Tag Archives: rural living

Our kitchen table

Posted on by
Reply

Bright and early this morning my husband loaded up three horses, two cats and two dogs to bring to town to the vet for minor procedures and shots.

This morning we were also getting ready for picture day at school. At any point in the one- hour span it takes us to get out the door, I was running a coffeeshop, pancake house, therapist office and hair salon out of my kitchen. On the table sat a kennel full of two cats who hate each other, growling loudly to make sure everyone knew about it while my husband searched the premise for a leash for dogs that only go to town for vet appointments (and one goat show last year, but that was an accident.)

I did not volunteer to go with my husband for the vet drop off. I had my own drop off to do with a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old trying to keep their hair in place and practicing their smiles while singing along to their curated iTunes playlist coming through the speakers of the SUV. In addition to barista, line cook, therapist and stylist, I am also the lowest paid chauffer in the land.

Spotted in the school drop off line. Edie was not impressed: “What if there was a nun driving behind him?!”

On Sunday I turned my kitchen into an art studio and invited the cousins over to paint jeans in our school colors to get ready for homecoming week. Picture a giant kitchen table covered in clothes and paint and sparkles and four girls at varying levels of interest and perfectionism—two of them happily painting, drawing and adding gems to the pockets of their jeans without a care about the outcome looking like Martha Stewart’s Pinterest board,  and two of them on the other side of the table and spectrum of perfectionism who cared very much that their garments looked like Martha’s. To give you a clear picture:  at one point one of the girls (who shall not be named for fear of retaliation) was laying on the ground saying, “we’re doomed!” because the outline of her wolf paw print was too thick. This was the third time she had taken to the floor over the placement of paint, and it wouldn’t be her last.

This is where my little sister’s master’s level education in school counseling comes in handy in our life. I am not a real therapist, after all, and so I went to my room and screamed into a pillow for ten seconds while she gave a lesson on perfectionism and trying to enjoy the process and, also, how to be nicer to your mom. I looked at my little sister and remembered when we used to gather our daughters together around this table for construction paper handprint turkeys and dream of their bright future. Never in this dream did I anticipate an art project to doom us all…

Anyway, all of the girls eventually completed their jeans to a level they were proud of, (although Rosie would have liked to add a couple hundred more gems) and then it was time to clear that kitchen table for a frozen pizza supper because that’s all I could mentally handle after hours in the crafting trenches.  

This kitchen table is first generation. My husband and I bought it after our oldest daughter was born. Up until that point we had been eating and crafting and playing cards and grooming animals on second-hand tables that held memories and stories of their own. We had ours built by Amish furniture makers with big family suppers in mind, and so it pulls out with four extra leaves and can comfortably seat fourteen people or so.  When my husband walks by to see another craft explosion, he likes to mention that he never thought all these tiny paint brushes would be a part of his life. In my world, any surface is a crafting surface. In his world, any surface is a place to set a tool, so he should understand. This table has also been a work bench plenty of times.

A couple weeks ago I was minding my own business at that kitchen table, making a cute “cake” out of diapers for a friend’s baby shower while my daughters and nieces milled around the kitchen creating things of their own. We had a batch of kittens several weeks prior and one poor little one had developed a growth on his neck that my husband diagnosed as a bot fly (or warble fly) larva. In case you can’t imagine, this is gross. Botfly larva create a slow-growing, raised, boil-like bump on the carrier that can be extracted by using Vaseline to suffocate the larva so it comes up for air and you can pull it out with a tweezer. Ugh. Naturally, I imagined we would deal with this situation in the barn or the great outdoors. But no. Right in the middle of my diaper cake crafting time, on the other side of that kitchen table sat my husband in his reading glasses, holding a tiny kitten in the palm of his rubber-gloved hand about to confidently perform a veterinary procedure while one girl gagged and two girls observed in fascination, narrating the entire endeavor for me because I couldn’t watch.

Because my protests were waved off, I at least grabbed a couple towels to protect the surface and scootched my craft out of the way until the kitten was saved. Which he was in no time.

Martha Stewart would never.

This is gross, but I had to show you

But we did. And then I thoroughly sanitized, because our kitchen table might be a temporary vet office, but it’s also our crafting table, and our hair salon, and our therapist office, and our card table and our crafting table and, for gawd sake, and our pancake house!

There she is, in a rare moment of cleanliness

Come sit at my kitchen counter

Posted on by
1

Come sit at my kitchen counter and I will tell you everything. 

It will be messy, and I will have to clear a space for your drink glass, maybe wipe this morning’s crumbs away, or scrub the jelly so it doesn’t stick to your forearms as you lean in and ask how things are going. Come in and sit at my kitchen counter and I will tell you how Rosie caught a little garter snake this morning and is out collecting rocks and sticks for its Tupper Wear habitat. The cousins just pulled in the driveway in their little ATV they call “The Red Aamodt.”  Edie has been sleeping in like a teenager. School starts tomorrow and we are not ready.  Don’t mind the drill sitting on the seat next to you, Chad’s still finishing up the deck. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter, come because you were invited (you’re always invited) or come because you’re passing by and want a cup of coffee and to see the kids. It’s not like my grandma’s kitchen, or my mom’s, I won’t have rolls or bars or cookies set out on a whim, I’m not much of a baker, but I always have coffee. And if it’s the right time, I will make you a drink and pull out the chips and salsa, or cheese and crackers, because I am more like my other gramma like that. And I always have a dip. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter and I will ask you, “How’s work?” “What’s your wife up to?” “How did the fair, the rodeo, the talent show, the soccer game, the basketball tournament go?” And I really want to know. I will be a bit disheveled probably, because if you’re at my kitchen counter and I am at home, I likely woke up and just got on with things like dishes and laundry and cleaning off the little table full of art supplies, or maybe I was outside cutting the weeds or the grass or pressure washing Rosie’s shoe because she got stuck in the mud while she was trying to catch frogs. But I likely didn’t take the time to look in the mirror because I forget about things like that until someone shows up and then I remember. But if you’re here, you’re in a no judgement zone, and I expect it will go both ways and you will look past the way my hair can stand straight up now and that I have grass clippings in my teeth.  

Come sit at my kitchen counter and say you can’t stay long but then stay for hours. Stay for lunch because I’m fixing it anyway. And it’s just sandwiches, but we all have to eat. And then head out with Chad to check the water tanks and game cameras and come back in for burgers because I’m fixing them anyway and we all have to eat. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter and you might have to hold a baby doll or get closer to a hamster and a gecko than you’re probably comfortable with. Sit at my kitchen counter, and I’m just warning you, my oldest will hang on every word that you say, but she won’t say much in case you notice she’s there and hold back. She wants to hear everything.

Come sit at my kitchen counter and look out the window, here comes the turkeys down to water in the dam. Sit at my kitchen counter and there’s the momma deer with her two does. There’s the elk. There’s that coyote. There are the kids out conducting a funeral for the newborn barn kitten that didn’t make it. 

Come sit at my kitchen counter, do you need more coffee? Another beer? Sorry, the puppy seems to have stolen your shoe. Do you have time to watch a dance they’ve been rehearsing? How about a play? It’s short, but we need to relocate to the living room, here, let me move the laundry…

Come sit at my kitchen counter, I love you. 

A city girl would never…

Posted on by
Reply

“There’s always a price,” my little sister chirped from the passenger seat of my SUV. Sweat was dripping down her face and soaking her body, which was covered in sand in every conceivable and inconceivable area. She looked at me laughing the sort of laugh you laugh when you want to cry and then laughed harder when she realized that however bad the sweaty, sandblasted look was on her, it was worse on me.

It was a Wednesday afternoon in late July, the temperature reading on the dash said 104 and the decision the two of us made to play hooky from the rest of our responsibilities backfired in the way that was funny and sort of harmless, but also has you questioning why you didn’t pick the suburbs.

“City girls would never!” our friend said as she was lugging a cooler, swim bag, a floatie we couldn’t deflate, a heavy denim blanket and two lawn chairs (one she couldn’t figure out how to collapse)  a quarter of a mile through rocks and sand, a trail of reeds and black biting flies in the middle of a wind storm that was blasting our bodies with sand in 100 + temps  with 1000% humidity, because a storm was coming, of course, but not the kind that comes with rain to cool you off.

The thing is, once we get to the end of July everyone in the upper Midwest starts panicking a bit about summer being over, visualizing the seventeen months of winter that are ahead of us. And because we were in the middle of a relentless heat wave I suggested that instead of shirking our responsibilities to hit the public pool, we should try for the beach on Lake Sakakawea thirty miles north of town because we hadn’t been to the big lake yet this year and you have to go to the big lake at least once or it’s not a summer. So, I packed a swim bag and a big cooler full of drinks, some snacks and sandwiches, towels, beach chairs, floaties, a worthless air pump and our puppy and swung by to grab my sister and her daughters, who all packed the same things (minus the puppy). And along the way a friend called to see if we wanted to join her at the pool and somehow we convinced her that lugging all of the stuff I just mentioned, plus five girls, a half mile from the car to the beach in 104 degrees was a better idea. She said she’d meet us there in a jiff.

Now in case you’re reading this and you’re picturing a lake situation where you drive right into a nice paved parking lot facing a groomed public beach with those little barricade buoys marking out a safe swim zone complete with restrooms, garbage cans and a shower, this is not the case here. This beach, in our childhood, used to be a two track trail off a gravel road with a flat spot on the prairie for parking and a skinny, sandy walking trail through the weeds that leads down to the water, which, depending on how high the lake is that summer, can be quite a hike. These days they’ve made it a little more accessible, with a nice road and a groomed parking area, but it’s still pretty rustic and that’s why we love it.  In my memory though, the hike wasn’t so cumbersome, but that’s probably because I’m reaching back from when I was a teenager, ripping off my clothes and running for the shore after my shift at the clothing store in town. Now, we are moms with four young girls between us, two who had to poop immediately upon arrival in that little makeshift parking lot. “No worries,” I said, “I forgot ice. We will just head to the marina store and take care of it.” So back we went, about three miles, to the marina store only to find that the marina store is closed on Wednesdays and so are the bathrooms. Knowing we could live without ice, I remembered the vault toilets that existed in the campground and headed there for what was the world’s stinky-est sauna experience.  With that task done, we were on our way to cool off, no thanks to the luke-warm beverages in the cooler I discovered was way too heavy to drag to the beach anyway. And also no thanks to the crappy portable air compressor that we packed that couldn’t inflate a balloon in forty minutes, let alone four big floaties. I grabbed the puppy, a pool ring and the inflatable banana the girls couldn’t live without, along with all the other essentials, but not the cooler, and we finally headed toward the beach to plop our lawn chairs in the water and watch the girls swim while we sipped on the cold beverages our friend brought in her reasonably-sized cooler which she remembered to stock with ice. And it was fun. The water was cool. The views were pretty. The puppy dug a hole under our umbrella and sat in the shade. The girls ran up and down the beach collecting rocks and sticks to float. I spent twenty minutes blowing up the pool ring and my sister spent fifteen blowing up the banana. I spit sunflower seeds into the sand between dips in the water and we gabbed, enjoying being girls on the beach for a good hour and a half, until…

The wind started to pick up, blowing the little umbrella where the puppy sat across the shore. I got up to chase it (and the puppy), looked down the beach and saw a wall of sand heading right for us. Oh. No. I turned to watch the girls chasing the run-away banana floatie deeper into the lake. “Leave it!!!!” I yelled as I grabbed the pup. “Come back to shore!” My little sister went in after them, carrying the half-inflated pool ring like her life depended on it. Our friend started frantically gathering all the things we lugged down to the shore while the sand whipped at our squinty eyes and stung our sweaty skin. Our daughters tried to help, following behind us dragging whatever item their little bodies could carry, trying not to blow away while shlepping through the sand and swatting the black flies, all of us puffing and sweating and whining up the hill and to the car. My sister, still clinging to that pool ring (trying to compensate for the lost banana I guess,) arrived at the car behind me and declared that while I survived two bouts of cancer, if she died carrying a cooler, chair, kid and pool ring through that sand storm in 104 degrees it would have been an embarrassing obituary. She was close. And then we proceeded to frantically throw every single thing, plus the soggy, itchy kids, puppy, and the forty-five pounds of sand that came with it in the back of my SUV and peeled out of the there so fast that I didn’t realize the back hatch was wide open until a mile or two down the gravel road.

“Next time we’ll just go to the pool,” we all laughed, only half meaning it, because a country girl would never… 

Not so special hill

Posted on by
2

Let me tell you about a hillside on the ranch that never used to be special.

It was just a mildly steep slope along the edge of the fields, covered in creeping juniper growing in rocky and clay soil. We ride to the top occasionally to check the landscape for cows or move past it pushing them home. The hill pops up on the other side of the fence from what used to be fields. And so, I suppose my grandpa and dad used to drive past it in the tractor, digging up soil, and then planting seeds, and then turning alfalfa into bales before that field was turned into what we called “The CRP” for most of my childhood

The soil on that hillside is no good for grazing or planting, but from up there you can see for miles in every direction, although it’s not a hill located in a spot convenient for lingering and looking. There is no real trail that connects you to it. If you’re walking, it’s a good mile and a half cross country and three fences to crawl from the main county road. If you’re driving a pickup or an ATV, I hope it has good shocks because those old fields are bumpy. I once drove out there when I was nine months pregnant with Rosie hoping I’d bounce her out.  Riding horseback is the best way to get there if you need to go there and that’s how my dad and my little sister discovered, one late June morning, that the hill wasn’t just a hill, but one covered from top to bottom in bright orange wildflowers we call the tiger lily.

Now, timing is everything on this discovery. These wildflowers have always been coveted on our place in the same way as the juneberries and wild raspberries are in the poky and buzzing brush patches of the low spots in the summer pastures. If you’re from anywhere in the rural north, you understand the weight and urgency of fleeting summer moments. And these moments hang heavy in the sweet juice of wild berries, waiting impatiently for you to find them and pluck them for your pockets and pies before the birds fill their bellies. And you have a window of only a few days to get there, which turns the hunt and gather into a sort of ritual that makes the find taste sweeter, the sky a little bluer, the breeze much more appreciated.

The wild tiger lily acts the same, not because the birds are after them, but because time and the heat of the sun are. If my sister and my dad would have timed their ride a week before or a week later, they would have missed the magic that lay dormant under those creeping juniper each winter, waiting for the right mix of heat and rain to reach toward the sky and bloom. Who knows how long those tiger lilies were growing and spreading across that hillside before a human eye detected them and made a fuss. And a fuss we make, because usually you only find these flowers growing in pairs or fours dotted sporadically deep in the back pastures. But this find, that day, about five or so years ago, it was a harvest. My sister couldn’t wait to come home and take me back there to see for myself, to fill my hands in a wide grip with their stems and put them in that special old green mason jar on my kitchen table.

And so we’ve done it every year since. The end of June rolls around and we say to one another “We should go check on the tiger lilies,” and so we round up our daughters and cram them, and sometimes their baby dolls, and all the time the dogs too, and we bring a little basket and some scissors so as not to pull up the roots and we make the drive up off the mailbox, along the field trail then off into the bumps through the gate and down the hill so we can walk up and collect along the way.  With each visit that hilltop gets a bit more special to us as we remember our daughters and how small they used to be, their dirty blonde hair tinting gold with the sun, blowing back as they stand on a big rock with their arms out and sing into the sky, a small collection of mis-matched wildflowers tight in their fists.

This year our cousins and aunts and uncles from our dad’s side were here to visit the ranch that is so special to all of us. When planning things to eat and places to take them, my little sister and I looked at each other and remembered that it was tiger lily season. And so, after lunch on a sunny Friday afternoon every all-terrain vehicle we possessed between the four places was loaded up with relatives driving in a slow-moving wagon train inching across this sacred landscape on our way to show them how an ordinary hill can be magic. And all of us up there, big cousins, little cousins, great aunts and uncles, grampas and moms and dads and kids and spouses, connected by a bloodline and the land under our feet, wandered out, climbed up, said things like ‘oh, look at that!’ and ‘so beautiful’ and ‘look at the view’ and ‘look at the sky’ and ‘look, two blossoms on one stem’ and, if they were like Rosie, sneezed at least three-thousand times while collecting and taking photos and, because you can’t really help it, fist full of flowers, climbed to the very top, opened our arms and lifted our faces to the blue sky, all together on this once not so special hill.

County Fair Ice Breaker

Posted on by
1

Well, the county fair is wrapped up. I wrote the following column in the early morning before day one, knowing the week would be filled with early mornings, late nights and zero vegetable consumption. Since then they wrapped up the static exhibit, two goat shows, a sale, showing the lizard and surviving an afternoon of carnival rides. The girls had a fun fair, did their best and learned some good lessons along the way. So did Chad and I.

I suppose I’ll have more to say about it in this week’s column, but these were my thoughts in the calm before the whirlwind.

County Fair Ice Breaker

“I told the judge a joke,” Rosie said between dance moves at the ice cream shop in town. We were there with my parents and cousins, recapping how the interview process went for their 4-H projects that afternoon. On the way to town, to prepare, we went over what the judges might ask, and I reminded them to sit up, speak up, use eye contact and to be proud of their projects. Then we talked logistics, like remember what goat feed you use and the camera model for their photography project, but telling the judge a joke as an icebreaker never came up. That was all Rosie.

Rosie, who picked out new pink cowboy boots specifically for this reason, and for the dance in the dirt when the fair is over, the ribbons are distributed and the goats are sold. Rosie who has had about enough of Cloverbud rainbow ribbons for her lifetime and is ready for a purple rosette and belt buckle already. Rosie, who admitted she was a little nervous standing on that piece of tape waiting for her turn to sit down and talk about her ceramic garden paver, watercolor bird blobs and the picture she took of her new puppy in a box.

“How do you know that a goose can’t hear?”

“How?”

“Because everything time you talk to it, it says, “Huh?”

Rainbow ribbons for all!

So that’s how we kicked off 4-H week here at the ranch. I’m writing this in the wee-hours of the morning, twenty minutes before I need to wake the kids up to start getting their goats ready to bring to town in the rain. And the lizard, we’re bringing that too, because filling out a 4-H record book for a leopard gecko where you have to calculate the cost per pound of meal worms was a challenge only we would be silly enough to accept.  

Walking through that exhibit hall every year filled with kids from our community buttoned up in green and white, some polished and proud of their welding or painting projects, some sort of melting because their Lego set fell apart on the way to town, their parents waiting along the sides of the room dragging wagons or holding boxes asking “How did it go?” and taking pictures and patting backs or giving words of encouragement on the first day of the county fair is about as Americana as it gets. It’s all so wholesome if you forget about the kitchen table negotiations and barnyard arguments that got us all to that point that morning. That’s what the parents are talking about behind those big boxes filled with baked goods and potted plants while they wait for their kids to show off their woodworking project with community members like my dad, Papa Gene, who was there that day as a judge.

“He asked some really good questions!” our neighbor girl declared after she got done with what I’m sure was a lengthy visit about her planter. “I would have never thought he’d ask about the glue!”

But he would. He would ask about the glue, and the inspiration, and if she’s having fun and who helped her build it and if she would do the project again and then he would say ‘good job, really great job, keep it up, keep it up.’  Papa Gene has never met a kid or a horse he didn’t think had the most potential in the world. Blue ribbons for all!

“I think I did a good job,” my oldest daughter declared after she finished chatting about her painted jeans, prairie rose photo, ceramic, Lego and painting projects that afternoon. Her smile was big and genuine and from my post on the sidelines with the other moms, I could see her smiling and chatting away. The way she has matured from previous years of this 4-H experience was more evident on her this year than ever.

“Are you proud of yourself?” I asked?

“Yes!”

And, well, that’s the point of it all isn’t it?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need go wake up the girls and the goats and try to get to town on time today. See you at the county fair!

*This column is dedicated to Marcia Hellandsaas, our 4-H matriarch and true example of someone dedicated to the role of what it means to be a kind, honest and hardworking leader. We all loved you and you will be missed dearly.

Owl song

Posted on by
Reply

I woke up this morning to our owl hooting outside our bedroom window. I call it our owl because he lives in the trees where we live too. I see him sometimes when I pull down our drive at dusk, perched on the road or on the top of an old oak tree. It isn’t often, but when I get to witness his big wings spread and swoop silently away in the disruption of my headlights, I feel like a witness to a sacred thing.

And so, the declaration of the owl’s presence was the first thing I said to my husband when I woke up this morning. “The owl was hooting,” I declared before my eyes were even fully awake. He opened his arms up and I buried my head there for a few moments before pouring the kids their morning cereal.

I read somewhere that in many spiritual traditions, seeing an owl is a reminder to pay attention to your inner wisdom. In some cultures, an owl hoot is viewed as a sign of spiritual protection or a guide through personal transformation or spiritual growth. A little more digging into the symbolism of the owl uncovers a dozen differing and conflicting interpretations of the animal’s presence in your life, from a hoot at night signifying immanent death to an owl’s call predicting the gender of an unborn baby.

I don’t know what it means for me that I’ve been hearing the hoot of our owl more regularly lately, except maybe that I’m listening, and that it’s comforting to me somehow to be reminded we’re out here making our casseroles and snuggling under blankets alongside the wild things, especially when the world seems heavy.

When we built our house, we put in big glass doors that slide open to the tall hill and stock dam outside. Everyone that comes to visit will first take a stop by each door to look out, hands in their pockets, to see what might come over that big hill, or walk toward that water for a drink. They’ll press their faces closer to the glass and I’ll worry that they’ll notice how are deck needs to be redone, or the grill that needs to be cleaned, but they never do. They’re looking beyond that always, into the grass and the trees and the sky.

This morning the fog settled in the low spots and blocked the sunrise. The turkeys came down to wander through the swing set and pick at the old tomato plants in my garden.

Later a coyote will come up over that hill and slink down through the path in the oaks and ash. The doe and her two fawns will eat acorns by the tire swing and it’s warm today, so the squirrels will be out, fat and frantic and chattering in the treetops where our owl sleeps.

There was a time this was the only news a human could know, and in this they looked for more meaning. In all this evolution of language and technology, connectedness and schooling and travel and religion, still, where’s the answer?

What will become of us?I close my eyes and listen for the owl call.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

from The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems (Penguin, 2018)

The big chair and the tree

Posted on by
6

Have you ever experienced a moment in your life where, in the middle of it, you’ve heard the voice in your head say, this is it, this is a memory now? 

I have several I go back to now and again, but the recent quietly falling snow has reminded me of this one—my husband and I sitting together, squished side by side in the big leather chair with the big leather ottoman that we had purchased second hand from our landlord the year before. We had only been married a couple years, and we moved that big piece of furniture into our very first house with the level of optimism and delusion you only really get when you’re in your early twenties. And we had it big enough to think that buying a repossessed house that needed to be completely gutted to be livable was a choice that was going to get us closer to the big dream. Little did we know that gutting a house, while trying and failing to start a family, would threaten to gut us too, like the big dream getting the best of us before we even really got started. 

But at night, after coming home from full-time, adult jobs to a house full of ripped up carpet, tools on the countertops and unusable spaces, we would tinker a bit on a project, maybe I would go for a walk with the dogs, we would feed ourselves and then we would sit on that big chair together under a blanket and it would all feel manageable somehow. 

It was in this timeframe in our lives I had my first and only Christmas tree meltdown. The winters we lived in that big, broken house were relentless. The snow never stopped falling and it would drift so high up against the south side of the house that our dog would climb the bank to sit on the roof of our garage and keep watch on the neighborhood. Over those two years, we lost six pregnancies while we worked to renovate about the same number of rooms on that godforsaken house. All this is to say, those rooms and the rooms in my mind didn’t seem well-kept enough to deserve a tree, and so I procrastinated the whole thing, though my husband insisted. We needed a tree. And so he took me down to the grocery store parking lot where they bring trees in from places that can grow trees and we picked one that was perfect and alive and full and we put it in the back of my husband’s pickup and we brought it to the not-done-yet house and we moved our big chair over a bit and we put that tree by the big picture window that faced the street and I put on the bulbs and lights I bought new from Walmart. And they were pretty enough. It was all pretty enough, and sweet and what you do on Christmas. 

And I hated it anyway. Like, I had a total disdain for this tree. I remember it clearly, the sight of it made me angry. It made me cry and it made me frustrated and I tried to blame it on the ornaments with no sentimental value or the fact that it was leaning a bit even though it wasn’t leaning at all. And I remember my husband being so patient with me, but I was not patient at all. I was irrational and at the time I didn’t know why. I just thought I was going crazy in this house with endless wallpaper to peel and sawdust to sweep and this tree, with it’s stupid glass bulbs and not one single baby-hand-print-ornament hanging on it, was just standing there in this mess, mocking me. 

But that night, despite my unreasonable attitude, my husband and I sat in that big chair, his right arm under my back, my head on his shoulder, and we watched the twinkle of the tree against the window while outside the big flakes were falling under the warmth of the street lights. Everything was quiet then, even the thoughts in my head. They stopped too to tell me, this is it. This is what matters, right here squished in this chair. Girl, this is what peace is. Remember it. 

Last weekend I watched our daughters pile out of my dad’s big tractor and plop their little snow-suited bodies in the piles of big snow that had fallen on the ranch the past few days. They rode along with him as he cleared a path for our pickup to drive out in the West pasture to find a Christmas tree to cut and decorate. The sun had just come out and the sky was as blue as it can look, making that fresh snow sparkle and our daughters just ran like wild animals across that pasture while we examined the spindly wild cedars in the hills.

The sight of them, with my dad and my husband and the laughing was closer to heaven than it was to that grocery store parking lot I stood in all those years ago.

The tree we picked? Way less beautiful by magazine standards. And it’s filled with candy canes now, and homemade ornaments and it will probably fall over at some point because these trees usually do. And the years will pass and I know I won’t remember that tree, but that day? It will be with me forever.

And, well, I guess I just wanted to tell you that. I wanted to tell you that in case you needed to hear it.

Cold Weather

Posted on by
3

It’s officially the end of a season now. We often mark time out here based on our cattle
business, and last week we sold calves. Shipping Day. Weaning. These are the other
ways to say that our year of work spent caring for the cattle and their calves has come
to fruition. We spent the past few days riding every pasture to make sure every animal
was home safe. We rode through the first dusting of snow and a bitter wind, and then a
couple of really beautiful, perfectly chilly late autumn days kicking up some stray cattle
and mule deer from the draws, knowing in our bones winter is set to fully kick in any
moment now and send us for cover under our wool caps, coveralls and big coats.

When the truck came to load the calves on Tuesday we had picked out a little pen full of
heifers to keep on the place. We had done this sorting the night before to make things
go more smoothly on shipping morning only to wake up to find that of course they had
broken through the panel to get themselves mixed back up with the herd again. And so,
we did it again, sorting the calves from their mothers, and the steers from the heifers
and the best heifers from the bunch to keep. Both Edie and Rosie had picked the most
colorful from the lot as theirs to keep, a big black baldie with four white legs named
Socks and a red brockleface name Ginger who seems to be growing some horns. The
two stand out nice and dramatically from the herd of uniform black future mommas we
picked to keep building our herd and we’re all fine with it around here. It’s a family
operation, as it goes.

Which is pretty clear when you see us all filtering into Stockman’s sale barn, unloading
daughter after niece into the gravel parking lot, each one packing some sort of tote,
purse or backpack full of notebooks and art projects to take up to the steep seats and
entertain themselves while we wait for our pen of calves to come through.

“Look, there’s Eyelee!” Rosie hollered to her youngest cousin across the seats when the
heavy set of steers came through the ring. “Remember we named him that because he
has white eyelashes?” That’s the fun part about running Herford bulls on black cows, it’s
easier to name them and tell them apart. Emma, my five-year-old niece and lover of
every cow she ever met, wasn’t thrilled to see all our babies go. I’m thinking Rosie’s
explanation about what was happening from her seven-year-old perspective while
watching the calves get loaded on the trailer that morning probably didn’t help ease her
mind. It wasn’t that long ago when my husband and I had to haul both our daughters out
of the sale barn, bawling because they just realized the calves weren’t coming back
home, but it seems they’ve come to terms with the process these days.

And it’s nothing a little trip to the pizza and arcade place won’t fix, a little tradition my
family decided on a few years ago to celebrate making it to sale day. Because nothings
says success like wining 600 tickets on ski-ball and cashing them in for a long, neon
plastic hand with a lever that picks things up and allows you to bug your little sister and
mother from at least three feet away.

Anyway, all this is to say we’re grateful for another year on this place raising happy
healthy kids and a happy, healthy herd into a new season. This time of year definitely
makes me feel nostalgic, which usually, for me, results in a song. To honor that feeling, I
thought I’d share one I wrote while riding through that bitter wind a few weeks ago
alongside my husband who hadn’t yet switched from a cowboy hat to a wool cap. The
change has been made now, that’s for sure.

Stay warm. Stay cozy. Stay grateful.



Cold Weather
Summer is over, I heard him say
The breeze isn’t cool anymore, anyway
It’s hard and it’s bitter, it cuts through the layers
Of denim and leather and good-hearted neighbors

Summer is over, my fingers are froze
The horses in pastures are growing thick coats
You put yours on too and I’ll switch my straw hat
For the wool cap and new scarf you bought me for Christmas

You get the gate and I’ll keep the coffee on
I take mine with cream, you take yours black and strong
There’s things that I know, how it rains, then shines, then snows
For worse or for better, count on me, counting on you and cold weather

Summer is over and we’re getting older
And so are the kids used to ride on your shoulders
And now they are stretched long and lean like the blue stem
That bend in the wind trying to duck out of our hands

Summer is over, the furnace just kicked on
The dew on the grass turns to frost at the dawn
The flies on the windowsill got tired of spinning
Tell me, you think it’s the end or beginning?

The wheels of the past

Posted on by
1

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

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

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

Old Truck

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

October 9, 2010. Rearview

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

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

These days feel more like the clouds in the wind.

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

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

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

What’s Better?

Posted on by
1

What’s better than a slice of garden tomato on a slab of fresh, homemade toasted bread? With a little mayo mix spread and a sprinkle of salt? Well, maybe if you add a fresh cucumber to the mix. That’s the best. And crispy bacon too, if you have it, but you don’t need it. You really only need that fresh tomato and that crusty bread.

What’s better than a fluffy, tiny kitten snuggled in the nook of your arm on a rainy Sunday when the tasks you had to do have been done or saved for later and the only real pressing issue is this nap you’re about to take with this kitten purring and safe. And maybe it’s quiet in the house, but maybe you have kids and so the chatter of their pretend play is in the background as your eye lids get heavy. You might only drift off for a moment, but everyone’s home. Everyone’s safe. It’s Sunday. You can relax. What’s better?

What’s better than soup on the stove? The kind you put together with the person you love hovering in the kitchen to tell you about their day, or tease you a bit about the mess, or add a few more sprinkles of garlic and another bay leaf when you turn your back. What’s better than the smell of a recipe you’ve made together for over a decade, knowing you all love it. Knowing you’re all about to dig in and be full. Maybe adding a cheese sandwich, I guess. That could make it better. But you don’t need it. The soup stands on its own.

What’s better than your old ranch dog sitting next to you on the bench seat  of an old pickup in the crisp cool fog of a fall morning as the sun is starting to appear?

What’s better than that dog eagerly awaiting the work ahead, coming to the call to push the cattle out of the brush or pull the strays back in with the herd? What’s better? Maybe that old ranch dog gets let in the house by your young daughters to be called up on the couch to watch “Peter Pan.”  And he won’t look you in the eye when you admire the scene because he’s nervous that you might blow his cover as a house dog now and make him go out. But you don’t. You couldn’t. He’s a good boy, and not too stinky tonight. He’s mellowed out with his old age, and he’s earned it. He sleeps in your daughter’s bed now and you can’t help but notice the funny juxtaposition of his job as ruthless cattle hound by day and stuffed animal at night. This dog too, contains multitudes. What’s better?

What’s better than laying down next to your seven-year-old at bedtime and listening to her read you a chapter out of her favorite book? What’s better than her little voice swelling with inflection as she notices the exclamation points and quotation marks and so she becomes the character. It’s been a long day, but her bed is cozy and you drift off a bit until she stumbles with a word and you wake up, sleepily correcting her. She shuts off the bedside lamp because her eyes are sleepy too and in the dark she asks you a question about the stars that you can’t really answer because who really knows? Who really knows the depth of the universe and if there is anyone else out there, among those stars, who might be wondering too…

What’s better? What’s better?