I am behind on posting columns for the past two weeks, and so today you get a two-in-one post to get us back on the rails!
Hope it’s as pretty where you are as it is here with the colors changing and the rain falling and the weather cooling down.
Right Place, Right Time
September 19, 2026
Last week I played music in a little park by the lake about two hours from the ranch. I was supposed to bring a sound system with me, which I didn’t realize until I got there and there was no sound system. But I did bring along my dad and my steele guitar playing friend who, luckily, lived close enough to go grab his system from his house. And when I realized I also forgot my guitar strap and my capo on my kitchen counter, my dad came in clutch with extras and the two guys combined saved the day.
Forgetting something as pertinent to a gig as a sound system is not something I’ve ever done. The fact that I was so confident in my decision not to bring one sort of had me on edge. The fact that it all worked out in the end thanks to those around me that had exactly what we needed, got me thinking about all the times in life we find ourselves in predicaments that can only be solved by the good fortune of having access to the right people at the exact right time.
Like when I got stuck behind a wreck in traffic on my way to town to pick Edie up from kindergarten and it was clear not only was I going to be late, but I was going to be very, very late. I was able to dial my friend and within five minutes she was there, saving the day and the kindergarten tears from falling.
Or like when my husband’s pickup recently broke down on the way home from town and his business partner just happened to be driving by pulling Chad’s flatbed trailer.
Or when my uncle was on his way to town to replace a broken toilet and stopped by the house to say hi first, only to discover that my husband had a brand new, extra toilet just hanging out in the garage.
Or when we were hosting a big, nationally touring country act in town and the stage management needed a drum stand in like five minutes and the local music teacher had just bought a new one–and she lived two blocks away from the stage–so she just walked it right over.
I’m writing this in the passenger seat of my car as my husband drives us back east to Rochester so I can get my first scan since treatment at Mayo Clinic. I’m confident we will find that the tumors are gone or shrinking nicely and we’ll head back home with good news, but I’m still annoyed we have to go at all. I mean, I’m missing Rosie’s fun run and Edie’s basketball game and Rosie’s field trip to the Dinosaur museum. And the girls aren’t happy about it either, a little residual panic from the last time I was there for so long. But this morning as we were packing up to leave, my husband looked at his phone and laughed. “You didn’t tell me it was a RUN!” my sister-in-law’s message read. She had enthusiastically said yes to Chad’s request to join Rosie on the track that morning (he could not handle her disappointed little face.) “She just LAPPED me!”
“Aunt of the year,” I wrote to a woman who found herself jogging with a hundred third graders at 8:30 in the morning in 40 degrees.
Day. Saved.
I am an independent person. Some could look at it as a strength in character, but often in my life it’s a quality that has been one of my biggest failings. As a kid, when someone would try to pick me up for a hug or to help me get more quickly from point A to point B, I would protest, “Put me down, I’m not a doll!” And then flee the scene.
My nature, when I’m sick, is to suffer in silence, away from people. If I were an animal, I would hole up and probably just die. And it’s a little bit that I hate to be a burden, and a little bit that I feel a need to regulate the room or the situation. If I’m uncomfortable or stressed, it could make you uncomfortable or stressed, and that stresses me out. And this is dumb, because this is not the way humans are supposed to exist in this world. And it’s not how I see it as someone on the other side of the help situation. One of my favorite things in the world is when someone needs a tissue or a wet wipe or a mint or a pocketknife and I am the woman who has all those things in her purse. My husband’s whole life thesis is being the guy ready for anything and willing to help in a crisis or inconvenience of any size and it’s the thing I love the most about him.
I walked into my office the other day and the chair that I ordered the week before had been put together for me when I was out. My coworker had her husband do it, because he loves that sort of thing, and as a person who hates to follow directions and also hates those tiny allen wrenches, it was as if he had hung the moon for me. And maybe this example isn’t as much about saving the day as it is about just doing something nice for someone. There are so many of you out there who operate like this, just going around making life easier for others intentionally or by being at the right place at the right time and willing to help.
Anyway, as we’re pulling off on the interstate I guess I just felt compelled to refect on the feeling of “phew,” and the sentiment of “thank you.”
See you back at the ranch!
To Disappear is Sometimes the Dream
September 26, 2026
“Do you think I could make it to the grain bins and back before it gets pitch black?” I asked my husband as I scooped the last of the rice and chicken off my plate an into my mouth. The rest of my family was lingering at the table, poking at a supper that was a little sub-par and reaching the limit of a long day. It was a little after 8 pm and supper was later than I wanted it to be, but the sun setting so quickly had me sort of shocked and frazzled.
In the summer and spring months a walk after supper was no problem. We could eat at 10 pm and I would still have time for an hour-long stroll to the fields. But it’s late September now and it was staring me down and ruining my plan to re-gain my sanity before bedtime.
“No,” my husband replied. “You’ll definitely be walking in the dark.”
I jumped up, put my dish in the sink and pulled on my shoes anyway. I’ve never been the kind of kid who’s afraid of the dark and so out I went, the three dogs jumping along in front of me, just as excited as I was to not skip this part of the day. We were a little past what the professionals like to call ‘Golden Hour,’ the time in the evening when the sinking sun casts a perfect golden hue on everything under its shine. We were well into the sunset portion of the evening, the time when the muskrats come out from wherever muskrats go, to swim in the stock dam. The time when the bats start to dive and swoop. The time when, if those dogs get too far ahead of you on the path, they will disappear entirely into the horizon.
To disappear entirely into the horizon. That’s nightfall in the country and it holds with it a certain type of feeling that’s hard to explain. It’s the feeling you get when you park your car after a long drive in the middle of the night and you shut the door behind you and look up at the sky and notice the quiet twinkling of the stars, or, maybe if you’re lucky, the northern lights. It’s 3 am and no one is out and you remember the times when you were a kid and you fell asleep in the backseat of your parents’ car, and you woke up when the engine cut, but you pretended to sleep anyway so your dad would carry you in. And you opened your eyes to see those same stars in the same type of quiet night and somehow, all these years later, you feel like that kid in the night under those stars again. I guess that’s how I would describe the feeling.
I was only out walking on the field trails for about fifteen minutes before the sun shifted entirely below that horizon and the dogs and I faded with it. Just a moment before I looked up and spotted a large mule deer on the skyline. His tall rack reached to the sky, and he was backlit by the last moment of yellow, a black dramatic silhouette staring right at something moving in the distance (that something was me) before bouncing off over the hill to disappear too.
Yesterday I got the news that my cancer is shrinking, has shrunk, will shrink more. We found out when we were in Mayo last week, but we needed one more confirmation to make it official. My husband sat next to me in the car as we were parked in the Walmart parking lot on our way through one town to get to the next for a meeting across the state. We video conferenced in for a quick confirmation. You look good. Things look good. Cancer is shrinking, has shrunk, will shrink more. See you in three months for another follow up, goodbye. We ended the call and continued driving east.
“It feels like maybe that news needed a bit more fanfare,” I said as we moved down the street a bit.
“Like, what do you mean?’ my husband asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. It was the same feeling I felt when I completed my last chemo treatment and I was alone with my little pin and too introverted to ask someone to take my picture. The moment felt at least selfie-worthy, but I wasn’t in the mood.
“Maybe a cake or something?” I laughed.
“Well, there’s Cashwise, want me to pull in?” he joked.
No. No I didn’t, I realized. I didn’t want a cake or a party or a fuss really. I just wanted to go about our day, make it to our meeting on time and home that night because we had work in the morning. I wanted to watch that moment, that tumor, that blip, shrink and disappear into the horizon of my life. To disappear is sometimes the dream.
The nights will be longer now as the sun sets sooner, but it’s ok. I’ve never been the kind of kid who’s afraid of the dark.
