Tag Archives: photography

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…   

From lost to found in the Badlands

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WATFORD CITY, N.D. — If you missed the news, I’m here to tell you that the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, located in western North Dakota, has been named as one of the Best of the World for 2026 by National Geographic.

That’s a big deal for us because we love to sing its praises. It’s a magical place indeed, because of its rugged and unique beauty, but also because somehow, it’s remained a bit of a secret. That means it’s a national park where you may be lucky enough to actually find yourself alone out there, which I consider a pretty special gift.

So to honor the honor, I want to share a piece I wrote several years ago when I went searching for a quiet moment in the north unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

And if you’re looking for a place to be inspired, make it the Badlands. Stop into the Visitor Center in Watford City before you go, we’ll be happy to sell you some treats and give you some tips!

From lost to found in the Badlands

Well, fall came dancing along in all its glory and we sure didn’t need the calendar to tell us so. Just like the uncharacteristically warm weather, the leaves on the trees were not about to take the subtle approach to the season change.

Overnight, the ash leaves turned from green to gold, the vines bright red, the grass and flowers exploded seeds, and even the slow and steady oaks began letting go of their acorns and turning one leaf over to gold at a time.

After a challenging week, I was ready to celebrate autumn the way it deserved to be celebrated. I was ready to let go of my agenda and frolic in it, climb a big hill and feel the warm breeze in my hair.

After a trip to the big town for an appointment, I pointed my car down the busy highway filled with lines of trucks, pickups and SUVs that moved humans at full speed along that paved ribbon of road that winds through buttes and half-cut wheat fields, across the Little Missouri River that sparkles and meanders under the big blue sky and slowly sinking sun.

I wanted to meander, too. I wanted to meander among the things out here that are allowed a slow change, a subtle move toward hibernation, a good long preparation for a show like no other, a recital of how to slow down gracefully.

And I couldn’t help but wonder while I tried to keep my eyes on the road despite the neon yellow trees waving at me from the ditches, if these people who were sharing my path were seeing this. Did they notice that the tree was waving to them, too? Were they commenting on how the crows have gathered?

As we came down through the brakes that move us through the Badlands, did they notice how the layers of the buttes — the line of red scoria, the black coal, the clay — did they notice how, in the late afternoon light, the landscape looked like a giant canvas created with wisps of an artist’s brush?

Did they see that river? I mean, really see it when they passed over the bridge? Did they take note of how it has receded a bit? And as they approached the sign that read “Theodore Roosevelt National Park-North Unit,” a sign that indicated they were indeed on the home stretch to their destination perhaps, only 15 miles to the town to stop for gas, to make it home, to take a rest on a long truck route, were they enticed like I was that afternoon to stop for a bit?

Because what could be better than breathing in fall from inside a place that exists raw and pure? A park. A reserve. A spot saved specifically to ensure that nature is allowed to go on doing what it does best while undisturbed by the agenda of the human race, which at that point I was convinced didn’t have a handle on how to live gracefully in a world designed for us, let alone accept and live harmoniously among what we can’t control or may not understand — like the change of weather and the seasons and the sun beating down on the hard earth.

And I was guilty as well of taking this for granted. I was guilty of driving by this spot time and time again as it called to me to take a rest, to visit, to have a walk or a seat or a climb.

But not that day. That day I needed its therapy. I needed to park my car and stretch my limbs and take a look around.

From the top of Battleship Butte. From the trail at the river bottom. From the flat where the bison graze.

So as I pulled my cap down and took to the familiar trail that wound up that big, daunting and famous butte along the road, I took notice of the breeze clattering the drying leaves together, the birds frantically preparing for the chill, the grasshoppers flinging their bodies at the dried grass and rocks …

And then I noticed I was alone.

Alone as I scrambled and pulled my tired body up the steep and rocky trail toward the top of my world as two bison grazed on the flat below the buttes.

Alone as I reached my destination with no other ears around to hear me catch my breath and then sigh in awe at the colors and solitude.

Alone as I watched those bison move and graze, a spectator in a different world, a spy on a giant rock.

Alone to take my time as I noticed how the trees sparkled on the river bottom against the sinking sun. No one to tell me that’s enough, enough photos, enough time, enough gazing.

Alone as I walked toward the river and there was no one there to stop me from following it a little bit farther, to see what it looked like on the other side of the bend.

No one there but me and a head full of thoughts and worries that were being pushed out of the way to make room for the scenery, the quiet, the wildlife tracks and magnificent colors and trails before me.

And because I was alone, I was able to notice that after a few weeks gone missing, I was becoming myself again. The self that understood this was my habitat and my home. The self that knows the seasons will always change, the leaves will dry up, the acorns will fall, the birds will fly away from the cold or prepare for it, the grasshoppers will finish their rituals, the snow will come and coat the hard earth, then melt with the warm sun, changing the landscape, as the water runs through and cuts the cracks in the earth.

And the bison will roam, and the antelope will, too, and the prairie dogs will burrow, the pheasants will roost, and the bugs will hum and buzz and disappear, knowing, or not knowing, that their lives are fragile, just like ours out here where we can find ourselves alone.

Sweet Clover Season

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I wish you could smell the sweet clover out here this time of year. I step outside and I’m flooded with a wave of memories of all that I used to be, summer after summer growing up out here. It smells like work and evenings spent sliding down hills on cardboard boxes with my cousins. It smells like ingredients for mud pie and playing house in the lilac bushes by the red barn. It smells like bringing lunch to dad in the field above our house, horseflies and heat biting our skin.

It smells like my first car and the windows rolled down, taking back roads with my best friends as passengers, kicking up dust as we tested the limits of teenage-dom.

It smells like my leaving, bittersweet. My last summer as a kid here before it was time to go and grow up already. Be on my own.

And it smells like coming home, take a right on the pink road, stop at the top of the hill and look at it all before heading down and turning into mom and dad’s for a glass of wine and a steak on the deck that looks out toward the garden and up the crick bed where I used to play everyday.

This summer my daughters and their cousins have lived on this landscape, on this ranch, the way kids should. Spinning on the tire swing, hiking up to the top of Pot and Pans, trying to catch fish in the fishless stock dam, zooming on dirt bikes, pushing baby doll strollers in the tall grass and skinning knees on the scoria roads. There was a time when it was quiet out on this homestead place, back when my sisters and I left for the big towns and didn’t dare turn to look back over our shoulders, leaving my parents here to wonder what happens next to the place that has raised us when there is no one left for it to raise.

Fast forward twenty years and the ranch, well, now it’s buzzing, laughing, full of life like I remembered it when I was growing up and our grandparents were alive and serving us push-up pops from the small front porch of their small brown house. Weren’t we all just five years old running through the clover, itching our mosquito bites, begging for popsicles and just one more hour to play outside?

Now we are the ones on the other side of the supper bell. As I type this my daughters are over the hill at their aunt and uncles’ lighting leftover 4th of July smoke bombs on the gravel because it rained. I needed a few minutes to collect my thoughts and it is mid-summer and the smell of that clover makes me lonesome somehow for a life that I am currently living. Do you understand what I mean? That feeling of knowing that it’s fleeting? The clover reminds us and so do the limbs of my daughters stretching up and reaching closer to the sky every minute now. The chubby gone from their rosy cheeks. How many more summers will that clover feel magic? 

All of the summers I hope.

Because I know being here like this, reflecting at my kitchen counter while our children stay up past any reasonable bedtime because it’s summer on the prairie and the light lingers, I know it didn’t come without a cost for our family, keeping it here for us…

I know that we did nothing but be born to people who know the value of the land, not in dollars, but in something that is hard for me to find words for right now.

Pride?

Work?

Home?

A place to belong?

My uncle Wade stops in on his way back to Texas and I live to hear the two brothers remember what it was like to be young out here. Young Wade always found hanging back on a roundup, eating on a Juneberry bush. Dad as a kid getting bucked off on the road when his little brother popped over the hill on his tricycle. Milking cows and riding broncs and chasing girls and growing up together out in these same hills…

How many gloves and hats and scarves have been left dangling in these trees, scooped off heads and hands of little cowboys and cowgirls rushing on the backs of horses running through the trees?

How many wild plum pits have been spit at one another?

How many mud pies have been made in this barnyard, topped off with little pieces of sweet clover.

I’ll take that clover. I’ll breathe it in, and I will remember when it itched our bare little legs in the summer while we searched for kittens in the nooks of the red barn. And I’ll be thankful it itches my legs still… because they’ll grow up too fast you know. Just like we did, out here among the clover.

I used to take photographs

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I used to take photographs. Not just with my phone, but with a big camera I would tote around almost nightly on my walks through the hills or on rides through the pastures. I would sling it across my body as a constant reminder to stay on the lookout for the way the evening sunset makes the tops of the trees glow or creates a halo around the wild sunflowers if you get down low enough in the grass. There was something about having that camera in my hand that automatically transformed me back into the little girl I used to be out here. To have the task on hand to capture it  reminded me to look out for the wonder. 

I’m not sure exactly when I put my camera back in the bag and then up on a shelf to collect dust, but I’m pretty sure it was around the time the babies came. I documented my first-born’s every move with that big camera up until her ninth month or so. I know because I have a hundred-page hardcover book to prove it. But then technology turned my phone into a more convenient and quality option and then Rosie arrived and then the wandering changed to carrying one baby in a pack and pulling the other in a wagon down the gravel road. 

How fast this sight has changed

Lately I’ve been feeling farther and farther away from myself. Usually, this sort of ache is reserved for long winter nights, but for some reason, it’s creeping up on me in the change into summer, which has been notorious for snapping me back to myself. I haven’t planted a single tomato plant. The garden isn’t tilled. The horses need about a hundred more rides. My calendar is dinging with deadlines that feel impossible to meet and I find I’m feeling a bit frantic about making sure this summer teaches my daughters some things about responsibility with as much room for play as possible. 

Responsibility and play. I think that might be the never-ending battle we’re all up against. Can they possibly exist together in balance? If you have any sort of roots in ranching or agriculture, I can see you nodding your head along when I say there is never a time where you can relax without thinking you should be doing something more productive. 

Because there is always something to be done here. The barn needs to be torn down and rebuilt this summer and so does the shed. The siding needs to be put on the house and the deck needs to be rebuilt. The old equipment needs to be moved off the hill and we need to resurface the road to the barnyard. We need to rebuild the corrals and spray the burdock plants and ride fences and move cows, and also, we have that day job and softball practice for the kids and the county fair next week. We’re getting none of it done in the process of trying to do all of it. The feeling of being fragmented and frazzled and underprepared for everything is one I can’t shake. A walk to the hilltop to document the wildflowers is the least productive thing on the list. But maybe the thing we need most. 

Last week in our efforts to get the kids ready for the county fair, I took that old camera off the shelf and out of its bag. My sister and I signed our oldest daughters up to enter a photography project and it was time we got it done. We walked out into the yard and bent over the little patch of prairie roses in the front yard. I did a little speech about focus and timing and patience and light and looking around for things worth photographing. My niece pointed out how it would be best to crop out the cowpie under the wildflower photo and I said she was right. There is beauty growing right alongside the poop. We just try to focus on the beauty when we’re behind the camera. 

After the wildflower lesson we set our new kittens up in a little basket out on the lawn for a little photoshoot. Those four little fuzz balls were the star of the show for a good fifteen minutes while we worked on catching their best angles and fawned over how sweet they were.

The lawn was long and needed to be mowed. The tomato patch needed to be tilled. My office work was waiting, but I was too busy saying “oh how cute!” and “get a little lower, focus on their eyes,” and “oh my goodness the sweetness,” to think about anything else. I liked the way the world felt to me in the yard that day. 

I think I’ll leave that camera out and within reach this summer…

Kids in the Branding Pen

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Every year at the beginning of June a group of our friends from Bismarck and Dickinson load up and come to the ranch to help us brand our calves. It’s become a tradition for them to help in the pens as a way to say thank you for allowing them to hunt turkey and deer on the place throughout the years. The gesture and the help are thoughtful and appreciated, but it’s not an expected exchange. We would gladly have them out anytime for whatever reason. But every year for nearly ten years or so, they have been making it work, no matter how much or how little notice we give them. They wake up early, load up their kids and make the drive to sort, wrestle, ear tag and stand ready for whatever other task we might throw at them. And then, when the work is done, all ten or more of the kids run wild on the dirt piles and in the trees collecting ticks and dirt on their jeans, I serve up cookies and a couple big roasters of beef and then we take the kids for their favorite part: a ride on our horses. 

This year was no different. We called last minute, and our friends were there standing by the pens waiting for us at 8 am when we finally got the cattle gathered. Which means that a pickup-load from Bismarck had to leave their houses at 5 am and our friends from Dickinson cut their weekend fishing at the lake short and then, before they left that afternoon, they handed over a big bag of walleye that we fried up and devoured on Tuesday.

I was standing in the pen next to my friend who was running the ear tagger while her eight-year-old daughter, Olivia, was charged with marking the calves who received a vaccination. Her two sons were in the pens too, one spraying antiseptic on the castrated calves and the other now big enough to wrestle. My own daughters had abandoned their post of sorting ear tags and counting calves for some sort of game of pretend in the hills with the other kids and I had just looked up long enough to realize it. I told my friend that her daughter should join them. “She can go play, she’s helped plenty already,” I said, now embarrassed that our friends’ kids were busting their butts while ours ran wild.  

“I told the kids that this is our church this morning,” my friend replied. “Helping our neighbors, acts of service, this is what it’s about.”  

Her kids have been coming to the ranch for years, to help or to hunt or to play, since before her sweet eight-year-old daughter could walk and her boys were toddling around, fascinated by the trees and the wildlife, reminding us every time how special this place is and how lucky we are. At almost every visit our kids have wandered together to places on this ranch that my own kids barely frequent—the thick trees on the banks to the north of the house, the muddy patch of cattails in front of the dam, the old equipment on the top of the hill. When the boys were younger, after every visit we were left with a big pile of old bones and cool sticks and rocks as a collection on our front drive, little treasures they couldn’t keep their hands off. And when it comes to the animals, the horses and the baby kittens, and now, the goats, Olivia has never been able to get enough. She would outlast my daughters’ capacity for sitting horseback by hours, her smile stretched from ear to ear, falling in love with every horse on the place. This year it was no different, even in the heat of the day as we watched these growing kids navigate themselves in the saddle more independently than ever.  I looked at Olivia and wondered how we could fit one of these horses in her backyard in town. And if they would finally agree to take a kitten home. 

It might be the kids getting older, changing so much since the last time I saw them, that got me thinking how grateful I am for the reminder they provide us to not take this for granted. Eventually I got my own kids back in the branding pens for a bit to help, but the magic of the work doesn’t hit them the same way it does for these kids coming in from town once or twice a year. My hope is that I can raise them to appreciate it, to know how rare and important it is to care for a place like this, to stand side-by-side and share in the work, to bring out the big roaster of beef to feed our friends after they’ve put in the sweat alongside us at the end of the day, even if my youngest daughter eventually does run away to New York like she’s been threatening since she could talk and my oldest heads to the ocean. 

In the chaos of the branding pen I don’t know if my kids got the lessons they needed from us this year, but I hope they learned something from our friends about what it means to be there, to be reliable and to be good neighbors, happy to help.  

Wild flowers, wild onions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green snakes and rainbows

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Happy mid August! We’re late with the podcast this week because I was traveling and helping host our big Ribfest event in town on Friday. Saturday we celebrated our 17th Anniversary by recovering from slinging beers at the concert until well past mid night. Both my husband and I have the same syndrome, we would much rather be hauling chairs, punching tickets or working the bar at these things, we think it’s more fun? Is that weird? It is fun though, to be a part of making the wheels of these community events turn ’round, even if it meant our idea of an anniversary activity was a nap.

(Cue pictures of the legendary BlackHawk and regional favorite tribute band Hairball…and all the thousands of People!!!)

Anyway, so I’m behind, like I’ve been all summer, but honestly, who isn’t? It’s a gift to not have enough time for all the things you want to do isn’t it? So enjoy last week’s column and if you didn’t yet, check out last week’s podcast (where we cover the snake situation). If you like to hear us chat in the kitchen while we intermittently get interrupted by kids and cats and company, tell your friends to like and subscribe to Meanwhile, back at the ranch… on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/veederranch

Green Snakes and Rainbows

My daughters brought a tiny green grass snake into the house recently. I was working in the kitchen and they excitedly called up from the basement with big news, but before I could turn around, there they were, standing behind me excitedly introducing me to “Greenie.”

Rosie, my five-year-old, fell in love with that little grass snake. She made a habitat for him in a cardboard box with rocks and grass, shade and a little dish of water. It would wrap around her hand and wrist and everyone who stopped by that day got an introduction. She was proud to have had a hand in discovering this little wonder, curious about its tiny tongue and what it eats and where it sleeps and, of course, how to tell if it’s a girl or a boy, which in case you’re wondering, is impossible, even if you Google it.

If she had a say in it, that little grass snake would have stayed with us here, in the house, in that box by her bed. But the rule about wild animals is that they just get to visit. No sleepovers. Rosie cried when her sister helped her release it that afternoon. Then, when I wasn’t looking, she caught it again. And so another round of tears fell when I helped her release it that evening. She held it close to her little chest before setting it free in the weeds and I lingered to be sure the snake didn’t make it in our family Christmas card photos. I didn’t point out the other tiny green grass snake I noticed had met its end on the road a few dozen feet from us.

The next evening the humidity brewed up a dramatic summer storm and as it moved across the countryside it left behind a rainbow that refused to give up. I drove toward it the entire 30 miles from town to the ranch and still it held onto its colors so I could see what it looked like against the backdrop of the old red barn. We need to tear that barn down, but it seems that everyone around here is waiting for the other to make the first move. It’s hard to let go, even to things made of wood and stone. In that moment though, I was glad it was there, quietly hanging on to the landscape, slowly and silently fading like old red barns and rainbows do.

A couple years ago, when Rosie was three or so, we were at the start of a long road trip and I asked her if she wanted to color or watch a show. “No,” she replied, “I’m just going to look out the window in case there’s a rainbow.”

I fixed my eyes on the road and the colors stretching over it. I just heard the news that someone I thought would live forever had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. And this sounds silly, but the news was the reason I stopped on my way home to get my favorite flavor of ice cream cone for the road. It’s the reason I drove a bit slower, a bit more carefully thinking about Rosie and the rainbow and the little green garden snake and the man I knew that was on this earth yesterday and somewhere else today, maybe somewhere rainbows go when they disappear if you want to get poetic about it.

And I did want to get poetic about it I think. I took a walk that evening as the sun was setting and the wind calmed down. I thought I would make it quick and beat the dark and the rain, but as I turned to head the half mile back to the house the sun sunk below the horizon and the sky began to spit rain. I lifted my face up and closed my eyes, trying to feel each drop hit my forehead and then my cheeks, my lips and my hairline and my nose and my eyelids.

In a few weeks I will turn 40 and I will wonder how it happened and I will wonder what I’ve learned in all these years and I will wonder where the time has gone.

But in that moment, on the dark road with my face to the sky, I was alive and breathing with my feet on the earth.

Look up. Look down. Look out. Look around. In case there’s a rainbow. In case there’s a beautiful little green snake.

Drive Careful, Watch for Deer and other things we say here…

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Drive carefully. Watch for deer. How was the drive? Is it icy? Blowing snow?

Leave early. Drive slowly. Check the weather. Call me when you get there. Call me when you leave. I’ll wait up for you. I’ll leave the light on.

In rural North Dakota, especially in the icy and volatile tundra that is the 17 months of winter, I grew up hearing these statements as a sort of language of love. Because to get to most anywhere we need to go, we have to consider the roads.

A 30-mile drive to school, work, groceries and the nearest gas station. A 90-mile drive to a big-box store or an airport. A 140-mile drive to a specialty doctor or to have a baby near a NICU, to get your wisdom teeth removed, a treatment for your cancer or, sometimes, before Amazon delivered the world to your door, just to find the right size of envelope or diapers.

How are the roads?

My little sister just texted me that question as I arrived in town and she’s making plans to bring her girls to gymnastics later this afternoon. It rained all day yesterday, right on top of the ice and snow, and then, just to be dramatic, the wind blew all night at 40 mph.

The fact that the roads between the ranch and town were just fine was some sort of weather phenomenon, ruining any excuse I might have been able to scrounge up for why I barely got Edie to kindergarten in time. And why I forgot my workbag with my computer in it and basically everything I needed for a long day in town. It wasn’t the roads. It’s just me. It’s just me in the middle of winter — frazzled, pale and distracted, trying to get two tired little children up out of their beds when it’s still dark outside.

Because what I think we’re really meant to be doing this time of year is eating a bottomless serving of straight-up carbs and hibernating. My word, it’s hard to fight nature these days. (I yawn for the 50th time in 10 minutes).

For the last three weeks, I’ve been back and forth from the ranch and across the state on these January roads, bringing my children’s book to libraries, schools and stores along the way. I’ve driven in blinding snow and clear skies, in the dark of the early morning and the quiet of late nights, on patchy ice, highways wet with cold rain, by snowdrifts and through snowdrifts, into the sun and away from it, past big trucks stuck in ditches and moms like me pulled over in SUVs, and snowplows, and semis hauling cattle and giant wind turbine blades and crosses along highways and interstates, lit up with solar lights or decorated with flags and flowers or a high school jersey reminding us that, when we’re moving this fast — blur-shaped people on wheels at 80 mph, trying to keep a schedule, to get there on time, to get home for supper or homework or bedtime — it only takes a split second for the whole plan to change.

And that’s why we ask. That’s why we wait up. That’s why we tell you to watch for the deer or the moose or the ice or the snow or the wind or the rain. That’s why we tell you to drive safe. Please. Drive safe. Because it’s the only way to feel we have a semblance of control of these miles we need to trek on stretches of highways, interstates and back roads that are equal parts freedom and fear.

The moving, it’s always been hazardous for humans. It’s not new to these times we’re living in, the walking or riding across uncharted landscapes or well-worn trails. Handcarved boats with handsewn sails taking us out to a sea that angers easily or a river that goes from calm to raging just around the bend. If only all these years of evolution could protect us now from those unexpected waves. Sometimes we start to believe it can. So just in case, we say:

Drive safely.

Travel safe.

“Prairie Princess” Children’s Book Release

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Ten years ago, I wrote a little poem that asked a young girl to show us around her home on the ranch.

I had just moved back to my family’s ranch in western North Dakota and was living in my grandma’s tiny brown house in the barnyard with my husband. The task I gave myself was to do all the things I used to do as a kid on this place: pick handfuls of wildflowers, ride our horses, take long walks up and down the creek, help work cows, eat Popsicles on the deck, linger outside doing nothing as much as possible and, of course, slide down a gumbo hill in the rain (which turned out to only be a good idea because it made a good story and I didn’t die…).

During that time, I was in a state of transition having just quit a full-time fundraising job and left town with my dogs and my husband for home on the ranch. I wasn’t positive I made the right decision, but then I hadn’t really been positive about much for those first seven or so years of my 20s.

What am I doing back here? What should I be doing back here? Should I take another desk job? Should I hit the road again or switch my career path entirely?

Should we try again for a baby? Should we give up? How is a grown-up supposed to behave?

I had no answers. All I knew is that it felt good to be in that little house trying to make something out of all those chokecherries I just picked. And it felt good to be on the back of a horse trailing cattle to a new pasture with my dad and husband.

It felt good to take the time to throw sticks in the creek and watch them float with the direction of the little stream. And then I sometimes wished that I were that stick, letting the current take me where it will. Or maybe the house cat, the one that used to be the kitten we rescued from the barn, growing up with no concerns except about being a cat. If only being human was that simple.

But we make it complicated, and so I found that channeling the 8-year-old version of myself helped balance me a bit. I spent so much of that summer writing it all down.

That’s how “Prairie Princess” was born. Because I wanted that little girl to show me around this place, to tell me the way she sees it — catching snowflakes on her tongue, helping with chores, dancing along the ridgeline and singing at the top of her lungs. Just like I used to.

I tucked that poem away then, but kept it in the back of my mind as I found my direction and became a mother to two little girls who looked exactly like the Prairie Princess I envisioned in that poem.

And so, 10 years later, I decided it was time to make that poem come to life in the form of a children’s book, so the voice of that little girl could help other kids see the special connection and responsibility we have to the land.

I took photos of my own little girls on the ranch and used them as inspiration for the artist who so beautifully painted it. Daphne Johnson Clark is a friend of mine with rural roots here in Western North Dakota and she made the book come to life.

And now it’s here, after all these years.

To celebrate, I am visiting libraries, museums and other venues across the state to read the book, talk about sense of place and conduct a creative workshop that encourages kids to express themselves through art and poetry. And I hope I will see you out there.

Even if you don’t have a child to bring with you, I believe this story will help you remember what it was like when the world felt wide open and magical and all for you.

I hope you know it still is…

Click here to order a signed copy of Prairie Princess and other music and merchandise

Click here for the KFYR-TV News Interview about Prairie Princess (with a few words from the kids)

Click here for the KX-TV News Interview about the book

Tiny, perfect things

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There is a hill on the ranch that is completely covered in tiger lilies. My little sister went on a ride with Dad and they discovered them, a scattering of bright orange petals opening up to the bright blue sky.

It has been a dry year here, with our spring rain coming to us late, and so our wildflower crop is just now appearing. And this news about the tiger lilies may not seem so thrilling to some, but it’s exciting for us.

Because the flower is so perfect, and so exotic looking, and they don’t always come up every year. So when they do, we feel like we have access to our own personal florist, Mother Nature.

I don’t know if everyone has a favorite flower, but the tiger lily is mine. I carried them at my wedding, a bouquet of orange walking with me down a grassy, makeshift aisle in a cow pasture. We had to mow and build benches and move cow pies to make it presentable for guests, but we didn’t get rid of all of the cactus. My little sister found this out as she was making her trek down the aisle in front of me. I didn’t know if she was crying because of the cactus in her leg, or if she was so happy for us. I think a little of both.

Anyway, that’s what happens when you live in a wild place. No matter how you try to tame it, the flies and the thorns, the barn swallows and the raccoons, they don’t care about your fancy new deck furniture that you got for the family reunion — they will show up to eat the cat food and then poop on it.

And so then you sort of become wild, too. I know because I caught myself standing outside in my underwear one morning yelling at the birds to find a new place to make their messy clay nests. Not here, swallows. Not on the side of my house! And my husband? Well, he likes to scare raccoons at midnight… also in his underwear.

Anyway, I guess that’s why the wildflowers seem so special out here. For so much of the year we’re battling the elements, praying for rain, shoveling snow, bundling up, tracking mud in the house, pulling burs out of horses’ manes, cutting down weeds and clearing and cleaning and building and doctoring. The wildflowers, especially the tiger lily, seem like a reminder that there is perfection in this world, in the smallest things. Tiny, pretty miracles surviving despite and because of the hot sun and clay dirt.

I took my girls to that tiger lily hill the other day to check out this year’s crop. On the way they were singing Bible school songs they just learned, doing the actions and repeating the lines over and not quite right the way little kids do in the cutest way.

They had never seen a tiger lily before, and so it was a fun and easy Easter egg hunt, each girl grabbing up more than a handful of the flowers and thrilled with it all. With the familiar songs they were humming, and their sun-flushed cheeks and mosquito-bit arms, I couldn’t help but think: Now isn’t this the quintessential ranch summer?

I wonder what they will remember about being a little kid out in these hills. Do they feel as wild and free as I used to feel out here, enamored with the mystery of this place and how it can change so magically by the hour, the sun sinking down, turning the tips of the trees and grass and my daughters’ hair golden?

I hope so. I hope they feel as wild and beautiful and as loved as those lilies, because they are to me. My own little tiger lilies on the hilltop, growing before my eyes.

My favorite little flowers reminding us that there are perfect things in this world.