Tag Archives: vacation

Country kids go to town

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When we were kids, my little sister loved to go to town for one reason.

Sidewalks.

It seems silly, but, of course, we didn’t have sidewalks on the ranch. Every path was either made of crumbling and sharp pink scoria or dirt turned to mud. We weren’t much for rollerbladers or skateboarders out here, but we got pretty good at our bikes, because the alternative hurt quite a bit.

A few weeks ago we brought our daughters down to Arizona to meet up with my parents who are seeing who they might become as snowbirds. After last winter, my mom got online and committed the whole month of February to a house with a pool by a golf course in Mesa. And my dad wondered out loud for months what a person does in the desert for 29 whole days without cow chores.

Turns out for the first week you cuss that you’ve arrived during the only time it ever rains in the dessert. And the next week you grocery shop for the grandkids’ arrival and text the pool guy cause a 62 degree swimming pool is not necessarily “heated.” Not by Arizona standards anyway.

But it seemed like it was just fine for the North Dakota kids who packed their shorts sandals ad swimming suits and jumped right in, committed to summertime the way all North Dakota kids are when the temperature hits above 30 degrees after forty months of winter. White pasty legs be darned right alongside hypothermia. We’re on vacation people.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this as we arrived home a few days ago and got right back to the grind of home improvement (a.k.a trying to finish our three-year house addition project by laying flooring for days) and cow feeding and kid’s schedules. Funny how cold 20 degrees feels when you’ve been in the dessert for five days and know the real world awaits. How quickly we become acclimated to a new life where we are the family who lives in an adobe style house, doesn’t own coats, and walks to the coffeeshop in the morning. On sidewalks.

The first thing Rosie did when she got to that dessert house is assessed her boundaries. Because a kid who’s growing up on a ranch doesn’t really have many. For as far as they can see, the landscape is theirs. So, naturally, Rosie wondered why she couldn’t cross the fence into the golf course and check out the geese alongside the water fountain. And why she couldn’t play in the neighbor’s driveway. Or go and pet the other neighbor’s pit bull or run way ahead on our walks the way she does on the ranch, singing and spinning and paying no attention to the idea that a thousand lives are driving and living behind doors and windshields and fences alongside her. In our world, those thousands of lives she’s dancing by are living out in the open, under her feet, above her head and all around her.

It’s a strange thing to watch your country kids try to make sense of a city. And it’s another strange thing to be a country parent trying to take advantage of every morsel of experience we could find in that city for the kids’ sake. In the five days we spent in Mesa, we hit up the aquarium, the butterfly exhibit, the zoo and a little street fair. And in between we watched our kids swim in the 62-degree pool while we lounged in the tropical 70-degree sun, unashamed by our own glowing white (and thoroughly sun screened) limbs.

For us, simply being together in the warm sun was a luxury. Add some chips and salsa to that chilly pool and we were living the dream. If I asked the kids their favorite part of the vacation, that’s what they will tell me. The pool and the airplane ride. And maybe next the part where a butterfly landed on Rosie’s shoulder, and another on Edie’s shoe. And touching the stingrays at the aquarium. And then the weird monkeys red butts.

And the sidewalks.

Prairie People Hit the Beach

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Do you know what it takes to get out of the great white north in March?

Ask anyone who tried it the past couple weeks of spring break and they will tell you it was an act of God. Some of them never made it out.

Listen to the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

We were the lucky ones (cue dramatic music). Because for some reason our tactic of driving more north to Canada to catch a flight to Mexico actually worked. I mean, the flight was delayed ten hours, but the promise a 100 degree temperature change and unlimited access to tequila kept our spirits up. And also, not one soul left behind in North Dakota will tolerate any complaints about a March trip to Mexico in the middle of the blizzard, so I wouldn’t dare. Didn’t even want to send a picture of me blinding the country with my neon winter white ranch kid legs blazing in the sun. My plan was to just slip quietly away with my husband and my sunscreen and giant hat to pretend for a week that the only care we have in the world is how many more chips and guacamole we could possibly eat before it was time to eat an actual meal.

Traded our wool caps for vacation hats

I turn 40 this year. My husband had his turn in September. Mexico with friends was a gift we gave ourselves for making it this far. And now I’m scheming on what excuse I can come up with to do the same thing next year. Although maybe the only excuse a person needs to get away from it all is that, in the end, it makes you more tolerable to the people who have to live with you.

I will also take a moment here to plead my case for a week’s paid vacation in a tropical place for every person who has had to endure this forty-five month North Dakota winter. I don’t know who is going to pay for it, but I’m sure we can work it out in a bake sale or something…

So that’s where we’ve been, my husband and I. We left our kids behind with the in-laws to do things kids do with grandparents—bake cookies, eat cookies, bake cupcakes, eat cupcakes, snuggle, watch movies, swim in the big community pool and, apparently, partake in major shopping sprees. When they Facetimed us to model their new outfits, with a margarita in my hand and my feet in the pool it was hard to tell among us who was having more fun–and I threw my body down a 98 foot waterslide. In hindsight, the waterslide was a terrible idea, but I’ll never admit it, not to my kids anyway.

Oh, vacation life! Where nobody knows you except the yahoos you brought with you and so somehow you can convince yourself that you are the person who thinks 98-foot waterslides are fun and not just an un-prescribed enema/neti pot treatment.

In Mexico, it could not be clearer that the lot of us were northern folk. With one half of our crew of 14 residing in Canada and the other from North Dakota, our combined complexions lounging in the pool could likely be seen from space. And if that didn’t give it away, one of us puking on the 20-minute ferry ride to the island probably did. We are prairie people. The only waves we have up here are made of grain.

But in Mexico, we’re different. In Mexico, I scuba dive.

Yup. Just give me a 20-minute lesson on land and I’m expert enough to put my face underwater and not panic. And by not panicking I mean managing only to do the one thing required of me to not die while scuba diving and that is to breathe. Need me to actually swim, or push that button that releases air to send me up or down, or look at fish or pose for a picture or not float to the surface and need to be pulled back down? Can’t do it. Working on breathing here.

Oh, if just breathing were the only task. That’s the power of vacation mode.

If you need me I’m back home now, eating noodle soup, re-acclimating to my natural habitat and making plans for the bake sale.

When ranch kids hit the big town

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Rosie and Edie on the set of “Don’t let the pigeon ride the bus”

We’re back at the ranch after week in Mexico and I’m working on getting acclimated to my natural habitat. The shock of 85 degrees to -4 has yet to wear out, even though I’ve eaten knoephla soup for supper two days in a row. Oh, how quickly I can become a beach person.

Anyway, because of our hiatus, I’m a little behind on sharing the weekly column and podcast. Chad and I plan to sit down and record a bit tonight.

The weekend before we left on vacation we took the girls to the big town across the state to visit friends and take them to a theater production. I don’t know why I decided this was something we had to do, but it turned out it was something we had to do. Sometimes you just need to make plans to break out of the ordinary routine and give your kids some new experiences. Especially on the edge of an eternal winter.

Anyway, this column is a reflection on what it means to take our little ranch girls to the big town. Turns out it’s a lot of time on the escalator.

The dangers of taking the country kid to town

We spent last weekend in the big town. I decided to make a singing trip a family trip all the way across the state, which happened to be right on the heels of one major winter storm and at the helm of another because it’s March and that’s what March does up north. And the cows aren’t having calves yet, so we took the chance to get away.

Also, lately the girls have been asking when we can go to the beach, and the closest we can get right now is meeting friends at a hotel pool in Fargo where there was 47 feet of snow piling up outside and more promised for Sunday.

And they were thrilled about it. Truly. Isn’t that the best thing about kids? It takes such simple efforts to make them happy. A promise of ice cream. Pizza for supper. A quarter in the gumball machine. Going up and down the escalator 55 times.

Seriously. I think the level of excitement about the escalator is the reddest of flags when identifying a rural/country kid in the big town. We also rode the store’s Ferris Wheel, but the escalator won in popularity. Rosie rode it so many times that her big sister Edie started to be seriously concerned about the rules. Could she get kicked out for shenanigans like this? Are you allowed to go up and then immediately down? Is there a limit on escalator rides? Does she know she’s starting to get embarrassing?

So went all of Edie’s 7-year-old concerns about her little sister’s lack of decorum in public. It’s like the big sister took a trip to civilization and realized that, perhaps, her little sister wasn’t equipped for these types of outings considering she wasn’t yet civilized herself.

So we took them to the roller-skating rink. Because etiquette goes out the window when you’re fighting for your life with eight tiny wheels strapped to your feet. And in case you’re wondering, country kids don’t know how to roller-skate due to the lack of available paved surfaces.

My kids took to the wood floor with all the confidence and grace of baby zoo giraffes on a frozen lake while their professional Rollerblading town friend and my husband spent the majority of the two-hour rink time holding hands and elbows and dragging our daughters back up on their wobbly, wheeled feet.

Which reminded me of the only time I ever roller-skated in my life down at my cousins’ ranch on the South Dakota border. Between the four of us, we had one pair of real, leather roller-skates with the orange wheels. They were at least four sizes too big, but it didn’t matter. We would take turns, two at a time, gliding around in circles on one skate on the small slab of concrete outside of their garage, skinning our bare knees there as we developed confidence entirely too quickly for the make-shift sport.

Needless to say, I didn’t step foot in a roller-skate that day. At this age, I have to seriously consider the repercussions of breaking a hip.

But my girls? After two Slurpies, three pieces of pizza, and five games of skee ball on the way out the door, they deemed themselves experts and have decided they’d like to live in Fargo now. Where they have roller rinks.

And Target.

Oh, yeah, Edie decided she’d really just like to live in Target, and now I’m wondering how I’ve failed as a ranch mom, because surely now they’re going to leave me for the big cities with roller rinks and escalators, and I’m going to have to follow them and live in an RV in the local KOA to have a proper relationship with my grandkids.

Anyyywaaayyy …

My activity of choice for the weekend was less physical and more theater.

Edie’s been reading “The Pigeon Series” books by Mo Willems, and my cousin (the one with the roller-skates) just happened to be directing the play “Don’t Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus” that weekend. So we went, and it was adorable, and now Edie wants to live in Target and be an actress, and Rosie is so brave she goes down hotel pool waterslides backwards and headfirst even though Edie tells her it’s explicitly, most likely against the rules, and so now they’re both surely going to leave me for the warmer weather and waterslides in LA.

But first we had to get back to the ranch, which was completely impossible on Sunday because when you live in North Dakota, you shouldn’t go anywhere but Jamaica in March. And so we were forced to spend one more evening in the oasis of the hotel pool. As I drove us white-knuckled back west for five hours on icy and drifty roads, I wondered if maybe my girls were on to something. I mean, escalators are pretty fun.

But then, so are baby calves.

See you at the beach.

On Marriage and Montana

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Dear Husband,

Listen to the podcast where Jessie sits down with Chad to visit about marriage in the thick of it and to hear the audio version of the column. Subscribe on Anchor, Spotify or Apple Podcast

Last weekend when we were heading across the North Dakota, Montana borderline. Looking out the windows as the landscape turned from badlands to plains, we admired the green grass and marveled at how the big Yellowstone and Missouri rivers were pushing their banks to the limits at every turn. It’s that season. The snow melt from the mountains and the rains reminding us that there are very few ways to tame the water when it needs to rage. It’s out of the river’s control really. So many outside forces at play…

The night before we packed up our pickup camper with my guitars and boots, bedding and snacks, lawn chairs and coolers, you worked until dark tearing down an old garage at a neighbor’s place.

With heavy equipment and your muscles, you wanted to leave a clean slate in that yard before we dropped or daughters at their grandparents’ place and you drove with me to sit in the audience while I played songs for a mountain town, who, just days before, was on the edge of disaster as their creek flooded and took houses and streets with it.

But you wouldn’t have known it that weekend on the main streets of this small mountain town. The restaurants were full, the shops were stocked and the doors to the bars and venues were swung open so that you could hear musicians like me strumming guitars and singing songs about hope and loss and family and these untamable rivers and love, of course.

I drank tequila after the shows and you talked about ranching with anyone who asked because your hat and the way you lean so self-assured with one shoulder against the wall in the back gave you away.

Dear Husband, you were there with me so I suppose I don’t have to tell you all this, but I guess I want to remember the way you’ve always let me know that my dream is your dream too. And so you carry my guitar and you sell my albums in the back and you grab the things I forgot, the cord and the picks and the lists and you tell me good job even if maybe it wasn’t my best job.

Husband, we haven’t been away together, just the two of us, in a while. The kids and the ranch and the chores and the work fill our days and nights like the melting snow from the mountains floods the river and so we think we have no choice but to keep rushing, keep pushing, keep flowing harder to keep on our feet, to keep between the banks.  

The last time we slept next to this unruly creek at the edge of this mountain town we were in your dad’s old Ford pickup with a broken AC and a 1970’s pop-up camper in the box and I had never really been in the mountains so you were taking me there.

We were just kids then and I remember hoping that it could be like this forever, you in the driver’s seat, me singing along to the radio and helping us find our way. 20 years later, on the very same route, you turned our pickup off the interstate and told me you missed me and I cried. I cried because I knew it. I missed you too, in the kind of way that you’re right there but I can’t get to you. I cried because didn’t we know better?

That weekend I sang a love song I wrote before the kids came, when we were younger and building a life, not knowing then that the tools will always be out on the kitchen table, we just need to remember to pick them up. And I don’t have many love songs, I’m not sure why. I’ve been in love with you much longer than I haven’t in this life. On that stage, I realized that’s probably why. Sometimes we admire the big oak we’ve grown, but don’t thank the strong branches for the leaves and the shade and for hanging on to help weather the storms.

So Husband, we may be that great big river right now, running and rushing and picking things up along the way, but along the banks of that creek that weekend I made a quiet promise to myself not to wait for disaster. And I promise you I’m not waiting any longer for the sun to dry off of the mountaintops and force us to slow down. Can we promise to be a different kind of river?  Let’s find a flat meadow and spread out and slow down and be grateful anytime we can, but maybe most importantly when we think we can’t.

Dear Husband, I have plenty more love songs to write.

Love,

Your wife  

To get away, and be glad to be back…

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It was spring break and so we let loose two little pale-as-our-snow Northern prairie girls in Florida. They swam with dolphins, caught a lizard, came face to face with a couple of sea otters, snorkeled and rode a roller coaster and jumped in the backyard pool approximately 3 million times, which is about equal to the amount of times they yelled, “Watch this!”

And so we watched. We, the parents who clearly overpacked, realizing our two little girls had no intentions of ever removing their swimming suits. And so we had to drag them out of that pool every night for the entire seven-day vacation, wondering if fingers can be eternally pruned. Or as Edie used to say, “sprinkly.”

We got back to the ranch and woke up to the official first day of spring. Which doesn’t really mean that it’s going to feel like spring around here, except now we can leave the house in the light and come home in the light and therefore we can see the light at the end of the winter tunnel. And that’s why Northerners need places like Florida. So much so that in the mix of a bazillion people at SeaWorld, Rosie spotted one of her preschool friends.

And then, the next day, we ran into folks from a neighboring town and so Disney is right, it’s a small world after all. Especially when all the frozen people are planning to head south at the same time.

What a blessing it is to get away for a bit. This vacation was one that was supposed to kick off, quite literally, the day the world shut down in 2020. It was a gift from my husband’s family, the kind that has aunts, cousins, sisters, brothers, grandkids and Gramma and Grandpa scheduling time to live in a house together for a week and do nothing but the fun things. Who would have thought that it would take two entire years to actually get us there? The last time we did something like this as an entire family, my daughters were just a dream and my now-teenage nieces and nephew were much shorter, much younger and found me less embarrassing.

Which I proved wasn’t such an unreasonable sentiment when I took that nephew along to help me deliver our leftover boxes of beer and soda to the neighbors at 11 p.m. the night before we left our Airbnb because I “would just hate to see it go to waste.”

Those neighbors opened the door slowly to a woman in PJs and humidity hair and they looked as cautious and confused as they should have been and suddenly I became overly aware of my nerdy North Dakotan accent. I’ve never felt more Midwestern in my life, except for moments later when the poor woman finally took the boxes and began to close the door and I couldn’t stop myself from popping my head in to elaborate: “There’s just a few beers, some pop, I mean soda, and a juice box or two, you gotta dig for those, sorry… you know, we heard you back in the pool and thought you might put it to use. Hate to see it go to waste! Enjoy! Enjoy your vacation!” Because when in doubt, just keep talking. That seems to be my motto. Lord help me.

My nephew couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He literally ran himself into our glass patio door and we both laughed harder than we ever have together. He said it was his favorite memory of Florida, beating the dolphins and his shark-fishing excursion, me embarrassing myself.

And isn’t that how it goes if you do it right? My dad asked Rosie, my 4-year-old, what was her favorite part of the vacation and she said it was swimming in the backyard pool and staying in the same house as all her cousins and her Nana and Papa. No dolphin jump or roller coaster ride or new princess outfit complete with a sword beats any of that, the actual time spent. Sometimes we just need a few plane rides and a four-hour wait in the rental car pickup line to get us there.

And now we’re home. And it’s spring. And soon the calves will be born and the crocuses will bloom and my daughters will be riding their bikes on the lone piece of pavement on the ranch, fingers fully dried out and “unsprinkled.” To be gone long enough to miss it. To be away in paradise and be glad to be back, well, what a gift. What a blessing.

We’re Island People now…

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A few weeks ago we attempted a vacation with our friends in the Dominican. I spent the days leading up to it doing the laundry, packing myself, packing the girls, making work arrangements, avoiding trying on my swimsuits and locating and managing all the things you need to locate and manage in order to be gone for a week. On Wednesday I finally dropped the girls off at the inlaws’, met my husband at home, put the finishing touches in my suitcase, shut off the lights and locked the doors behind us and by the time we reached the mailbox we got an email telling us our flight was cancelled.

Blizzard.

No flights leaving North Dakota ever for the rest of our lives.

Or at least it seemed like it. No flights to the Dominican anyway, not until the following week, no matter what magic we tried or what town we were willing to drive to.

It’s a long story from there that continues with our friends in the Dominican on Thursday and my husband and I in Jamaica, alone, on Saturday afternoon and ends with us staring at a road closed sign at 2:30 am a week later in our attempt to get home.

Turns out it’s impossible to leave and impossible to return around here.

Coming Home: We’re Island People Now
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There have been plenty of times I’ve felt like I like I live in the middle of nowhere. Like, every time I’m out of milk and a trip to the store and back takes me, at minimum, two hours.

But when you live 30 miles from the nearest grocery store, you never just pick up milk. And you never only go to the grocery store. Because you made the trip, you might as well hit up Tractor Supply Co. and then the post office and your sister’s to get back your casserole dish and then maybe the pharmacy and then Mom’s store to see what’s on sale…

The point is, around here, there’s no such thing as an easy trip. Anywhere.

And last week, at the lonely and desperate hour of 2:30 am, my husband and I were reminded again of that harsh reality. After a total of 10 hours in a vehicle, 20 hours in airports, 14 hours on planes, 10 days away from home and 30,000 hours on the phone with the travel company discussing the impossibility of getting from North Dakota to the Dominican Republic like we planned six months prior, my husband and I were finally staring down the last 15 miles that stood between us and our own beds.

The only thing left to do was move the “ROAD CLOSED” barricade stretching across the dark highway and magically turn our pickup into a boat to float across the Little Missouri River that was currently and conveniently flowing right over the Lost Bridge that, prior to this point in all of our 30-plus years, has never been under water.

Yeah, there’s a first time for everything, but if you think we were coming home from our first trip to the Dominican Republic, you would be mistaken. Because when you live in the middle of nowhere North Dakota and you plan a vacation to a tropical destination in March — or any month between September and May — there is a 70 to 95 percent chance that there will be a snowstorm with a clever name scheduled to fly in and ruin your plans.

So while our friends caught their direct flight to the Dominican Republic from Canada, where apparently everything including the weather is nicer, my husband and I rerouted our plans to Jamaica. And it took three days and a lost bag to get from here to there, but we made it to the beach.

We just had to make it to a beach. I mean, I suggested we just forget it and go back home and use our time off to work on the ranch or the house or our taxes, but when I couldn’t get my husband’s sobbing under control, I decided on Plan C. It could have been me that was crying, but I can’t remember.

ARCHIVE: Read more of Jessie Veeder’s Coming Home columns

All memories of my former life were wiped clean as soon as I face-planted on the lawn chair on the beach and woke up with the resort logo imprinted on my cheek and a sudden craving for mimosas, which became a steady staple in my diet as the newest resident of Jamaica.

Turns out I’m way cooler in Jamaica.

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I read books. I jump off cliffs.

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I’m a bridesmaid in a wedding for a woman I just met.

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I eat out every night. I nap.

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I’m friends with people from across the globe. I get massages. I jump off cliffs.

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I hang out under waterfalls.

Ok, maybe I’m not that cool, but regardless I stared down that two-hour detour at the bridge that morning clinging on to Jamaica-me for dear life, milling over the repercussions of calling my in-laws to tell them to pack the girls and meet us at the airport because we’re island people now.

Which is sort of true for our real-life anyway, given the river situation.

Oh well. In only a few months, you couldn’t convince me anywhere else in the middle of nowhere is better than our middle of nowhere.

I think I’ll just stock my fridge with Champagne and get a floaty for the stock dam and home will be about as close to paradise as you can get. Happy spring!

Who are we without our memories?

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Happy summer everyone. We took as much of a hiatus from real life as we could over the 4th of July week to head to my grandparent’s lake cabin in Minnesota like we do every year over the holiday.

This year was pretty special as more family joined us from across the midwest and my two-year old had a blast following the big kids around the lake.

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Great Grandpa and Grandma with all ten of their great grandchildren

I’m not going to lie, traveling with two young kids and staying in a hotel for night upon night is no joke.

Kids like schedules. But there are so many reasons it’s worth it to spend a week having donut holes for breakfast, skipping naps for more swim time, serving popsicles before supper and wiping the sand and grass off of their little feet before zipping up their jammies and flopping down for bed sunkissed, dirty and exhausted from fun at 10 pm.

My only wish is that my girls could remember every minute of the weekend spent with this family, especially these special moments…

Last week, Edie caught her first fish off of her great-grandparents’ dock on a little lake in Minnesota.

After her daddy helped her pull that bluegill out of the water using the little orange fishing pole with the button reel that has likely caught many grandkids’ first fishes, she inspected its puckered mouth, ran her fingers over its scales, looked toward the shore and yelled at the top of her lungs, “Gramma Ginny, look! I caught a fish!”

Gramma Ginny is Edie’s 80-something great-grandmother who is known to her family as a woman who loves to play bridge, has read thousands of books, is probably magic because she can float in the water for hours without paddling and refuses to look on anything but the bright side in life. This is a quality that is seeing her and her family through the difficult and inevitable process of time that has taken her quick wit and memory, but has not broken her spirit.

Edie calls gramma Ginny her best friend and like any best friend, she was thrilled by her little granddaughter’s first catch. I watched them celebrate with a lump in my throat wishing time would stop for a moment.

Edie, don’t get bigger just yet. Gramma, don’t get older. Warm sun, don’t go down on Lake Melissa today; just hang in the sky a little longer and shine on my mom in her swimsuit as she floats out to the sailboat with her sisters. Don’t set on these cousins getting to know one another and growing up too fast. Don’t stop our laughing and start our worries. Not yet. Hold still now, time.

“It’s a beautiful day. A good day,” said Gramma Ginny over and over as all 10 of her great-grandchildren, from 7 months to 14 years old, navigated their relationships to one another over games of beanbag toss, squirt gun fights and kayak trips to the lily pads.

“Yes, yes it is Gramma,” we would reply, all of us reliving old memories of swim lessons from aunties, rainy day card games and mosquito slapping by the campfire, wishing we didn’t know that our matriarch’s memories slip in and out like waves as she holds on tight to her husband’s hand and wades into the familiar feel of the cool lake water towards her grown daughters with children and grandchildren of their own.

I looked at my grandparents and thought about the 60-some years of a life they’ve lived hand in hand like that and I wondered how it is that I want to stop the very thing that has given them so much adventure and fulfillment and love.

What do we know if we can’t remember it all?

Who are we without our recollections, our stories? Our memories?

We are my 2-year-old daughter, fresh and eager to discover a mysterious new world, and her great-grandmother, two best friends celebrating a catch in a special moment on a good and beautiful day.

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Taking time before time takes us away…

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It’s been over a week since we got back to the real world after the vacation Husband and I took just the two of us, and boy did we get back to reality. Since then we’ve had a family reunion event, work catch-up, Little Sister’s baby shower,

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my in-law’s anniversary party, branding…

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and zero time to unpack.

You should see my room.

No. You shouldn’t. I don’t even want to see my room.

Yes, summer’s arrived in full swing in our neck of the woods and so has begun the mad rush to fit in as much work and fun as we can in the 90 days we get of summer.

I love this time of year. Already the heat has sent Edie, Sylas my niece and me to the pool in town on opening day to take a dip,

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running through the sprinkler, filling the baby pool, planting flowers, riding horses 8480C446-7BEA-43BF-BB3E-85162447DB0Dand all of the summer things I envisioned for us this year. It’s going to be a good one.

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Now if we could just get some rain while we anxiously await the birth of the new addition to the clan. Little Sister is due in about two weeks, but just to freak her out I like to tell her she is for sure going early.

Any minute now…

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She protests. But as she’ll soon find out, in motherhood, it’s best to just surrender the whole illusion of control thing.

It’s one of the reasons parents need vacations most of all.

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I wish my parents had time for more of them when we were growing up. I’m sure we gave them plenty of reasons to want to leave us with the grandparents.

We’re just lucky we got the chance before this happens…

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Edie’s only child status expires December 8th…

Coming Home: Time away together is an investment in each other

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We said we would take a honeymoon later. I was on the verge of turning 23, out of college a couple years and on the road with my music. He was on the verge of 24 and climbing oil derricks, seven days on, seven days off and more if he could.

We were on a mission, on a roll, in love but on our own schedules.

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We’d go when we had a bit more money.

We’d go in the winter when we craved the heat.

We’d go before the first baby.

We’d go. We promised we’d go.

But when you’re almost 23 and almost 24 you know nothing about time and how it sneaks up on you like the white streaks of hair around your temples or that old shoulder injury that grabs you when you’ve been fencing all day, and then suddenly you’re 10 years older and wiser, perhaps only because that’s what time forces on you.

And so we finally went. Last week, to honor those 10 years, we dug out our swimming suits, sent the toddler to her cousins’ and hopped a plane for a resort by the ocean, just the two of us, for the first time.

Oh, we’ve done plenty of traveling — work trips across the globe, family trips to the mountains, road trips and camping trips and trips to warm places with friends — but it was time to designate one of those tropical post-car trips for ourselves.

And I’m not saying you need to take vacations to places with sandy beaches and palm trees to stay in love, but I am saying it helps.

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To see your man out of his element with the sole mission to relax, have fun and drink rum is like being reintroduced to the person you fell in love with before you had a toddler and cattle and a mortgage on a partially-finished house.

But if you hate long airplane rides or prefer, like one of my cowboy friends, that the air doesn’t get the chance to touch your legs outside your Wranglers, I’ve decided now that we’re back, sunburned and broke, that all you really need is a few days away somewhere.

Because if you don’t invest in each other, who will?

And part of the investment is remembering why you chose one another for this business of life in the first place. Funny how uprooting, for even a short amount of time, can help put it all in its place. I think it’s the daydream moments you get when you’re doing unfamiliar things, like swimming side-by-side in the ocean, watching the boats come in and out of the bay, wishing time would stand still so you never have to vacuum again …

And then a stingray swims between your legs and you jump up on your complimentary floaty faster than Michael Phelps wins gold medals and you’re reminded of the first of many reasons you’ve chosen life together on the prairie.

Reason number two?

I got seasick sitting on the floaty.

Life and love: just one reality check after another.

Go get yours, friends.

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When it’s colder than Antarctica…

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Happy Monday night everyone.

I had a weird dream last night that I was on a fancy ship and it was sinking, all the rooms were filling up with water and I was watching it happen like a movie. I woke up after a scene where me and a woman, who spent what I was sure to be our last breaths painting her nails, discovered we were the sole survivors.

I’m not sure what that means, except it stuck with me all day and I think the chaos I experienced in my sleep might be responsible for the chaos that ensued in my house today.

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In other words, Edie discovered the kitchen cabinets. And, even though I was prepared enough to buy those baby-proofing cabinet locks, I didn’t install them yet. And, when I went to do it today, I discovered that the baby-proofing cabinet locks I bought are stupid. And I hate them. And I need different ones. But I live 30 miles from town and apparently we’re in another two-day blizzard warning, so I have to wait for Amazon.com again, the same store that was responsible for my stupid purchase in the first place.  Because nobody’s review said they were stupid.

So basically, nothing’s safe anymore. When I go to get ready for the day, Edie thinks she needs to put on makeup and scatter my bathroom drawers across the floor into the bedroom where she then unloads my entire bottom drawer before moving on to the next one so she can try on all of my bras before heading to the closet for the scarves.

And I could stop her. But then I would never get my teeth brushed, hair combed, face washed, eyebrows plucked, etc.

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So I just let her loose. And if you can picture what our master bedroom and bathroom looks after those ten minutes, well, just apply that scenario to every room in the house.

Oh, I love her. She’s so fun right now.

Fun and exhausting.

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She’s sleeping now after a bedtime performance featuring her singing and waving her arms and swaying back and forth across the living room. There was to be no “night night” until the applause.

So now I have a moment to share this week’s column, which is basically an extension of my last post and my thoughts on the new year and how sometimes I think we don’t give the whole “who we are in the moments we’re in” enough credit.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately–the need to focus on the present instead of all of the plans I think I need to be making.

And I was doing really good at it for the first week of the new year. But you guys, yesterday it was colder here than in frickin’ Antarctica and the North Pole…

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and I had a couple glasses of wine in the evening and my sister was here to instigate and my mom was here to cheer us on and my husband was in the “whatever you want wife” mood and before I knew it I booked him and I a trip to Jamaica.

I feel like it was a bit of a cabin fever, I’m freezing my ass off and it’s our tenth year of marriage and we never had a proper honeymoon impulse purchase, but it’s done and, well, I did say we needed to have more date nights so, well, take that new years resolution!

So that’s where we’ll be at the end of May. And until then you can find me and Edie in this house at the other end of a trail of bras. I’ll be there trying my damnedest to get this book done. I’m almost there friends.

Almost there.

If I could just keep Edie out of the kitchen cabinets.

Peace, love and childproofing,

Sunday Column: A resolution for more sweet things
by Jessie Veeder
1-8-17
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com

I’m finding it hard to concentrate this morning.

After another two days of more snow, the sun is finally shining bright through my window and the arctic, frosty air is creating a big rainbow halo over the stock dam.

If I didn’t know better, I would think it might actually be a nice day out there. But I’ve lived here long enough. This is what five below zero looks like.

The baby is at daycare, and it’s the first time in a couple weeks that I’ve been home without her. It’s quiet. I can hear the furnace turn on and off, the background music to the thoughts I should be thinking about the symbol of a new year, a fresh start, another chance to make myself better.

However, I keep getting distracted by the part of the internet that features tropical vacations while last night’s dishes stay piled in the sink and Edie’s toys stay scattered on the ground alongside the crumbs from the crackers she was carrying around, one in each hand, before her noodle supper.

Welcome to 2017.

It looks about exactly like 2016 except colder, messier and, well, there’s more snow.

I’ve always sort of hated the fact that the whole new-year-new-beginnings thing falls smack in the middle of the longest season. I mean, how does anyone expect to swear off carbs and start a treadmill regime in January in North Dakota when we need the extra padding the most? It’s irresponsible.

Talk to me in July about healthy resolutions, and I’ll be the first one to schedule us a hiking trip.

Talk to me about resolutions in January and, well, here are the necessary life changes that are on my mind:

  1. More snuggles
  2. More sleep
  3. More sweaters
  4. More vacations

Oh, and I should probably shovel off my deck before it collapses under the weight of the five foot snowdrift, but that looks like the only mildly productive resolution I’ve accumulated.

Don’t get me wrong, I have career goals brewing, and some fun projects coming down the pipe for 2017, but this year I’m not sure how complicated I want to get in making personal promises to myself.

Because I’ve spent the entire duration of 2016 in the new-to-me universe of motherhood, wondering what it is I should be doing and how my limited time, limited energy and limited money is best spent, a question that seems more pressing now that I’m responsible for a little one, and she grows and changes by the second.

And you know what I just realized? It isn’t caring for this new life that’s been so tiring and challenging. No. That’s been the fun part.

The hard parts have been on me and that nagging voice in my head that I keep nurturing, the one that keeps suggesting that what I’m doing isn’t enough.

Working more or home more? Daycare or no daycare? More play dates? More real dates? Early mornings spent writing? Even earlier mornings on the treadmill?

Nobody tells you that about new motherhood. They don’t tell you that the biggest adjustment is getting to know the new version of yourself after that baby is born.

It’s been over a year and I’m not sure I’m there yet, except I’m determined to stop being so hard on her in 2017.

I’m determined to like her. Because I haven’t written a song or done a lunge in months, but I have pulled a tiny human in a sled to the top of a snowy hill all in the name of a smile, and I think that might be just as important (and more aerobic) these days.

And I simply can’t bring myself to say I’m going to eat fewer caramel rolls in 2017 because the New Year needs more sweet things, not less.

So here’s a thought I’ve never really entertained in a life spent making plans (plans that got us to this very magical and demanding moment of our lives): Maybe what we’re doing right now is exactly what we need to be doing right now.

And maybe it’s perfect timing after all. January is the best month for snuggling.

 

 

Sunday Column: Thousands of miles away…

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January is a tough month for us here in North Dakota. It’s smack in the middle of winter. It’s generally the coldest, the days are the shortest and the holidays are behind us…ahead of us? More winter.

To combat the January blues this year we decided to to break free before the New Year and ring it in somewhere warmer, somewhere that didn’t look anything like the rolling, white and brown ice colored hills and bare trees of the winter landscape at home.

So we packed up our swimming suits and our vacation hats, gathered our friends and headed to Mexico.

On a real vacation. One that wasn’t attached to some sort of work I had to do. (Which is typically the types of vacations Husband and I do).

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I told you about it a bit, I showed you the juxtaposition of it all in a slideshow of contrasting photos of bare skin and snowsuits.

But there was more to say about it I think. More to say about a chance to break free for a moment…

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It’s funny how a few days in a world so different, so far away from our own, sort of pulls you out of place, your own place, sweeps you off your feet, widens your eyes and lets down your hair.

But it wasn’t long before I started wondering what it might be like to really live there, on a place that touches the ocean. A place where cactuses stretch their arms to the sky and the wind blows sea salt and sand up on the shore, a place with sea fisherman instead of oil men.

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Who would I be here in this sand, under this sun? What would I love?

What would I do?

Coming Home: Finding yourself thousands of miles from home
Jessie Veeder
1-18-15
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com

This week I’m back in Nashville, working on finishing up the new album. I’ll spend my days listening to instruments–dobros and guitars, fiddles and harmonies, fill up the spaces in my songs, songs about work and worry and love and landscape.

Songs about horses and home.

And I will sing and sing and sing to get every word right.

That’s the work I’ll do this week, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the buttes and the place that raised me…and I am so grateful for it.