what it takes to get out of the great white north in March?

Ask anyone who tried it the past couple weeks of spring break and they will tell you it was an act of God. Some of them never made it out.

Listen to the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

We were the lucky ones (cue dramatic music). Because for some reason our tactic of driving more north to Canada to catch a flight to Mexico actually worked. I mean, the flight was delayed ten hours, but the promise a 100 degree temperature change and unlimited access to tequila kept our spirits up. And also, not one soul left behind in North Dakota will tolerate any complaints about a March trip to Mexico in the middle of the blizzard, so I wouldn’t dare. Didn’t even want to send a picture of me blinding the country with my neon winter white ranch kid legs blazing in the sun. My plan was to just slip quietly away with my husband and my sunscreen and giant hat to pretend for a week that the only care we have in the world is how many more chips and guacamole we could possibly eat before it was time to eat an actual meal.

Traded our wool caps for vacation hats

I turn 40 this year. My husband had his turn in September. Mexico with friends was a gift we gave ourselves for making it this far. And now I’m scheming on what excuse I can come up with to do the same thing next year. Although maybe the only excuse a person needs to get away from it all is that, in the end, it makes you more tolerable to the people who have to live with you.

I will also take a moment here to plead my case for a week’s paid vacation in a tropical place for every person who has had to endure this forty-five month North Dakota winter. I don’t know who is going to pay for it, but I’m sure we can work it out in a bake sale or something…

So that’s where we’ve been, my husband and I. We left our kids behind with the in-laws to do things kids do with grandparents—bake cookies, eat cookies, bake cupcakes, eat cupcakes, snuggle, watch movies, swim in the big community pool and, apparently, partake in major shopping sprees. When they Facetimed us to model their new outfits, with a margarita in my hand and my feet in the pool it was hard to tell among us who was having more fun–and I threw my body down a 98 foot waterslide. In hindsight, the waterslide was a terrible idea, but I’ll never admit it, not to my kids anyway.

Oh, vacation life! Where nobody knows you except the yahoos you brought with you and so somehow you can convince yourself that you are the person who thinks 98-foot waterslides are fun and not just an un-prescribed enema/neti pot treatment.

In Mexico, it could not be clearer that the lot of us were northern folk. With one half of our crew of 14 residing in Canada and the other from North Dakota, our combined complexions lounging in the pool could likely be seen from space. And if that didn’t give it away, one of us puking on the 20-minute ferry ride to the island probably did. We are prairie people. The only waves we have up here are made of grain.

But in Mexico, we’re different. In Mexico, I scuba dive.

Yup. Just give me a 20-minute lesson on land and I’m expert enough to put my face underwater and not panic. And by not panicking I mean managing only to do the one thing required of me to not die while scuba diving and that is to breathe. Need me to actually swim, or push that button that releases air to send me up or down, or look at fish or pose for a picture or not float to the surface and need to be pulled back down? Can’t do it. Working on breathing here.

Oh, if just breathing were the only task. That’s the power of vacation mode.

If you need me I’m back home now, eating noodle soup, re-acclimating to my natural habitat and making plans for the bake sale.

The “Happy To” mentality might be the key to marital success

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This week on the podcast Chad and I talk all things marriage and I share an unreleased, rough cut of a song I wrote about us, so stay tuned until the end. Listen here, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!


My husband took the kids to school recently to save me some time to finish up work and get ready for a singing job out of town. He took my car (because the less transfer of car seats in our lives, the better) and on his way home he gassed it up, and, gasp, got the oil changed.

When he arrived home and shared the news you would have thought he bought me diamonds. Really. Because it’s not like I couldn’t have done these tasks myself, but it was a sweet and unexpected thing that made my life a bit easier and I loved him for it.

And also, I fall into the cliché category of wives whose car seems to always need gas every single time my husband drives it, like magical timing.  And so here I pause for all the husbands’ collective groans.

And I would be ashamed, but I’m too distracted and that’s my argument and his argument about the entire situation combined.

Anyway, I was going to make a point here now about how we all have these little life tasks that are essential and easy enough, but are uniquely annoying to us individually. For me, for example, it’s getting my oil changed or putting my clothes away. Mowing the lawn is on my husband’s list. But I think the greater point here is how easy it can be to make our lives better for one another.

My grandpa will be turning 90 this month. He’s been married to my grandma for over 70 years. In their years together my grandmother has never pumped her own gas. Now, at one point this may have been a sign of the times, but it certainly was never because my grandmother wasn’t capable of doing it herself. I asked him once about it and he said it was just something he wanted to do for her. Made her life easier and he was happy to do it.

Grandma Ginny and Grandpa Bill

To be happy to do it. Could that just be the most sage marriage advice there is? Could it also be the most difficult one to achieve? I mean, dedicating your life to someone so easily lends itself to resentments and tit-for-tats and disappointments. The day-to-day of work and raising kids and trying to keep the dust out of the corners of it all can wear on partners who once stood before one another and promised for better or worse. And our mindset after the honeymoon phase can easily shift to the black hole of “But what are you doing to help me here!?” On my bad days, when I’m overwhelmed and feel a bit lonely in the rhythm of work and motherhood, I fall in there. And quite easily, I can wallow.

Recently my husband and I got away for a night to the big town, just the two of us. And it wasn’t for a job or to pick up ranch or building supplies, it was to catch a moment to talk and eat supper uninterrupted. (And, let’s be honest here, to make a Costco run, because at this phase in the game, that’s romance.) Both of us are bad at prioritizing time alone. Both of us are better people to one another when we do it.

Which is something my grandma would tell me. Her memory is failing her now at the end of her life, but if she could I think she would tell me her life’s greatest joy has been her relationship with her husband. Even now, in the cruel grip of dementia, she hasn’t forgotten that she loves him.

And I don’t know how to tie that in a neat little bow of guidance on this sort of marital success, except to say I think it started as love and continued through the years as genuine admiration. Each made the other proud. Each made the other feel special and worth the extra effort.

And maybe we could start there with a simple flip of the running commentary in our heads. What if the “What are you doing?” question turned to “What am I doing?” and then, when we could, we went out to mow the lawn. Or took the extra time to iron his shirts the way he likes. Or started his pickup in the cold or pumped her gas without a comment to go with it simply and most importantly because we’re happy to.

This is five

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It’s a snow day at the ranch and all the roads in ND are closed. So while all the kids were in the house, I sat down to chat with my little sister, Alex, about parenting five year olds and trying to replicate the magic Christmases we had as kids. There are interruptions, per usual, I talk about Rosie and her packrat tendencies and Alex shares a story about how she and an egg went to town.

Listen to the podcast here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or Spotify.

Happy snow day moms and dads! Don’t forget to move that elf.

This is Five

Rosie, my youngest daughter, turned five at the beginning of the month. If you’re wondering what five is like, if it’s been a while since you had a five-year-old living under your roof, or have been five yourself, then I’m here today to paint a picture.

And that picture begins with all of the things that could be hiding under a five-year-old’s pillow. Because I, myself, just had a recent revelation a few nights back when our household was conducting one of our middle-of-the-night bed shuffling rituals, the one where Rosie wakes up and climbs the stairs with her blankie at 2 am and then climbs up on our bed and then climbs up on my head to finish her good night’s sleep. And despite contradicting viewpoints on a mother’s need for personal space, I do admit that I like mine, especially at 2 am. So I made my way down to her big empty bed only to discover that it wasn’t as empty as I assumed. I slid my arm under the pillow to snuggle in and was greeted with a half-eaten bag of goldfish crackers, a Santa squishy ball, five rolls of Smarties candies, a tiny notebook, an ice-pop wrapper, a bouncy ball, a tiny doll shoe and a partridge in a pear tree.

And so it was 2:04 am on a random Tuesday night in December when I discovered my youngest daughter is a pack rat. A sneaky one.

And that not all five-year-olds are created equally.

I mean, I could leave a bag full of chocolate in the middle of the kitchen table, within reach and sniffing distance of my oldest daughter, and she wouldn’t dare make a move without first being granted permission. And chocolate is her absolute favorite thing in the entire world. But so are rules. She’s the firstborn and her universe can only run on order.

And so I’ve been moving through parenting both daughters naively and blissfully thinking that sort of discipline and obedience must be a package deal.  But it turns out the second one is sneaky, thriving on flying under the radar, letting the older one take the spotlight until her comedy routine is honed and she can steal the show. As a middle child myself, I should have known.

Anyway, today I offered to help her make her bed and the darling assured me that she had it under control, which just turned out to be a ploy to get me off her trail while she tried to figure out what to do with the sticky stash of pillowcase Sweet Tarts she’d been hoarding. I didn’t even know we had Sweet Tarts and so this is what I’m saying.

I took the child with me grocery shopping yesterday and we had the cart overflowing with what I was hoping would be at least a week or two of meals and snacks. And while I busied myself bagging up the vegetables and cereal at the end of the conveyer belt, Rosie took my distraction as an opportunity to try a new strategy. 

Among the string cheese and tortilla shells, Rosie got one of those Kinder Joy Egg things that is conveniently placed at small-child-eye-level, the kind with the candy and a tiny plastic toy, past me and through the grocery clerk. By the time I found it, I’d already paid for it.

“Rosie!” I exclaimed. “Did you put this candy in with our groceries without asking?”

“Yeah,” she replied, not phased in the least. “I didn’t ask because I knew you’d say no.”

“I would have said no,” I told her.

And then she told me, “But now you paid for it, so I might as well eat it.”

I was so baffled by her antics that I plowed my cart full of groceries right into the Christmas tree by the door on our way out, which apparently has now become a part of her core memory, because she’s reminded me and anyone within ear shot of it at least a dozen times already.

So that’s five.

Oh, and also, tonight at supper she told me she has a crush. He’s a cowboy and he’s cool and he ropes and she’s a cowgirl so what’s the deal?

The deal is, send prayers.

Happy Birthday sweet Rosie. We love every little thing about you.   

40 Years

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Listen to my interview with my parents and learn what my mom thought when dad brought her to the ranch when there were still party lines and how dad’s night in county jail gave him clarity on the direction of his life. 

My parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last week.

There aren’t many photos of their simple backyard wedding day around the ranch, just a few tucked inside old photo albums among snaps of cousin birthday parties, family in Christmas sweaters, Hereford cattle and my dad holding a string of fish he caught on their “honeymoon” to the big lake in the Badlands where my mom might have begun to realize what she was really getting into — it was going to be a no-real-frills existence with this man, not that the woman needed frills.

But she was up for it. I like to imagine that not much scared my mom back then. She had survived and left a problematic marriage well before she was out of her 20s. She packed up her hand-me-down furniture, clothes and dishes and called her sister and she was out of it, on her own with her young daughter in tow.

When she met my dad, she didn’t need him. She had her friends and family and her guts and she was working on finishing her social work degree. She taught ballet for extra cash, and aerobics, too. And knowing my dad, all of that was likely the appeal anyway, that she didn’t need him. That he could be who he was and she would take it or leave it. The woman wasn’t there to change anyone.

But it turns out he did change, maybe a bit, not for her but because of her. I’m privy to more of the scoop as I’ve taken Dad along for long road trips to music gigs throughout the years. On the miles of county roads and interstates, you get talking about things you might not otherwise get around to.

He told me the two had broken up at one point before their engagement and a few weeks later he found himself hitching a ride from a skeptical sheriff who didn’t fully believe his story about his broke-down pickup but let him spend the night in a county jail cell because there were no hotels in the town. And so he was sorta broke, sorta lonesome and sorta wondering what the heck he was doing. If he died that night, would anyone even know where he was?

He wanted her to know.

He laughs now thinking about it, but really, how do you decide to take the leap into committing to build a life with someone? Did Dad really need this sort of dramatic experience to make him see the light? Realistically, he probably only realized it was the light in hindsight. But it’s a good story with a good lesson I think, that you have choices. That when you are responsible for the life you build, it makes you one of the lucky ones.

In my experience witnessing my parents’ marriage throughout my lifetime, it’s been the sweet way they mix independence and individuality with support and care that’s always made me feel secure. Watching them, I never got the impression that you had to give a part of yourself up to be with someone.

And my young ballerina mother from the Red River Valley couldn’t have thrown herself into a more foreign situation — with the country churches and schools, the party line phones and that time she found a rattlesnake in the house when she was home alone with just my sister and me as a little baby—but I’ve never heard resentment once. They chose this life together and as the years went on, my mom figured out how she could best be herself in it, determined to bloom where she planted her life, understanding the important hold this place had on my father.

These days I’m getting to know them in a different season of their lives, one that looks like retirement (well, sort of) and grandchildren and the ability to do things they could have never done in the years spent raising kids and cattle and careers.

How lucky are we to continue to learn from them? I know they love one another by the way they let the other one be, as if to say, “I love you because I know you and we’ve got this.” And in the past 40 years, they’ve been dealt some pretty mountainous obstacles that took the ways in which they are very much the opposite to fully get through. No one tells you that can make all the difference. My parents have never shied away from the tough things.

But they’ve never argued on what they find moral and right. They’ve never disagreed on the way they both view giving and helping. They didn’t even disagree when my dad flat-out gave their minivan to a person who needed it more. And so I guess it’s the ways in which they are the same that really pack the power punch.

Anyway, in true no-frills fashion, we didn’t plan a big fancy anniversary party this year. Instead, my mom went fishing with my dad, this time on a nice pontoon. With magazines and wine. And that sounds just like them, doesn’t it?