Tag Archives: musings

The hair! The hair! The (graying) hair!

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My hair is turning gray. 

Well, it’s been turning gray since my late twenties, but now I seem to be shocking people with it. To be fair, when I left for chemo treatment in the spring, my hair was long and dark, with some nicely managed sparkles of gray here and there. When I returned home six weeks later, it was short, thin, wild and, yeah, pretty dang gray. It was a drastic transition, one that I decided to roll with because what’s the point of dying hair that was coming out in clumps. 

“Woah, your hair!” is the first thing out of about everyone’s mouth when they haven’t seen me in a while. “Woah, my hair!” is the first thing out of my mouth every morning when I wake up to find it standing on end and reminding me, along with my aching neck and stiff ankle, that I am fluffy, but not in a spring chicken sort of way. 

Before chemo
After chemo

When I first moved back to my family’s ranch in my late twenties, I remember writing a piece on my blog about how I intended on aging out on the ranch gracefully and graciously. I was going to continue to wear my red wedding boots as long as I lived and let my hair grow out wild and free and as silver as it needed to be. There were other things on that list–like I promised to always make time to pick crocuses and bury my face in the mane of a horse and remember that it’s not about how you look, it’s about how you live. And that’s easy for a twenty-something to say I suppose, although I want to believe her. 

But that twenty-something didn’t know that her feet were going to grow a half a size with each baby. And she didn’t have an Instagram feed yet, not to mention one that’s constantly telling her that, at 43, there are a lot of cracks to be repaired and bumps to smooth out and plenty of money to spend in order to make you feel worth looking at. I have a couple of cosmetic shelves that prove they’ve convinced…

“I love your hair! I wish I could do that with mine!”  It’s something that has been said to me over the course of the last several months, but it’s also something I’ve said to other silver-haired women over the years, wondering if I’d ever be brave enough myself to just let it go, the way the twenty-something version of myself promised I would. 

Brave seems like a dumb word for this whole thing, but I’m keeping it in. My husband has been encouraging me to just let the gray fly for a few years now, reminding me that it’s no secret that people get older. Hair dye can only do so much work, he says. But could he really understand why the gray-haired thing is such a hard thing for many women? His beard turns gray and the world calls it sexy and distinguished (and I agree).

My hair turns gray and the world wonders why I let myself go.  I mean, women have been taught to fight against showing our age so ferociously that multiple million (billion?) dollar industries are built upon the very concept. I’m 43 and I’ve had forehead wrinkles and laugh lines pretty much since birth because when I talk, laugh, cry, sleep or breath in this world, I use my entire face, but never in my entire life have I ever been so aware of my face. Want to prevent wrinkles? Stop existing. 

It’s exhausting. 

I mean, I have better things to worry about—family and land stewardship and community and creative endeavors that fuel me. And for every ten-thousand anti-wrinkle and anti-mom-pouch messages out there, there are like one hundred women screaming into the void telling us to just chill, you are more than your body. 

And they’re right. But I was a girl the 90s and what was done to us then is not so easily undone. What they’re doing to us these days? Oof. And I’m a woman now and, dang it, is it wrong to admit I want to feel beautiful in this world, while simultaneously worrying about more important things.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that what we’re being sold as beautiful these days is not only such a complete and utter fabrication, it’s missing the whole point. Glass smooth skin and thick hair to our butts and thighs that don’t touch, the chokehold it can have on someone like me, a grown woman who knows better, makes me terrified for our daughters. 

If you were to ask me what I think is beautiful in a woman, I wouldn’t name one of those things. If you were to ask me what I like about myself, none of those things would come up either, for better or for worse. 

But I’ve always liked my hair well enough, although the relationship has shifted as I’ve let the gray show. Now I’m on shaky ground…

Because one of the most stunning women I have ever known is my grandma Edie, with silver hair and thick thighs and a laugh that lit up an entire county. I knew her mostly in cattlewomen t-shirts and jeans, or in her gardening shorts. Sometimes she wore pink lipstick and she became a queen. 

I wonder what my daughters would say if I asked them about beautiful women…

My grandma holding me

Maybe what I’m trying to say here is that I don’t want them to live in a world where letting their hair just be their dang hair is considered brave. I want them to exist beautifully without placing such a heavy amount of weight on a laugh line or a tan line. That weight can be saved for what they carry in a community. The bravery should be saved for that very same thing too. 

And then their hair! Their hair! Their hair can just be their beautiful hair.  

Our kitchen table

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Bright and early this morning my husband loaded up three horses, two cats and two dogs to bring to town to the vet for minor procedures and shots.

This morning we were also getting ready for picture day at school. At any point in the one- hour span it takes us to get out the door, I was running a coffeeshop, pancake house, therapist office and hair salon out of my kitchen. On the table sat a kennel full of two cats who hate each other, growling loudly to make sure everyone knew about it while my husband searched the premise for a leash for dogs that only go to town for vet appointments (and one goat show last year, but that was an accident.)

I did not volunteer to go with my husband for the vet drop off. I had my own drop off to do with a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old trying to keep their hair in place and practicing their smiles while singing along to their curated iTunes playlist coming through the speakers of the SUV. In addition to barista, line cook, therapist and stylist, I am also the lowest paid chauffer in the land.

Spotted in the school drop off line. Edie was not impressed: “What if there was a nun driving behind him?!”

On Sunday I turned my kitchen into an art studio and invited the cousins over to paint jeans in our school colors to get ready for homecoming week. Picture a giant kitchen table covered in clothes and paint and sparkles and four girls at varying levels of interest and perfectionism—two of them happily painting, drawing and adding gems to the pockets of their jeans without a care about the outcome looking like Martha Stewart’s Pinterest board,  and two of them on the other side of the table and spectrum of perfectionism who cared very much that their garments looked like Martha’s. To give you a clear picture:  at one point one of the girls (who shall not be named for fear of retaliation) was laying on the ground saying, “we’re doomed!” because the outline of her wolf paw print was too thick. This was the third time she had taken to the floor over the placement of paint, and it wouldn’t be her last.

This is where my little sister’s master’s level education in school counseling comes in handy in our life. I am not a real therapist, after all, and so I went to my room and screamed into a pillow for ten seconds while she gave a lesson on perfectionism and trying to enjoy the process and, also, how to be nicer to your mom. I looked at my little sister and remembered when we used to gather our daughters together around this table for construction paper handprint turkeys and dream of their bright future. Never in this dream did I anticipate an art project to doom us all…

Anyway, all of the girls eventually completed their jeans to a level they were proud of, (although Rosie would have liked to add a couple hundred more gems) and then it was time to clear that kitchen table for a frozen pizza supper because that’s all I could mentally handle after hours in the crafting trenches.  

This kitchen table is first generation. My husband and I bought it after our oldest daughter was born. Up until that point we had been eating and crafting and playing cards and grooming animals on second-hand tables that held memories and stories of their own. We had ours built by Amish furniture makers with big family suppers in mind, and so it pulls out with four extra leaves and can comfortably seat fourteen people or so.  When my husband walks by to see another craft explosion, he likes to mention that he never thought all these tiny paint brushes would be a part of his life. In my world, any surface is a crafting surface. In his world, any surface is a place to set a tool, so he should understand. This table has also been a work bench plenty of times.

A couple weeks ago I was minding my own business at that kitchen table, making a cute “cake” out of diapers for a friend’s baby shower while my daughters and nieces milled around the kitchen creating things of their own. We had a batch of kittens several weeks prior and one poor little one had developed a growth on his neck that my husband diagnosed as a bot fly (or warble fly) larva. In case you can’t imagine, this is gross. Botfly larva create a slow-growing, raised, boil-like bump on the carrier that can be extracted by using Vaseline to suffocate the larva so it comes up for air and you can pull it out with a tweezer. Ugh. Naturally, I imagined we would deal with this situation in the barn or the great outdoors. But no. Right in the middle of my diaper cake crafting time, on the other side of that kitchen table sat my husband in his reading glasses, holding a tiny kitten in the palm of his rubber-gloved hand about to confidently perform a veterinary procedure while one girl gagged and two girls observed in fascination, narrating the entire endeavor for me because I couldn’t watch.

Because my protests were waved off, I at least grabbed a couple towels to protect the surface and scootched my craft out of the way until the kitten was saved. Which he was in no time.

Martha Stewart would never.

This is gross, but I had to show you

But we did. And then I thoroughly sanitized, because our kitchen table might be a temporary vet office, but it’s also our crafting table, and our hair salon, and our therapist office, and our card table and our crafting table and, for gawd sake, and our pancake house!

There she is, in a rare moment of cleanliness

A List

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One of my favorite parts of my day is taking the dogs out on my walk up to the field, or on the trail to the east pasture in the evening after supper. I like how they know, when I come out with my tennis shoes on, that it’s time to take off. I look at my puppy and say “outside!” and he perks up and races to the door to great the cow dogs. And I perk up too as soon as that fresh air hits my face and we all go bouncing together down the road and up through tall grasses and down through the trees. These animals are free to go anywhere without us out here, that’s one of the many perks of being a ranch dog, but (apart from their occasional wander to my sister’s and the oil sites down the road) they chose to stay here with us and wait for a walk or a ride in the side-by-side or alongside a horse.

I was out with them yesterday afternoon before the kids got home from basketball practice with my husband. I had some moments to myself that day, so I decided to take my walk early. Lately I’ve been skipping the music or talk in my headphones, swapping the option for whatever quiet I can hear and daring to catch my own thoughts, like I used to before there were so many ways to plug into the chatter. The sun was only barely starting to move toward the horizon and I felt the sort of free you feel when you’re out in the world on a random Tuesday afternoon when your normal routine would have you working behind a computer, behind the walls, behind the wheel of a fast-moving car..

“I love the way these dogs zip back and forth like this,” I thought to myself as my shoes left footprints in the silty soil of the trail. It had rained the night before and there were still spots that were a bit slippery. There was a moment I almost went down. I laughed to myself, of course, there was no one else around, but I laughed still. It feels silly to almost slip, even when you’re alone.

“I love the smell of these wet leaves. This cooler air. This breeze,” I continued to myself as I moved up that hill behind those bouncy dogs who were making a wide swath of circles before coming back to check in on me. “I love this stack of bales on the horizon and the way the dust smells when they’re rolled out. I love fall work and last week when we walked out and could see our breath for the first time in months.”

My moving feet and beating heart and air sucking in and pushing out of my lungs became a rhythm for the quiet little list I started creating in my head. “What else do I love? What else? Let’s think about it now. Let’s make a list.”

“I love round-bellied kittens who just learned to walk with their tails spiked up.

I love watching my children roll dough on the kitchen counter with him and his shirt sleeves pushed up and that he uses his strong hands to build houses and also tiny dumplings for soup.

I love it when the fog settles in the low places on our morning drive and when I come up over the hilltop I get to look down on the clouds. I like that Rosie wants me to stop the car so she can run through them.

I love the big granite rocks on the hilltops that have been here a million years, and I like rain puddles and the grass greening up after summer, after all.

I love when we see a hawk on a fence post, or a grouse perched in the bullberry brush and I love the wild turkeys who roost on the roof of our house and we only know they’ve been there when they decide to fly down past our windows to the lawn in the morning and scare me to death.

I love a kitchen table card game, one more please before bed and I love brushing my daughters’ hair in the morning, even when they don’t like the style and pull it all out to do it themselves.  

I love the way he taught them to use a fork to dip the Oreos in milk and I love any laugh I can get out of him.

I love the sound of my nieces calling me ‘Aunt Jessie’ like that’s the only name I ever had,

and I love the sound of a steele guitar in a band I get to sing with.

I love finding a big fat toad in the yard, or a turtle, or a bull snake,

and I love the way the wild mushrooms pop up under old leaves and the little, almost big, cowboy kids who made bolo ties with me last weekend out of paper and ribbon and wore them every day at the rodeos and I love this cow trail that’s also a horse trail that’s also a deer trail and an elk trail and a racoon trail and a trail for me and my footsteps and these dogs. These funny little pack of cow dogs zipping back and forth like this. I love these dogs…”

To be seen and to disappear

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I am behind on posting columns for the past two weeks, and so today you get a two-in-one post to get us back on the rails!

Hope it’s as pretty where you are as it is here with the colors changing and the rain falling and the weather cooling down.

Right Place, Right Time
September 19, 2026

Last week I played music in a little park by the lake about two hours from the ranch. I was supposed to bring a sound system with me, which I didn’t realize until I got there and there was no sound system. But I did bring along my dad and my steele guitar playing friend who, luckily, lived close enough to go grab his system from his house. And when I realized I also forgot my guitar strap and my capo on my kitchen counter, my dad came in clutch with extras and the two guys combined saved the day.

Forgetting something as pertinent to a gig as a sound system is not something I’ve ever done. The fact that I was so confident in my decision not to bring one sort of had me on edge. The fact that it all worked out in the end thanks to those around me that had exactly what we needed, got me thinking about all the times in life we find ourselves in predicaments that can only be solved by the good fortune of having access to the right people at the exact right time.

Like when I got stuck behind a wreck in traffic on my way to town to pick Edie up from kindergarten and it was clear not only was I going to be late, but I was going to be very, very late. I was able to dial my friend and within five minutes she was there, saving the day and the kindergarten tears from falling.

Or like when my husband’s pickup recently broke down on the way home from town and his business partner just happened to be driving by pulling Chad’s flatbed trailer.  

Or when my uncle was on his way to town to replace a broken toilet and stopped by the house to say hi first, only to discover that my husband had a brand new, extra toilet just hanging out in the garage.

Or when we were hosting a big, nationally touring country act in town and the stage management needed a drum stand in like five minutes and the local music teacher had just bought a new one–and she lived two blocks away from the stage–so she just walked it right over.

Hunter Hayes in Watford City

I’m writing this in the passenger seat of my car as my husband drives us back east to Rochester so I can get my first scan since treatment at Mayo Clinic. I’m confident we will find that the tumors are gone or shrinking nicely and we’ll head back home with good news, but I’m still annoyed we have to go at all. I mean, I’m missing Rosie’s fun run and Edie’s basketball game and Rosie’s field trip to the Dinosaur museum. And the girls aren’t happy about it either, a little residual panic from the last time I was there for so long. But this morning as we were packing up to leave, my husband looked at his phone and laughed. “You didn’t tell me it was a RUN!” my sister-in-law’s message read. She had enthusiastically said yes to Chad’s request to join Rosie on the track that morning (he could not handle her disappointed little face.) “She just LAPPED me!”

“Aunt of the year,” I wrote to a woman who found herself jogging with a hundred third graders at 8:30 in the morning in 40 degrees.

Day. Saved.

Rosie finished ten laps!

I am an independent person. Some could look at it as a strength in character, but often in my life it’s a quality that has been one of my biggest failings. As a kid, when someone would try to pick me up for a hug or to help me get more quickly from point A to point B, I would protest, “Put me down, I’m not a doll!” And then flee the scene.

My nature, when I’m sick, is to suffer in silence, away from people. If I were an animal, I would hole up and probably just die. And it’s a little bit that I hate to be a burden, and a little bit that I feel a need to regulate the room or the situation. If I’m uncomfortable or stressed, it could make you uncomfortable or stressed, and that stresses me out. And this is dumb, because this is not the way humans are supposed to exist in this world. And it’s not how I see it as someone on the other side of the help situation. One of my favorite things in the world is when someone needs a tissue or a wet wipe or a mint or a pocketknife and I am the woman who has all those things in her purse. My husband’s whole life thesis is being the guy ready for anything and willing to help in a crisis or inconvenience of any size and it’s the thing I love the most about him.

I walked into my office the other day and the chair that I ordered the week before had been put together for me when I was out. My coworker had her husband do it, because he loves that sort of thing, and as a person who hates to follow directions and also hates those tiny allen wrenches, it was as if he had hung the moon for me. And maybe this example isn’t as much about saving the day as it is about just doing something nice for someone. There are so many of you out there who operate like this, just going around making life easier for others intentionally or by being at the right place at the right time and willing to help.

Anyway, as we’re pulling off on the interstate I guess I just felt compelled to refect on the feeling of “phew,” and the sentiment of “thank you.”

See you back at the ranch!

To Disappear is Sometimes the Dream
September 26, 2026

“Do you think I could make it to the grain bins and back before it gets pitch black?” I asked my husband as I scooped the last of the rice and chicken off my plate an into my mouth. The rest of my family was lingering at the table, poking at a supper that was a little sub-par and reaching the limit of a long day. It was a little after 8 pm and supper was later than I wanted it to be, but the sun setting so quickly had me sort of shocked and frazzled.

In the summer and spring months a walk after supper was no problem. We could eat at 10 pm and I would still have time for an hour-long stroll to the fields. But it’s late September now and it was staring me down and ruining my plan to re-gain my sanity before bedtime.

“No,” my husband replied. “You’ll definitely be walking in the dark.”

I jumped up, put my dish in the sink and pulled on my shoes anyway. I’ve never been the kind of kid who’s afraid of the dark and so out I went, the three dogs jumping along in front of me, just as excited as I was to not skip this part of the day. We were a little past what the professionals like to call ‘Golden Hour,’ the time in the evening when the sinking sun casts a perfect golden hue on everything under its shine. We were well into the sunset portion of the evening, the time when the muskrats come out from wherever muskrats go, to swim in the stock dam. The time when the bats start to dive and swoop. The time when, if those dogs get too far ahead of you on the path, they will disappear entirely into the horizon.

To disappear entirely into the horizon. That’s nightfall in the country and it holds with it a certain type of feeling that’s hard to explain. It’s the feeling you get when you park your car after a long drive in the middle of the night and you shut the door behind you and look up at the sky and notice the quiet twinkling of the stars, or, maybe if you’re lucky, the northern lights. It’s 3 am and no one is out and you remember the times when you were a kid and you fell asleep in the backseat of your parents’ car, and you woke up when the engine cut, but you pretended to sleep anyway so your dad would carry you in. And you opened your eyes to see those same stars in the same type of quiet night and somehow, all these years later, you feel like that kid in the night under those stars again. I guess that’s how I would describe the feeling.

I was only out walking on the field trails for about fifteen minutes before the sun shifted entirely below that horizon and the dogs and I faded with it. Just a moment before I looked up and spotted a large mule deer on the skyline. His tall rack reached to the sky, and he was backlit by the last moment of yellow, a black dramatic silhouette staring right at something moving in the distance (that something was me) before bouncing off over the hill to disappear too.

Yesterday I got the news that my cancer is shrinking, has shrunk, will shrink more. We found out when we were in Mayo last week, but we needed one more confirmation to make it official. My husband sat next to me in the car as we were parked in the Walmart parking lot on our way through one town to get to the next for a meeting across the state. We video conferenced in for a quick confirmation. You look good. Things look good. Cancer is shrinking, has shrunk, will shrink more. See you in three months for another follow up, goodbye. We ended the call and continued driving east.

“It feels like maybe that news needed a bit more fanfare,” I said as we moved down the street a bit.

“Like, what do you mean?’ my husband asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. It was the same feeling I felt when I completed my last chemo treatment and I was alone with my little pin and too introverted to ask someone to take my picture. The moment felt at least selfie-worthy, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“Maybe a cake or something?” I laughed.

“Well, there’s Cashwise, want me to pull in?” he joked.

No. No I didn’t, I realized. I didn’t want a cake or a party or a fuss really. I just wanted to go about our day, make it to our meeting on time and home that night because we had work in the morning. I wanted to watch that moment, that tumor, that blip, shrink and disappear into the horizon of my life. To disappear is sometimes the dream.

The nights will be longer now as the sun sets sooner, but it’s ok. I’ve never been the kind of kid who’s afraid of the dark.

Turtle Excursion

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Have you ever heard the National Anthem performed at full volume by four little girls crammed inside a two-door side-by-side while you’re driving across a bumpy field with a little dog at your feet and one perched on the tool box in the back with the wind blowing a late summer storm in?

It’s the kind of volume that sends even the most seasoned parent into a bit of a twitch. I should have known when I suggested singing instead of arguing over whether we should have stayed longer at the beaver dam to see if we could catch more turtles with a storm coming in. How dumb of me to think that they would choose a sweet folk performance as a serenade…

My sister and I have been taking our daughters and our dogs on little ranch excursions like this since the kids were tiny enough to fit in baby packs strapped to our chests as we drove prairie trails looking for crocuses or new calves, sunflowers and Christmas trees  There was a point all six of us could fit across the bench seat of our old side-by-side and still fit one or two dogs in there with us. We blinked and suddenly we have a six, eight, nine and ten year-old plus six dogs between us. It’s safe to say we’ve outgrown our little side-by-side rides together.  

But that doesn’t stop us from trying. Which is what we were doing last week when my husband came back from his daily rounds of checking on things. He was up in at the big beaver dams behind my parent’s house and walked up on dozens of turtles sunning themselves on logs and one big snapping turtle just swimming around, being his very cool prehistoric self in the middle of the modern age.

These three big beaver dams were a magical place for my sister and I when we were growing up. We would follow the creek from our backyard about a good mile or so through a thick coulee of oaks and ash and scrub trees to pick wild raspberries, catch frogs, collect ticks and see if the lily pads had appeared or if we could catch the beavers doing their work.

Each dam gets deeper and wider the farther you follow it, and the banks are steep, the brush thorny and tangled and the ground is uneven and covered in tall-green grass and reeds, the vegetation staying green until fall because it stays cool in the shade. It doesn’t feel like you’re on the North Dakota prairie when you’re following these trails cut by cattle, deer and elk. You get yourself far enough away from the house and the barn and you think maybe you’re in a true forest. When you’re a kid you think maybe you could be a wild girl out here on our own, living under a lean-to fort and surviving off of chokecherries. Sort of makes you feel that way as an adult too.

We spied a big ‘ol snapping turtle

I have spent some time in every season of my life sitting on those banks as a spectator, quietly watching the wildlife swim and drink and eat and work. The beavers always fascinated me, how they could take down all those trees and control all that water like little construction workers in round, fluffy bodies— it didn’t seem physically possible. But my favorite was always watching the turtles, so of course I was going to load up the kids to see what we could see that day.

“Can we all fit?” my little sister asked as I pulled into her driveway.

“Only if we leave a few dogs behind.”

But as you can imagine, four girls running, chatting, debating the appearance of poison ivy and complaining about the burs sticking to their jeans, two moms telling them to toughen up and that we used to come back here as kids ALONE and nobody even knew where we WERE and we were FINE and it was the NINETIES and the two dogs that decided to follow along and bark at the ducks fleeing for their lives is only sneaky enough to catch a brief glimpse of two beavers running away.  And the red-eared slider turtles probably heard us coming from three miles away and chose to save themselves the drama.  But that old snapping turtle? He’s seen some things and was so unbothered that he just swam around pulling pond scum with him, giving a show long enough for us all to fawn over how massive and old and cool he was before the wind picked up, folding the leaves on the trees and threatening a bit of rain. And so, we all headed back to that old side-by-side, pulling the barbed-wire fence open for one another to cross one by one.

“I thought we were going to catch some turtles,” Rosie said, sorta disappointed.

“I think we’re going to have to practice our sneaking skills,” I replied as I started up the machine and set her on my lap so the rest of the girls could cram in and shut the door. “Why don’t you all sing a song to get us home…”

“OOOHHH SAAYYY CANN YOU SEEEE!!!!! BY THE DAWNSERLY LIGHT!!!”

Next time they’re driving separate…

Come sit at my kitchen counter

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Come sit at my kitchen counter and I will tell you everything. 

It will be messy, and I will have to clear a space for your drink glass, maybe wipe this morning’s crumbs away, or scrub the jelly so it doesn’t stick to your forearms as you lean in and ask how things are going. Come in and sit at my kitchen counter and I will tell you how Rosie caught a little garter snake this morning and is out collecting rocks and sticks for its Tupper Wear habitat. The cousins just pulled in the driveway in their little ATV they call “The Red Aamodt.”  Edie has been sleeping in like a teenager. School starts tomorrow and we are not ready.  Don’t mind the drill sitting on the seat next to you, Chad’s still finishing up the deck. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter, come because you were invited (you’re always invited) or come because you’re passing by and want a cup of coffee and to see the kids. It’s not like my grandma’s kitchen, or my mom’s, I won’t have rolls or bars or cookies set out on a whim, I’m not much of a baker, but I always have coffee. And if it’s the right time, I will make you a drink and pull out the chips and salsa, or cheese and crackers, because I am more like my other gramma like that. And I always have a dip. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter and I will ask you, “How’s work?” “What’s your wife up to?” “How did the fair, the rodeo, the talent show, the soccer game, the basketball tournament go?” And I really want to know. I will be a bit disheveled probably, because if you’re at my kitchen counter and I am at home, I likely woke up and just got on with things like dishes and laundry and cleaning off the little table full of art supplies, or maybe I was outside cutting the weeds or the grass or pressure washing Rosie’s shoe because she got stuck in the mud while she was trying to catch frogs. But I likely didn’t take the time to look in the mirror because I forget about things like that until someone shows up and then I remember. But if you’re here, you’re in a no judgement zone, and I expect it will go both ways and you will look past the way my hair can stand straight up now and that I have grass clippings in my teeth.  

Come sit at my kitchen counter and say you can’t stay long but then stay for hours. Stay for lunch because I’m fixing it anyway. And it’s just sandwiches, but we all have to eat. And then head out with Chad to check the water tanks and game cameras and come back in for burgers because I’m fixing them anyway and we all have to eat. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter and you might have to hold a baby doll or get closer to a hamster and a gecko than you’re probably comfortable with. Sit at my kitchen counter, and I’m just warning you, my oldest will hang on every word that you say, but she won’t say much in case you notice she’s there and hold back. She wants to hear everything.

Come sit at my kitchen counter and look out the window, here comes the turkeys down to water in the dam. Sit at my kitchen counter and there’s the momma deer with her two does. There’s the elk. There’s that coyote. There are the kids out conducting a funeral for the newborn barn kitten that didn’t make it. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter, do you need more coffee? Another beer? Sorry, the puppy seems to have stolen your shoe. Do you have time to watch a dance they’ve been rehearsing? How about a play? It’s short, but we need to relocate to the living room, here, let me move the laundry…

Come sit at my kitchen counter, I love you. 

The best meal I ever ate

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The best meal I ever ate was after I jumped out of a plane over South Padre Island right behind my friend and right before my husband. I screamed a scream that came from the carnal parts of my body as we did a free fall toward the ocean. I was barefooted and strapped to a young man with wild hair and a bandana and when the chute finally opened and we floated down to the shore, he told me to take in the tranquility and beauty of it all while I fought the urge to revisit my morning breakfast. When my bare feet hit the sand, the nausea subsided and the relief kicked in—I survived a jump out of a questionable airplane, look at me, I’m young and wild and free…and starving!  When my husband made it down to earth, looking about as calm as he does when he wakes up in the morning, we all grabbed a margarita and a fish taco at a little shoreside shack and no fish taco or margarita will ever compare, because I was ALIVE!

Except once I had a margarita on a camping trip with friends and one of them brought dozens and dozens of limes and loads of ice and good tequila and he didn’t hold back on those and the salty rim served in a red solo cup while we all sat in camp chairs and watched the people with money drive jet skis back and forth across the big lake with nothing at all to do but sit together.

The best meal I ever ate was my grandma’s cold tuna noodle salad that she would make my grandpa and me the summer I lived with them at their lake in Minnesota. I was there to work for a theater program, a year out of college and two months away from my wedding, I watched my grandparents move in and out of their days together after over fifty years of marriage. I would put the coffee on for them in the morning before I left for work, a little convenience I could offer that they praised overtly. My grandma was known for her brownies and fun-loving nature, but she wasn’t known for her cooking. She made this noodle salad one pretty evening and we ate it on the porch beside the lake with short glasses of vodka tonics with a maraschino cherry and both grandpa and I agreed we loved it, and so we told her, and for the rest of the summer, that salad was always in the fridge.

The best meal I ever ate featured a big, ripe tomato and a perfect cucumber from my garden, and my little sister’s homemade bread and a recipe from Val for the dressing and I ate it at the messy counter in our home with the windows open to catch a cool, late summer breeze. I made one for myself and then another when my husband came in from work and we said, “There’s nothing better, nothing better,” while the juice of that tomato dripped out from between the bread and onto our plates.

The best meal I ever ate was wild elk from his grill after a long bow hunting season. The best meal I ever ate was his mom’s fried porkchops with a side of mashed potatoes and creamed peas when I was sixteen and over for supper for the first time. I didn’t know about creamed peas and without them, what is life?

The best meal I ever at is at my mom’s every Christmas.

The best meal I ever ate was the hot dog I roasted on a stick over the impromptu backyard campfire last night with my husband and the cousins and my parents and my kids and too many dogs running around barking at the coyotes howling as the red moon came up. And it was 10 pm and too late for supper but it was his idea because the kids asked and so we stirred up a side of mac and cheese and corn on the cob and s’mores for dessert, but it was that hotdog that was my meal after a long day where maybe I didn’t feel like a campfire but was so glad there was one waiting for me because it was a little burnt and the bun was too small but look at us out here, we’ve survived another day and we’re young enough and wild and free and hungry and we have people we love and we’re ALIVE, eating hotdogs together.  

Fine and Grateful

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“How are you feeling?”

That’s been the question of the summer for me after spending the spring in Rochester at the Mayo Clinic for radiation and chemo treatment on two tumors that reappeared outside my esophagus after a good six-year cancer hiatus.

“Fine. I’m really feeling fine,” has been my reply to those in my community who have pulled me aside for a hug, or stopped to visit in the grocery store, or sent me a text or passed by me while leading goats and kids through the fairgrounds.

“Really?” Is a reply.

“Oh good!” Is another.

“Are you sure?” Is one too.

“Good to see you’re back at it.” Is also one.

“Thank you, thank you so much for asking,” is what I say. And it’s what I genuinely mean. Even I’m surprised that this gets to be my answer.

Because it turns out that the question is a strange one to navigate. Do I feel fine? Yes, really. The little ailments that plagued me during and shortly after treatment have wound down now—the mild heartburn and nausea, the weird bone pain—but it’s hard to describe. My confidence is shaken and I don’t really feel like myself in my own body. The thought of even being in public is a little unnerving, not because I don’t want to be around people, but because I don’t feel like me in the room.

Which brings me to the, “How are you feeling?” question again. I’m finding it’s also a strange question to navigate for the people who love and care about you. Because everyone who asks wants to hear the truth of it, and I certainly want to give it, that’s sort of my thing, for better or for worse. But there is a bit of an expectation (is that the right word?) of what a cancer patient looks like. When I say I’m fine, sometimes I get the sense that they don’t believe me. When I say I’m fine, sometimes I wonder myself.

Prior to my experience, I had the notion that the results of chemo and radiation and treatment in every patient meant they were to become frail and bald. Now I understand that every treatment is different and every dose, every plan, every zap and poke and pill is concocted a thousand different ways for the thousands of different phases, stages, places and varieties a tumor presents itself and spreads. (Isn’t that a fun little sentence to write? Ugh.) My cancer didn’t make me sick this time, and neither did the treatment really and for that I am as grateful as they come. Maybe that should be my new answer to the question. “Fine and grateful.”

Because cancer recovery on me looks like a woman who used to have long, dark, thick hair who cut it off and let the grays come in because it was coming out in handfuls. And as much as I thought I would be the type of woman who wouldn’t care about my hair, the kind of woman who would just be grateful to be alive, it turns out I am not that woman. I am mad and annoyed about my hair, despite knowing better and still hanging on to enough to pull off a fluffy bob. And I overexplain it to everyone for some reason, even though I should probably just shut up and say, “Fine and grateful.”  I become annoying to myself in those moments.

Cancer recovery on me also looks a little puffy and a little more sweaty (if that’s possible) and doing what I can fit into my jeans for an upcoming concert I have on the schedule next week. Should that be important to me? Probably not. Is it? Yes. Because I would like to be in control of my body again, thankyouverymuch.

Cancer recovery on me also looks like continuing to work and show up for my kids and take long walks and get on a horse and host family suppers because slowing all the way down doesn’t make me feel better, it makes me feel less like myself.

And maybe that’s it. That I don’t want cancer to define me the same way I didn’t want infertility to define me. Maybe that’s where the confidence thing comes in. I’ve been shifting the focus away from the treatments and back into my regular life now for a bit over a month, but the reality of my situation still lingers in the shower drain, in the supplements I’m buying that probably won’t help a thing, in the closet full of clothes that don’t fit, in the little moments of overwhelm and worry when I wake up at 3 am and in the question: “How are you feeling?”

And I thank you all, truly, for asking. I’ll happily answer the question a thousand times.

A gecko at the county fair

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So, Edie showed her lizard at the county fair. 

I think this might be something worth telling you all about because a county fair of our modest size doesn’t get many leopard gecko entries. Rabbits, chickens and an occasional duck or turkey usually round out the small animal category, but we’re in the business of pushing it a bit, and so there we were at 7 am loading the trailer with a goat named Beef and another named Noodles and a visibly annoyed Tango the lizard and his cozy terrarium in the back of my SUV to get to town for the show. 

When we made this sort of reptile commitment, it was a month or so before the big event and we thought it would be fun to bring Edie’s pet into town and show it off as an exhibit. Not having a history of showing small animals at the fair, I thought that the judging process would look like a visit to the cage to interview about the proper care and feeding of a lizard, and maybe a chance to take him out quickly to show him off, and that would be it. 

I was wrong, as you can imagine. Turns out, I am wrong plenty when it comes to 4-H. 

Because showing a lizard at the fair also means filling out paperwork that includes a pet portrait, pet raising highs and lows, a feeding schedule, a cost analysis and future goals for you and your pet lizard. (Turns out it costs $8 a month to keep a lizard alive.) 

Question: What do you hope to gain from this project? 
Can keeping him alive be an answer? 

No. When Edie was interviewed about her record book that morning after she’d discussed her Lego set, ceramic and the jeans she painted for her birthday, she said she hoped to learn all she could learn about leopard geckos. Which was a cute and responsible answer, one that helped her win a blue ribbon for her bookkeeping and reptile knowledge. So that was cute and, most importantly, done.

We set the glass terrarium up on a back table in the barn next to a beam where we could hang Tango’s heat lamp. That little scaly lizard looked a bit out of place among the big, beautiful bunnies munching hay in their cages. I told Edie to throw him some worms while we figured out what was next for the guy. And let me tell you when I realized that what came next was her holding that little lizard in her hands in line between a bunny and a little chicken in the show ring, I about had a heart attack. 

“You mean she actually SHOWS it?” I panicked to my husband. “Like, set it on the little carpet in front of the judge SHOWS it?” 

“Appears so,” he replied after asking around to the fellow 4-H moms, one who had a similar experience with her son and a bearded dragon a few years back. 

“I don’t know if I want to do this,” Edie whispered to her dad while I was off somewhere declaring my own discomfort to anyone who would listen. “Nobody shows lizards here.” 

And with that my husband pulled out all the ways in which being the girl with a lizard at the fair is going to give her street cred and her attitude shifted as she pulled her pet from his cage and cupped it in her hands.

“Are you sure you don’t want to bring him out to the ring in his cage?” I asked, envisioning a scenario in which the lizard leaps from the carpet and off the table and into a ring covered in wood chips never to be seen again.

“No, I got it mom,” my daughter replied confidently. 

“Ok, I could get a little box,” I tried again, wondering if domestic chickens have a taste for gecko.

“Mommmmaaa, I. Got. It.” 

And with that my daughter was off in her little green 4-H shirt and ponytail, placing her pet reptile on the carpet, keeping him safe, and telling the judge all about it with a big smile. 

In fact, everyone watching that judge try to figure out how to place three bunnies, a chicken and a lizard in the pet showmanship category was grinning as big as Edie that afternoon. What a funny little display and such a testament to what it means to be at a small-town county fair. 

“It was a tough job,” the judge declared on the microphone. “A rabbit, a chicken and a gecko don’t have much in common, but it came down to how confident and knowledgeable each kid was about their animal today. I give this boy with the rabbit on the end here a grand and the lizard comes in with reserved.” 

Well, that make me unclench my jaw a bit to grab my own smile as I watched Edie shake the judge’s hand and walk out of the arena with that lizard unscathed and her head held high. It clenched right up again at the gate when she and that lizard were swarmed by every little 4-Her that could get close. 

“Is that a lizard?”  “You’re the lizard girl!” “Can I hold him?” “What’s his name?” “Will he bite me?” “How old is he?” and on and on it went, the girl and her gecko like rock stars all the way back to the cage, where Tango got an extra worm and a chance to hide. Turns out the only spotlight he likes is a heat light. But in that moment, Tango made Edie a brave, 4-H star. I couldn’t have been more proud. 

And that is what you get when you take a lizard to the county fair. 

Ways to say “I Love You” in the summer

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Bring the noodle salad to the Tuesday T-ball picnic. And if you forgot the key ingredient at the grocery store and realized it too late so that you couldn’t make the noodle salad after all, cut up the half watermelon in the fridge and add grapes and bring that instead. And when the mom arrives with the cut-up watermelon with grapes to sit alongside the four other bowls and plates of cut up watermelon, say, “That’s ok! Kids love fruit, it will all get eaten.”

Send your ten-year-old over to hold the toddler’s hand and walk her around at the 4th of July Rodeo.

Stand behind the horse trailer or boat trailer and help line it up.

Have popsicles ready in the freezer in case the neighbor kids show up.

Go to the branding and do the ear tags or take the pictures or watch the babies or run for supplies.

Gas up the lawnmower, fill up the tires, change the oil but leave the mowing to her.

Bring the extra cucumbers to the nursing home and the extra eggs to your sister and leave the extra zucchini in the front seat of any unlocked car.  

Make a rhubarb cake for church breakfast.

Leave room for a your friend’s lawn chair next to yours at the ballgame and tell her you like her new haircut, then when she tells you the kids are going to bed too late and her house is a mess  and they’re behind on their 4-H projects, nod your head and say “same, same, same,” and then tell her the story about your daughters’ goat who keeps getting out and eating your petunias.

Take the kids to clean the ditches.

Make him an egg salad sandwich with a little baggie of chips and a full-sized Snickers bar and an orange already peeled with a jug of ice water and bring it to the field. Pack yourself the same lunch and eat with him in the shade.

Sit in your lawn chair in the garage with the door open at the end of the day and watch the cars drive slowly home and the kids play in the lawn and offer a beer or a pop to the neighbor who says hello. Have an extra chair there in case.

Take them out for ice cream and say yes to an extra scoop.

Ask, “Did you put on sunscreen?”  “Do you need a Band-Aid?” Bring the bug spray.  

Help them move the old fridge out to the garage and the new fridge into the kitchen. Stay for pizza after.

Clip his long hair short at 10 pm in the kitchen. Make sure the peach bath towel stays draped around his shoulders. Tell him he’s handsome.

Run her a cool bath.

Buy Dr. Pepper for the fridge and orange pushup pops for eating on the front stoop.

Take a 4 pm nap with the fan blowing.

Ride along for a parts-run to town, bring sunflower seeds and roll the windows down.

Help them make a lemonade stand and drive them to the highway to set it up and when they run out, drive home to make more.

Leave the shades to your bedroom open and the let the sunrise wake you up.
Bring them to the pool and go all the way in, over your head even. Fix their goggles a thousand times.

Be the parade-float supervisor.
Plan vacation bible school for your little church and invite the new family in town.

Water your neighbor’s tomato plants and geraniums while they take the kids on a waterpark vacation. Feed her cat too. Say “I’d love to,” when she calls because you mean it. You’d love to. Have fun, it’s summer. I love you.