One of my favorite parts of my day is taking the dogs out on my walk up to the field, or on the trail to the east pasture in the evening after supper. I like how they know, when I come out with my tennis shoes on, that it’s time to take off. I look at my puppy and say “outside!” and he perks up and races to the door to great the cow dogs. And I perk up too as soon as that fresh air hits my face and we all go bouncing together down the road and up through tall grasses and down through the trees. These animals are free to go anywhere without us out here, that’s one of the many perks of being a ranch dog, but (apart from their occasional wander to my sister’s and the oil sites down the road) they chose to stay here with us and wait for a walk or a ride in the side-by-side or alongside a horse.
I was out with them yesterday afternoon before the kids got home from basketball practice with my husband. I had some moments to myself that day, so I decided to take my walk early. Lately I’ve been skipping the music or talk in my headphones, swapping the option for whatever quiet I can hear and daring to catch my own thoughts, like I used to before there were so many ways to plug into the chatter. The sun was only barely starting to move toward the horizon and I felt the sort of free you feel when you’re out in the world on a random Tuesday afternoon when your normal routine would have you working behind a computer, behind the walls, behind the wheel of a fast-moving car..
“I love the way these dogs zip back and forth like this,” I thought to myself as my shoes left footprints in the silty soil of the trail. It had rained the night before and there were still spots that were a bit slippery. There was a moment I almost went down. I laughed to myself, of course, there was no one else around, but I laughed still. It feels silly to almost slip, even when you’re alone.
“I love the smell of these wet leaves. This cooler air. This breeze,” I continued to myself as I moved up that hill behind those bouncy dogs who were making a wide swath of circles before coming back to check in on me. “I love this stack of bales on the horizon and the way the dust smells when they’re rolled out. I love fall work and last week when we walked out and could see our breath for the first time in months.”
My moving feet and beating heart and air sucking in and pushing out of my lungs became a rhythm for the quiet little list I started creating in my head. “What else do I love? What else? Let’s think about it now. Let’s make a list.”
“I love round-bellied kittens who just learned to walk with their tails spiked up.
I love watching my children roll dough on the kitchen counter with him and his shirt sleeves pushed up and that he uses his strong hands to build houses and also tiny dumplings for soup.
I love it when the fog settles in the low places on our morning drive and when I come up over the hilltop I get to look down on the clouds. I like that Rosie wants me to stop the car so she can run through them.
I love the big granite rocks on the hilltops that have been here a million years, and I like rain puddles and the grass greening up after summer, after all.
I love when we see a hawk on a fence post, or a grouse perched in the bullberry brush and I love the wild turkeys who roost on the roof of our house and we only know they’ve been there when they decide to fly down past our windows to the lawn in the morning and scare me to death.
I love a kitchen table card game, one more please before bed and I love brushing my daughters’ hair in the morning, even when they don’t like the style and pull it all out to do it themselves.
I love the way he taught them to use a fork to dip the Oreos in milk and I love any laugh I can get out of him.
I love the sound of my nieces calling me ‘Aunt Jessie’ like that’s the only name I ever had,
and I love the sound of a steele guitar in a band I get to sing with.
I love finding a big fat toad in the yard, or a turtle, or a bull snake,
and I love the way the wild mushrooms pop up under old leaves and the little, almost big, cowboy kids who made bolo ties with me last weekend out of paper and ribbon and wore them every day at the rodeos and I love this cow trail that’s also a horse trail that’s also a deer trail and an elk trail and a racoon trail and a trail for me and my footsteps and these dogs. These funny little pack of cow dogs zipping back and forth like this. I love these dogs…”
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.
Hunter Hayes in Watford City
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.
Rosie finished ten laps!
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.
I live in a rural, midwestern, blue collar world where many working people rely on the Cenex station or Circle Ks for their breakfasts and lunches. I am one of them on occasion of course, especially when I’m traveling across the region for music. I know all the best places to get the jerky sticks I like and the store with the good bathrooms and caramel rolls, the coffee bar and the ones that stay open past ten. Right off the interstate or on state highways, in tiny towns along the way, you name it and I’ve likely stopped for sunflower seeds or Cheetos, and, if Dad’s with me after a performance, an ice cream sandwich out of their chest freezer, per tradition.
You see a snapshot of the communities when you stop at these local truck stops or corner stores. Sometimes there’s a table or two where the old-timers sit and drink coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Sometimes there’s a constant stream of high school kids coming in and out like they own the place (because they’re also running the place). Or it’s moms grabbing ice for the cooler on their way to a camping trip or cowboys and cowgirls pulling horse trailers to the next rodeo or the occasional bus full of a small-town basketball team grabbing a snack for the three-hour drive home on a Tuesday night after a win. Or a loss. You can usually tell the outcome without asking.
The further you get out east in North Dakota the less white, ¾ ton pickups you encounter. And, unless they’re Red River Valley farmers, the cleaner the boots on the men. I am reminded quickly as I point my car in that direction that I’m living in a unique corner of the world—prosperous and buzzing and navigating unprecedented times.
And so I like it, specifically, when I spot a man of this caliber in my community, the one with a hard hat hanging on the rack in his company pickup wearing fire retardant clothing and big, steel toed boots coming out of the station holding a box of pizza or a sandwich wrapped in cellophane and then a little bottle of chocolate milk.
In a world where these working men flood these gas stations in town, stepping out of company pickups or semis, or trucks pulling horse trailers, looking a little dirty and scuffed and weathered from working outside in the harsh elements, there’s an expectation that it’s all Copenhagen and energy drinks for these guys. These guys that, in the history of this place that boomed from 1,200 people to nearly 10,000 in a blink over a decade ago, acquired a reputation of turning this small section of the country into the wild west.
And maybe it was a little bit true for a while there, and some of them deserved the blame for sure, but it’s that little bottle of Cass Clay tucked under his arm while he steps back out into the wind or the rain or the relentless heat that endears me to him.
Weren’t they all just little boys?
Same with those old timers drinking free refills of drip coffee. Once they were on that basketball bus, maybe before that highway was paved and the small corner Cenex was turned into a travel plaza. They have something to say about it, the little oasis that fuels families on their way out of town and moms on their way to work, employing the local teenagers and making sure there’s a place to grab late-night Doritos and sons or husbands or daddies drinking chocolate milk on their lunch break, all of us stopping in, fueling up, holding the doors for one another on our way through another day in midwestern, rural, blue-collar America…
Have you ever heard the National Anthem performed at full volume by four little girls crammed inside a two-door side-by-side while you’re driving across a bumpy field with a little dog at your feet and one perched on the tool box in the back with the wind blowing a late summer storm in?
It’s the kind of volume that sends even the most seasoned parent into a bit of a twitch. I should have known when I suggested singing instead of arguing over whether we should have stayed longer at the beaver dam to see if we could catch more turtles with a storm coming in. How dumb of me to think that they would choose a sweet folk performance as a serenade…
My sister and I have been taking our daughters and our dogs on little ranch excursions like this since the kids were tiny enough to fit in baby packs strapped to our chests as we drove prairie trails looking for crocuses or new calves, sunflowers and Christmas trees There was a point all six of us could fit across the bench seat of our old side-by-side and still fit one or two dogs in there with us. We blinked and suddenly we have a six, eight, nine and ten year-old plus six dogs between us. It’s safe to say we’ve outgrown our little side-by-side rides together.
But that doesn’t stop us from trying. Which is what we were doing last week when my husband came back from his daily rounds of checking on things. He was up in at the big beaver dams behind my parent’s house and walked up on dozens of turtles sunning themselves on logs and one big snapping turtle just swimming around, being his very cool prehistoric self in the middle of the modern age.
These three big beaver dams were a magical place for my sister and I when we were growing up. We would follow the creek from our backyard about a good mile or so through a thick coulee of oaks and ash and scrub trees to pick wild raspberries, catch frogs, collect ticks and see if the lily pads had appeared or if we could catch the beavers doing their work.
Each dam gets deeper and wider the farther you follow it, and the banks are steep, the brush thorny and tangled and the ground is uneven and covered in tall-green grass and reeds, the vegetation staying green until fall because it stays cool in the shade. It doesn’t feel like you’re on the North Dakota prairie when you’re following these trails cut by cattle, deer and elk. You get yourself far enough away from the house and the barn and you think maybe you’re in a true forest. When you’re a kid you think maybe you could be a wild girl out here on our own, living under a lean-to fort and surviving off of chokecherries. Sort of makes you feel that way as an adult too.
We spied a big ‘ol snapping turtle
I have spent some time in every season of my life sitting on those banks as a spectator, quietly watching the wildlife swim and drink and eat and work. The beavers always fascinated me, how they could take down all those trees and control all that water like little construction workers in round, fluffy bodies— it didn’t seem physically possible. But my favorite was always watching the turtles, so of course I was going to load up the kids to see what we could see that day.
“Can we all fit?” my little sister asked as I pulled into her driveway.
“Only if we leave a few dogs behind.”
But as you can imagine, four girls running, chatting, debating the appearance of poison ivy and complaining about the burs sticking to their jeans, two moms telling them to toughen up and that we used to come back here as kids ALONE and nobody even knew where we WERE and we were FINE and it was the NINETIES and the two dogs that decided to follow along and bark at the ducks fleeing for their lives is only sneaky enough to catch a brief glimpse of two beavers running away. And the red-eared slider turtles probably heard us coming from three miles away and chose to save themselves the drama. But that old snapping turtle? He’s seen some things and was so unbothered that he just swam around pulling pond scum with him, giving a show long enough for us all to fawn over how massive and old and cool he was before the wind picked up, folding the leaves on the trees and threatening a bit of rain. And so, we all headed back to that old side-by-side, pulling the barbed-wire fence open for one another to cross one by one.
“I thought we were going to catch some turtles,” Rosie said, sorta disappointed.
“I think we’re going to have to practice our sneaking skills,” I replied as I started up the machine and set her on my lap so the rest of the girls could cram in and shut the door. “Why don’t you all sing a song to get us home…”
“OOOHHH SAAYYY CANN YOU SEEEE!!!!! BY THE DAWNSERLY LIGHT!!!”
We have a puppy in the house. And even if I didn’t tell you, and if, for some reason the little gremlin didn’t greet you coming into the door by licking your feet and stealing your shoes, you would know by the pile he has collected on the floor in our living room of all of the shoes he has successfully confiscated. He’s a hoarder of all smelly and chewable things and he gathers them up from all corners of our home and yard and brings them back to the nice pink fluffy blanket he’s claimed as his own on the living room rug so that he can lay among them.
Nothing is safe here, as everyone who has ever had a puppy in the house knows. If you’re sitting at our kitchen counter and you just casually drop a flip flop or a Birkensock, as one might in a comfortable conversation, it is gone within seconds. Same with a slipper. And, if God forbid, you let a pair of your underwear drop to the ground, out of nowhere, the puppy appears like a thief in the night. And the thing is, you might not even notice until someone stops over for a visit and there’s your undies, right smack in the middle of the floor. Or worse, he might drop them at the guest’s feet along with every stuffed animal my daughters own and their socks and random dish towels, but that’s just the inside things.
Our puppy, a little toy Australian shepherd named Scootch, really likes to bring the outside in, and he likes to do it incognito. Like, I didn’t notice the half-decayed mouse he found on our walk tucked discreetly in his little snout until I smelled it while attempting a living room lounge. How quickly our life switches to chase mode in situations like this—the little turd doesn’t give up his treasures without a fight. Treasures like acorns and dead toads and sticks and little weird bones and rocks. Remember, we live in a wild place, and this world is his oyster.
Why do we have a puppy? Because our ranch dogs are getting older, for one thing. And another thing is the girls like to have those old ranch dogs in the house, and in their beds, and on the couch in the living room. And if you remember what I just said, we live in a wild place, one that for a ranch dog, includes at least one roll in squishy cow poop a day, one or two swims in the stock dam, a few runs through the hills to pick up burs and ticks and a lot of things to eat that aren’t helpful in the breath department. But these old dogs love the inside arrangement so much that they have taken to letting themselves in to sleep on Rosie’s bed when everyone in the house is gone to work and school. It’s always fun to discover the dog-shaped dirt outline on the bedspread and pillow when I get home, the dogs being smart enough to vacate the premise before they’re caught red-handed. It’s a real Goldilocks situation we have going here.
Which, I guess, doesn’t really explain the puppy situation better except that it seems like every time my husband and I experience something a bit traumatic (like, oh I don’t know, another cancer diagnosis?) we wind up adding a new animal to the ranch population. (It’s how we wound up with a pug who thought he was a cow dog a long time ago, but that’s a story for the archives.) Last time I went through the cancer thing, I convinced everyone that the girls needed a little white pony I saw on Facebook. I was heavily medicated and my family would do anything I said because they were worried and so that’s how we found ourselves with an arthritic pony with an attitude problem.
When I was in Rochester this spring, I spent a lot of my six-week stint taking walks and missing my old dogs on the ranch. And so consequently, I also spent time doing research on the best kind of pup I could bring home that would love ranch life and walks and be a more reasonable pet to live in the house and snuggle on our furniture. And so, I found Scootch. The idea that once we got to the end of the rough stuff, the girls and I would have a little pup to take care of wound up to be the perfect plan in the end. It helps to have things We sure love him and his soft fluffy coat and smarts and playful nature. And it doesn’t mean the big dogs are out forever, let me be clear, but given how little they enjoy the bath part of being inside dogs, I think they’re ok with this replacement, as long as the little dog keeps his distance and saves some stinky stuff for them.
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…
“There’s a Dewalt battery operated industrial fan on sale over there,” I said to my husband as he searched the back wall of Tractor Supply for the right battery for my car that wouldn’t start. “I could use it on stage when it’s hot.”
“Well, happy anniversary!” he laughed. “Go load it up!”
We spent that morning moving cows to better grass and water, riding good horses through pretty country, commenting on how we really need the rain. We had a few additional errands and chores to get done that Sunday before sending the kids down the road to their grandparents’ so we could grill a steak and pour a glass of wine to celebrate in our kitchen.
As of last week, we have been married for twenty years. On our actual anniversary I will be across the state performing and my husband will be at the ranch working and our daughters will be playing with their cousins on the last few days of summer. And maybe twenty years deserves a bigger celebration than a trip to Tractor Supply and clearing the table of the baby dolls so we can eat steak together at 9 pm, but in our life, grand gestures have never been a thing.
The biggest, I suppose, was our wedding in the cow pasture under the oak tree where he proposed. We planned a little movie scene ceremony, complete with an entrance on a horse drawn wagon. All our guests sat on homemade benches on a breezy August day after a much-needed evening of thunderstorms that threatened the whole plan. Chad spent the entire 48 hours prior roasting a pig in a big hole in the ground to feed the rehearsal dinner guests and, due to that thunderstorm, our back yard picnic turned into a jam session in my parents’ tiny garage, the only place on the ranch we hadn’t cleaned. We were just kids when we made these plans. I turned 23 two weeks into our marriage when, for our honeymoon my new husband came with me on his four days off his oil rig job to a small gig where I played music under a picnic shelter in Redfield, South Dakota. Along the way we splurged on a fancy hotel and a new refrigerator that was too big to fit in the kitchen in the tiny ranch house, so it sat there in the middle of the house for days until we figured out a new plan.
We were just 23, but I had already loved him for years by then, silly girl. Silly kids.
If I were a better writer, I would have worked to make a list of the top 10 things I’ve learned about marriage in these twenty short years. Or maybe I could offer some advice. But marriage, no matter how long it lasts, isn’t a tidy list. In fact, maybe the longer you’re together, the less tidy it all becomes.
“You should hear it outside, it’s just buzzing and humming,” he said as he came in from taking the steaks off the grill. “The crickets are so loud, and so is the owl. It’s dark but everything’s just vibrating.”
I stood under the big kitchen light, clearing the counter for our little supper for two, chopping the lettuce and grabbing the plates. In the movies I would have lit some candles or lit a fire, maybe I would have come out in a pretty dress. Maybe there would have been jewelry. But we didn’t get to all that because we were too busy catching up, talking about plans for the barn and the kids and the business and the funny thing that happened yesterday, letting it all sit on the counter too long. These days, with two growing girls nipping at our heels, our house is rarely filled with just our two voices. To just be us under this roof is rare.
But it won’t be rare for long—that’s the one thing we know well. We put trust in the fleeting part, the good and the hard, and we’re pretty good at linking arms and trudging on through. And it’s easier when he gets the battery for my broken car and I get the groceries and we do the dishes together and I fold his socks and mow the lawn and he cleans the drain and makes the homemade noodles and he puts Rosie to bed and I put Edie to bed and I let the puppy out and he pulls on the other end of the fitted sheet and I stand behind the trailer to make sure he’s lined out and he wipes the dust off the backup camera of my car every time he walks by it.
Twenty years of marriage and I still understand that love is hardly ever loud. I knew that as the girl who married him. I just liked being with a man who made things like cattle work, a trip to Tractor Supply, a sort of messy house and a kitchen counter supper feel like the best life anyone could ask for.
It will be hot in the summer. It will be the end of July heading into the dog days and the air conditioning on your main floor might not keep up. And the day before you were working outside and it was 95 degrees and the sweat dripped off your forehead and into your eyes. And it slithered down your back too, soaked through your shirt, but you found a bit of shade for a break and a drink of water, and you caught a little breeze and you said out loud, “Breeze feels good,” and he said, “Yeah, sure does,” and only a hot summer day makes you love a tiny bit of wind that way.
It will be hot in the summer and the air conditioning on your main floor might not keep up, but maybe there’s a basement and maybe it’s Sunday and maybe it’s so cold down there you need a blanket to cover the two of you on the old couch while you watch a movie you picked and he hates. And maybe you fall asleep anyway and maybe he doesn’t move because he likes the way your head feels heavy against his chest that way, the way it used to, I guess the way it always has, when you fall asleep on him. It’s been a long time, and it was a hot day and maybe you’ll think there’s nothing better in the world than that nap.
It will be hot in the summer, and it will be the end of July heading into August and maybe your cousin will call to tell you to put on your swimming suit and get on your bike because the sprinkler’s on under the trampoline and maybe you’ll jump and slide and giggle for hours, grass clipping stuck to your little bare feet, the sun and the water helping you grow like a flower.
It will be hot in the summer, and it will be the end of July and maybe you had no plans for a Saturday and maybe you were feeling bad about that because it seems like everyone you know is at a lake or in a pool somewhere. So then maybe you just decide to throw your camp chair in the back of the car and head there yourself because who says you can’t just go jump in that big lake on your own? It doesn’t have to cost a thing to sit on the shore, maybe just the $3.99 bag of sunflower seeds and the two Coors Lights you keep in the back of the fridge. And the bug spray because the black flies bite out here in the heat, but it’s hot in the summer and that shore is yours too and so you take it and you wade in slowly, up to your waist before you let the cold water finally rush over your head—you pop back up to face the sun smiling.
It will be hot in the summer, and it will be August and in four days your job will end, and school will start and you will be seventeen. Maybe it’s a Friday night and maybe you call your friend who has one of those big round pools that sits above the ground in her backyard and you have floated back there with her almost every hot afternoon of your childhood, and so this day will be no different except that in four days you will be in your school clothes again, no watermelon pool ring in sight, and it makes you feel nostalgic for the moment you’re still in, but missing already somehow, and that’s the first time you’ve felt something like that. It’s summer and it’s hot and your legs are tan and your best friend’s face is freckled, and you don’t say much then, you just sing along to the songs you know on her mix and float and float and float.
It will be hot in the summer and it will be the end of July heading into the dog days and the cows will need to be moved so you will wake up early to help your dad to beat the heat and the flies, even though maybe you didn’t get in last night until 1 am. And maybe you’ll be glad you did because it will be so foggy and so cool in those early hours that you will forget that in just a few hours that fog will be chased away by the scorching sun. But it won’t matter then, you’re awake now, up with the early risers for the best part of the summer day, because it will be hot, and the sweat will drip off your forehead and into your eyes, it will be hot in the summer, but maybe there will be a breeze. It will be hot in the summer, but maybe there will be a cool basement or a big lake. It will be hot in the summer, but maybe there will be a backyard hose, or a little pool or a foggy morning and most certainly it will be hot in the summer but most certainly it won’t be for long…
“These kids are having the best summer ever,” I said to my friend as I waded in to meet her and my sister standing waist-deep in the public swimming pool. It was a scorching 95 degree day and I just picked up my oldest daughter and her best friend from a morning softball camp, fed them a sandwich from Subway and met the rest of the crew to beat the heat with an afternoon swim.
“When I was their age just going to a restaurant was a big deal, now it’s just part of their day,” I said. “And if I got to go to the pool I town once or twice a summer, I was living the life.”
“When I was their age, I used to ride my bike five miles one way into town to get to the public pool,” my friend laughed. “I must have been a ripped little kid.”
And from there, for the next half-hour or so, three moms reminisced about summertime in the 90s, while fending off splashes and football throws to the head, keeping one eye on our kids, fixing goggles, watching three hundred and fifty-two handstands, forty-two underwater summersaults and one-thousand jump spins off the edge.
“My best friend lived a mile up the hill, we used to ride our bikes all day right down the middle of the highway,” I recalled. “I guess I probably could have had the ten-year-olds walk a quarter of a mile to the pool after practice.”
The 90s summer nostalgia is a trending topic for the millennials who are now raising their own kids in the golden age of childhood. The memories of drinking out of the hose and orange pushups, ham and plastic cheese on Wonder Bread, running through sprinklers and neighborhood yards until the porch lights came on are core memories that pop to the surface when we smell a fresh cut lawn. I think we wonder if there will ever be a time we’ll feel as carefree …and then we wonder if our children could possibly feel the same way.
Of course, a 90s summer in a small town looked a bit different than a 90s summer thirty miles from the nearest ball field. My summers as a kid were spent with that best friend up the hill, sometimes dragging our little sisters along to jump on the hay bales or head to the creek to catch more ticks than frogs, and sometimes trying to ditch them. I mowed the lawn and painted the barn and worked on 4-H projects and rode and fell off horses that dad was breaking and sat out on the deck in my swimming suit with my big sister to get a tan. I was bored in a way that had me laying on the floor of my bedroom listening to the same Brooks and Dunn tape over and over again. I was bored in a way that had me picking the guitar for hours. Bored in a way that had me sitting cross-legged on the floor to latch-hook a giant sunflower. Bored in a way that had my friends and I confiscating my parents’ camcorder to make elaborate music videos to Reba McEntire songs and unsupervised enough to hold one scene on the roof of a house.
Bored in a way I doubt I will ever be again.
Last week I enrolled my daughters in a little summer theater program where they put on a full-scale musical in just five days. My oldest played a corn cob, my youngest a pixie. They worked on learning their lines in the evening and practiced their songs for the weekend talent show. The week before they were jumping in a Minnesota lake. The week before that they were spinning on rides at the county fair before heading to bible camp. And in between they’ve been wearing out the path between our house and their cousins’ to jump on the trampoline with the sprinkler running. As I type this, my youngest and her friend haven’t quite awoken from their sleepover last night. When they do, they will resume pushing their babies in strollers across the cow pasture and re-organizing my husband’s office to play school.
“Isn’t having a daughter so fun,” one of my friends said as we passed one another in town. “It’s like you get to re-live your girlhood and I love it.”
Her comment came a few days after what I said in the pool about our kids living their best lives. I admit, mine was a bit snarky—maybe because I just got done holding a towel above my head to serve as the girls’ changing room before squeezing into my swimming suit in a 100-degree locker room—but I think she’s right. We were at the pool that day after softball camp because the 10-year-old girl in me also wanted to meet my friends there and go swimming. And she wants to do the talent show and the play and the rides and the trampoline and the sleepover.
I looked up from the splashing to see my little sister in a lawn chair. She went to the concessions and got a giant blue popsicle, the kind that comes in the plastic tube and is about three feet long. When she had enough, she passed it over to me and I sat next to her and finished it off with my feet in the cool water and there we were again, just two girls raising girls and having the best summer ever.
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.
