Tag Archives: North Dakota

Fly Swatting Season

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We’re officially in the fly-swatting era of summer at the ranch. That goes along with the haying and the weed pulling and the sprinkler running and the contemplating fixing fence era, which goes along with sweating. Lots of sweating. Welcome everyone.

Last week my little sister texted to let me know that her girls had set up a lemonade stand in their yard and were looking for customers. Their timing was perfect because I just gave my husband a ride to bring his pickup home from the hay field. It seemed, by the grace of the equipment gods, that they finished up baling and lemonade sounded pretty good to the guys of the Veeder Ranch about then. Even better? They only had to pay in compliments…

Except Rosie. She likes a chance to grab her pink wallet and spend. Unfortunately her cousins’ stand didn’t take Trampoline Park Cards, but luckily she had some tooth fairy cash, which the small business gladly welcomed.

Is there anything cuter than a lemonade stand? Honestly. It might be the most Americana experience you can find. But country kids, they have to go about it a bit differently. When I was a kid I the early 90s, we used to set up shop up on the highway and wait for the sound of a pickup in the distance. We would have waited until 2010 without a real customer if it wasn’t for our moms, who I now realize were making some calls to the neighbors. I think we cleared about three generous dollars those days, but I’d have to ask my friend, the accountant. I’ve always been in the marketing department…

Anyway, these days there’s a real risk of your lemonade getting blown away by the big oil rigs zooming by, so a successful stand still requires a bit of mom-power. And never mind the random kittens sniffing at the product periodically. Or the chickens dusting themselves in the driveway. This is summer in the country, and the lemonade tastes about as strong as the coffee they sip in the basement of our Lutheran church. It’s perfectly fine and made with love.

Yes, we’re deep enough into the heat of the season that we dare complain about it up here in the North, mostly because it’s not the heat really, it’s the humidity. Could really use a breeze.

And also, are we the only family that has one favorite fly swatter that we swear works better than any other fly swatter ever invented and it’s the puke yellow fly swatter that hung in your grandma’s old farmhouse your entire life until she died and somehow, miraculously, it was left to you? And even though it exists in your house like a fossil, when you go to reach for it it’s never left in the spot you think it was left in and you can only find the stupid, souvenir flyswatter you brought from Nashville because it was shaped like a guitar and you thought it was funny after a couple drinks, but it can’t kill a fly to save a life?

Anyone?

Oh, Gramma’s puke yellow fly swatter and her bright pink lipstick, some of my greatest earthly possessions.

And summer, you’re here now in all your glory and I’m sweating but you’re so many of the things I love about being alive.

Alive and hot and watching the tomatoes and my mosquito bites get red. So you can’t leave yet, we’re still thinking about fencing….

Wild flowers, wild onions

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The smell of wild onions seeps through the closed doors and windows of the pickup I’m driving pointing back west towards home. It’s the time of night in the summer where it’s too late to be light, but it is the kind of light that turns the clouds pink and gives the sweet clover halos. It’s the time of night in the summer where you wish it wouldn’t end, the day, the light like this, the colors, the cooling down of the air. The season.

I’m driving home with my daughters in the back seat of the pickup. They look out the window at the power lines and ditch sunflowers whizzing by and as they look their legs are getting longer, their skin is a new shade of brown, their hair lightened by days in the sprinkler. Little wildflowers.

I smell the wild onions and suddenly I’m a little wildflower too in the dog days of summer, digging up the sweet salty roots with the boys on the side hill over the barbed wire fence outside the yard of my country school. We’re fresh off summer break, called back to desks and times tables and drinking milk out of little paper cones from the big machine. Before that, every day was like recess.   

It’s 95 degrees and the air conditioning in our house can’t keep up and I’m an adult now and I am married and so we are the ones tasked to fix it. But we are hot and it’s July and maybe we could load up the kids and head to the lake, but instead I turn on the sprinkler so the water sort of hits my tomato plants and sort of hits the inflatable pool and sort of hits my bare legs as I sit in a lawn chair sucking on a red popsicle and flipping through a magazine. My daughters splash and slide and make game after game out of the running water. And occasionally a horse fly bites my ankles, and occasionally my daughters holler about a bug in the pool, but it’s summer on the ranch and we wave off these aggravations and carry on with basking and splashing away a Sunday afternoon.

I meet my husband in the shade cast by our deck in the slowly sinking sun. I plop in a chair next to him and the smell of diesel exhaust and sweat and it reminds me of all the good men who ever worked out here on this place in the heat. He’s one of them and the gratitude for that, well I carry it in my bones. He sips a beer and takes off his hat, leaving a band of sweat on his forehead and the salt and pepper hair around his head smashed down. We talk about the yard and the swather he worked on today. Tractors around this place, they don’t run for long, but it’s time to cut hay and so this is the task. Alfalfa and sweet clover  and all the tall grasses mixed in, we’ll roll it out in a few months when we find ourselves on a different planet, covered in white, dressed thick from head to toe to shield our skin from 20 below.

But that frozen place doesn’t exist today. Today it is summer, and the dogs are panting under our chairs and those loud grasshoppers are clacking in the tall grass and we slap at that horsefly again and discuss what to put on the grill. It’s too late to be light and we should wrap up the day, but we linger a bit longer and let the words slow between us because the breeze feels nice….

Which brings us back to the air conditioning as we watch our daughters play. We tell one another how they’ve grown as if we both haven’t been witnessing it together.

They run to us then, someone fell or someone’s cold. We wrap each one in a towel and the smell of their damp skin and the wet grass smells like our childhood too. Weren’t we just kids out here. Aren’t we still? Together under the sun, heading in. Heading home.

A little suffering makes the dessert taste better

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And now for a story I shared a few years back before we put nice gate latches on all the new gates thus releasing me from the gate-closing-rage I experienced as a young woman on this ranch…now if we could just do something about the wood ticks.

Recently I went on a walk to close some gates in our home pasture and check a couple juneberry patches.

Juneberries are a special treat around here. Like wild mini-blueberries, if they show up, they show up around this time to much fanfare for those of us who know people who make pies.

Juneberries make the best pies in the world. Probably because getting to them before the frost kills them or the birds eat them up is so rare, and the entire task of picking enough of the little purple berries sends you to the most mosquito and tick infested, hot, thorny, itchiest places in the free world, so finally making and tasting a Juneberry pie is like completing some prairie, culinary, ironman marathon.

Only better and more gratifying, because, well, pie.

Anyway, my little stroll before sunset was only mildly successful. The gates on this place were made to be shut only by Thor himself. Or the Hulk. Or some hybrid of a bear-man. By the time I grunted and groaned, used my entire body weight trying to push the two posts together to maybe, possibly, for the love of Dolly Parton, stretch the three wires tight enough to get the little wire loop over the top of the scrawny post, I was sweating, cussing, bleeding and wondering how I missed the yeti that we apparently hired to fix the gates on this place.

I called Husband on my cell phone (who was inside the house with the baby, like twenty yards away) and told him there’s no way in hell I’m ever getting that gate shut and that shutting the gates was his job from now on who do you think I am what is this all about who in their right mind makes gates that tight good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart.

And, if you’re wondering, the gate on the other side of that pasture went about the same way…

Anyway, on my way I did in fact locate a big ‘ol juneberry patch. But the best berries, of course, were hanging out about fifteen feet above my head at the very tops of the bushes. And to get to them I had to wade through thorny bushes up to my armpits. But some of those thorny bushes had raspberries growing on them, so that was a win.

I proceeded to eat every ripe red berry I could find, even the one with the worm on it, which I discovered after I put it in my mouth and crunched.

So that was a loss.

Yes, the raspberries, worms and all, were within my reach. The juneberries, not so much. But tonight I’m going to see if my husband might want to come with me to back our old pickup up to that bush, stand in the box, brave the mosquitos and pick us some berries.

Because, well…pie.

Anyway, when I got home I discovered that apparently wading up to my armpits in thorny brush to pick raspberries was not only a good way to accidentally eat a worm, but, even better, it’s a great way to acquire 500 wood ticks.

I came home and picked off a good fifteen or so. Stripped down to my undies, checked myself out in the mirror, sat down on the chair and proceeded to pick off at least five more.

After a shower, when I crawled into bed I wondered out loud to Husband what time of night I would wake up to a tick crawling across my face. He made a guess. I made a guess.

But we were both wrong.

At about 12:30 am, just as I had drifted into a nice slumber, I was indeed awoken by a tick, but it wasn’t crawling across my face. No.

It was crawling toward my butt crack.

Thank good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart, I cut him off at the pass!

I guess, if we need a moral of the story, dessert tastes better when you truly suffer for it…

Ranching and Romance

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

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

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

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

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

Crocs: function and fashion collide

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

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

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

Our wedding tree

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

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

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

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

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

The order of things

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At night, in the summer, we sleep with the windows open and so the chirping of the birds wakes me up in the morning. It’s alarming how much they have to say, how loud they seem after so many months of quiet skies.

I’m listening to them right now as I type, the chirping of the birds and my cat on the deck making his presence known through the screen door. Last week he brought one of those birds to that door mat, reminding us of the order of things.

The order of things is ever present here at the ranch. A few days ago I took my daughters on a walk with me to the east pasture stock dam—out the front door and down through the swing gate, along the two track trail, past where we park the old cars and broken down equipment and through the tall brush that reaches their armpits before a quick stop to pick wild flowers to hand to me, to pick off a couple ticks and flick them to the dirt. I used to carry each one of my daughters on my chest in a pack when they were babies out here, just the two of us looking around, but only me, their momma, watching my step for the both of us.

And now look at them running! Look at their thin legs and stretched out bodies, listen to them jabber and make up stories. Listen to them laugh and ask questions about weather and the names of the grasses and the bugs, watch them throw dirt clumps into the dam and remember when we were back here on our horses, this place already drawn like a map on their beating hearts.

Recently my husband came down from the fields with news that he found a sick calf and he was headed to town for some medicine to try to save it. A few days before he had picked my dad up from that very same field after he came off a horse and needed to be treated for broken ribs at the local hospital. The calf didn’t live long enough for the hour it took my husband to get to town and back and dad was stuck in the house, slowed way down but able to give advice on how to help that momma cow who lost her calf become a mom to our bottle calf in the barn.

Things go wrong even when the sky is blue and the grass is green and there is no reason for it really except that things go wrong. I hopped in the passenger seat of the pickup next to my husband ready to be an extra set of hands to coax that calf the girls named “Little X” into the trailer and then to help introduce him, draped in the smell of the dead calf, to that momma cow. The clouds rolled in over the horizon and it started to pour on us, but that momma, she licked that little calf before he spooked and ran to the corner of the pen. And that little lick, it gave us enough hope that this new relationship might work with a some patience.

I think that’s all that ranching is really. Enough hope. Enough patience. Enough little triumphs to keep at it.

And so my husband worked multiple visits to that cow/calf pen into his daily schedule. Two times a day he loaded the cow into the chute and brought the calf to help him suck and each night when I came home from town I got the report. “He’s scared of the cow.” “He’s doing better.” “He’s getting the hang of it.”

Last night I came home late, frazzled from a long and stressful workday where I’ve been navigating my way through uncharted waters. I cried and complained and wondered if I was getting it right. Wondered if I have what it takes. My husband listened and then said, “Change clothes, we’re going to check that calf.” And I would have much rather put the covers over my head, but I went along to find Little X in the pen with his new mom, bucking and kicking and, look at that, sucking from that momma like the calf he was born to be.

And it might sound too simple, but I’m going to say it because it was true. In that moment I was just so proud and relieved about that little victory for those two animals and my husband that it made the impossible things that weighed on me that day seem a little more possible. The lump eased from my throat and I slept soundly that night until the birds woke me, singing because they’re in the business of being birds, not a question in their world if they’re doing it right.

Because that’s the order of things.

My sister’s bluebird

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Can you see the rainbow?” The text pinged my phone while I was on hour eight or twenty of laying in my bed with the flu. My husband and daughters had been gone all day for our niece’s graduation, but I had to skip it because, after months of dodging it, it was my turn to be sick.

But my little sister, Alex, who lives right over the hill on the other side of the barnyard, wasn’t going to let me miss an opportunity to see a rainbow, a good remedy for the pukes.

Earlier that day she snuck in to put cookies and fresh baked bread on my kitchen counter, trying to be sneaky, but forgetting that my phone dings every time she gets close to the house, a little hack in the form of an app that helps us with our morning kid pick-ups and evening kid drop-offs.

“Are you going for a walk?” she texted me the evening before, just as I was opening the gate and heading on my two-mile loop to the east pasture and back. “I’ll meet you!”

The ping on her phone told her I was leaving the house and she needed to escape too. Who knew that the tracking app would come in so handy for all sorts of non-emergencies?

But I was glad she caught up with me, a sentence I would have never uttered when I was twelve and she was seven and following me on my after-school walks up the creek. I used to turn around and yell at her to go home, now we coordinate our escapes together.

My little sister, she’s better at it than me. She’s always been the social one, the one to pick up the phone, the one to ask what we’re doing or how we’re doing and the one to make sure everyone knows what’s going through her mind at all times, an endearing feature of her personality that shines most in stressful or beautiful moments.

Which means we get the play-by-play of angst that occurs when she’s trying to get a fresh horse to cross a muddy creek, but then…“Oooo, look at those daisies!!” she squealed while riding through our calf crop with our uncle and dad against hurricane-force winds.

“I just love them, look at all of them,” she gushed as I continued to fight with my flighty pony and the wind, both seemingly out to kill me that day.

My uncle and I looked at each other and chuckled. What a very Alex thing to say. Then we looked over at my dad who sat horseback taking pictures of us because, “The sky is just so blue! It’s beautiful. I don’t want to forget it.”

What a very Dad thing to say.

Yes, it seemed both bluebirds on their respective shoulders were hanging on despite the wind, reminding me to invite mine back.

Reminding me to get up and look outside.

Reminding me that it can be better with company.

And fresh bread. When did she learn to make fresh bread?

Anyway, I’m feeling better now. If you need me, well, call Alex. She knows where I am.

When you look

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From my music video for “Northern Lights” produced by Ken Howie

I remember the first time I witnessed the northern lights. As memories so often go, I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember stepping out of my parent’s car in the driveway at the ranch and my dad telling me to look up. I was 9 or 10 or 11 or 12, one of those ages that blend into one another in childhood, and it was spontaneous, the way things like the northern lights used to be before we could predict them in the way we do now, announcing their arrival on an app or a website or a social media post to help others experience it. Which is a lovely perk of the modern age…

But maybe not the same as stumbling upon them in the way that we did that night, a little piece of magic we witnessed as mere humans who just happened to look up at the right time.

I found them again years later in the dead cold of January when my dad was recovering from a very close brush with death in a hospital bed in the big town. I think my husband was driving me home from a visit with him and I caught a glimpse of them out the passenger window, green and white and gold light dancing on the dark horizon reminding me how small we are here in the scheme of things. Reminding me that even the coldest night can be beautiful if we look up.

Last weekend I walked to the top of a big hill overlooking the ranch with my mom and both of my sisters. It was Mother’s Day and it was just the four of us. We stopped along the way to pick handfuls of wild sweet peas to lay on the spot where we placed my grandmother’s ashes just about a year earlier. We caught our breath when we reached the top, laughing at my big sister who always wears the most impractical outfits and footwear for the ranch. We put our hands on our hips and quieted, looking out across the neon green landscape, catching the scent of the plum blossoms on one of the most perfectly beautiful spring days. It occurred to me then that the four of us—our mom, and the daughters she raised spread across the decades—have likely never been alone like this together, out in the wilds of the ranch. No dads, no kids, just the women here, looking out. Looking up. We placed those sweet peas on the little stacks of rocks and remembered my mother’s mother and noticed a little yellow butterfly make its way through our gathering before heading back down that hill to share a meal and watch the kids play in the lawn.

Recently, my dad brought home a little black-white-face calf to the barn. He had been out checking cows and noticed it wet and left behind, potentially a twin to another brand-new calf nearby who was up and sucking. He placed a little “x-marks-the-spot” on his head to distinguish it from the other calves so he could come back and check on him to be sure he wasn’t claimed before taking him back to the barn to try him on a bottle. We rounded up our daughters to give the calf a proper welcome, glad he was found, and a little worried if he would ever figure out the bottle.

That night my oldest daughter fell off a pony we’ve been working on. She was fine but my husband and I, we felt terrible. “If only if only if only,” are the things we say when little accidents and close calls happen. We always think we should know better. She got back on and shook the scared off before we returned home right before dark to eat a cereal supper.

I missed the northern lights that night despite all the places and ways it was forecast so we could make plans to witness it. We laid our kids down safe in their beds, I said a quiet prayer of gratitude and fell asleep as the last bit of light fell under the horizon. While we dreamed, the lights danced around us and our friends and neighbors took to porches and lawns and parking lots to stand in awe. Turns out, magic happens, even when you’re not looking…

Photo by We 3 Bs Photography

But oh, when you do! Oh, when you do!

My music video for “Northern Lights”

Life in my car

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“The person who invented pants is really smart,” my oldest daughter’s voice chimed in from the way back seat of our Suburban.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I responded, not really that surprised that the comment came out of silence and, also, out of nowhere. She’s eight and that’s her resting state.

“Right because people used to just wear tiny chaps over their privates. And maybe not even over their butts!”

And that was her little sister’s contribution to the conversation as we rounded the corner to school drop off, just another Tuesday under a cloudy sky. Only this one was a little perilous because for some reason my phone had switched itself to Mountain time during the wee hours of the night, something that my husband didn’t bring to my attention until he noticed my level of calm strolling around the kitchen gathering breakfast and snacks and my thoughts for the day didn’t match the level of urgency 7:25 am warranted in our house.

Like we should be out the door in four minutes and all of us were still in our pajamas.

And so, of course I didn’t believe him or the kitchen clock that doesn’t ever change or the fact that it did, actually, look more like a 7:30 am sun situation than a 6:30 am situation, but honestly, I’m hanging by a thread here.

We shifted into warp speed then, but I didn’t have time to look in the mirror if we had a prayer of making it to school on time. And so I didn’t, knowing full well I have everything I need in my car to put myself together in a parking lot somewhere before heading into work. This is a special skill that rural women have. Well, maybe all women have it, but I can only speak from my own experience of living thirty miles from town for most of my life. Pair that with decades of working as a touring musician and I would guess the number of times I’ve applied my makeup in the visor mirror of my vehicle in a gas station parking lot might just outnumber the times I’ve used the one above the bathroom sink.

My husband pointed this out as he was putting the finishing touches on our new master bathroom. He has been making me a little vanity counter right in front of the window because natural light is the best light to illuminate all my flaws, something I’ve come to learn from that visor mirror. Indoor lighting can’t be trusted. I need nature to tell me the cold, hard truth.

He’s been working on a new closet for us as well, something much bigger and more convenient than the front seat of my car where I do quite a bit of my changing. I’ve been pushing my driver’s seat back to change in and out of tights and jeans and boots and dresses for so much of my life it’s a miracle that I haven’t created more embarrassing moments for myself and innocent pedestrians by now.

But then it’s hard to know how many people I actually traumatized in the McDonalds drive-through line as I removed my boots, belt and shapeware from under my dress while ordering a Big Mac for the hour drive back to the ranch.

If multitasking is the pillar from which I run my life, then my car is the sanctuary from which I carry out my last-minute tasks in the few quiet moments between drop off and workday, and workday and school pick-up line. Behind the dashboard is my desk, my phone booth, my five-minute nap space, my quick-bite kitchen table, my vanity, and, maybe most importantly, the place where I get to listen to my growing daughters ponder life as they count the power poles and trees zooming by their windows.

Anyway, if you happen to catch me deep in a rear-view-mirror-mascara situation, just kindly pass on by. The invisible-while-I’m-in-my-car façade is what I have to hold on to these days.

Peace, love and also, Big-Macs taste better when you remove your Spanx.  

The timing of spring

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Welcome to the warm-up North Dakota. As I write this the rain is soaking the grass and I swear it’s turning a neon green right before my eyes. We had ten calves yesterday, and likely a half-dozen or so more will be born in the rain. But they won’t mind, they will be licked clean by their mommas and kept in the protection of the tall grass and they’ll wait for the sun so they can stand up and buck and kick and run, just like us people it seems. Waiting for the sun to launch us alive again.

When you’ve lived on a piece of land for most of your life, you become a part of the rhythm of things. You inherently know the timing of a change in seasons and when to expect longer light. And, like the wild things, no matter how domesticated we become, we change with those seasons too. Like, I know the first crocus is accompanied by my dad taking the first horse out for a spring ride. And then comes the first calves and no more dark morning drives to school, followed quickly by later bedtimes…

Last Saturday after spending as much time as I could outside finding things that needed to be done, I had to head in and figure out supper. Instead of frozen pizza, I picked a recipe I hadn’t made before and regretted every minute of cooking and shredding the chicken. The task and the warm, calm evening made it tempting to turn in my adult badge and join the kids outside.  They were playing with their cousins on the playground in the yard, bringing toys and dolls that had been cooped up in the house outside to get dirty and worn out in the spring sun, out in the sand and dirt. And I don’t mind about that sort of thing, because outside is where kids are supposed to be. Outside is where I wanted to be, and so I had the sliding door cracked so I could feel the fresh breeze and hear them laughing.

All I wanted to do was climb the hills and look for the sweet peas my dad said he spotted that day. Sometimes the business of my current, middle-aged life prevents me from getting there first, but I knew just where to find them: follow the two-track trail up to the field and take a detour before the gate to the hill on the edge of the tree line. You’ll find the yellow flowers poking out among the granite rocks. And just after the sweet peas come the blue bells and after the blue bells the earth comes alive with lady slippers and paintbrushes and prairie roses and wild daisies. Next come the cone flowers.  Then, in the heat, the tiger lilies follow and then the sunflowers come in with the grasshoppers and the ripening tomatoes in my garden.

And none of these names we have for the flowers are likely correct. You probably call them something different, but when it comes to wildflowers, names don’t matter.

We’ll start serving supper later and later and now, it will sneak up on us gradually until the thick of July when we come in at ten o’clock to eat hot dogs and beans. It had already begun last weekend when, at 8 pm, we took our first bites. But there was still time for me to escape to those granite rocks after helping clear the table. And so I raced the light a bit, the dogs running out ahead of me to sniff out any mice or gophers in their path while I was sniffing out sweet peas. It wasn’t a long hunt, because there they were, right where I’ve found them year after year after year. In a few more warm days, after this soaking rain, that yellow flower will fill the hillsides, too many to gather into a bouquet, but that evening I picked just a few for the mason jar on my table. I clenched the stems in my left hand and took a big whiff and headed back home to beat the dark, humming a little welcome song to the warm up and to more simple hot dog suppers…

Dakota Cowboy Interview

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Recently, on a rainy day in April, I had a chance to visit with Tisa Peek for the Dakota Cowboy show on Bek TV. We sat horseback in her arena and talked plans and inspiration, arts and music and community building. This show is dedicated to telling the story of rural North Dakota and the people who are doing good work here, was an honor to be included.

Give it a watch here or click the image below:

If you’re interested in where I’m playing this summer, or to get me on your event calendar, visit www.jessieveedermusic.com/shows