Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

music, poetry, musings, photography and philosophy from a woman who found her way back home and wants you to come over for a hike and a cocktail.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Tag Archives: memories

The big chair and the tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wheels of the past

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Fall has settled in at the ranch and we’ve been spending some time working the cows and moving the cows and contemplating the market and thinking about next year’s goals. With the crisp of its arrival comes the regret of not accomplishing all we set out to accomplish in the warmer, fleeting, summer months. It’s always this way on the ranch, and I would argue, gets worse as we get older and so do the fences and buildings that need to be repaired, rebuilt or torn down.

Like most farms and ranches, we have a couple places on our land that have become graveyards for old equipment, cars, campers, boats or mowers. They sit in the draws as a reminder of a part of your life you used to live. When I was a kid, these graveyards were full of my great uncles’ fancy old cars, my great grandpa’s pickup, dad’s snowmobiles and dirt bikes and machinery that at some point was declared beyond repair. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe they just couldn’t get to the repair part, or didn’t have the tool or the money and there it sat. The issue of time has always been an issue of time out here, no matter the decade.

As a kid I used to love to snoop around in these places. I would sit in driver’s seats and play with the shifter and the push the pedals and the buttons on the radio and pretend I was speeding down the road, my imagination somehow in the past with a future me at the wheel. I loved the smell of the dust that puffed up from the ripped and cracked seats and the sound the rusty springs made under the weight of my ten-year-old body bundled up against the bite of the wind. And I liked feeling like I was discovering a secret about these things and inventing the characters they might have driven along the backroads.

Old Truck

Most of my memories about visiting these relics take place in autumn when the heat has blown off making way for the frost. The burdock has headed out and the pig weeds and creeping jenny’s growing up and around the running boards and wheel wells is dry and stomped out by the cows. The flies and wasps have gone to their graves and so sitting in old cars doesn’t feel sweltering, but sort of haunted.

October 9, 2010. Rearview

Haunted. This season will do that to a person. Last week after a particularly windy and chilly morning spent moving cows with my dad and my husband, I sat on my palomino in our corrals along the edge of the west pasture while my husband worked on connecting a tired old gate to its latch and my dad tested the fussy water system in the tank. I was the kind of cold that got to my fingers and toes and turned them the same numb they used to get when I was a kid in this very same corral, in this very same wind, waiting on dad.

I looked over at that wooden chute standing weathered and worn connected, just barely now, to old posts and deteriorating rails. These corrals hadn’t been used in years, but the cold stinging my bones brought me back to the time I was a kid in this very same spot, bundled up as much as a kid could be bundled up, waiting on Dad to fix something. Or maybe we were running calves through that chute, vaccinating or doctoring and I wasn’t being useful after dismounting my horse and so I was colder than everyone else. And I remembered then how I disappeared from the bite of the relentless wind by laying my entire body down in the corner of those corrals, low, low, low enough to bury me in the grass. I remember the smell of the dirt and the way the clouds looked moving graceful and alarmingly quick across a sky that was deceivingly blue for such a brutal day. In my memory I was there for hours, cold and bundled and huddled and waiting for the job to be done. But time isn’t the same when you’re young. It moves slow like the water through a creek in the fall. Even slower when you’re cold.

These days feel more like the clouds in the wind.

I’m no longer the little girl I used to be out here. But how could it be when my bones are the same kind of cold? My fingers. My toes. This tall grass. My dad in his scotch cap. These old corrals. The smell of this horse and the dirt.

I looked up then and noticed those clouds flying and I felt the way I used to feel sitting those old cars so long ago.  Haunted.

Only the nostalgia is mine this time, not someone else’s mysterious story. That future is here now and she’s’ holding tight to the wheel of the past…

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.

May your kitchen always be too small for all the people you love

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Baby me in my grandpa’s arms with my cousins in my grandparent’s kitchen

There’s a joke I always make on stage during my performances. It involves holidays in my grandma’s tiny house on the ranch and how, looking back, we managed to pack three families with young kids in a 600-square-foot house for Easter dinner or Christmas mornings and sleepovers.

It seems magical that the house never felt small to us cousins, at least not until we grew up and realized that small space packed with six extra adults and eight kids under the age of 12 probably explained why Grandma always kept the kitchen window cracked even in the middle of winter and forgot the Jell-O salad in the fridge.

When we see holiday movies (and I’ve watched a lot of them this season), we see the giant houses with the big wreaths and the grand staircases, a table stretched out for miles with matching settings and a picture-perfect fireplace standing regal as the backdrop of every kind of predictable storyline that all works out in the end.

Cousins on a couch

But weren’t most of us more like a “kid’s card table in the living room and two or three attached to the end of the kitchen table” sort of family?

And maybe we took out the matching dinnerware if we had it handed down or saved from a wedding, but only once a year and only enough for six or eight of us.

And raise your hand if you spent the afternoon with your cousins making up an elaborate group dance or play in order to hold your family hostage for a performance at the end of the night, with aunts and uncles and grandparents piled on the living room couch, your grandpa’s easy chair and the floor.

And did the tree look a little chaotic, donning handmade paper and pipe cleaner ornaments among the antique bulbs and garland and the star that was always a little worse for the wear but it’s tradition?

Did everyone always linger in the kitchen by the olive and pickle tray even if the house was big enough to send everyone to the basement or living room and out of the way?

And wasn’t it always a little hot, a little sleepy in that house even though it was also a little loud?

The cutest picture of little Edie opening a hair brush at Christmas

Each Christmas, we spend a weekend at my in-laws’ beautiful home in a neighboring town. If there ever was a woman made to host a holiday, it’s my mother-in-law, and if ever there was a house built for three Christmas trees and an extended family weekend together, it’s theirs.

In fact, they built it just for moments like these, from the ground up actually, all on their own after their kids were grown and they moved on to the next chapter of their lives, with a pretty staircase that leads to two bedrooms on the upper level and then another on the main floor for guests, a pool table in the basement that also works for family pingpong tournaments, a hot tub room, a sewing room, a couple cozy living rooms.

A little montage from Christmas at the in-laws, including modeling our jammies from the PJ exchange.

Still, I walked up the stairs and — you guessed it — everyone, all 15 of us plus the dog, were huddled together in the kitchen.

Isn’t that beautiful?

I think about my grandma in that tiny house and I wonder, if she would have been given the years she needed to watch her grandkids grow, would she have planned a larger home with a more accommodating layout?

She was a woman born to an immigrant family, one of 12 kids raised on this prairie. I imagine she was used to close quarters, but I also imagine she had a dream home in mind, as we all do.

In fact, we just finished up an addition on our own home in the name of hosting Christmas Eve pancake suppers and Easter dinners and branding day lunches. We added a wide-open living room and a dining room with enough space to extend the table. This is the first Christmas we’re hosting with the new layout and more room, but we’ve been living with it long enough to realize what we already knew: they will gather in the kitchen.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas and I hope you had to crack the kitchen window and I hope you forgot the Jell-O salad in the fridge and I hope you are lucky enough to have a kitchen too small for all the people you love.

Making Music. Making Pies.

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The kids are back to school, the mornings are cool, the tomatoes are ripening in the garden and so are the wild plums in the sharp and poky brushes of the ranch. Just yesterday my nieces came in with handfuls they had collected with their mom and grandpa and informed me that they are ready by dropping them on my kitchen counter and inviting us all to indulge.

Ripe wild plums are one of the signs that we’re transitioning into fall and so I wanted to share with you a memory from the archives from when I found myself with a bag full of homegrown apples and the urge to do something beautiful with them. And so my mom, little sister and I  (none of us seasoned bakers) decided to take on my grandma Edie’s pie recipe, crust and all.

It’s a sweet memory sprinkled with nostalgia from when my oldest daughter (who just started second grade) was just a baby.  She was fresh and new to this world, named after the grandma’s whose recipe we had in hand, and I was fresh and new to motherhood and feeling domestic and content in the kitchen surrounded by the comfort of generations and the promise of a cool down.

Enjoy this season. Enjoy the fruits of your labor and lock your doors because it’s also the time of year that zucchini starts hitchhiking…

Making Memories. Making Pies.
September, 2016

My mom keeps a small wooden box in her kitchen, tucked up in the cupboard next to her collection of cookbooks. On the front it reads “RECIPES” in the shaky, wood-burning technique of a young boy trying his hand at carpentry.

And inside is an assortment of recipe cards, of course, notes from a kitchen and a cook who left us all too soon, taking with her that famous homemade plum sauce.

And the from-scratch buns she served with supper.

And the familiar casseroles that you could smell cooking as you walked up toward the tiny brown house from the barnyard after a ride on a cool fall evening.

Every once in awhile my mom will open that box on a search for a memory tied to our taste buds. She’ll sort through the small file of faded handwriting and index cards until she finds it, setting it on the counter while she gathers ingredients, measures stirs and puts the dish together the best way she remembers.

I’m thinking about it now because it’s sitting on my kitchen table, the one that used to sit in my grandmother’s kitchen all those years ago acting as a surface to roll out dough and pie crusts or a place to serve countless birthday cakes or her famous April Fool’s day coffee filter pancakes.

And so they’ve met again, that table and that box, which is currently sitting next to a pie pan covered in tinfoil.

Because last week we pulled the box out on a mission for guidance on what to do with the 50,000 pounds of apples my little sister inherited from the tree in the backyard of the house she bought a few years back.

“Maybe we should make applesauce or apple crisp,” we said as Little Sister plopped the fourth bag full of fruit on my kitchen counter, my mom sipping coffee and my big sister entertaining my nephew beside her.

I reached up in the cupboards to dust off a couple recipe books because we all agreed then that apples this nice deserve to be in a pie, and Googling “pie making” seemed too impersonal for such an heirloom-type task.

Then Mom remembered the recipe box.

And that Gramma Edie used to make the best apple pies.

It was a memory that was intimately hers and vaguely her daughters’. We were too young to remember the cinnamon spice or the sweetness of the apples or the way she would make extra crust to bake into pieces and sprinkle with sugar when the pies were done, but our mother did.

And most certainly so did our dad.

So we dove into the recipe with the unreasonable confidence of amateurs and spent the afternoon in my kitchen, peeling apples, bouncing the baby and rolling and re-rolling out gramma’s paradoxically named “No Fail Pie Crust,” laughing and cheering a victory cheer as we finally successfully transferred it to the top of the pie using four hands and three spatulas, certain this wasn’t our grandmother’s technique.

Wondering how she might have done it.

Little Sister carved a heart in the top to make it look more presentable. We put the pie in the oven, set the timer and hoped for the best.

We fed the baby and gave her a bath. We watched my nephew demonstrate his ninja moves. We talked and poured a drink. We cleared the counter for supper. We put the baby to bed.

And then we pulled the pie from the oven. We marveled at our work. We decided it looked beautiful, that we might declare it a huge success, but first we should see what Dad thinks.

So we dished him up a piece. It crumbled into a pile on his plate, not pie shaped at all. But he closed his eyes and took a bite and declared it just the right amount of cinnamon, the apples not too hard, the crust like he remembered, not pretty but good.

We served ourselves and ate up around that old table. We thought of our grandma, wondered if she might have given us a little help and put the recipe back in the box right next to her memory and the new one we made.

And we closed the lid.

This story, Grandma’s recipe and more can be found in my book “Coming Home” available for purchase here.

Music News

My new single, “If You Were A Cowboy” will be released on September 12 on all platforms! Pre-save it on Spotify here to help it gain some momentum and to get it delivered directly to your inbox on release day!

Enjoy a sneak peek into the making of the music video, which we wrapped up this week in a cool old barn near Bismarck with some great North Dakota based musicians and videographers.

My grandma, she could float

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This week we said goodbye to my grandma Ginny, my mom’s mother, in a little lake town in Minnesota.

It’s easy to look back at what I knew of this woman and be proud to have called her my grandmother. And for a few days we spent time with family in her and grampa’s cabin on the shores of Lake Melissa. And it seemed she ordered the weather up just for us, so our kids could jump in its cool, clear waters and pull up fish after fish after little sun fish. She was smiling down for sure.

Due to the crazy travel schedule, watch for the podcast to be published tomorrow.

My grandma, she could float
Forum Communications

There are things about people you remember when they’ve left this world and it’s never what you think will stick with you when you’re mourning their death at their funeral or writing an obituary or a note of condolence.

I want to say something profound here today about my grandmother Virginia Blain, who died peacefully in her bed last week in a little lake town in Minnesota at 89 years old. I want to tell you about a woman who grew up as a baker’s daughter and married and nurtured the love of her life for nearly 70 years. I want to tell you how she built a professional career in the 1950s, kept her own checking account and raised four smart and independent daughters. I want to tell you how she swam in lakes and oceans around the world and planted hundreds of flower gardens and read a thousand books and played a million games of bridge before time made her mind betray her, slowly taking her away from the people who love her, in this life, where she will be dearly missed…

But all I can think about right now is how she could float. My grandmother, who was an accomplished Girls Scout and a lifeguard and a strong swimmer who spent her long life on the shores of Minnesota lakes, would walk out into the water and just let it hold her up as she smiled under her straw hat and splashed her grandkids with the hands she didn’t need to use to keep her head above water. And we would all try it then as we watched her, our skinny, pale, Midwestern bodies flailing, our cheeks puffed out as we held our breath and sunk under the water while she laughed.

“Ginny was a happy person,” that’s what my grandfather wrote at the end of her obituary and I can’t stop crying over it and I’m not sure why. After all the things that she was, that line reaches inside me and stirs it all up.

Because it’s true. In fact, she might have been the definition of it, even in the most challenging times in her life. She dealt with doubt or loneliness by organizing a card game or hosting a party or getting to work. When her husband’s military career took her from the familiar sidewalks of her North Dakota home to Japan in the infancy of marriage and new motherhood, she called it an adventure and took a flower arranging class and for the rest of her summers there was never an empty flowerbed or bud vase in sight.

To be loved by a person like my grandma Ginny is to feel like she created her sunshine just to have you stand in it and warm up. She had a way of making it all special. I wanted to make sure I said that because it’s true. Serving pretzels? She’d put them in a pretty dish with sour cream and garlic salt for dipping. She’d wrap the son-in-laws’ Christmas socks in a nice box with tissue paper and a curled bow, making Hanes look luxurious. She’d mix salted peanuts with M&Ms and make sure the glass bowl was always full for company. She’d make a game of waiting in line. She put a cherry in the vodka tonic. She put the music on for supper. She made plans for breakfast in bed, then made sure he made plans to reciprocate. She’d have you circle your favorite things in every catalog. She’d tell him he’s handsome. She’d tell everyone he’s handsome.

To my grandma, life was a game that she genuinely wanted to play, and she wanted you to play with her.

When you’re loved by someone like her, you want to make her proud. That alone is the greatest gift she could have left us with.

My grandma was hydrangeas in the garden and a sailboat ride with her husband. She was a good book in the lawn chair in the shade by the lake and a cold washcloth on your forehead when there was nothing else she could do. She was a big laugh, a game of Tripoly and leave the dishes for later. My grandma was lumpy mashed potatoes and mediocre Salisbury steak that tasted better than it was because she made no apologies and it wasn’t about the food anyway. She was licorice in the candy drawer and doughnut holes from the bakery and fishing with gummy worms off the dock. And my grandma, she was happy.

My grandma, she could float..

The magic of childhood

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On the podcast Chad and I reminisce about some of the most magical times of our childhoods after Edie’s birthday reminded us of how exciting the little things can be when we’re young. Then I confesses some of my most embarrassing moments in the recent weeks while Chad cringes in the corner and questions his life decisions. Then stay tuned for a sweet little interview with the birthday girl!

When’s the last time you’ve been so completely excited about something that you couldn’t sleep? Like, not nerves, but the kind of happy anticipation that makes it impossible to switch your mind off. Body wiggling, so completely pumped that you wanted to close your eyes and skip days to get the thing that you could not wait for?

It’s been a while for me. I didn’t think so. If you were to ask me this question a couple months ago I’m sure I would have been able to come up with an answer to an event or activity or vacation or something that had me energized in recent years, but then last week happened and now I’m convinced that adult excited can’t hold a candle to almost-7-year-old on the night before her first sleep-over birthday party ever excited.

That kind of kid energy, it’s palpable, and for the last couple weeks we have been in a countdown to the big birthday party. With each passing day, my daughter, she leveled up, until the last two nights before the party we were left with the kind of emotion that the little darling could hardly manage. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and she certainly wasn’t going to fall asleep without checking and double checking her mother’s work, popping up out of what I thought was a dead sleep multiple times to ask me things like “Did you get the cupcakes?” “Did you call the other mommies and tell them to tell the teachers we’re picking my friends up after school?” “Do you think we should go to the pool first or just come home to play?” And then, “I’m so excited I might cry.” And then she did a little and so did I, wondering if either one of us was going to get any sleep and suddenly nervous that I was going to somehow screw something up (I mean, she has such little faith!)

So now I’ve concluded that probably the last time I’ve ever been that excited was when I was eight or nine and I was decorating our kitchen with homemade construction paper cutouts of fish and seaweed and blue and yellow streamers and planning the water balloon fight my friends and I were going to have when they came over to celebrate. And then I got a brand new bike to boot and I was over the moon.

Or the Christmas Eve night when I was right in the sweet spot of childhood and also my neighbor asked me to babysit a tiny baby goat for the holiday weekend named Filipe. And I had that goat in a box by my bed and a lit up cedar branch of a Christmas tree in my room that kept falling over with the weight of all the ornaments and lights because the little coffee can stuffed with wet newspaper didn’t stand a chance and I was anticipating the beanbag chair I’d asked for and Santa delivered…that was something. That was a memory.

And it was simple as that. A tiny baby goat in diapers and a beanbag chair on Christmas morning.

And then there was our wedding, of course. I was absolutely excited about that one, but big days like that as an adult get complicated a bit with grown-up expectations and responsibility. So much of it is in our hands then. But kids? Kids keep it simple. It’s all about the play. It’s all in their heart.

And so I hosted my first ever 7-year-old birthday party sleepover as a mom. And, to Edie’s relief, I remembered the school pickup protocol and I remembered the cupcakes. We got her the toy on her wish-list and we had tacos and did all of the things—dress-up, nail painting, charades, dance party, played house, Barbies, crafts, movie, popcorn and staying up too late. (I even let them use glitter because I’m wild and crazy and one of the girls called me fun and so it is worth sweeping it off the floor for the rest of my life.)

When we finally had to bring her friends back to their parents, I apologized to the mommies for the sugar rush and late bedtime and the glitter ornament I packed up in their bags. One of the moms even thanked me for the purple and green hair chalk in her daughter’s blonde hair. She said it was perfect for their family pictures that afternoon, but I’m not sure she meant it. I told her she’s just lucky I didn’t send a kitten home as a party favor. That was a real option…

Anyway, I asked Edie if her birthday party was everything she hoped it would be and she said she wished it lasted longer and so I took that as a yes. And I’m taking her as my inspiration going into this holiday season to strip off a few layers of adulthood-induced stress and channel that good old-fashioned childhood energy.

Anyone have a baby goat that needs babysitting?

Where we float

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Lake Sakakawea Sunset

There’s something about having access to a lake like Lake Sakakawea that makes a 16-year-old feel simultaneously invincible and terrified. Jessie Veeder / The Forum

Where we float
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Recently, I loaded the girls up in the car for an impromptu trip to the shore of Lake Sakakawea, where my husband was finishing up a carpentry job on a cabin.

Our ranch is only about a half-hour drive to the shores of that big rustic lake surrounded by buttes and ranch country with more shoreline than California. As teenagers, my boyfriend and I would take every chance we could get to load up his dad’s old pickup with the canoe, or, if we were lucky and could get it running, his fishing boat, and head down to her muddy shores.

There’s something about having access to a lake like this that makes a 16-year-old feel simultaneously invincible and terrified. Like kings of the universe, but insignificant enough to understand that there are things in this world that could swallow us whole.

I stood on the edge of that water with our young daughters as we watched that boy I loved then, now a full-grown man, skip rocks halfway across the bay. The sun revealed a glint of white around his temples where his dark hair used to bleach in the sun, the same way our daughters’ hair is turning white under the first rays of summer.

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I felt the cool clay on my bare feet, the same bare feet that I used to prop up on the dash of his gray Thunderbird going way too fast with the windows rolled down, on our way to find a spot where we could fling open the doors of that old car, strip some layers off of our hot skin and run into the water, frantic and young and splashing until that lake did, in fact, swallow us up, just like it promised. But just for a moment, before we had to come up for air.

And the thing about love is that you can fall into it with anyone, anywhere. And maybe I fell in love with him in the halls of that high school when everything else was awkward and uncertain, except the boy who showed up each day to walk me to science class. But the campfires he built and the fish he caught and the cool water and the laughing and the way that he kissed me in that Thunderbird kept me there with him to see what the next summer might bring.

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That was 20 summers ago. Twenty summers that brought us right back here to the muddy banks where it began, watching our babies strip down to undies, splashing, tossing rocks and searching the banks of this massive shore for treasure upon treasure upon treasure, me with our girls and my darling dear husband, enamored, exhausted and smack-dab in the maddening middle part.

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And sometimes it feels like we were never those kids, like it was a million years ago, but in a million more our daughters will be doing the same. And then unlike us, they will likely fall in love again, and again and again until the timing is right or, more likely, completely wrong, and so then they will dive.

And I will watch them and be reminded about the falling part, the frantic, feet flying toward the freezing water, gasping for air, falling part and be glad for the memories…

And then, when I need to, I will tell them about the holding each other up part. Because that part, well, that’s where we float.

Chad and Jessie

 

Rose soap and the woodwork of our memories…

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Lasting memories of my great grandma

When I was in kindergarten, I lived in Grand Forks with my family in a small white stucco house by the Red River.

I don’t remember too much about this time in my life, except the blond neighbor girl named Jenny, my blue bicycle, drinking Dad’s cold coffee in his basement office, my little sister’s run-in with a hornet’s nest, my sparkly jelly shoes and my Great-Grandma Rognlie. Actually, her name was Eleanor, but we called her by her last name because she was the kind of woman who took formalities seriously.

She lived in a red house a few blocks away from our little white one by the river dike, and every day I would walk there to spend time with her in those free and unplanned hours kids used to have between after school and suppertime.

And that time for me as a little girl meant saltine crackers arranged on a plate and spread with peanut butter, reading books with her giant light-up magnifying glass at her antique fold-down desk, watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on PBS while laying on the carpet in front of her couch with the birds on it and her screened-in porch and her garden and this sophisticated woman with immaculate hair that was curled and styled every Tuesday at the salon.

When I pull from my memory, I realize that walking into my great-grandmother’s house was like walking into a different time that smelled like rose soap, tasted like frosted gingerbread cookies from the bakery and looked like a woman who worked to make money so she could put a roof over the heads and food in the mouths of two boys by herself in a time when women didn’t do those things without a man in the house, or at least they didn’t dare declare it.

But I didn’t know that about her then. I didn’t know how strong she was or the sacrifices she made or how hard it must have been or how proud it made her to see both those boys go on to graduate from universities, marry good women, contribute to their communities, succeed in their careers and raise children of their own.

I just knew she let me have Juicy Fruit gum and play her old piano and try on her fancy hats and shoes and she would order my sisters and me things from the Lillian Vernon catalog. And I knew that she always had a tablecloth on her table and a centerpiece and a game of Skip-Bo or Uno or Wheelbarrow or Solitaire and that she took the time to play cards with me after “Mister Rogers” and before my dad came to pick me up.

And on Sundays, I knew that she liked to take us all out to the Village Inn where I’d get three crayons and a paper menu and a pancake with that little dollop of whipped cream and I better behave.

And I knew that she had another husband later in her life, because I saw him in a black-and-white picture framed in her hallway, but I didn’t know him because I wasn’t born yet when he died, or maybe I was, I just wouldn’t remember, but somehow I knew that they didn’t have enough time together. None of us who love really do, do we?

ARCHIVE: Read more of Jessie Veeder’s Coming Home columns

And I’m thinking of my Grandma Rognlie today because last night I watched my mom, dressed for the occasion, help my little Rosie put on her peacoat to head out the door of a theater event and I swear I could smell her grandmother’s rose soap…

And it occurred to me there is no way for my daughters to understand the complicated, compassionate, strong and beautiful story that lies within my mother. I can only hope that one day they will all grow old enough to ask the questions, woman to woman.

But right now, they know they’ll always find M&M’s in her drawer conveniently placed at their height, and on Thursday she’ll take my oldest to dance and then for a smoothie at her coffee shop and then the two sisters will run and play under the racks at her store until it’s time to head back to the ranch without sidewalks.

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And my daughters, they don’t know it now, but when they grow older these moments will lie quiet in the woodwork of their memories, waiting there for them when they close their eyes, searching for a way to feel safe and special and loved.

And they may never know the full story, and they surely won’t remember much about being small, but they will remember what matters, and it will always matter: that red house, that rose soap, that card game, those M&Ms, that Juicy Fruit gum…

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What the cat knows…

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What the cat knows
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When we were growing up, we had a house cat.

I shouldn’t say “we,” really, because that cat was all my little sister’s, except that my big sister named her Belly, after one of her favorite mid-’90s girl grunge bands and I got the heroic ranch kid privilege of rescuing her as a tiny abandoned kitten from underneath my grandma’s deck while my 5-year-old sister clenched her small, nervous fists under her chin and waited for her turn to hold her.

And so the runty calico cat with the weird name came to be ours and stayed through the entirety of my little sister’s childhood. And she was a typical cat in all the ways cats are cats.

She did her own thing. She waited at the door to go out and then would immediately climb up the screen, tearing it to shreds and driving my mother crazy. In an effort to try to deter this habit, we were given permission to use our squirt guns in the house. But only on the cat clinging to the screen door, of course.

But Belly didn’t care. She knew how to get our attention. She knew how to get what she wanted. And what she wanted was to sleep in my little sister’s bed every night.

After she was tucked in, if my dad forgot to leave the door open a crack, the cat would sit out there pathetically whining until the little kid version of my sister, with her wild hair, leaky eyes and big heart, would let her in. Every night for 13 years until my sister left home and left that cat behind.

Belly didn’t live a year without my sister in the house. My little sister was her person. And in a different life I’d be the type of skeptic that doesn’t believe in those sorts of bonds, except I watched that cat come and get my little sister before she gave birth to both sets of her kittens in that house that raised us all, which is an uncommon behavior for any animal, especially an independent cat.

ARCHIVE: Read more of Jessie Veeder’s Coming Home columns

I’ve seen it with my dad and his horses, too. And I’ve had it with my old dog Hondo, who always slept on the floor on my side of the bed, even though he was technically my husband’s hunting lab. My mom has a cat now that will only sit on her lap — that is until the few times a year my uncle from Texas arrives, and then that cat’s all his. It’s as if she’s saying, “Oh, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Yes, I think we choose them, and then they choose us, because maybe they just know better.

Last week I brought my two young daughters to Dickinson, N.D., to sign the paperwork to adopt a big, orange house cat from an animal rescue. As I write, I’m not sure why I felt compelled to do such a crazy thing. Maybe it was that heroic ranch kid rescue gene in me, but the last thing I need is another wild creature in these walls.

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And Lord knows there are plenty of cats for giveaway out here in rural North Dakota, except I saw him in a photo all curled up in that cage and I made a decision. Oh, I used the “we need a mouser” excuse on my husband, but this big orange cat is clearly a lover, not a fighter and my husband knows it.

Time will tell us what this cat knows.

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