Tag Archives: nostalgia

The good life of a good dog

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My dad lost his old cow dog, Juno, last week. After fourteen years of chasing cows through the draws, barking at squirrels and fighting with raccoons, howling with the coyotes and riding shotgun next to dad in the side-by-side, she took her last rest in her snug bed under the heat-lamp in the garage and didn’t wake up again.

Fourteen years is a long life for a ranch dog living wide open, tasked with the very thing they were bred to do. The job of moving cattle alongside the horses, chasing them out of the tough brush or keeping them motivated while moving pastures is dangerous enough, but add in the other wild and unpredictable things—a rattlesnake or a mountain lion, a truck driving too fast down our county road—and it’s not surprising that some of our dogs don’t live to be old and gray. But Juno did. And while she was with us, she was about the best dog there ever was.

I can say that, and you can believe me, because she wasn’t my dog. Everyone thinks their dog is the best dog, but everyone loved Juno and you would have loved her too. I held her tiny fluffy body on my lap in the passenger seat of my dad’s pickup when we brought her home from the neighbor’s. We had just moved back to the ranch for good and I was excited to have a pup around and just like that she belonged here the same way every animal has on this ranch (except maybe those two wild Corrientes that kept trying to run away to the badlands).

Anyway, dogs out here, they’re special, like an extension of our limbs when there is work to be done or fences to be adjusted or when things need to be checked. And so they ride along, in the back of pickups or in the backseat or, like Juno, right next to you in the cab of whatever you’re driving, bringing along the stink from whatever they rolled in and all the personality they possess.

These dogs, the blue heelers, the border collies, the kelpies, the Australian Shepherds and all the combinations there can be, they know why they’ve been put on this planet, and it’s to follow at your heels, from barn to house to shop to tractor to cattle pen to pasture to pickup to four-wheeler to horse pen to the ends of the Earth in case they can be of assistance, or annoyance, but always in the name of companionship.

Our neighbor had a big blue heeler when I was growing up named Critter. Critter’s place in the world moved up through the years from pickup box to shot gun seat until Critter and my neighbor could be found driving around the place practically cheek to cheek, the dog making a point every once in a while, to put his paw up on his human’s shoulder while watching the trail ahead as a sign of partnership and solidarity.

The other day I came home to find our two dogs in the house. We have a border collie/Aussie cross named Remi and a Hanging Tree Cattle dog named Gus. They’ve lived in the garage and in the yard their entire lives like most cow dogs do, so when they get to come inside, they’re not sure what to do but stare at my husband’s face and follow him from room to room waiting for a command. And I’m not sure why he decided to bring them in, other than he’s been working on the house addition for the past couple weeks and he just likes to have them close. When you open the door though, they can’t get out fast enough to go roll in the snow and pee on the trees and chase the squirrels and run out ahead and do the things dogs are meant to do. Honestly, I’d like to come back as these dogs in another life, to know so fully what it is that you’re made for is a gift that only humans can overthink and screw up.

Maybe we should work to be more like the dogs, more like Juno…Fluffy and affectionate, an easy keeper and ready to be there when needed (and even when she isn’t–cut to that dog showing up ten miles from home when you tried to leave her behind.)

Anyway, life won’t be the same here at the ranch without you Juno. Thanks for all the help.

Cousins by the camper

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Cousins by the camper
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Listen to the podcast here

There’s a family photo that resurfaces every once in a while of six little kids with fluffy ‘90s hair sitting on a picnic bench in front of a 1980s tin-sided bumper pull camper. One of us is in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, a couple in tight rolled jeans, all of us had bangs that started in the middle of our craniums. It was summer in North Dakota on the edge of the clay shores of Lake Sakakawea and we were squinting against the morning sun, a calm moment captured between itching mosquito bites and slapping horse flies away. A calm moment captured before a picnic of watermelon and juice boxes and hotdogs cooked on my uncle’s tiny grill. A calm moment captured before we became who we really were in that fuzzy photograph—cousins, grandchildren of Pete and Edith Veeder, connected by blood and big love and orange push-up pops and a ranch with a pink road that runs right through. Cousins reunited for a weekend of camping under a fussy North Dakota sky where it’s always a little too cold for swimming with a good chance of a camper-shaking thunderstorm.

Those six kids are all grown up now and so are the two who were too wiggly to sit still for the photo, some of us raising fluffy haired kids of our own. And this summer, for many different reasons, I will have seen every one of my cousins in person, on both sides of my family, in the matter of a few months. This very likely hasn’t happened since we were kids and it’s been an unexpected blessing in this season that is rolling in and out of my life as quickly as one of those thunderstorms.

I watch my daughters take the road that cuts between my house and my sister’s on their way to play because they can hardly stand a day without seeing one another. Now that they are old enough, they take that road themselves. And when I tag along, they leave me in the dust, holding hands and pulling tight on that thread that binds me to them, stretching it out to reach the people they need beyond me. What I would have given to have lived right down the road from my cousins.

I watch these girls run toward one another and I can’t help but wonder how these relationships will continue and evolve through the years, as sisters and cousins and friends. Their innocence presently has us all fooled into thinking that it could last forever, that they will eternally be bonded in this same tender and intricate way. But years have shown me enough scenarios in which it can all quietly or not so quietly fade or crumble or implode because humans are complicated, and our hearts are tender, and time is a thief. Sometimes my sister and I let ourselves imagine our daughters as teenagers fighting over boyfriends or driving themselves to town for a rodeo or a football game. We think my youngest, Rosie, will insist on driving and then we think she’ll drive too fast. And Edie, my oldest, will try to keep them in line but Emma, my youngest niece will take Rosie’s back. And Ada, the animal lover, might prefer to stay home with the horses, but could be convinced to break any rule because Rosie and Emma plead a good case. Oh it’s fun to imagine but not without wondering how they could ever be anything but here safe at the ranch at 3 and  5 and 6 and 7, in the sweet spot of sprinkler running and Bible Camp songs and endless game of babies in our basement.

Is that what our parents thought that day they asked us to sit shoulder to shoulder on the picnic bench? That if they pointed that camera and developed that film that it would help them remember this fleeting moment where we were together and sun kissed and smiling, before we knew that growing up could simultaneously ache and excite us. Before that thread pulled tight on us across the countryside as we wandered off to find out who we were supposed to be beyond the grass-stained knees of those tight-rolled jeans. I know it is. And then I wonder if they knew that it was because they believed in that pink road and that picnic table bench and family camping trips and Christmas suppers and Easter egg hunts at gramma’s that even now, after all these years, we do what it takes to have the chance to be who we really are, who we’ve always been, Pete and Edith’s grandchildren, squeezing in to say cheese.  

What they left behind

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This week’s column is a revisited story from my book, “Coming Home.” Get your copy at www.veederranch.com.

On the Podcast this week I sit down with my husband to talk about homestead houses and how history can haunt us, just like the Goat Man Chad encountered near the Lost Bridge in the badlands. Find out what word I just made up out of thin air last week, hear a story about Lutheran kids dressing up as nuns and get the scoop on the spooky relic from the old house behind my childhood home that chills me still. 
Listen here, or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

What they left behind

It’s a gloomy day, the rain is falling, the sky is gray and the trees are stripped from black branches. It’s Halloween season and all of the sudden I’m reminded of the old house that used to sit up in a grove of trees behind the yard where I grew up.

It’s not so uncommon around here for a family to purchase land from neighbors or inherit an old family homestead, so there aren’t many farmsteads around these parts that didn’t come with an old structure lingering on the property, providing ranch kids with plenty of bedtime ghost story material.

And so it went with the old house that stood tucked back on the other side of the barbed wire fence, against a slope of a hill, surrounded by oak trees and the remnants of Mrs. B’s famous garden. Her hearty lilac bushes, her grove of apple trees, her wild asparagus and rhubarb still thrive in the clearing she made in those trees all those mysterious years ago, before the family up and left, leaving that garden untended, the root cellar full and a house seemingly frozen in time.

“What happened to them?” I would contemplate with my cousins, one of our favorite subjects as our eyes grew heavy, tucked in bunk beds and sleeping bags scattered on the floor, together growing up, together trying to figure out what the passing of time really means and how a story could be left so undone.

Gramma took some old dresses, vintage black smocks with pearl buttons and lace collars from the small bedroom closet of the old house. We would pull them over our heads to perform pretend wedding ceremonies or attend fancy parties like we saw on our mothers’ soap operas, the fabric smelling like mothballs, dust and old forgotten things.

But no matter what character you were that day, you couldn’t help but think about who the real woman in those dresses once was. And who would leave them behind?

So, as it goes with kids, our curiosity outweighed our fear and we went on a mission to collect samples of this family’s life that still existed between those walls.

And while I remember kitchen utensils hanging neatly on hooks, canned beets and potatoes lined up on shelves, the table and chairs sitting in the sunlight against the window, waiting for a neighbor to stop over for coffee, I also remember bedrooms scattered with old newspapers and magazines, the dates revealing the last years of occupancy, the fashion of the season, stories of drought and cattle prices sprawled out among diary entries and old letters, a glimpse into a world that existed long before us kids sifting through the rubble in tennis shoes with neon laces.

And then I remember the dentures. Or maybe I just remember the story my oldest cousin told about the dentures. It doesn’t matter now who was actually there to witness it, it evolved to belong to everyone. An expedition to the old house, a creak of a cupboard door and the discovery of a jar full of teeth that nobody noticed before.

“The place is haunted.” That was the consensus, especially when, at the next visit, the unwelcome house guests were greeted at the door by a flurry of bats (or, more likely, a bat or two). Yes, the spirits of that mysterious couple came back to the place. How else could you explain the thriving asparagus plants? The teeth?!

And so that was our story of the old house, a strangely fantastic pillar of our childhood adventures and a structure that had to eventually be burned down due to its disintegrating floor joists and general unsafe environment.

I stood in my snowsuit and beanie and watched the flames engulf the graying wood and shoot up over the tops of the black oak trees and wondered how it all eventually came down to this; a life turned into old forgotten things, turned into ashes, turned into stories.

Maybe that’s the scariest tale of them all.

But each fall the apples in the old woman’s orchard ripen, each spring her lilacs bloom and each year their names come to our lips because of what they left behind, making me wonder if we were right about the haunting thing after all.

Summer, don’t leave me…

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This week on the podcast, I have coffee with my little sister, Alex, who is a former guidance counselor and teacher, to get some perspective on back to school. Alex gives some tips on the best questions to ask about your child’s day to actually get a response and I try to get to the bottom of why having a kid going into first grade is carrying more weight than the first day of Kindergarten. We talk season changes on the ranch, back to school traditions and more. Listen at this link or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.  

What can happen in a summer at the ranch? When you’re raising two young daughters this is where they sprout and bloom, in this season of sunshine and sprinklers and butterflies and toads. We’re winding it down now.

If you’re reading this in your local newspaper, I am probably in one of the big towns coaxing those daughters to try on pair of school shoes, making them stand up, walk around a bit, feeling where their big toe hits, asking them if they feel ok. Do they feel ok? It’s the exact same thing my mom used to do, word for word it seems. Because these days you can get just about anything to come to you in the mail out here with the click of a button, but the shoes need to be tried. It’s a back-to-school ritual that we’re in now because I blinked.

I blinked.

They all told me not to, but I did and the spring that brought record breaking snow drifts with it, then it melted and made way for a summer filled with armpit high grass and wildflowers and healthy black calves kicking up their heels on the hilltops and laying down in the cool draws. Because the rain came to feed the hay crop and you should see the bales dotting the fields. Here we spend our three fleeting months of summer preparing for the long winter and we’re all more prepared than ever it seems. Thanks to the rain. Thanks to the sun. Thanks for the work.

I watched my daughters’ sandy hair turn blonde under that sun, and their pale skin tan, their cheeks rosy and flushed when they came in for popsicles. And I saw them stretch out of their long pants so they could properly skin their knees on the scoria road as they ran wide open toward their cousins’ house. I want to run wide open with them right back into the spring so we can do it all over again, but this time I’ll keep my eyes wide open. I promise.  

Why does this always happen to me? Why do I get lonesome for this season before it’s even officially over? Is it because it always feels like we’re at the end of one of those predictable summer themed movies, where the lighting is perfect and they conquer a fear and they all fall in love in the end at a beach house somewhere along the coastline? Back here in the real world I’m picking the ripe tomatoes from my garden and hoping for rain again, the sun is setting low at 9 pm and  the credits are rolling and I have to get back inside to get to the dishes….

And nothing has changed here except sort of everything. Kids learn to ride their bikes and climb the monkey bars backwards. They make friends in the campground they’ll never see again. She decides not to wear shirts with unicorns on them because she’s not a baby anymore. They fix their own hair, get their own milk to pour, decide they like tomatoes, grow an inch…

It’s all so gradual, these quiet transformations, like summer herself. You go out one day and notice the sweet peas coming with the green grass and the next time you look they’re dried up and gone, making way for the sunflowers to bend in the wind alongside that green grass turned golden.

This is us too you know, I need to make the reminder should we forget that we are as much a part of the transformation of seasons and time ticking as the rising and setting of the sun. You might not have noticed. You might have blinked, and that’s ok.

So stand up, walk around in it now, how does it fit? Does it feel ok? Do you feel ok?

Summer Don’t Leave Me

Summer don’t leave me
stay under my feet
hang warm in the sky
don’t dry up the wheat

Summer stay near me
to kiss my skin tan
mess up my long hair
hold tight my hand

Summer please stay here
in the chokecherry trees
on the back of a good horse
in the green of the leaves

Oh, Summer my good friend
there’s only so many hours
so take the storms and the rainbows…

but don’t take my wildflowers

Wild Sunflowers

This world needs more barn dances

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In this week’s podcast, my husband and I reflect on who taught us to dance, how our Dirty Dancing days are over and pontificate on the old house that used to be on the ranch, who lived there and why they left

I think what this broken old world needs is a few more barn dances.

You may have forgotten that those used to be a thing that people did.

Above the house where I grew up is an old shed. It’s sat there for nearly a hundred years now I think. It outlasted the homestead house where a family used to live and then one day moved away, leaving what seemed to be everything behind—dresses and books and filled-in calendars and ledgers and dishes in the cupboards, canned garden vegetables in the root cellar, the lilac bushes and the apple orchard and mattresses and lace curtains moving like quiet ghosts with the wind cutting through the gaps in the walls. Old houses fall apart in the most slow and lonesome way when there’s no one there to sweep the floors and wipe the windows and serve the bread.

They left the house and all those things and they left that little wooden shed my dad said used to be a granary. He remembers it and he remembers those neighbors.

They used to have dances in there my dad told me when I was poking around as a kid. It seemed impossible to me. That granary was much too small, not even close to 1,000 square feet. If you danced it would be a tight circle. Add a guitar and a fiddle and the quarters would be beyond close. Tight. Unimaginable to us these days, losing ourselves and one another in wide-open floor plans, separate rooms and all the space between. Houses are big enough now so that you never have to lay a hand on each other on your way to the kitchen sink, or sit with legs touching on the living room sofa, or fall asleep to the sound of your sister breathing in the small bed next to you. Not if you didn’t want to anyway. Not if you’re what we call “lucky” to have all that room…

Back then I imagine the landscape, and the work that needed to be done upon it, gave you all the space you needed from the next living soul. Lonesome looked a bit different back then.

Maybe that’s why they turned tiny granaries into dance floors. Because wouldn’t you want to hear the slow drawl of the neighbor’s fiddle spill out of the leaky roof and into the night sky lit with stars? Wouldn’t you want to put your hand on her waist and swing her around laughing? Wouldn’t you want to sing along, to hear their voices overlap and chatter, gossiping and encouraging and entertaining to help you forget for a moment the worry of it all?

You would have wanted to then, when it was a bit quieter. When the world you knew stretched only as far as the horizon, or as far as you could afford a train ticket to take you. You see, they were islands too, in much different ways. And then, in so many of the same. Humans have always been humans, after all.

But the dancing in that tiny building, well, one hundred or so years ago, there was no other choice.

Now we have so many. So many excuses. So many oceans we’ve put between us… But last week a man in the middle of rural North Dakota, more than one hundred years from when the first barn was raised on this northern prairie landscape, called his family, his neighbors and friends, and told them to come on over to the Homeplace. Come on over to the barn. We’ll feed you. There will be music. And there will be dancing.

He’s been doing it for years, so they knew. They had it on their calendars. And his daughters and their families and he and his wife, they made the Fleischkuechle and the kuchen because that was tradition too. And me, well me and the guys were lucky enough to witness it all from the little stage in the corner of the loft of the old barn with the shined up floors where we strummed guitars and sang some songs they knew and some they didn’t and all with a beat for a good two step, or a waltz or a chance to join hands in a circle. Because I heard him say it into the microphone when he welcomed them all to that loft after a picnic supper–he didn’t want his grandchildren to grow up in a world where there were no barn dance. So he made sure, at least for his community, it was not a lost tradition.

And from my perch behind the microphone he reminded me that we may not all have big beautiful barns preserved from the cruel weather of time, but if we’re lucky, we have a spot that might work just fine enough for dancing in a circle.

Because I’m not sure, but I think it’s true, that just like old houses, people, they fall apart too, slow and lonesome if there’s no one there to sweep the floors, to brush past, to breathe the same close air, to sway side to side, and open the curtains and let the light in and serve the bread and do the things that, together, people are meant to do…

Will our children know the quiet?

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Will our kids have a chance to know the quiet?
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On a recent trip to a Minnesota town, I took a walk along a path by the river that wound through the city. I kept my headphones out and listened to the sound of slow-moving traffic, wind moving through the changing leaves, dogs barking, a mom and dad chatting, strolling their newborn down the sidewalk on a sunny evening, the sound of my own thoughts…

In the quiet neighborhood I noticed a little girl swinging, alone on the playground behind her apartment complex, her mom sitting on a bench at the corner of the sandbox while the child sang to herself, pumping her legs up to the sky, lost in thoughts of her own, only the way a child can do it when left to herself. What might it be like to be a bird? She closes her eyes and imagines she’s flying, imagines she has wings and a place to be. She sings to herself and the world she’s created in that slow and steady moment she was given to play alone.

I used to be that girl. I hope we all have been a version of her at some point in our childhoods, whether we grew up between these sidewalks or, like me, with miles of road and trees and creeks separating me from parks like these. With years between my sisters and me, I spent plenty of time alone as a kid, using my imagination to occupy me, to come up with a project or a song or a place I needed to be that day — checking on the wild raspberries, trying my hand at catching a frog or pushing logs up along a fallen tree and calling it a fort. I didn’t know it then, but it was the best gift I could have been given, the time to learn how to be with myself.

It’s served me well now as an adult in a career that’s sent me traveling thousands and thousands of miles along lonesome stretches of highway, navigating it alone. Dining alone. On a mission to wander.

To be quiet with myself has never been a thing that’s scared me, and now, as a parent to two young children in a world that feels noisier every day, the thing that scares me about the quiet is that our children won’t have a chance to know it. And without the quiet moments, I worry they won’t get to truly know themselves.

Last weekend my husband was digging in a water tank for the cattle behind my parents’ house, along the creek that used to be my old stomping grounds. My 5-year-old suggested we take him a picnic and so we packed up juice boxes in lunchboxes and ducked through the fences behind dad’s garden, past where the tire swing used to hang and along the beaver dam where a tin-can telephone used to connect my fort with my little sister’s across the creek.

We found a log to sit on and dug into our treats, talking about how I used to float sticks and watch the water bugs row across the clear water, and pretty soon I was leading them along that creek bank, making crowns out of reeds, picking riverbank grapes, jumping after frogs and digging in the sand. I was transported and they were transfixed the way wild places work on children. Let’s go farther, stay longer, look for more frogs, please.

Do you know we can still feel this way if we allow it? The magic — it still works on us too. I forget sometimes, but I was reminded.

There’s magic in nature. Magic. Magic in reaching for the sky, in the pumping of our legs to the rhythm of the songs we sing to ourselves. What’s it like to be a bird? Close your eyes, let the quiet in and grow yourself wings…

Lost tooth memories

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Losing a tooth and gaining memories
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My oldest daughter lost her first tooth last week. On her 47th jump off the panel fence while we were feeding bottle calves, she fell and jarred her little jaw enough to knock a loose tooth looser.

By bedtime, all bathed and fresh and ready for sleep, she let her daddy pull that wiggly tooth, the one I swear she just grew yesterday.

And while she went into the whole thing brave and tough, chaos ensued well past bedtime when she realized a part of her that was once in her mouth, was now in her hand.

And there was blood.

And crying. From both Edie and her little sister. (And maybe me a little, because I thought he was just going to wiggle it!) But, for Edie, all that was scary was calmed by the dollars left under her pillow. I’m still not sure Rosie is over the trauma of it all.

Come to think of it, maybe neither am I. Because it all seems to be happening at once. She turns 5 and learns to ride her bike without training wheels, she loses her first tooth, I register her for kindergarten and listen to sad ’90s country for a week straight — and then I blink and she’s taking the painting she did in junior high, the old lamp in the attic and packing up the station wagon, waving goodbye to me while I stand in the very same driveway where she just learned to ride her bike yesterday.

At least that’s what Suzy Boggus told me as I drove out of the elementary school parking lot wiping my tears away. The song has a bit more bite than it did when I was singing along to it on my bus ride to school.

Letting go.

We’ve taken a large step into that phase of parenting now, and my girls take twirling leap after spinning bike tire toward their independence. I see it now in how they’re suddenly so aware of the wide-open spaces that surround them. No more fenced yard holding them in — they climb right under it and wonder now if they can get themselves from our house to Gramma’s or aunt Alex’s.

Maybe if they run to the top of the hill and stand on the tallest rock. Maybe if they follow that deer trail, or the cow dog. Maybe if they didn’t pick up every pretty rock they found along the way. Maybe if they wouldn’t have face-planted in the dirt running too fast down the hill. Maybe if they would have told their mother they were leaving the yard, she could have come and rescued them from themselves a bit earlier.

But oh, so much of me loves to watch them suddenly realize that all of this is theirs to make footprints on. To take care of. To inspect for crocuses, to pick up a cactus or two on their jeans. The big blue sky, the tall oaks, the stock dam and the crick and the sticks they throw for the dogs, the mud that gets stuck to their boots, the big rocks that will become their special, secret spots, even though we can see them from the house…

My daughters, at 5 and 3, are entering the sweet spot of childhood where memories are made and the world seems wide open and full of questions and mystery. They’re entering a phase of childhood in which I can remember for myself now, and how it felt to fall in love with this place.

How it felt to hold my little sister’s hand and help her through the fence.

How big my dad’s fingers felt in my mouth when he helped pull out my first tooth…

I can remember that, Edie. You’ll remember it now too… you’ll remember now…

Driving the backroads

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Life on the backroads
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Ever have to yield to a guy trying to clear a giant tumbleweed in full motion out of a parking lot by way of running it down with his pickup? Ever see him fail the first time and then feel guilty that you didn’t just let it hit your car when it was coming for you, you know, to be helpful?

Ever been in line at a drive-thru and have the man in front of you get out of his vehicle to say that he can guess where you’re from by the amount of dirt on your car?

Ever hauled a live goat home in the plush back seat of your best friend’s dad’s car before you even had a proper license?

Ever been 17 sleeping in the gooseneck of a horse trailer at a rodeo to save money on hotels?

Ever stopped to take a photo of your shortest friend in funny glasses next to the highway sign for Gnome, N.D.?

Or what about grabbing a photo with a roadside smiling stack of hay bales? Or the ones that look like jack-o’-lanterns in the fall and snowmen in the winter?

Ever rush to the aid of the people certainly dead or badly mangled in the car you just witnessed fly off the highway in the Badlands and crash directly into a tree, only to find the passengers completely unharmed and in the middle of an argument that no near-lethal car accident was going to end? Ever stand in the middle of that highway and demand that the driver let you give him a ride instead of walking the 10 miles home?

Ever swear you saw a man run across that same highway in the dark dead of night, only to have your search turn up nothing but the memories of a ghost?

Ever take your little sister to her orthodontist appointment in the big town and drive through parking lots and back alleys to avoid stoplights because you learned to drive on a gravel road and weren’t quite ready for that sort of traffic?

Did your friends ever make you drive the pickup and gooseneck trailer full of rodeo horses through a new town just to laugh at you when you stalled out because they knew you sucked at driving stick?

Ever been 8 or 9 with your best friend, weaving your bikes with playing cards pinned to the spokes through the dotted centerlines of the highway?

Ever have to put oil in the tank of your 1982 Ford LTD every morning before you drove it to school and every afternoon in the parking lot after if you had any hope of starting the thing?

Ever go in the ditch three or four times the first day you got to drive that car to school by yourself, because you missed the lesson about icy roads and rear-wheel drive?

Does anyone even know about rear-wheel drive anymore? Or three-wheelers that twice cracked his ribs, and then his collarbone and then his shoulder blade?

Ever sit in the back seat of his Thunderbird on a hot summer day with the windows rolled up and the heat blaring, driving too fast on your way to the shores of the big lake just so you could be sweaty and desperate enough to strip down and jump in its barely thawed waters when you arrived?

Ever wore the red mud to town on the front of your dress pants? Hauled a couple square bales or deer heads for the taxidermy in your SUV on the way to Thanksgiving? Drove a pickup with no back seat and napped in its shade in a hayfield? Pulled up to a job with a fully intact pheasant stuck to your grill?

Ever cruised the three blocks of Main Street over and over in a car with a name your friends gave it, pushing curfew under the big, black sky just to move because you were young and restless in a small town?

Every once in a while, do you get behind the wheel on the back roads of North Dakota and feel that way again, and so you take the long way home?

The things we leave behind…

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The things we leave behind
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’ve always been enamored with old buildings, the kind you see standing haggard and hunkered down along a county road or state highway.

Or, when you’re sitting in the passenger seat as he zips past on the interstate and you’re looking out at where the sky finally meets the curve of the earth, you might catch a glimpse of a memory way out there on a section line. A school maybe. A church?

It would be small and unassuming except for the lack of trees and similar structures on the prairie landscape, and it might as well be a castle. To me, a place like that holds as many mysteries.

I don’t think the sentiment toward abandoned places or things is unique to people who grew up on these Plains dotted with weathered-out buildings, humble, tumbling barns and a row or two of lilac bushes and windbreak trees left to fend for themselves against the prairie elements. On days when the wind blows 40 miles an hour or the temperature drops well below freezing, I build up more of a sentimental response to those who came before us and how they might have survived it, well aware that I am here because they did more than stay alive somehow.

On top of a hill in the horse pasture connected to our barnyard, if you stand the right amount of back and look close enough, you will find two sets of teepee rings, armfuls of nice granite boulders placed in the dirt in a nearly perfect circle under the big blue sky. I stand up there and wonder what it looked like all those years ago, without fences, or water tanks, without this smattering of bur oaks and ash growing taller in the draws. Without houses or roads.

If you put yourself in the right spot out here, there are a few places you can look that don’t so evidently reflect the modern era. You can imagine it then, how high the grass might have grown, how thick the mosquito swarm, how you might find more value in a flower or the creek that runs through it all. How different the quiet sounded.

And it’s so much easier to think about the lives of the souls who left structures and tools and equipment behind for us to ponder, to poke around in, to photograph. We forget these days that there was a time humans lived without leaving so much behind. It’s remarkable to think about, the innovation we’re capable of as humans and how it can simultaneously make us and break us.

I’ve said this before about living on this 110-year-old ranch. I’m a fourth generation raising the fifth, and some days, I feel like I’m surrounded by ghosts. My girls dig in the sand under their swings and they find a glass medicine container, pieces of ceramic bowls and plates, a 7UP bottle. We’ve built on top of an old burn pile, and some things don’t go so quickly back to the earth.

Old plow outside the Veeder House

Dad dropped fencing pliers in the east pasture 20 years ago, and I stumble upon it on my evening walk. I wonder, who will someday find that hat I caught on a tree a few years back?

My husband digs out the corners of the old shop, grease cans and motor parts, welding units and scrap metal, wooden skis and a chair no one truly thought they could part with. Except they could. They did. There’s nothing left in that shop worth photographing, really, and so we might as well make it useful.

I fall off my horse at 10 years old and pick up a perfect arrowhead, just laying there now with no job but to be discovered, making us wonder what it might have been like before the world turned 55,000 times, day by day slowly shedding the past for valiant pursuit of the future…

To live wild

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To live wild
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When I was a little girl all wrapped up in the magic of this place, my favorite book of all time was “My Side of the Mountain.” It’s a story about a boy who finds himself living away from home in the wilderness of the mountains inside of a giant hollowed out-tree.

I can’t remember the exact story now or why he was alone out there, but I remember diagrams of how to build a fire with no supplies and something about a windmill and making a spear for fishing.

I still have the book buried somewhere. It was one I couldn’t give up to charity or to my younger sister, as if keeping it meant that I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to be at 9 or 10 years old — wild and young and capable of survival out in the wilderness alone. Without a house. Or a toilet. Or my mom’s cheeseburger chowder.

Yes, there was a time that was my plan. In the evenings I would step off the bus, grab a snack and head out to the trees behind our house. For months I would work on building what I called “secret forts” all along the creek that winds through our ranch. I would drag fallen logs to lean against tree branches bent just right, keeping watch for my little sister who always followed far enough behind to not be noticed right away, identifying my plan and ruining the whole point of secret forts.

Once my log “shelter” was constructed, I would lie down on my back on the tall grass, fallen leaves and twigs underneath, and I would think about the next step. I would need a door, some rope and a knife… a fire ring, of course…

I would scour the creek bottom for granite rocks when the sun would start its slow sink below the banks, and then I would decide I wasn’t quite ready to spend the night, my stomach rumbling at the thought of supper on the stove at home, and then I would follow the cow trail back toward the familiar comfort of the house.

This was my daily ritual for months and one of my signature childhood memories. Eventually I gave in and helped my little sister build her own fort. A much smaller fort. Across the creek. Out of sight.

I thought I wanted to be alone out there, left to my own devices, but it turned out that having company was sorta nice. So we built a tin-can telephone that stretched from my fort to hers and brought down old chair cushions from the shed, searched for wild raspberries, tried to catch frogs and minnows in the beaver dam and spent our evenings planning our next move: spending the night.

But we never did it. Summer gave way to fall and the leaves fell and covered the floor of our paradise. We would pull on our beanies, mittens and boots and trudge down the freezing creek to clear out the fire ring we weren’t yet brave enough to use. And then the cold set in and the snow came and the neighbor girls called us to go sledding and our dream of being wilderness women collected snow and waited on a warmer season.

I can’t help but think about those girls on days like these. Days when the cold sets in and the house seems smaller. Days when the demands of the grown-up life I’ve built weigh heavy in responsibility and uncertainty and I feel tethered to them…

I try to remember a time where I felt like there was no one but me and the wind out here… the wind that calls, “Come have an adventure, girl. Come dream about hollowed-out trees…”

I step outside and I try to summon the magic as the cold bites at my cheeks and the snow crunches under my feet. I turn around and I miss the summers of my youth… I turn around and I’m alone with a woman who used to be a girl I knew, a girl who thought she might tame the coyotes one day, and break unbreakable horses, and live wild.

I follow the creek and look for her. I know she’s here somewhere. I hope she hasn’t given up…