Who we were, who we are

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I took my husband with me on a long road trip to western Montana recently. I had a songwriter’s festival on a Friday, but booked another singing engagement the night before in Bismarck, so I needed a little help to make the mileage and the math work so I could show up on time.

My husband has been working long hours this summer as he expands his construction business and I haven’t seen much of him for the past four months. The timing to have him come along to help with the drive was terrible, as in, he didn’t really have the time. And also, we would be arriving home the day before school started and so we would be pushing it. But once we lived in Western Montana and it was the weekend of our 19^th wedding anniversary and I thought maybe we could combine the work with a weekend spent actually away, just the two of us, with no real agenda after the singing was over.

This is how you do vacations when you’re married to a traveling musician. It’s been happening since before we were married. Want to go to Northern Minnesota? Cool, I have a gig there, we’ll stay an extra night. Ever curious about Redfield, South Dakota population 2,214? Well, we’re going there for our honeymoon. We can stop in Fargo on the way home and get a fridge that’s way to big for the tiny farmhouse kitchen.

Funny how nearly twenty years can go by and so many things just have not changed about who we are together and separate. At the little steak dinner we had with the kids on our anniversary, my husband asked me what I liked most about being married to him. I answered quickly. I’ve always felt safe with him. And he never makes me feel guilty for my weird schedule and the sort of unpredictable paths I’ve taken as a writer and musician. I’ve always just felt so certain that he can handle anything.

“What do you like about being married to me?” I asked in return before our daughters chimed in, dying to know all our favorite things about them, naturally.

“It’s that you haven’t really changed,” he said.

And I didn’t know how to take that initially. Certainly, in so many ways I hope I have changed for the better. Age and tough life lessons and motherhood and marriage and illnesses have gotten me there. But what he meant was more like this: “Things that made you happy when I knew you as a kid, still make you happy. You laugh at the same things,” he began. And, probably because we just got back from a family ride on our dirt bikes up to the fields where I chose not to wear long pants and regretted every poky slap of the pig weeds and clover against my ankles, but persisted never-the-less, only to tip my dirt bike over on the bumpy trail on the way home, he continued. “You are up for things the same way you used to be.”

And I’m not sure that statement is as true as it could be, but I like that his impression of this woman he’s known his whole life is that all those things that could have changed how I laugh and how I show up with joy, well, they haven’t. It felt nice to be seen that way.

So, I took the compliment. And then I took my guitar and my husband to the mountains, stopping at 2 am to take a sleep at a Super 8 Hotel just like our South Dakota trip all those years ago. And while we were there, we tried to remember what it was like for us when, briefly, we were mountain people. But, for people with so much history together, the two of us have never been good at looking back. Maybe that’s why we like a road trip so much.

And so, we spent the weekend wandering and eating, listening to music and obsessing over a 1980s fat-tire dirt bike my husband found at a garage sale in Phillpsburg 600 miles from home. Even though school was going to start. Even though his work kept calling. Even though I had deadlines and another gig to get back to.

And it wasn’t overly romantic. There were no grand gestures of reconnecting. It was slow and it was only two days and it was just the two of us and we did what we wanted, which, turns out was getting cash out of the ATM so we could pick up that old dirt bike on the way home. Because yeah, if I haven’t changed, well, neither has he.

Diners, Fenceposts and Cowboy Poems: Road Trip to Elko

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

1,037 miles, 16 hours, seven thousand fenceposts, one overnight snowstorm,

two or three little hometown diner meals

one night in a Comfort Inn in Idaho Falls and a couple of tourist moments later…

Twin Falls, ID

and we finally made it all the way down to Elko, Nevada from the great white north to participate in the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

There’s cowboys here from all over the country, but it turns out I’m the only one with red scoria still stuck to her car and a good ‘ol Northern, kinda sounds like you’re from Canada, accent.

And I’m the one hanging around with this guy.

I can’t tell you what it means to be here surrounded by all of this talent, all of these stories of ranch living, all of these expressive people in hats and boots and some really great mustaches. Last night I met a hat maker with a leather-tooled neck tie and vowed I’d find one and start spreading his style-sense back in North Dakota.

Would it be weird if I wore a leather tooled neck tie?

Maybe.

Anyway, last night was my first gig at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

Martha Scanlan sound check

I took the stage at the Convention Center for a show called “Straddling the Line,” with landscape storyteller and accomplished musician Martha Scanlan and sage rocker and cowboy Brenn Hill. In its 30th Anniversary the gathering is focused on the next generation of cowboy poets, singers and storytellers so we each took our turn talking and singing about what it means to be out here loving our land and the work we do.

Watch the full concert here:

The audience and the people here are warm and inviting. We’re from all over the country, but we have things in common and so much to learn from one another. Wednesday night we rolled into town and bought tickets to a Ranch Radio Show where Stephanie Davis sang about the magic of baling twine, and besides the leather-tie promise, I promise to learn all the words to that song, because I swear it was written about Pops.

Today the streets and concert halls will fill up again, a sea of cowboy hats and the buzz of information, stories and music being passed around.

This morning we will walk down the street for a fresh donut and I’ll take the stage with my friend D.W. Groethe before heading back to the Convention Center to join other forth and fifth generation ranchers to talk about what it’s like to be back on the ranch.

Tonight we will see Ian Tyson and dance at Stockmens.

And tomorrow we’ll do it all over again before heading back up north to the horses taking in the winter sun on the top of the hills outside my window.

Music has given me so many gifts in my life, this week is one of them.

Grateful to be here. Grateful to tell my story.

Grateful that you all are listening and sharing yours too.

Peace, Love and Happy Trails!
Jessie

Sunday Column: What makes a summer

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Well, we made it back from the edge of the Montana mountains late last night. We were a wagon train of two pickups headed west, our cargo of guitars and sleeping bags, boots and coolers of beer, musicians and friends, a little more dusty than when we arrived in that Montana cow pasture ringing with music on Friday.

It was a long haul. 800 some miles, three small town diner stops,

countless fuel-ups, sunflower seeds and coffee refills and only one “could have been major but actually turned out ok for once” pickup hiccup on the interstate east of Billings, MT.

Because, as Husband says, “It isn’t an adventure until it’s an adventure.”

And so we had one out in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, a bunch of neighbors and friends from the oil fields of North Dakota headed west to hear Merle Haggard sing “Momma Tried” and pick a little themselves on stage and around the campsite at night.

I’m home now with the memory of it turning the corners of my lips up a bit as I unpack and pack my bags again to head east for another gig.

I go to Devils Lake, ND today to sing in a park, but the band will stay home. They have work to do and things to catch up on so I’ll go it alone and that’s alright.

Although it’s always more fun with the boys around.

It’s going to be August in a few days.

August. The last month of summer at the ranch, rolling in with big thunderheads, sunflowers, prairie grass and wheat that turns gold over night.

Summer is fleeting here and I’ve spent this season chasing it–behind my camera, on the highway, on the back of a horse, on the top of a hill, down in the cool draws and behind my computer making plans.

I wish it were longer. Everyone does. But it doesn’t matter really. I’ll think of summer when the snow falls outside my window in December and I won’t think about its lifespan.

I’ll think about the life we put into it.

Coming Home: Berry season brings good intentions
By Jessie Veeder
7/28/13
Fargo Forum
www.inforum.com

Because summer means so many things to me, and so I’m happy to be here in it while it lasts…whether it’s picking wild raspberries in a cool draw on our North Dakota ranch