The sun sets on an old day
I hit the road to see a friend
Some days I need to leave this place
so I can come home again
Coming Home: Winter blues washed away by spring melt
by Jessie Veeder
3/16/14
Fargo Forum
http://www.inforum.com
Sometimes the day is so lovely, you just have to go out in it.
Sometimes the moon shows up before the sun goes down and lines up just right in the blue sky hovering peacefully over golden grass.
Grass that was hiding under all that snow, snow that’s melting because it’s 50 degrees ABOVE zero now, so you decide to pull on your muck boots and splash around in it a little, feeling so good you don’t even mind the little hole in the right one that lets the water in to soak your socks.
It doesn’t matter. It’s summer now.
Your feet don’t get cold in the summer.
And you took your camera, because you need to document what a beautiful mess it all is when the thaw comes.
You need to photograph those tiny bubbles.
You need to capture those trees standing nice and tall and straight.
You must preserve the memory of that rushing water cutting its way through the stubborn ice in the shade of the valley.
You have to show everyone, shout it so they can hear you above the babbling streams…
“Spring is springing!”
“Spring is springing!”
“Spring is…”
Dammit dog!
If it’s peace and tranquility I’m looking for out there…well…
Happy thaw out everyone!
We woke up this Valentines Day to find a nice fresh coat of fluffy snow, a little sun and some sparkle in the air.
I was happy to see it, because for about three months it’s literally been too cold to snow.
Yes.
Too. Cold. To. Snow.
That’s a thing here.
Which means I’ve been cooped up a bit, and so has my camera. Things like cameras and fingers don’t work too well when it’s too cold to snow.
But those clouds and that sun seemed to be working this morning (I mean it was like 10 degrees above zero) so I went out in it.
A gift to myself for a day covered in love.
Love and sparkly snow on the tips of berry covered branches…
On the noses of dogs…
Ok, all over the faces of dogs…
On the tips of the grass…
On the backs of horses…
In barnyards…
and all of the things made more beautiful with a little light…
and a little frosting.
Happy Valentines Day Friends. Spread a little love today.
I don’t want to know what tomorrow brings, how it all turns out, how we might, at the end of it all, be rich or poor, lonely or surrounded, fine with it all or disappointed.
I don’t want to know the count of the stars in the sky or if they might fall one day.
I don’t want to know if this is it or if there’s more, because what is more than this?
At the end of the day all I want to know is the way the sun cast shadows and makes the manes on the horses glow like haloes in the pasture outside my window.
I want to know this. I always want to know this…
And the crunch of the leaves beneath my boots.
The smell of the sage.
The red on the berries, a gift of color that stays with us through winter.
The sound of the breeze bending the bare branches and how there’s no such thing as quiet when a heart beats.
No.
I don’t want to know the length of a good life or the minutes in forever or how it could, how it will, end.
I only want to know that golden light, the light that makes angels out of horses, and warms your face under your hat after a day’s work.
I want to know this light as it blots out the stars and makes for us a day.
And in that day and the days that might follow, the things that don’t matter, I don’t want to know.
It makes no difference, except one thing.
The thing that makes all the difference, that thing that holds on as that sun rises and sets.
The thing that I know like the light on your face.
You are loved. You are loved.
Every day you are loved.
I
The sun has started waking us up earlier. A funny little phenomenon called “Daylight Savings Time” made it that way. We moved our clocks back on Saturday night and woke up at 6 am on Sunday, watching the sun come up over Pots and Pans, waiting for some light to help us assess the recent neighbor call regarding a cow (or three or four) out in a pasture by the highway.
I remember when moving the clocks back meant moving the hand on an actual clock. I look around my house and I realize I don’t have an actual clock anywhere. Our clocks blink blue numbers on stove tops and microwaves, on telephones and digital temperature gauges and cellphones, computers and iPads that are smarter than us and don’t even need a human hand to remind them to change. They are programmed to know.
They do the same when we cross the river into Mountain time, switching swiftly and we gain an hour. Switching back and we’ve lost it.
I’ve spent that last few days looking at those clocks, the one on my phone and the one on
the stove I haven’t managed to change yet, and saying ridiculous things like:
“What time is it really?”
“So, it’s 9 o’clock but it’s really 10 ‘o’clock?”
“It’s 6 am but it’s really 7 am?”
“Man, it gets dark early.”
“Man I am tired.”
“Man, I miss that extra hour of light at the end of the day.”
But what’s in an hour anyway? It’s not like the changing of the clocks changes time. There are still 24 hours in these days and the sun still does what it will do up here where the earth is stripping down and getting ready for winter.
Daylight Savings Time, moving the clocks, adjusting the time, is just a human’s way to control things a bit. Moving time forward in the spring months means farmers and ranchers and outdoor enthusiasts get to stay out under that sun, working on the tractor, chasing the cattle, climbing a mountain, until 10 o’clock at night when the sun finally starts to disappear.
Moving the clocks backwards in the fall means we might drive to work in the light and get home in the dark.
It means a 5 pm sunset and a carb-loaded dinner at 6. It means more conversation against the dark of the windows, more time to plan for the things we might get done on the weekends in the light.
It means I went to bed last night at 9 o’clock and said something ridiculous like “It’s really 10.”
But it wasn’t. It was 9.
Because we’ve changed things. (Although I still haven’t changed that stove top clock).
I lay there under the covers in the loft and thought about 24 hours in a day.
10 hours of early-November daylight.
If I closed my eyes now, I thought, I would get 8 good hours of sleep.
I wondered about that hour and what I could do with an 60 minutes.
A 25 hour day? What would it mean?
Would it mean we could all slow down, take a few more minutes for the things we rush through as we move into the next hour?
Five more minutes to linger in bed, to wake each other up with sweet words and kisses, to talk about the day and when we’ll meet back at the house again.
Three more minutes to stir cream into our coffees, take a sip and stand in front of the window and watch the sun creep in. A couple seconds to comment on it, to say, “What a sight, what a world, what a morning…”
Four more minutes in the shower to rinse away the night.
Two more moments in front of the mirror to make my hair lay straight and my cheeks blush right.
An extra moment or two for the dogs so that when I throw them their food I might have been given some time to extend that head pat and ear scratch and stick fetching game.
Six more minutes on my drive to town, listening to the radio, the weather report and the school lunch announcements while trailing a big rig with out cussing or complaint. I have an extra hour after all. What’s six more minutes to me now?
Fifteen more minutes for lunch with a friend, a friend I could call for lunch because I have sixty more minutes now and the work can wait.
Five minutes more for a stranger on the street who asks for directions to a restaurant and then I ask her where she’s from and she makes a joke about the weather and we laugh together, a little less like strangers then.
Then, when I get home, eight more minutes on my walk to the top of the hill, to go a little further if I feel so compelled, or maybe just sit on that rock up there and watch it get darker.
Four extra minutes to spice up the roast for supper or stir and taste the soup.
One more minute to hold on to that welcome home hug.
Three more minutes to eat, for another biscuit, to wind down and visit.
And four more minutes to use to say goodnight. To lay there under the blankets, under the roof, under the stars that appeared and be thankful for the extra time.
So what’s in an hour really? Moments spent breathing and thinking and learning. Words spilling out that you should have said, or should have kept, or that really don’t matter, it’s just talking.
Sips on hot coffee cooling fast.
Steps on your favorite trail.
Frustration at dust while you wipe it away, songs hummed while scrubbing the dishes or washing your hair.
Broken nails, tracked in mud, a decision to wear your best dress tonight.
Laughter and sighing and tapping your fingers on your desk while you wait.
Line-standing, hand-shaking and smooches on best friends’ babies as you pass at the grocery store.
Big plans to build things, to change things, to move. Small plans for dinner or a trip to the zoo.
A phone call, an answer, an “I love you too.”
It’s not much, but the moments are ours to pass.
And those moments, they move on regardless of the clock and the hour in which it’s ticking.
Although not many people have clocks that tick anymore.
I suppose that’s just one of the many thing time can change…
October is heading over the horizon and it’s bringing with it all the colors–the golds and reds and browns–of a season that doesn’t stay long enough.
And it’s leaving a trail of frost in its wake.
I see it in the mornings, sparkling and shimmering on the railing of my deck, on the cracked windshield of the pickup, on the leftover leaves and acorns on the trails,
on the stems of the grass and the crust of the dirt.
I am digging out my sweaters again. Funny how it’s only been five months since I packed them away but I can’t seem to remember where they went.
Funny how it’s only been a few weeks since the sun touched my legs and already my skin is fading into its pale winter shade.
I run my hands over the horses’ backs and notice they’re changing too, long scruffy hair growing in to protect them from the promised winter winds.
We are becoming the season it seems.
I’m sipping tea to ward of the little scratch in my throat, the little runny nose that I acquired when the cold came in.
I am North Dakota. Personified in the permanent chilled flush in my cheeks, rolling up the hoses and packing away the cutoff shorts. Swapping cowboy boots for winter boots and my straw hat for one that is knit and covers my ears.
If I were California I would never change. If I were California I would wear summer dresses all year and never be ashamed of my scaly winter skin. I would eat orange popsicles and sip iced tea and put fresh flowers in a vase on my table every week. I would be sun kissed and golden and I wouldn’t wear socks.
Especially not wool socks.
If I were California I would be beautiful all year.
But I am North Dakota and my flowers have dried up now. And we are beginning our predictably unpredictable decent into winter.
The ice rests lightly on the water in the stock tank.
The air bites and the trees have stripped down to sleep. I am cutting potatoes for soup, boiling water and feeling weighed down but hungry the way only Northerners can feel.
If I were a beast I would hibernate.
If I had wings I would fly toward the sun.
If I were a legend I would find a way to catch the snow in my hands and send it back up.
Back up for another month.
And back down in December when winter is welcome.
To be nowhere
But in the moment.
This moment.
Is exactly where you need to be.
There’s a moment between summer and deep autumn at the ranch that’s so good at being glorious that it actually makes us all believe we could last forever under a sky that’s bright blue and crisp and warm and just the right amount of breezy all at the same time.
We’re easily swayed to forget up here, you know, about the drama that is our seasons. I imagine it’s a coping mechanism we develop that gets the crazy stoic people here through -40 degree temperature snaps.
It’s forgetting that gets us through, but it’s remembering too. The combination is an art form.
Because at -40 degrees we remember that one-day it will be sunny and 75.
And when it’s sunny, 118 degrees and 100% humidity and there’s not a lake in sight, we remember that -40 degrees and somehow find a way to be grateful for it all.
Yes we keep taking off layers and putting them on again until we make ourselves the perfect temperature.
Funny then how we’re not really good at giving the in-between moments the credit they’re due around here. We usually grab them up and soak them in just enough to get some work done on a horse, paint the house, wash the car or get the yard cleaned up for winter.
Because we’re taught up here to use those perfect weather moments to prepare us for the not so perfect ones that are coming.
That’s why fall, though a romantic season for some, gives me a little lump in my throat that tastes a lot like dread and mild panic.
Because while the pumpkins are nice and the apple cider tastes good enough, I can’t help but think that autumn is like the nice friend who slowly walks over to your lunch table with the news that your boyfriend doesn’t want to go out with you anymore.
And my boyfriend is summer. And when he’s gone, I’m stuck with the long and drawn out void that is winter–with a little splash of Christmas, a hint of a sledding party and a couple shots of schnapps to get me through the break-up.
Hear what I’m saying?
But the change is beautiful. I can’t help but marvel at it really, no matter its underlying plot to dry up the leaves and strip them from their branches and jump start my craving for carbohydrates and heavy whipping cream in everything.
So I decided to give it the credit it was due yesterday and I took a break from the office chair intent on marveling at some leaves, collecting some acorns and walking the trails the cattle and deer had cut through the trees during the heat of summer.
I will never call this moment a season, it’s too fleeting and foreboding for that, but I will reach out and touch those golden leaves and call it a sort of magic.
The kind that only nature can perform, not only on those leaves, but on the hair on a horse’s back, the fat on the calf, the trickling creek bed, the tall dry grasses, used up flowers and a woman like me.
Yes, I’m turning too. My skin is lightening. My hunger unsuppressed. My eyelids heavy when the sun sinks below the hill much earlier than my bedtime.
My pants a little tighter with the promise of colder weather.
Ok. I’ve been reminded. Summer–a month of electric thunderstorms and endless days, sunshine that heats up my skin and makes me feel young and in love with a world that can be so colorful– is over.
And so I’m thankful for the moment in these trees to be reminded that I have a little time yet, but I best be gathering those acorns.
And pulling on my layers.
We were out late last night working cattle.
And by late, I mean after dark.
And by after dark I mean, a sliver of a moon, a thousand stars, 50 head of black cattle, five people and one flashlight.
No, it’s not all raspberry picking, sunflowers and margaritas on the deck out here.
Sometimes we have to get Western.
And when all available cowboys and cowhands have jobs and responsibilities in the sweet and useful hours of the day, sometimes we find ourselves chasing the sun while we’re chasing the cows.
It’s difficult. Since moving back to the ranch two summers ago I’ve learned a lot of things. I’ve learned how to can a tomato, tile a shower, where to find a missing pug, how make a meal from what I have in my pantry because I’ve got no choice, I’m not driving to town, how to kill a burdock plant, what time of day makes the most magical photos and how long I can go without taking a shower before the neighbors start to complain…
But above all of that, mostly I’ve learned there aren’t enough hours in the day.
And I don’t know how Pops has done it all these years.
Ranching is a full time job. It’s not just about watching them graze in the pasture and riding through them like the Man from Snowy River every once in a while to get your cowboy fix. You have to feed them, move them, watch the water, watch for illness, doctor, move them again, find them when they’re out, fix the fence, move them, fix the fence, patch up corrals, bring them home, let the bulls out, get the bulls in, roundup, doctor, wean the babies, fix the fence, get a plan for hay, move the hay, feed the hay, break the ice on the stock dam and check them every day.
My dad has always had two full time jobs, one of them being ranching. His goal was to keep this place in the family and, during that time, that was the only choice. He would come home from work in the winter and I would bundle up in my Carharts and we would roll a bale out for the cattle in the freezing cold, nearly dark landscape. Sometimes I would drive the pickup while he scooped out cake or grain for a line of cattle trailing behind in the falling snow.
In the spring we would drive out and watch for calves being born. I would sit in the pickup as he braved the wrath of momma while he tagged and checked the baby.
There was more than one time that momma won the battle.
Summers were spent riding horses and moving pastures.
Fall was roundup and time spent in the pickup on the way to the sale barn.
And then he’d do it over again.
Every memory of being a side-kick ranch kid was one I hold close to me as part of my makeup, no matter the fact that I likely wasn’t one bit of help, except maybe that driving part.
And I like to think I’m good company.
I’ve been bucked off, had my fingers smashed, broken bones and cried out of frustration when facing a seemingly impossible task.
Ranching is not a job for the weak, and often I wondered (and I still wonder) if I’m made up of the things my father is made up of.
Why all of those years of long hours in town and late nights? Why not a house in town with a lawn, beer with the guys on Friday nights, golf on Saturday?
I never asked him because it’s a stupid question.
I’ve never asked him because I know the answer.
I’ll tell you here, but I have to do it quickly, because in an hour, we have to be home from town and saddled up. We have to bring more cows home and it’s gets dark earlier every night.
So here’s what he’d say:
This is it for me. Give me the beaches of the Caribbean, the steep mountains of Montana, give me perfect city streets laid out and predictable, give me the cactus and mysterious heat of the dessert, give me the shores of the mighty Missouri, the fjords of my grandparents’ homeland and I will say they are good.
I will tell you they’re beautiful.
I have seen them and I believe that’s true.
But I would not trade one day out in these pastures for a lifetime on those beaches, even if it means broken tractors and working until midnight with no light but the stars.
And I don’t know what else to say about it except this is my home and I will do what it takes to make sure that it stays the truth.
And that’s why I’m here.
Western North Dakota grows wild plums. In the patches of brush where the poison ivy sneaks and the cows go to get away from the flies, they start as blossoms on the thorny branches and, under the hot sun, turn from green in early July to red to a dark purple bite-sized berry just waiting to be picked in the beginning of autumn.
Wild plums mean summer is almost over. They mean roundup is on its way. They mean sucking on pits and spitting them at your little sister. They mean scratches from branches on a detour for a snack on the way to get the bull out of the trees.
They mean Pops’ stories of grampa sitting at the table in the winter dipping into a jar of canned wild plums , drenching them in cream and stacking the pits neatly on the table.
They mean memories of grandma’s jelly on peanut butter toast.
They mean reassurance that sweet things can grow in brutal places.
They mean a passing surprize on our way through a pasture and coming back later with the farm pickup to fill up a bucket, me squished in the middle seat between my husband and my dad, the Twins playing on the radio as we bump along on prairie trails that haven’t been under a tire in months looking for that magical patch of fruit, wondering out loud if we could of dreamed it.
Laughing at the thought.
Wild plums mean listening to the two men banter as they pick and reach and gather like little boys, making plans for the best way to fill our bucket.
“Shake the tree, we can get the ones on top.”
“Keep ’em out of the cow poop…poop plums are no good.”
“Are you eating them Jess. Hey, no eating!”
“I’ve never seen a patch like this. Jessie, you can make so much jelly!”
Yes. I could. With the 6 gallons of plums we picked last night standing in the bed of the pickup, ducked down in the clearing where the cows lay, scaling along the edges of the trees, I could make jars of jelly, pies, pastries and syrups to last until next plum picking season.
But even if I didn’t. Even if we did nothing more than feed those wild plums to the birds, it wouldn’t matter. The magic of wild and pure things is in their discovery and the sweet reminder that happiness can be as simple as a wild plum patch.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 