Tag Archives: musings

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.

The house he built

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I went to bed last night with the windows open in a bedroom in a house my husband has spent years building and perfecting. Last spring he finished a new master bedroom and bathroom off an expanded living room, growing our home as our family grew with the idea that we are a house for hosting and living-room cartwheels.

I snuggled down next to my husband and listened to the sound of him breathing while he slept in the bedroom he designed, equal parts grateful and in awe of his capabilities, always. His attitude has always been something along the lines of “I didn’t know how to do it until I tried to do it.” This place he’s built is a result of that quiet try, that confidence and the tenacity to just do it himself.

Building the loft thirteen years ago

The next morning, I woke up to him sneaking out to work on other people’s houses, a business he created after years worn down in the oilfield. I rolled over to catch a few more blinks, noticing how the sky was beginning to turn pink with the touch of the first moments of sun. I thought I should get up, rise with it, drink my coffee and start on a writing project, but I slipped back to sleep for a moment while the world lit up.

And I woke again to the sound of squirrel chatter, his obnoxious, angry squawk rising above the hundreds of bird species singing their morning song, the breeze rustling the full-grown leaves and a truck kicking up dust on the pink road.

And although I couldn’t hear it, I thought about the swish of the horses’ tails in the pasture, the buzz the flies make around their ears and the soft nicker in their throats when I approach with a grain bucket.

I thought about the cattle pulling dew covered green grass from the ground, munching and chewing and bellowing low for their calves.

I thought about the croak of the frogs in the dam, the familiar sound I fall asleep to each night we let the windows open and the air in.

I thought about the plop of the turtle leaving his rock for a swim in the dam. I thought about the howl of the coyote and the sound of the dogs crying back.

I thought about my fingers squeaking across the strings of my guitar, sitting out on the chair under the small oaks, working to make a melody.

I thought about the sound of my husband’s breathing and the words he says out loud at night when the world is sleeping, and so is he. I thought about what he dreams about.

And then I thought about the silence in this house as I lie listening to the world I was letting in through open windows, silence between walls that have absorbed the noise of saw blades spinning, voices discussing dinner, crying over tiling projects and laughing at the memory of the stupid kids we used to be. Soon it will be buzzing with the chatter of our own kids, waking up and pouring cereal and humming to themselves and arguing and painting and playing. It’s summer, so it won’t be quiet or clean in this house for months, or, more realistically, years. Squeals and laughter and music and questions and silliness, God willing, bouncing off the walls. In the evening, little by little my extended family will pop over to check in, my little sister and her daughters coming to play, my dad on his way from checking cows, my mom coming home from town, and they will stay long enough for supper and it will be loud in this house with stories and “watch this,” and “sit on your butt and eat,” and the scrape of forks on plates and “this is good Jess, thanks for having us over” and a little light arguing over the card game the girls picked for us all to play and that is what he built this place for. All of this.

The girls helping supervise the deck build

When everyone heads home the sun will be sinking below the horizon, but I will pop out anyway for a quiet walk in the hills before dark. When I get home, I will find my husband sleeping on the couch while our daughters lay in the crook of his arm and draped across his legs, the television reflecting the light of other peoples’ stories off his scruffy face.

I will switch it off and gather our daughters for their own beds before opening the windows in our new bedroom to let the stars in. I’ll fall asleep to the sound of the frogs, thinking about all the mornings to come in this house, the sounds of Christmases and birthday parties, failed dinners and dancing in the living room, conversations with friends, fights about bills and schedules and time, sobs about missing someone and laughter about having just what we need in a house he built with the windows open…

Nothing’s Forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owl song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

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

I go and lie down where the wood drake

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

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

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

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

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

Wendell Berry

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

Stories will save us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honey, let the dogs in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where I’m From

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Veeder homestead shack

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

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

I started early

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

Dad and his favorite dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My grandma Edie

Where I’m From

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dad and sister and me in the old trailer

Basketball Season

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January is settling in in rural North Dakota and my husband and I have found ourselves in a new season of our lives–and that season is called basketball.

Now anyone who grew up in a Class B school is familiar with the amount of passion a little town can put into their sports teams. And while Watford City has grown out of their Class B status, when it comes to who chooses to sit in the stands game after game, I would say the passion is still there.

4th Grade Girls hanging with the Varsity team last week

Our daughters started practicing for the first time with a little travel ball team in December. My husband picked up a hand-me-down basketball hoop for the driveway this fall in anticipation for this turn of athletic events, and we spent a fair number of evenings teaching the girls to dribble and competing in games of Lightning and PIG. When I was a kid in the summer this was a regular after-supper activity and so it’s bringing back some fun memories of shooting hoops with my little sister and my dad on our driveway—the only paved spot on the 3,000 acres.

In the fall my sister and I were taking a walk down the creek behind our childhood home with our daughters. We were admiring the changing leaves and watching our kids float sticks down the trickling stream when we came across a faded and severely deflated basketball about a half mile away from the house.

“I guess this is what happened to the ones we couldn’t get to,” my sister laughed, remembering the way that the hoop was positioned meant that every single air ball you threw was guaranteed to roll through a barbed wire fence into a gnarly patch of burdock, down the steep hill of the coulee and, if you didn’t make it in time (you never made it in time) land, splash, in the creek.

Oh, it made a good shot out of my little sister, who was the athlete of the family. Competitive by nature, basketball was her sport. So much so that I was able to watch her play in the state tournament in the big town next to my mother who was dressed head-to-toe in Wolves gear, complete with a cow bell and face paint. I would have laughed at her enthusiasm if I wasn’t siting there right next to her with an “Alex’s Sister” t-shirt and a temporary wolf paw tattoo on my face. So I guess I should have seen it all coming…

Last week our two daughters and my niece played in a huge tournament in our hometown. Over 80 teams participated in games over the course of two days, which meant that, counting parents, siblings and a smattering of extended family, there were probably like seventy-thousand fans in the building, all emotionally invested in every point, steal, pivot and play these elementary school kids were pulling out on the court.

The me that existed before motherhood, the one who didn’t understand that having children changes your DNA or something, would have been surprised to witness the back-and-forth commentary that went on between my husband and I as we stood between the courts trying to watch both kids play at the same time. As if a choir girl and a former wrestler had anything constructive to say about playing defense. At one point my husband had to stop me from just yelling “Hey! Hey! Hey” over and over at Edie, because I was nervous and I didn’t even realize I was even yelling anything at all.

What. Has. Happened. To. Me…

“The heart-rate-spike a mom gets watching her kids play sports equals a full workout.” My friend sent this to me after she too had spent that day in the gym going through the physical and emotional turmoil that is being a parent of a kid that plays elementary school sports.

“So that’s why I had to lay down on the heating pad when I got home,” I responded.

And let me be clear here, I’m not advocating for the yelling. Nothing good comes from sideline instructions from an over-anxious parent. But being there to witness the big beaming faces of our daughters’ looking into the crowd for us after making a basket or stealing the ball, well, that’s where the cheering comes in. And I’m a big promoter of that part. Apparently, it’s part of my DNA now.

Anyway, If you need me, I’ll be in some bleachers somewhere. You’ll probably hear me…

My favorite thing

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

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

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

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

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


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

The big chair and the tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cold Weather

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It’s officially the end of a season now. We often mark time out here based on our cattle
business, and last week we sold calves. Shipping Day. Weaning. These are the other
ways to say that our year of work spent caring for the cattle and their calves has come
to fruition. We spent the past few days riding every pasture to make sure every animal
was home safe. We rode through the first dusting of snow and a bitter wind, and then a
couple of really beautiful, perfectly chilly late autumn days kicking up some stray cattle
and mule deer from the draws, knowing in our bones winter is set to fully kick in any
moment now and send us for cover under our wool caps, coveralls and big coats.

When the truck came to load the calves on Tuesday we had picked out a little pen full of
heifers to keep on the place. We had done this sorting the night before to make things
go more smoothly on shipping morning only to wake up to find that of course they had
broken through the panel to get themselves mixed back up with the herd again. And so,
we did it again, sorting the calves from their mothers, and the steers from the heifers
and the best heifers from the bunch to keep. Both Edie and Rosie had picked the most
colorful from the lot as theirs to keep, a big black baldie with four white legs named
Socks and a red brockleface name Ginger who seems to be growing some horns. The
two stand out nice and dramatically from the herd of uniform black future mommas we
picked to keep building our herd and we’re all fine with it around here. It’s a family
operation, as it goes.

Which is pretty clear when you see us all filtering into Stockman’s sale barn, unloading
daughter after niece into the gravel parking lot, each one packing some sort of tote,
purse or backpack full of notebooks and art projects to take up to the steep seats and
entertain themselves while we wait for our pen of calves to come through.

“Look, there’s Eyelee!” Rosie hollered to her youngest cousin across the seats when the
heavy set of steers came through the ring. “Remember we named him that because he
has white eyelashes?” That’s the fun part about running Herford bulls on black cows, it’s
easier to name them and tell them apart. Emma, my five-year-old niece and lover of
every cow she ever met, wasn’t thrilled to see all our babies go. I’m thinking Rosie’s
explanation about what was happening from her seven-year-old perspective while
watching the calves get loaded on the trailer that morning probably didn’t help ease her
mind. It wasn’t that long ago when my husband and I had to haul both our daughters out
of the sale barn, bawling because they just realized the calves weren’t coming back
home, but it seems they’ve come to terms with the process these days.

And it’s nothing a little trip to the pizza and arcade place won’t fix, a little tradition my
family decided on a few years ago to celebrate making it to sale day. Because nothings
says success like wining 600 tickets on ski-ball and cashing them in for a long, neon
plastic hand with a lever that picks things up and allows you to bug your little sister and
mother from at least three feet away.

Anyway, all this is to say we’re grateful for another year on this place raising happy
healthy kids and a happy, healthy herd into a new season. This time of year definitely
makes me feel nostalgic, which usually, for me, results in a song. To honor that feeling, I
thought I’d share one I wrote while riding through that bitter wind a few weeks ago
alongside my husband who hadn’t yet switched from a cowboy hat to a wool cap. The
change has been made now, that’s for sure.

Stay warm. Stay cozy. Stay grateful.



Cold Weather
Summer is over, I heard him say
The breeze isn’t cool anymore, anyway
It’s hard and it’s bitter, it cuts through the layers
Of denim and leather and good-hearted neighbors

Summer is over, my fingers are froze
The horses in pastures are growing thick coats
You put yours on too and I’ll switch my straw hat
For the wool cap and new scarf you bought me for Christmas

You get the gate and I’ll keep the coffee on
I take mine with cream, you take yours black and strong
There’s things that I know, how it rains, then shines, then snows
For worse or for better, count on me, counting on you and cold weather

Summer is over and we’re getting older
And so are the kids used to ride on your shoulders
And now they are stretched long and lean like the blue stem
That bend in the wind trying to duck out of our hands

Summer is over, the furnace just kicked on
The dew on the grass turns to frost at the dawn
The flies on the windowsill got tired of spinning
Tell me, you think it’s the end or beginning?