Tag Archives: North Dakota

Small spaces

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It’s quite clear that I am enamored with all of this space around me–all of the grass and the sky and the pink road that stretches on for miles onto the horizon. I stand outside and feel like I could simply blow away with the leaves in this vast landscape, no more significant than a field mouse really.

But I am a completely different size in this house. In fact, I am actually quite significant, and so is my shoe population, unfortunately for my husband’s side of the closet. Just to give you a bit of a visual of what we are dealing with here, when you knock on the door, you can see directly into the bedroom (and if you take five steps, you will be inside of it). Closing the bedroom doors would be an option, except that they have windows–beautiful, but not so practical when you’re in the process of changing your shorts and the neighbor pops in for a chat. And if my husband and I were standing side by side in the living room and tried to perform the chicken dance the way it was meant, our elbows would be scraping the sides of the room, which rules out any kind of gymnastics performances. I haven’t nearly successfully completed the move of all our earthly possessions from our three bedroom, three bathroom home to our new humble abode and we have already nearly covered every moveable inch with stuff. And when you throw two people, and two dogs (one of them the size of a small teenage boy) into the mix, there is not much floor space to skip around in. And I do like to dance and sometimes kick a leg up while doing the dishes,  so that throws a bit of a kink in my style.

But I am not complaining. In fact I like living in smaller spaces, because, when it comes down to it it means less surface area to have to worry about dusting and scrubbing and vacuuming, and I’m really all for that. Anyway, I am sure, unless  you were born into the Hilton family or are waiting to be crowned the next king or queen of a country,  most of us have had the experience, or will have the gift of living in close quarters with someone we promised to have and hold no matter how many times we step on each others’ toes while brushing our teeth. In fact, I think it should be a requirement that all couples who are contemplating a life long commitment, live together in a one bedroom, one bathroom, one closet home. Because nothing spells love and commitment quite like holding your pee while your dearly beloved finishes his morning grooming ritual.

No, there is no hiding anything here really. Last night, we sat down in the living room for a lovely dinner of burned grilled chicken legs (I cooked), my husband sprawled out in his recliner, me and my plate dangerously close to his reclined stocking feet,  and I couldn’t get past the fact that my instant rice tasted a bit like a foot that had been crammed into a pair of work boots all day in 90 degree weather. Ugh, I think I can still smell it.

Although there is no hiding from the unfortunate stenches, there is also no hiding from each other. You wake up in the morning and as you move about the house, reaching for the coffee, your hand gently brushes his. You get ready for the day and you lean across his body for your comb and laugh as you watch him crane and distort his nose and mouth while he works to shave his face. He stands in the kitchen, cutting up onions for his famous and favorite soup and the smell of bay leaves and butter wrap around you and you can’t help but get up to do the same to him. The walls move in on you and you  move closer to one another. You are no longer swallowed up in the space between the multiple rooms you once used to get away from one another in an argument, but forced to look in the eye the emotions that have been provoked. The whispers in the dark sweep over you and the laughter rattles the foundation. There is no need to shout.

But when I am stubbing my toe on the coffee table for the thirteenth time that day or tripping over the damn dog in the middle of the floor, I can not believe this is where my five cousins, two sisters, two aunts, two uncles and my parents spent holiday weekends, cooking, eating, sleeping and, let’s be honest here, putting on interpretations of the “Wizard of Oz.” It seemed so much bigger when I was growing up. Interesting, considering that it was full of so much more than bodies, but of laughter and love and conversations, the smell of homemade bread, a house cat and a large Christmas Tree. Where did we all sleep? How did we manage to put on what I would consider successful and entertaining dance performances to Paula Abdul? How did we all fit around the kitchen table? And where did my grandmother keep all of her shoes for crying out loud?

I don’t know. I remember only faintly what it looked like in here, what photos she hung and where my grandfather’s easy chair sat. As I curse the closet space and shove my luggage under the bed of the very room my grandmother used to sleep in after a day of chores and raising three children, I wonder if she ever cursed the small stove or wished she had room for a bigger kitchen table. I imagine her life here, where her bed was placed and if the sun hit her face the same way it hits mine in the summer mornings and if she left the windows open at night like I do. I imagine her as a light hearted wife humming in the kitchen while plopping down pancakes for breakfast. Sometimes, when I’m outside,  I  swear I can hear her calling to the cattle or to her grandkids to come inside for supper. I compare her life to mine in this house, between these walls and how different this world must be from hers.

But seeing my tupperware shoved in the re-done cupboards, the laundry stacked up on the bed, the unopened cans waiting for me to rearrange the pantry and the work boots scattered in the entry way, I long to fill this house they way she filled it. I want people to sit close, eat my cooking and drink my bad coffee. I want our laughter and kitchen light to flood the farmyard late into the night and bounce off the buttes and make the landscape ring with life.

And some days, when I am scrubbing the floor or dusting the shelves, I feel like her. I feel her smile spread across my face, her kink in my back. And I wonder if this house held her the way it is holding me. I wonder if these walls closed in on them the way they have on us, urging us to break down, to touch, to hold on tight to each other.  I wonder if she stood in the kitchen making dinner for her husband and if he felt moved to come up behind her and gently kiss her cheek. I wonder if she danced in the living room. I wonder if she tripped over her coffee table and walked out into the landscape and opened her arms up wide and smiled as the big, blue sky swallowed her up.

Summer Flies

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Clover blooming in the pasture outside my house.

It’s hot today at the Veeder Ranch. Not a smoldering heat, but the sun is beating on the scoria road outside my house and quite unexpectedly, the trees are standing relatively still due to the lack of push by the usually relentless wind. Which entices the flies to buzz  confidently at my front door and around our horses’ noses, sending them into a some sort of trance, bobbing their heads like a metronome in an attempt to keep the persistent insects away. They head for the hill tops to find a breeze.

The cows also have a ritual, which I’ve only noticed, but haven’t studied (as I don’t claim to be, at the present time, a cow expert. I am however, to my husband’s dismay, hoping to become a pig expert, but we won’t go there today). They gather together in a cluster, maybe near the corner of a pasture, or on a side hill, and at a sporadic pace, switch their wiry tails, slapping each other over backs, on faces, under bellies, forming a sort of jumbled up assembly of “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine.”  I imagine them saying to each other on these days,  after a long winter of trudging through the snow, “Really? We just can’t catch a break here can we?”.

These instinctual methods for dealing with the mites that come with the short North Dakota summer seem a bit more methodical than my form of extermination, which is cussing mostly, and a flyswatter made available on every table in the house. Oh, and Raid.

But the pastures are green. Like neon green. After a couple days of rains that poured down from the sky like God was

The paint catching a breeze on a hilltop.

throwing out his bathwater (and God, I imagine, has quite the large tub), the sunshine is working on drying the puddles and putting a nice crust on the gumbo buttes of the badlands and the ruts created in the gravel roads around here.

So I roll up my sleeves and my pants legs and, with my flyswatter in tow, I sprawl out on the porch. Because of course I love the warm sunshine. It is what I have been waiting for since it left us last September. I welcome it to come and brown my skin and entice the sweat-beads on my forehead and chest. I tilt my head upwards, squint my eyes and say “bring it on!” Because, in my sun-worshiping opinion, we don’t get enough of these kinds of days up here. And when we do, unfortunately for the office bound and car bound and truck bound and shovel bound North Dakota employees, they do usually land on a Monday or Wednesday, followed up with a nice rainy weekend, which doesn’t stop the hearty residents from loading up their fishing boats and digging out their Bermuda shorts anyway, because dammit, the summer is short.

Clay butte outside my window baking in the summer sun.

I found in my days touring the Great Plains as a musician that there are two things people want to talk about when you tell them you are from North Dakota (as if they didn’t already figure it out as soon as I open my mouth): your accent (say “You Know”) and the weather. And as soon as I got done explaining that yes, I know I have an accent, and that I blame it on my Lutheran Church Lady heritage, and yes, I know I say “Dakoota” funny, and haha, yes, I wish I talked more like you and said “ant” instead of “aunt” and “yes” instead of “yah,” the conversation always turns to weather.

“It’s cold up there isn’t it?”

“Yah, sure is”

“How cold does it get”

“Pretty cold. Sometimes like 30 below zero” *

“Holy Shit”

“Yah”

Yes, we talk about the weather. Ask us and we will proudly declare that it takes a certain type of person to live here.

Cows switching their tails near the water tanks.

That the winters keep the riff-raff out. That we hunker down and deal with it.

But we, from the humble stock we sprang, rarely talk about the summers here. Maybe because, in our minds, they are not so dramatic. They don’t incline us to use as many puns and metaphors and exaggerated stories about the neighbors nearly freezing to death in a blizzard or almost dying walking across campus at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks (which is the coldest place on earth I am sure of it), or how the wind could blow the snow in a flurry one thousand miles an hour over roads coated with sheets of ice and North Dakota schools would not think of shutting down. No, North Dakota summers could not possibly be that dramatic.

But I think we are wrong here. The summers here are not to be skipped over on your way to explaining yourself out of why we endure the bitter cold. I believe there is something to be said, I mean, really be said, about the season that was sent here to save us.

Hondo cools off in the dam

Because graciously summer unfurls itself from its cocoon ever so slowly for us, year after year, revealing its colors in soft buds of green on the trees, allowing the sun to shine for just a few more minutes every day, enticing the crocuses to poke through the earth on the sides of hills. It gently whispers to us to open our windows, to let the winter air out of our houses, to let the dirt creep in on the bottom of our shoes, to water our lawns and watch the blades grow, to throw something on the grill. To warm up already!

It eases us into the new, refreshing sensation,  like a mother coaxing her child to get his feet wet in the pool, to come in a little further, until he finally, after giddy squeals and nervous shakes, dunks his head under the water.

And although most North Dakotans don’t truly believe it’s summer until it’s half-way over, until we have complained

Pearl the mule going in for a drink.

enough about the rain and the wind and the tornado warnings, it is days like today we jump right in. We say to each other as we walk down the street “What a beautiful day!” “It’s gorgeous out there.” “Finally! The sun!” And we plop down in our gardens, and jump into the chilly lakes, and take our sandwiches to the park, and tend to our flowers. Because days like these allow us to completely and utterly forget about the long, frigid January, the snow we shoveled through to get to our garages and the white out blizzard on the highway we were stuck in during Christmas. We finally get a chance to thaw out enough to suck on a popsicle from the Shwan’s man.

In fact, show us a photo of the previous winter and it would be unrecognizable on a day like today when the sky is so blue and the birds are chirping and the dogs are panting and our children are covered in sunscreen and sweat. Those snow drenched houses were another lifetime. Another world.

My summer fly.

Because it is hot today at the ranch and North Dakotans everywhere are turning on sprinklers, nursing their first sunburns, opening their windows and feeling at least a little grateful for the flies.

And that takes a special type of person.

*just a note for those of you looking to take a visit, and don’t know me personally–I do tend to exaggerate, especially when it comes to the weather. 30 below zero has probably never occurred here.  I am included in the dramatic bunch.

Happy first day of summer you crazies!

What are we holding on to?

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The Old Red Veeder barn where the reunion will take place.

So the Veeders are coming home. All of them. (Or as many of them who can fit in the time, take the drive, plan the flight and find it worth while).

It’s reunion season after all and that is what the Veeders intend to do. Reunite. Over casserole, bad lemonade, bars, jello salad and coffee and coffee and coffee.

My dad has been helping to plan this reunion for the past year. I mean of course. He is an important link in all of this as he has chosen, or has been charged with, or blessed, or just stupid enough to serve as the steward of this home place since his dad died nearly 20 years ago.

So, upon our official and gradual move from the city of Dickinson to our permanent residence at the ranch house, I have been helping a bit to get the place ready. Because, did I mention this house we have moved into has been vacant a good 10 years off and on? It turns out it needs some maintenance. (For those of you who have ever set up shop in an old house, I know you are nodding your head while recalling that lovely must-like scent.)  Anyway, I spent most of my day yesterday in the basement, cleaning out some goodies and numerous spider webs.

Now I must mention here, that I am no stranger to this place. I basically grew up here.  It wasn’t my childhood house, but it was my grandma’s home. Which meant that I spent many holidays, sleepovers, weekends and weekdays playing and reuniting with my cousins and aunts and uncles from across the country. It was our 600 square foot meeting place. Our stomping grounds.

The Veeder cousins with Grandma Edie during Easter at the Veeder House. I'm directly next to my grandma in the striped jumpsuit, always a good choice in the early 90s.

So there I was yesterday, in the depths of the basement, waist deep in boxes filled with other people’s stuff. Because over the years, this place has become the unofficial hiding spot for pottery, homemade doilies, ill-fitting clothing, and as it turns out, that sunflower latch-hook pillow I may have mentioned earlier. These boxes are full of the important things that people on both sides of my family, myself included, are just not quite ready to release their grip on. And this got me thinking. On the eve of family infiltrating the landscape, what, really, are we saving?

See, to me the act of organizing stuff in this particular basement was a little unnerving. Because this basement was the location of the wonderment of my youth. It is where my cousins and I performed faux marriage ceremonies, established the “Kitten Caboodle Club”  to help save stray cats all over the farm-yard, and played “don’t fall in the hot lava” (the flaming red, orange and yellow carpet may have served as inspiration). It is where I performed my first interpretive dance to “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” learned, with regret, that the Easter Bunny does not exist (and just to help me out, neither does Santa Clause), and was informed that some of us were moving far away to Texas. According to me (and I’ll speak for my sisters and my cousins) nothing that was currently in this room really belonged there.

Old butter, canning and milk jars found in the basement of the Veeder house.

I raised up my hands in frustration (and consequently swiped up a cob-web).

Then my dad came over and we found, under the bed, a collection of his old albums and we went through them one by one. With each Neil Young and Emmylou Harris and Bruce Springsteen record  came flooding back to my father a memory, an image, of who he was at the time he played it, over and over and over. He flipped to the back and read off, out-loud, the titles of the songs. Not surprisingly, many of them were familiar to me, because many of them he sings to this day. It was an exhilarating experience for him, to show someone else something that meant so much to him, to have his memory sparked enough to tell a few stories. We laid them all out on the bunk bed where I used to sleep. We laid all of them out.

But now what? I mean, I was working on cleaning this place out, to make room for the next batch of things I am not ready to release. What are we doing with these physical things and what does it say about the human condition that we insist on holding on so long? I mean, really, did my dad need to run hands over the covers of these albums to remember that he was once an afro donning, hippie-style ranch kid, in touch with his creativity and the front man and member of a traveling band? Do I really need to physically put on the mint green, 1960’s bridesmaid’s dress my grandma had in her dress-up drawer to remember that I once dramatically danced to Bette Midler in front of my entire extended family in the living room of this very house? I am not sure. I really am not sure.

I remember going through this house with my family, aunts, uncles and cousins after my grandmother died when I was

Veeder Cousins outside the Veeder house. Probably after one of our "Kitten Caboodle" meetings. Im am wearing the leotard and tights and carrying the blanket. That is a story for another day.

eleven. I remember there was an agreement that the grandkids each got a pair of her reading glasses (which she left all over her house, even though she usually had a pair strung around her neck) and we got to pick a few things that meant something to us individually. Something to remind us of her. I took one of her lipsticks. The kind that was blue or green and changed color on your lips. Mood lipstick I think they called it and it was always bright fuschia on her mouth. And also a Norwegean doll, who she referred to as “bestemor,” or “grandmother.” I am sure I found a couple other things, but I don’t remember. What I do remember was the stillness in the house that day– so quiet, even with all of us kids roaming around. I remember the smell of the grass softly seeping in through the open windows. I remember not giving a shit about her eyeglasses or her doll or her handkerchiefs. I wanted her voice, her laugh, her hands, her smell, her bread dough and homemade pickles. When I grew up, I wanted to ask her things and compare our features and understand why I may have turned out like her. And none of her things that I would put on my shelf could keep that from going away. Not when I lost her at eleven years old.

Wagon Wheel outside the Veeder House

The funny thing is, that here I am. In her house. Wanting so bad to keep the bricks and mortar in tact. Wanting to keep the windows clean and the floors swept. For her. For her family.

What am I holding on to?

My friend recently wrote that she too has been tempted to move back to her family farm to help make it “alive again.”

Maybe that’s what we’re doing here. All of the careful collections of things are set on shelves or in boxes to remind us about the spirit of the place, about ourselves. Because these relatives, my relatives, are not coming back for the noodle salad and family gossip. No. They are coming to touch the soil where my great-grandfather built his first home, to walk the hills they once rolled down as children, to stand on a familiar landmark, to breathe the air their great aunt sucked her last breath in, to visit the spot she once had a garden, to gather in the old barn. They are coming to remember and to celebrate the spirt of the place and the souls that rejoiced, wept and cussed here. Because we can’t hold on to the flesh and bone, the voices, the pain and the triumph, but we can preserve a tea-pot. And that helps us remember that we came from something. From something quite great.

Cornelia's Roses getting ready to bloom.

Which brings me to the roses.

I was told that  below our house is a patch of yellow roses that my great-grandmother planted before she died early and suddenly in 1932. Cornelia’s roses.  My great-grandfather, Eddy, tended to these flowers every day during the summers after her death, making sure they had water, sunshine, and were free of weeds.  Since his death I am not sure that anyone has hoed or weeded or fed those roses. Yesterday, after emerging from the basement flushed and searching for air, I walked down to where her garden used to be and found, that after over 80 years, those roses were holding on too.


Wildflowers

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When I was 10 or 11 I was obsessed with wildflowers. Obsessed.

Coincidentally, I was also obsessed with 4-H.

See the 4 H’s  (head, hands, health, heart…pretty sure that’s right…funny how those logistics kinda slip the mind ) was a country girl’s lifeline to the rest of the world. It meant to me, not only PROJECTS (which I LOVED, and  devoted my entire summer to), but also that I had one glorious weekend to spend in town with my almost equally nerdy friends comparing creations, eating fair burgers and flexing our flirting skills in the stands at the rodeo.

Yes, the county fair was a big damn deal people. Because my almost equally nerdy friends were from little and big farms dotted in a 30 to 50 mile radius from where I was  headquartered, the fair provided the only time I actually got to see them the entire summer. A typical bike ride to meet half way would have surely killed us both.

Yeah, the seeing the friends thing I did not take for granted. But given my athletic ability and the fact that the outlook of a successful sporting and rodeo career seemed pretty grim even at 10 or 11, the real reason for my devotion to the sport of 4-H was its trophy potential.

Trophy Potential.

(I feel compelled to mention here that I was the kid who followed 4-H dress code to annoying perfection. White pressed collared shirt buttoned up to the very top, strategically placed four leaf clover badge over my heart, tight wrangler blue jeans and polished boots. I was the epitome of 4-H, a model member, a spokes person. I should have been on the cover of “4-H Weekly” really. And if that magazine doesn’t exist, it should. Call me and I’ll make it happen).

Over the summers I had tried my hand at various activities. Like latch-hooking.

Does anyone even do this anymore?

I spent my evenings hunched over on the living room floor hooking yarn piece after yarn piece onto a pattern of a sunflower, cow, or horse.  I would then commission the help of a third party to actually make the creation functional as well as decretive. My sunflower became a pillow, the two animals were rustic wall hangings…now that I think of it, I wonder what ever happened to those works of art? I mean, they weren’t tacky at all.

Anyway, latch-hooking was the only activity that even resembled girly that I decided to try. I refused baking and wasn’t going to kid myself in the sewing department, considering my mother had once sewn a pair of my sister’s pants together at the hem, and she was my sewing role model.

So I tried my hand at things like wood-burning, which always turned into an inspirational piece about the heartland or living your life to the fullest. I also did educational projects on gardening, beavers and beaver dams, tried my hand at drawing my favorite stuffed animal and took countless photos of my cats, dogs and horizons.

All of these projects I would present to the judges with pride. Even though I knew it was going to be tough to compete with my friend who would pick a needlepoint project off of her grandmother’s wall the night before the fair and make up a great story about how she had learned so much working alongside her dear granny. (I have always been freakishly honest, so I knew I didn’t stand a chance if I tried that shenanigan. That, and no one related to me actually knew the definition of needlepoint).  Regardless, that friend and I would usually walk out with a respectable blue or red ribbon and a couple dollars in our pockets.

But let’s get real here. I generally do not have a competitive nature, but when it came to 4-H, I was out for blood. A hundred blue ribbons meant nothing. I wanted the grand. The purple. The TROPHY!

Which leads me to my wildflower obsession. I can’t remember, but I imagine it had been a long winter, giving me the time to consider inspiring projects that would surely land me a top spot at the State Fair (the county fair on steroids). I’m not sure what exactly gave me the idea to set out on a quest to hunt, gather and identify every living wildflower in McKenzie County, but it really was genius. It really carried massive potential. And it is exactly what I did.

As soon as the last pile of snow disappeared and first spring rain hit the earth, I hit the hills with my “Wildflowers of North Dakota” guide book and a whole lot of ambition. I became a hunter, a wild woman with a hawk’s eye for a splash of new color on the landscape. I would make my parents pull the car over if I thought I saw a semblance of a species I hadn’t collected yet. I was a seeker of the rare, fragile flower. It was a big day when I came across an in tact gumbo flower or perfectly assembled tiger lily. I remember taking my best friend out with me into the woods on our bikes with gloves and scissors because I NEEDED to collect a sample of Canadian thistle, which poked the shit out of your hands when you tried to pluck it from the ground. It is funny to me now that this became such a sought after specimen, considering every rancher would strongly disagree that this should be considered a wild flower. Wild yes. Flower no. But it had color and zest and, to me, it was beautiful as far as flowers go. I NEEDED it.

I would like to tell you that at the end of the summer, I took this project into town, stood proudly in front of the judges and confidently explained what I knew about the purple prairie cone flower and the blue flax. I would like to say that I had a worthy declaration of why I chose to include the creeping jenny and the Canadian thistle into a flower project. I am sure I was brilliant. And I’m pretty sure I got a purple ribbon, which prompted me to march my butt to the State Fair and receive the same result. I am pretty sure that is what happened.

But if I were to tell you the truth, which I aim to do here, (it’s that freakishly honest thing again), I would tell you that I guess I don’t really remember that part. What I remember is the sheer wonder I felt that summer in discovering the little gems in my surroundings. It was like searching for gold or diamonds out there in the landscape. Each yellow daisy I came across, each lady slipper I pressed and put in my book, gave me such a sense of accomplishment, such a sense of pride. I was in complete awe at the fact that the rough landscape, littered with rocks, clay and cactus could produce and sustain a vivid, fragrant, magenta flower that was so fragile that it only lived a couple days. It was the juxtaposition of it all.

This could be a brutal place, I heard stories about draughts, and how my grandparents had struggled on this landscape. But I just couldn’t believe it when I literally found myself frolicking in rolling hills of crocuses and sweet peas. Little rays of sunshine pushing through the earth. I became so engrossed, that at times, I felt like one of the flowers myself.

This came to mind again to me so vividly last night. 16 years after that monumental project I found myself walking out in the June evening air with my camera, ready to take photos of the horses, or the dogs or some form of exciting wildlife. But I continued to point my camera to the ground, snapping photos of these flowers sprouting out yellow as a single stem from between a rock, growing in flocks across the peak of a hill or in a coulee, scattered like heaven’s perfect garden along the landscape. I became fascinated again.

And I was downright giddy. Because that girl I had been looking to find again–on the road, in books, at work,  in crowded bars–was finally at home with her flowers.

A Lesson In Living

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A lesson in living

by Jessie Veeder

this land
from where my heart sprang
where my father took his first breath
my grandmother her last

horizon to horizon
I turned from you
head wrenched back over my shoulder
and I run to you again
asking you to find me here

somewhere

I once knew you
this place
and I scream to you to break this hurt against your granite stones
I lurch my despair off your buttes
I march
I march
I march
across your fields

I plead

as you gently twist my hair in the wind
and cradle me in the rolling hills
you return to me the rosy cheeks of my youth
and lead my feet on trails I once cut
over and
over and
over

all the while trees are falling
roots torn from the ground
birds crashing to earth

storms howling

and you soak up the tears
back to the dirt
as the first purple flower of spring pushes through
you speak not a word

and go on living

*This poem is published in “On Second Thought,” the magazine of the North Dakota Humanities Council. Please visit their website and check out their wonderful mission and programming.