Tag Archives: nostalgia

20 Years

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“There’s a Dewalt battery operated industrial fan on sale over there,” I said to my husband as he searched the back wall of Tractor Supply for the right battery for my car that wouldn’t start. “I could use it on stage when it’s hot.”

“Well, happy anniversary!” he laughed. “Go load it up!”

We spent that morning moving cows to better grass and water, riding good horses through pretty country, commenting on how we really need the rain. We had a few additional errands and chores to get done that Sunday before sending the kids down the road to their grandparents’ so we could grill a steak and pour a glass of wine to celebrate in our kitchen. 

As of last week, we have been married for twenty years. On our actual anniversary I will be across the state performing and my husband will be at the ranch working and our daughters will be playing with their cousins on the last few days of summer. And maybe twenty years deserves a bigger celebration than a trip to Tractor Supply and clearing the table of the baby dolls so we can eat steak together at 9 pm, but in our life, grand gestures have never been a thing.

The biggest, I suppose, was our wedding in the cow pasture under the oak tree where he proposed. We planned a little movie scene ceremony, complete with an entrance on a horse drawn wagon. All our guests sat on homemade benches on a breezy August day after a much-needed evening of thunderstorms that threatened the whole plan. Chad spent the entire 48 hours prior roasting a pig in a big hole in the ground to feed the rehearsal dinner guests and, due to that thunderstorm, our back yard picnic turned into a jam session in my parents’ tiny garage, the only place on the ranch we hadn’t cleaned. We were just kids when we made these plans. I turned 23 two weeks into our marriage when, for our honeymoon my new husband came with me on his four days off his oil rig job to a small gig where I played music under a picnic shelter in Redfield, South Dakota. Along the way we splurged on a fancy hotel and a new refrigerator that was too big to fit in the kitchen in the tiny ranch house, so it sat there in the middle of the house for days until we figured out a new plan.

We were just 23, but I had already loved him for years by then, silly girl. Silly kids.

If I were a better writer, I would have worked to make a list of the top 10 things I’ve learned about marriage in these twenty short years. Or maybe I could offer some advice. But marriage, no matter how long it lasts, isn’t a tidy list. In fact, maybe the longer you’re together, the less tidy it all becomes.

“You should hear it outside, it’s just buzzing and humming,” he said as he came in from taking the steaks off the grill. “The crickets are so loud, and so is the owl. It’s dark but everything’s just vibrating.”

I stood under the big kitchen light, clearing the counter for our little supper for two, chopping the lettuce and grabbing the plates. In the movies I would have lit some candles or lit a fire, maybe I would have come out in a pretty dress. Maybe there would have been jewelry. But we didn’t get to all that because we were too busy catching up, talking about plans for the barn and the kids and the business and the funny thing that happened yesterday, letting it all sit on the counter too long. These days, with two growing girls nipping at our heels, our house is rarely filled with just our two voices. To just be us under this roof is rare.

But it won’t be rare for long—that’s the one thing we know well. We put trust in the fleeting part, the good and the hard, and we’re pretty good at linking arms and trudging on through. And it’s easier when he gets the battery for my broken car and I get the groceries and we do the dishes together and I fold his socks and mow the lawn and he cleans the drain and makes the homemade noodles and he puts Rosie to bed and I put Edie to bed and I let the puppy out and he pulls on the other end of the fitted sheet and I stand behind the trailer to make sure he’s lined out and he wipes the dust off the backup camera of my car every time he walks by it.

Twenty years of marriage and I still understand that love is hardly ever loud. I knew that as the girl who married him. I just liked being with a man who made things like cattle work, a trip to Tractor Supply, a sort of messy house and a kitchen counter supper feel like the best life anyone could ask for.

The best meal I ever ate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Ice Cream

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My grandpa Bill loves ice cream. Every time we would visit him throughout my childhood he would always make a moment for the sweet treat, whether it was a banana split complete with hot fudge and peanuts or a trip to the local Dairy Queen where he would get a hot fudge sundae or a milkshake. Ice cream was his love language, and he didn’t phone it in when we’re talking about making it a ritual—he always had all the toppings at hand should the moment call for it. He is the sort of man who gives things like ice cream a little extra thought and I always appreciated that about him.

And so, I was thinking about him today as I made my way back to the condo after one of my last radiation treatments here in Rochester. A friend sent me a gift card to an ice cream place with a note that instructed me to get a little treat as I finished up my last week. It was such a kind gesture, and I put the gift card in my purse, thinking maybe I’d save it for the next time we were in a big town with the kids. For some reason, grabbing an ice cream by myself didn’t seem like something I was going to do, especially since the last few days had me feeling a little more sick and a little more emotionally drained, despite the promise of the end in sight.

Anyway, maybe it was the sun-shiney, almost 70-degree afternoon that changed my mind and gave me an actual, grampa-like craving for ice cream, or maybe it was my friend’s note and the gift card in my purse, but suddenly I was overcome by the certainty that a chocolate milk shake would cure me, and so I made the stop.

I had a similar feeling when the girls were here visiting me a few weeks back. Rosie wasn’t feeling well, so it left my oldest daughter and I to our own devices. And what does a mom and her ten-year-old daughter do on a beautiful day with no real agenda? You get ice cream and sit at the picnic table with an umbrella and listen as the girl talks. I thought about my grandpa that day too, how he would love the place with its dozens and dozens of ice cream flavors and how he would probably just order a hot fudge sundae or, like me, a chocolate milkshake, despite the endless options. I watched my daughter spoon tiny bites of her strawberry cheesecake flavor to her mouth while she talked about friends and basketball, and I could tell she was feeling special and grown up hanging out, just her and I. There’s a different way your kids act when you find it’s just the two of you. I think, somehow, both of us can be much more ourselves this way. I could have sat there forever I think, frozen in that space where we were together and we were just fine, and the sun was warm and the ice cream was delicious.

Back home, as part of our work in the arts, we also run a Visitor’s Center store called The Merc that scoops up six different flavors of hard ice cream. Whenever my mom picks her grandkids up from school they wind up there, sampling the new flavors and negotiating bigger scoops. The Merc is that place for a lot of grammas and grandpas, an easy way to do something special together.

And we have our regulars in the community who come to sit together at the tables or on the deck on a sunny day, and then those who always make it a stop on their way through town. For some time, there was a man who came almost every day for one scoop, well dressed with time for a visit, because ice cream is only half of it. And then once, when I was working behind the counter, a young man came through the drive-through and ordered a vanilla cone. I might have asked him a question about a double scoop or if he wanted anything else, and he replied by telling me the cone was for his dog, who was laying in the backseat of his pickup. She was sick and he was giving her one last treat. I couldn’t stop the tears when I handed him the ice cream and told him it was on the house.

What am I trying to say here? Something profound about ice cream? Yes, maybe I am. That there are simple things like the coveted chokecherry flavor that only your favorite place has, or the way I know what my husband would order even before makes the choice. There’s something  purely human about sharing a double scoop or offering up a taste or trying to soften a bad day with something so simple. Or whenever you chose chip and mint or cookie dough, you think of who you were on the front porch of your childhood home and maybe you can smell the fresh cut lawn or the clover.

Or maybe you take a sip of that milkshake to give yourself a little reprieve from a hard day because your friend loved you enough to suggest it could help. And you think of your grandpa then, and how he once drove you across the Midwest to play music because he didn’t think you should go all those miles alone and there was always a diner with a sundae waiting for the two of you along the way.

I paid for my milkshake and as I headed out the door, the teenage boy who was sitting at the table behind me shuffled up to the counter where a pretty girl was working her after school job, hell bent on continuing the flirting I had interrupted with my order, and I was glad to see that teenagers are still teenagers the same way ice cream stays ice cream. And I hope they fall in love… 

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)

Only in dreams

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I just woke up from a dream where I was in my grandma’s old house on the ranch. I was in the basement in the top bunk of the bedroom with the hot-lava colored carpet, under a new blanket, noticing the spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling and barn-wood covered wall. I asked the girl in the bed next to me, someone I knew in the dream but don’t know in the real world, how strange it is to feel like you’re nine-years-old again when you’re in your gramma’s house. And then I flicked a spider off my covers and walked across the hallway to the next room to find that my daughters had been there, they had set up a school-room for their dolls, using the nightstand and the bed with the scratchy comforter.  The dolls were lined up neat in the space and I scanned my eyes across each one and then I cried.

There are places I can only visit now in my dreams, but it seems I go this little house more than any other place in my memory.

We had a childhood friend who we lost in an accident a few years out of high school. He loved to work on cars and had the neatest handwriting and sat behind me in science class and always had a stick of gum to share. He was smart and neat, a mix of sweet and serious. I think of him always in his corduroy FFA jacket or at Charlie’s working on our friend’s race car. He was the first boy to ever buy me flowers. I was in seventh grade and I didn’t know how to act when a boy buys you flowers. I know I said thank you, I know I did that much, but then what? Like the old house I’ll never visit again, too quickly he became someone I now only see in dreams. And, again, like the old house, out of all the people I’ve lost, for some reason, he visits most often. And it’s always good to see him, except I wish that it could be that he lived on his farm on the other side of town and he works on tractors with his boys and my husband would text him to come over for New Years Eve and he should bring beer and the kids of course. I like to imagine he would have made his way back home like us, because I think that’s what he would have wanted.

The stock dam outside our house has frozen over smooth this winter, good enough for the girls to shove stocking feet in ice skates and head over the hill to glide around under the watch of the big hill we call Pots and Pans and the tall oak and ash. I stand on the side and watch them spin and fall and laugh and bruise their knees under fluffy snowpants. I wonder if I should buy my own ice skates this winter, it’s been years since I’ve been on them, but man, it used to be so fun. My little sister and I would walk down to the creek and shovel the snow off, then sit on the bank and lace up our skates. I remember one winter the snow didn’t need to be cleared and we could skate all the way up that little creek, like a magical icy trail among the trees. I watch my girls working on spins with their arms out and know there are versions of myself that I can never be again, not even if I put on the skates.

On New Years Eve I will ask my husband to build a fire on the side of that dam and we will invite our neighbors and family to come and skate. We’ll do this to create a memory for those kids and to recreate the good ones we have tied to this season. Because, yes, there are places we can only go in our dreams, and people we will only find there now. But while we’re here, while we’re here, maybe we should, maybe we could, make something for us to dream about…

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.

Kelly’s Peak

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“Summer is over!” my dad called to me from on top of his sorrel mare. I was dressed from head to toe in my fall gather clothing—long underwear, jeans, chaps, sweater, vest, coat, neckerchief, gloves and a wool cap—because this is the outfit you wear when it’s early fall and it’s early in the morning and the wind is working to blow you off at 50 miles per hour. I was riding beside him as we pushed our cows from the flat up through a rough draw next to a big, steep butte we call “Perkin’s Peak,” likely named after a family who once owned the land whose last name was Perkins, but I guess I never really asked.

Once, when I was a kid, we were moving cows in this exact spot, at this exact time of year, and neighbor Kelly was along during his ‘bull whip’ phase. Kelly lives just up the hill and down the highway a bit. His daughter is my childhood best friend, and for a good chunk of that year, whenever I would go visit, we would find him in the driveway between his barn and the house trying to crack the thing like The Man from Snowy River. Turns out learning to crack a bullwhip isn’t as easy as it looks, but he seemed to finally master it on the ground after several weeks of encouragement from his daughters. And so, of course, the next step was to take it on a ride to his neighbors’ to move cows.

And it’s not like any cowboy on the North Dakota plains really needs a bull whip for any particular reason except to be cinematic about it. And that crisp fall day, after we pushed those cows from Pederson’s, through Alton’s and across the road and onto the flat and through that draw along Perkin’s Peak toward the west pasture, over the “hyas” and the “whoops” and the “hey cows” we all hear the crack of that whip coming from the sky above us.

And you could probably guess it—neighbor Kelly couldn’t resist his own Man from Snowy River moment in time. Very quietly and unassumingly, so as not to ruin the dramatic moment for his audience, he had taken his horse up that sheer, rugged peak and from 500 feet in the saddle he cracked that whip. And then he cracked it again. And then he cracked it again against that slate blue, western sky, his neckerchief, like the fringe of his chaps, blowing in the wind.

Or something like that.

And I don’t really know how legends are made, but if the fact that we have remembered and rehashed that moment every single time we’ve passed by that peak for the last thirty years means anything, then I think neighbor Kelly might qualify. Maybe it’s time to see who I can talk to about getting the name changed to commemorate it. Maybe Kelly’s Cliff? Bull Whip Butte? I’m still workshopping it…

Yes, that day we remembered the bull whip. And then we remembered the time all those years ago when a horse disappeared from right under our other neighbor into the big ravine that no one warned him about. And then we laughed, and our fingers froze and we fixed on a water tank and an old gate and let the cows into their new pasture only to find them in with the neighbor’s cows about thirty minutes later.

Yes, summer is over but the new season and the landscape hold tight our stories and what a joy it is to hear them again against the wind. 

The wheels of the past

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Fall has settled in at the ranch and we’ve been spending some time working the cows and moving the cows and contemplating the market and thinking about next year’s goals. With the crisp of its arrival comes the regret of not accomplishing all we set out to accomplish in the warmer, fleeting, summer months. It’s always this way on the ranch, and I would argue, gets worse as we get older and so do the fences and buildings that need to be repaired, rebuilt or torn down.

Like most farms and ranches, we have a couple places on our land that have become graveyards for old equipment, cars, campers, boats or mowers. They sit in the draws as a reminder of a part of your life you used to live. When I was a kid, these graveyards were full of my great uncles’ fancy old cars, my great grandpa’s pickup, dad’s snowmobiles and dirt bikes and machinery that at some point was declared beyond repair. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe they just couldn’t get to the repair part, or didn’t have the tool or the money and there it sat. The issue of time has always been an issue of time out here, no matter the decade.

As a kid I used to love to snoop around in these places. I would sit in driver’s seats and play with the shifter and the push the pedals and the buttons on the radio and pretend I was speeding down the road, my imagination somehow in the past with a future me at the wheel. I loved the smell of the dust that puffed up from the ripped and cracked seats and the sound the rusty springs made under the weight of my ten-year-old body bundled up against the bite of the wind. And I liked feeling like I was discovering a secret about these things and inventing the characters they might have driven along the backroads.

Old Truck

Most of my memories about visiting these relics take place in autumn when the heat has blown off making way for the frost. The burdock has headed out and the pig weeds and creeping jenny’s growing up and around the running boards and wheel wells is dry and stomped out by the cows. The flies and wasps have gone to their graves and so sitting in old cars doesn’t feel sweltering, but sort of haunted.

October 9, 2010. Rearview

Haunted. This season will do that to a person. Last week after a particularly windy and chilly morning spent moving cows with my dad and my husband, I sat on my palomino in our corrals along the edge of the west pasture while my husband worked on connecting a tired old gate to its latch and my dad tested the fussy water system in the tank. I was the kind of cold that got to my fingers and toes and turned them the same numb they used to get when I was a kid in this very same corral, in this very same wind, waiting on dad.

I looked over at that wooden chute standing weathered and worn connected, just barely now, to old posts and deteriorating rails. These corrals hadn’t been used in years, but the cold stinging my bones brought me back to the time I was a kid in this very same spot, bundled up as much as a kid could be bundled up, waiting on Dad to fix something. Or maybe we were running calves through that chute, vaccinating or doctoring and I wasn’t being useful after dismounting my horse and so I was colder than everyone else. And I remembered then how I disappeared from the bite of the relentless wind by laying my entire body down in the corner of those corrals, low, low, low enough to bury me in the grass. I remember the smell of the dirt and the way the clouds looked moving graceful and alarmingly quick across a sky that was deceivingly blue for such a brutal day. In my memory I was there for hours, cold and bundled and huddled and waiting for the job to be done. But time isn’t the same when you’re young. It moves slow like the water through a creek in the fall. Even slower when you’re cold.

These days feel more like the clouds in the wind.

I’m no longer the little girl I used to be out here. But how could it be when my bones are the same kind of cold? My fingers. My toes. This tall grass. My dad in his scotch cap. These old corrals. The smell of this horse and the dirt.

I looked up then and noticed those clouds flying and I felt the way I used to feel sitting those old cars so long ago.  Haunted.

Only the nostalgia is mine this time, not someone else’s mysterious story. That future is here now and she’s’ holding tight to the wheel of the past…