The Official Music Video for Red Barns and People Get Old has just been published. Please take a moment with this special and personal story about generational ranching and the hearts and land involved.
Thank you for listening and thank you for sharing with the people in your life who may see a familiar story in this song.
Red Barns and People Get Old: Written by Jessie Veeder Starring: Cody Brown, Carol Mikkelson and Rosie Scofield Special thanks to Patty Sax Directed by: Nolan Johnson DoP Editor/Editor: Steven Dettling Video by @quantumdigital1404
Recorded at @omnisoundstudios Nashville, TN Produced, Mixed and Mastered by Bill Warner, Engineered by Josh Emmons and Bill Warner
The window to our bedroom was open and in my dreams I smelled it and heard it falling on the oak leaves still clinging tight to the branches. In our bed, between my body and my husband’s, our youngest daughter slept. Sometime during the darkest hours of the night, she wedged herself there, as she usually does, on a sleepy hunt for her father.
She is still only six. Or, she’s almost seven! She should sleep through the night on her own by now! We go back and forth on where we land with this, but in the middle of the night when the child needs someone to hold on to, neither one of us feels the need to fight it too hard. She’ll be grown soon. The bed is big enough. She won’t need us like this forever. I pull back the covers and I let her in.
I woke this morning to my alarm singing. Last week at this time, the sky would have been pink with the sunrise. This morning it was black.
“It’s time to wake up,” I huffed into the dark as my bare feet searched for the floor.
“Did it rain? Or did I dream it?”
My husband rolled over to try to wake our daughter and told me it wasn’t a dream. I pressed my face to the window screen to smell it the way I smelled it in my dream.
Even with the rain falling, my sleep wasn’t restful. My mind woke my body to worry about bills and things I shouldn’t have said and the work I should have done by now. And then enter the state of the suffering in the world, then of people I know and love, and things I can’t possibly change. Not at 3 am. Not ever.
Why is the quietest part of the night the loudest in my head?
Last week I visited a tiny town in North Dakota to play some music for a special event. In my career as a touring musician, I’ve had the privilege of learning how so many rural communities choose to bring people together, on a blocked off Main Street, in a Legion Club steel building, in an old high school gym, in parks and on patios. I perch myself up behind a microphone to tell stories to people listening intently or to a room full of folks who just want to visit, my music the backdrop to their conversations about the weather, the hay crop, the football team, the latest local tragedy or scandal. I use the word privilege because I regard the opportunity that way, even when the night is long and it feels like no one is listening. I get a front row seat to watch it all play out, who’s refilling the punch bowl and swapping the casserole dishes. Who’s folding programs and is the only one who knows how to turn on the old sound system. Who makes her rounds to each table to say hello. Who sticks around after to put away the folding chairs. Who’s kid grabs the big broom when the room is all cleared out.
Usually, I’m sent down the road with an extra centerpiece or noodle salad or a bag full of sandwiches and plenty of kind words and “thanks for coming all this way,” sometimes apologetically, as if their community isn’t as deserving of a visit as any other community in this country.
The air feels heavy as the weight of an election year makes big waves, moving through our conversations, across our kitchen tables, streaming through our speakers, screaming in the street. I lay awake last night and wondered, after all my life experience on the road and working in small towns, why it’s easier to holler enemy than try to understand one another. We’re making rivals out of our neighbors. It’s unsettling.
If I’m being honest, I’ve written and re-written the next two paragraphs a dozen times. Because I’m not sure what to say next. Here’s what I chose: Maybe you too were up in the quiet hours of the night with a loud head and a heavy heart. Maybe you felt lonesome or helpless, even with someone lying right next to you. Maybe you stood up and walked to the kitchen to feed your body and look at the moon. Maybe you slept soundly and dreamed about rain. Maybe you didn’t sleep at all. And maybe, in the midst of your insomnia, your daughter crawled in bed with you because she needs to be close. She needs to feel safe and loved. She needs something to hold on to.
And maybe, in the most tumultuous times, we could be brave enough to consider she’s all of us…
Photo out our back window on Saturday of the Bear Den Fire raging just five miles or so to the North West of the Ranch. Chad and countless other first responders, ranchers and community members spent hours and hours in 50-70 MPH winds trying their best to battle the dangerous spread.
On Saturday we had wild fires rage across Western North Dakota. Over 100,000 acres of cropland, federal land and private ranch land has burned. Two fires, one just to the northeast of our ranch surrounding the town of Mandaree, is only 40% contained as of yesterday. The National Guard has been working to contain this one and one in the badlands to the south west of us for the past five days. Homes, pastureland and livestock have been lost. Worst of all, two lives were taken by these fires, men who were trying to fight them in the area around Ray, ND. Please send us prayers for rain. And if you feel inclined, here’s a link to help aid the ranchers who lost so much this past week.
The North Dakota Stockmen’s Association and North Dakota Stockmen’s Foundation have teamed up to support cattle-ranching families in North Dakota who have suffered catastrophic losses in the horrific wildfires. In addition to their own $50,000 gift, the NDSA and NDSF are inviting others to join with them to provide financial support to help these ranchers rise from the ashes and rebuild their herds, their homes and their hope. Checks can be sent to the North Dakota Stockmen’s Foundation with “Out of the Ashes” written in the memo, or credit card gifts can be made at https://app.givingheartsday.org/#/charity/1576. The NDSA and NDSF will distribute 100% of the money raised to the victims of the wildfires through an application and nomination process. Applications will be available later this month. The NDSF is a 501(c)3.
The latest information about the state of these wildfires can be found here
Many of you have checked in on us as this news has developed. We were lucky as the wind was favorable to blow these fires away from our homes and the ranch, but many of my friends weren’t as lucky. And with the dry conditions and hot spots still looming, we’re not out of the woods until the snow falls. Thank you for your concern and thank you to the first responders who are working to keep us safe.
With that, lets move on to a more light-hearted predicament we found ourselves in last week on the ranch. I write about it in last week’s column:
Hegotstuck…
Last week I looked out the window to find my husband walking through the home pasture gate in the middle of the morning, like I do when I take a little stroll except my husband hasn’t taken a little stroll in his entire life. So naturally, I could only conclude that something did not go as planned.
And probably, more than likely, the man got something stuck somewhere…
Around here, no one really gives anyone guff about being stuck, because you never know when it could be you. Because, inevitably, it’s gonna be you.
But the man, he walked almost two miles in pretty cold 50 mph winds just to avoid the call to me or his father-in-law for help. I asked him why he didn’t use his “phone a friend” option and he said a guy who gets himself stuck so stupidly probably deserves to walk a good mile or so, you know, as a sort of lesson or punishment or something.
But walk-of-shame or not, he did need help, so he rounded up another side-by-side and me, his wife, who was wearing the entirely wrong outfit for traipsing around in 50 mph autumn winds miles from civilization (which is almost always my outfit choice in times of impromptu crisis.)
When I tell you this is not side-by-side or ATV country, I mean it. The denial of this fact is what lands us all in the sort of stuck-up-to-the-floorboards predicaments my husband found himself in that day. Because we live on the only quarter of North Dakota that isn’t entirely flat. We live where the hills drop down to form coulees ripe with springs and creeks that hold water and mud at different levels at different times depending on the season or the mood just to keep it sketchy and iffy and dangerous. And in those coulees the thorns and the brush patches thrive and twist and tangle over cattle and deer trails, letting enough light in to make you think you can make it through without a tree branch to the face, but usually you can’t, especially if your little sister or big brother is riding in front of you, scheduling that branch release to land just right.
Anyway, you can avoid the brush and the big canopy of oaks and ash trees if you keep to the hilltops, but you can never avoid the rocks and the holes and the craters on the edge of the badlands, so this is why we ride horses mostly. And, well, honestly, we’ve had to pull a good handful of horses out of thick mud and ravines in our days too…
But we forget all this somehow when we think we’re just gonna go check something quick, as if the fact that we’re in a hurry changes the landscape in some way. And that’s what my husband was doing that day he hopped in his all-terrain-vehicle and decided to go look for a missing bull, you know, real quick.
“What were you doing?” I asked him when het got into the house, cheeks flushed and a bit winded from the ordeal.
“Yeah, I’m stuck. Like, way back east.”
And I tell you, between being raised by my dad and being married to my husband and being, well, me, I have seen a lot of serious stuck-in-something-or-other predicaments and so I wasn’t surprised to find that this most recent one was no different. A classic case of “the crick bottom looks dry enough” and then, surprise, surprise, it gives way to the stinkiest, stickiest, black mud that Mother Nature makes. I know. I’ve been here before myself, I just happened to be a little closer to home.
And I tried not to say anything. I did. I stood there and took my directions as he hooked one bumper to the other with a random old calf roping rope that was in the back of the second ATV. I wondered to myself silently why on earth my husband didn’t bring a tow strap or a chain since he knew the task ahead of him. But I didn’t say anything. Not even when he instructed me to gas it but try not to spin the tires, but gas it, but try not to spin the tires, but gas it, and we went on like this not moving a nudge for a good 30 to to 60 seconds before his makeshift tow-rope snapped.
Then I couldn’t hold it. I had to ask, why. Why no tow strap? Why no chain?
Because he thought he had one.
Fair enough. Been there. But I was certain then that both of us would be walking home in no time and wished I wouldn’t have worn these stupid leggings and no wool cap like a dummy.
So then, because I couldn’t help myself looking at the cliff-like, brush tangled terrain in front of the stuck-side-by-side, I had to add ,“Where were you gonna go if you actually made it? “
I didn’t get a real clear answer on that one…
But the man is nothing if he’s not determined. So out came the shovel (he did remember that), a bit more rearranging of the rope, a bit more shoveling and five or six more “gun its” and well, what ‘do ‘ya know, we were out.
So off we went, me following him following our tracks back to the house. It was a miracle! I never doubted it! Sorta felt like a date then. I wonder if he learned his lesson…
And now, because I am publishing this for you and Jesus to read, I suppose to be fair, some day I’ll tell you how I got the side-by-side stuck between a tree and the dog kennel in our yard this summer. Well, my side of the story at least.
Stay safe out there. If you need me I’ll be hosing the black mud off the side-by-side and my stupid leggings…
I turned forty-one walking along the streets of Minneapolis. It was midnight and we were laughing, all five of us women, about something I can’t remember, something that probably wouldn’t have hit us this hard if we hadn’t just left a stadium where we sat shoulder to shoulder with 50,000 people singing along, at the top of our lungs, to our favorite songs.
50,000 people in one place who knew all the words to the same songs.
Five women who made space in lives that overwhelm us with ways in which we might be doing it all wrong. And, if we don’t pay attention the proper amount, take or don’t take the vitamins, wear or don’t wear the thing, vote or don’t vote this way, drink or don’t drink the milk, eat or don’t eat the meal, we risk screwing it all up. The parenting. The marriage. The job. The country. The earth. It’s a heavy weight to carry and it’s hard not to sprinkle it with a little dose of guilt when you decide to spend too much money on concert tickets, leave the kids at home, throw your cutest outfit in your suitcase, take the car seats out of the minivan and drive away for a weekend spent with four women who have done their version of the same to put some space between themselves and the notion that we might not all be ok.
It’s a heavy time in the news cycle, which just happens to coincide with the time in our lives where we’ve charged ourselves with raising the future. In the early mornings when I drive that future to school, I ask each daughter and niece to pick a song. This week “Jeramiah Was a Bullfrog” has been on heavy rotation. “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls…” we sing along as we drive, 65 MPH to 45 MPH to 25 MPH on roads they keep constructing. I park in front of the door to school and tell them I love them and tell them to be kind. They run into another day of childhood in middle America where we feel pretty lucky and pretty worried (I pause to wonder here if there are better words I could choose to describe it…)
Back at the stadium a young man behind me stands during the opening act, lifts his drink up in the air with one hand and puts his other arm around the girl he came with. Throughout the entire night, he sings almost every lyric with the vulnerability of a young child. But he’s not a young child, he is a man in middle America singing the lyrics of songs that describe what it feels like to lose someone, songs about addiction and fear, uncertainty and family and hope, tender things wrapped up safely in the sound of the fiddle and guitar and drums keeping time, coming from a man who looks like the guys in his hometown who maybe don’t talk about those things.
And maybe tomorrow, back at home, back at work, he won’t again. But he is here. Here he is, exposed, singing along.
I suppose if we admit that moments like this could save us, we must also admit that it could also be dangerous—50,000 people singing the same words…
I walked out of that stadium holding hands with the women I came with into a night bright with city lights. I turned 41 while the crowd of teenagers and twenty-somethings, mothers and dads with their daughters and sons, filtered out into that same night, sort of sweaty and tired and drunk with beer or feelings.
Back home my daughters stayed up too late in the big bed together while my husband fell asleep. The next day I drove that minivan back west to pick corn with the neighbors, eat pot-luck after a rodeo, sit in bleachers to cheer on the volleyball team, take an art class, sing with my dad on the deck, make a fish supper for my family, take a ride with my husband to check on a bull, brush my daughters’ hair, pack backpacks and give rides…
“Joy to the fishies in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me…” my daughters stop singing to open the car door and run to school…
This week I revisit a little predicament I found myself in back when we were working on landscaping our new home…
Happy Hay Hauling and Fly Swatting Season. Happy September!
Out here on the ranch there are people and animals and machinery and water and buildings and growing things and plans thought out but maybe not discussed with one another…
When you combine all the moving parts sometimes things can go kinda weird, get tangled up so to speak.
Like last week I came home from something or other to Husband pushing dirt on the Bobcat, just like every other dry summer day. We have been working on landscaping and planning for a fence to keep the cows out of yard, so getting the dirt in the right places has been the longest and first step in the process.
Anyway, so I get home and I drop my bags, shuffle the mail pile on the counter and look out the window at the hill where the horses generally graze, and then down at the plum patch on the edge of what will be our fenced in yard one day.
Then I notice a piece of wire or string or something stretched across the edge of the yard, from the plum patch, across the open toward the dam, with no end that I could see…
With Pops and Husband involved in this place, a few scenarios run through my mind about the existence of this piece of wire or string or whatever.
1) Maybe Husband is staking out where the fence will go, which is good, because I think he’s right on in the placement.
2) Could Husband have strung a piece of electric fence or wire or something to temporarily keep the cows off his dirt moving masterpiece?
3) But it sorta looks like a piece of twine, and Pops was out here on the 4-wheeler the other day driving up the hill to check on things. I bet a peice got stuck to the back of his machine and he drug it a ways…that’s probably it…
4) Who the hell knows…these boys never tell me anything…I gotta call Pops, I’m too lazy to try to catch Husband on that Bobcat right now…
I dial…it rings…he answers.
“Hello.”
“Hi, it’s me. Yeah, did you like, string some twine across our yard, or like, maybe drag a piece on your 4-wheeler when you went by the other day…”
“No. No I didn’t. I noticed it too. It was there when I drove past…piece of twine, goes all the way up to the dam as far as I can tell…a cow musta drug it I think…”
“Well that’s a theory…really? Weird…I wonder how far it goes?”
“Yeah, I don’t know…”
“Well, ok, just checking…I guess I’ll go investigate…wrap it up…”
“Yeah, ok bye.”
I hung up.
Wonder where a cow picked up all that twine? Wonder where it got hooked? On her foot? On her ear? On a tooth or something?
How did she pull it all that way without a snag or a snap?
I headed down to the plum patch, which seemed to be the middle of her destination, twine strung up in the thorns and heading toward the dam in one direction, to oblivion in the other…
I grabbed it and followed it along the cow path that lead to the dam…
To the edge of the dam where she grabbed a drink…
and then literally into the dam where she must have hung out to cool off.
And then turned around Then turned around to head to the shade of the trees up by the fence…
Where it looked like she might have taken and a nap and detached from it…
But that was only the beginning. because there I stood with a pretty substantial roll of twine around my arm looking for the end, which seemed to be trailing back toward my house again, up the hill and toward the barnyard, with no end in sight.
I backtracked, to find the source, coiling as I went…
It was going to be a long trip…
Back past the plum patch, up along the cow trail that turns into the road on the top of the hill. Past the old machinery and the broken down three-wheeler and lawn mower that we need to move for crying out loud. I have to get on that.
Then down toward the shop where the cow seemed to have gone back and forth, back and forth, zigzagging in front of the old tractor and little yellow boat. Then up to the old combine to scratch her back or something…
Then back up to the top of the hill, across the road, to the scoria pile we’re saving for a literal rainy day, then back down through the brush on the side hill toward the old combine again, tangling up in the thorns of the prairie rose patch somehow…
Then over toward the barn yard…wait, turn around, not yet…back in front of the shop, hooking on every stray weed and grass along the way, but never coming undone…no…where the hell did she pick this up?
Why did we leave a big-ass roll of twine just laying around for some creature without opposable thumbs to go dragging for miles and miles across the countryside?
Why can’t we get our shit together around here?
How long is this damn roll? How long is this going to take?
For five months the girls and I have been feeding bottle calves. It’s a long story, the way bottle calves’ stories usually start, because first we had one, a twin, and then we had two because if you have one you might as well have two. And then we found the first one a new momma, so then we were back to one. Her name is Midnight (guess what color she is) and we moved her closer to home so my girls have the every morning and night chore of mixing bottles and walking over the hill to feed her. And you’d think it would be a simple task, something that takes no time at all if you didn’t understand the inner-workings of six and eight-year-old sisters.
Just getting the right outfit alone takes 7-10 business days, Lord help me.
Anyway, recently, neighbors found out we had one bottle calf and thought we might as well have two, so now we have two again. The new calf’s name is Oreo, but not because he’s black and white. He’s just black. These are important details to some of us.
These little chores are so good for kids, but it takes reminding. And helping. And prodding and poking some days. Because no matter what–the weather, the mood, the late night– when you have a bottle calf (or two) you have a chore to do, something you’re responsible for and counts on you.
I type these words as I’m feeding my daughters a 4 PM hotdog lunch because somehow the summer day got away from us. I guess kids can be more flexible than bottle calves. Well, sometimes. Until they’re laying down on the mini-golf course in the heat of a Medora day because the night got too late and the morning too early and I left too much time between breakfast and lunch and, surprisingly, they’re on hole five and neither one of them got a hole-in-one yet. Which is quite unbelievable considering that was the first time in the history of the universe that either one of them has ever picked up a golf club. But still, how could it be?
But I digress. What I came here to talk about is how a ranch upbringing can teach kids responsibility and discipline, but I’m feeling a little like a fraud right now. As I type, I’ve just reminded my kids for the thirty-seventh time in the last twenty minutes to sit down while they eat. Which only resulted in more wiggling and a spilled lemonade.
So maybe what I want to say is that it doesn’t come as easy as that. Just raising a kid on a ranch doesn’t automatically make them a responsible, disciplined human being. It takes a good load of parental discipline too, and some days we do better than others. I’m thinking about this a bit more lately as we get ready to enter our girls in their first 4-H horse show. Just looking at the book of rules brings back that four-leaf-clover-shaped butterfly in my stomach from a hundred years ago. There. Are. So. Many. Rules. And there is so much to know about how to properly care for and ride your horse. Which I remember from all the practice I put in in the stubble field above our house with dad, a rancher and self-taught horse trainer trying to explain lead changes and seat placement to a sort-of nervous and timid ten-year-old.
The Legendary 4-H Photo, Little Sister and Me taking it Seriously.
And so there I was this morning, in dad’s shoes, with him standing next to me, trying to explain the very same things to my daughters, who, in turn, said the very same things I said to him, back to me. Like, “I know,” (do you?) and “I’m trying” (Ok then) and “You look like a gramma when you cheer.” (Ok, I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that to my dad, but seriously.)
At my daughter’s ages anyway, the hours our kids put into something they want to master directly correlates to the hours we put in as parents. And this summer has been especially busy for me professionally and so I find myself wondering lately if I’m doing enough to help them hone skills and build good solid roots on this ranch when one hand is tied up in town or on the road and the other is thinking I should probably sweep the floor once-in-a-while.
But just last night the three of us went down to the barnyard once again to feed those calves and my daughters grabbed each other’s hands and laughed and talked sweet to those babies as they sucked their big bottles and head-butted and chased the girls for more. And they laughed and they checked the water and they got slobbered on and they ran for their lives to the gate to avoid a two-calf-stampede. And then they got up and did it all again the next morning because no matter what, those calves need to be fed.
And that might not seem like a big deal really, but then you might not know the nature of six and eight-year-old sisters…
We’re officially in the fly-swatting era of summer at the ranch. That goes along with the haying and the weed pulling and the sprinkler running and the contemplating fixing fence era, which goes along with sweating. Lots of sweating. Welcome everyone.
Last week my little sister texted to let me know that her girls had set up a lemonade stand in their yard and were looking for customers. Their timing was perfect because I just gave my husband a ride to bring his pickup home from the hay field. It seemed, by the grace of the equipment gods, that they finished up baling and lemonade sounded pretty good to the guys of the Veeder Ranch about then. Even better? They only had to pay in compliments…
Except Rosie. She likes a chance to grab her pink wallet and spend. Unfortunately her cousins’ stand didn’t take Trampoline Park Cards, but luckily she had some tooth fairy cash, which the small business gladly welcomed.
Is there anything cuter than a lemonade stand? Honestly. It might be the most Americana experience you can find. But country kids, they have to go about it a bit differently. When I was a kid I the early 90s, we used to set up shop up on the highway and wait for the sound of a pickup in the distance. We would have waited until 2010 without a real customer if it wasn’t for our moms, who I now realize were making some calls to the neighbors. I think we cleared about three generous dollars those days, but I’d have to ask my friend, the accountant. I’ve always been in the marketing department…
Anyway, these days there’s a real risk of your lemonade getting blown away by the big oil rigs zooming by, so a successful stand still requires a bit of mom-power. And never mind the random kittens sniffing at the product periodically. Or the chickens dusting themselves in the driveway. This is summer in the country, and the lemonade tastes about as strong as the coffee they sip in the basement of our Lutheran church. It’s perfectly fine and made with love.
Yes, we’re deep enough into the heat of the season that we dare complain about it up here in the North, mostly because it’s not the heat really, it’s the humidity. Could really use a breeze.
And also, are we the only family that has one favorite fly swatter that we swear works better than any other fly swatter ever invented and it’s the puke yellow fly swatter that hung in your grandma’s old farmhouse your entire life until she died and somehow, miraculously, it was left to you? And even though it exists in your house like a fossil, when you go to reach for it it’s never left in the spot you think it was left in and you can only find the stupid, souvenir flyswatter you brought from Nashville because it was shaped like a guitar and you thought it was funny after a couple drinks, but it can’t kill a fly to save a life?
Anyone?
Oh, Gramma’s puke yellow fly swatter and her bright pink lipstick, some of my greatest earthly possessions.
And summer, you’re here now in all your glory and I’m sweating but you’re so many of the things I love about being alive.
Alive and hot and watching the tomatoes and my mosquito bites get red. So you can’t leave yet, we’re still thinking about fencing….
Last week I danced until two puffy little blisters formed on the pads at the bottom of my feet. It was 1,000 degrees and 100% humidity. It was at least five hours past my bedtime and half-way through singing along to “Don’t Stop Believing” with the after-concert bar band before I realized that it was 1,000 degrees, 100% humidity, five hours past my bedtime and I had two puffy little blisters on the bottom of my feet.
And it might be time to go home.
Have you ever had one of those nights where time doesn’t really mean anything? Where you’re standing in a crowd of people singing along to your favorite songs coming from your favorite band and you know all the words and you’re sweating through your clothes, but it doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter because tomorrow you can be the responsible human, tomorrow you can be the other side of your personality that makes the sandwiches and keeps up with the laundry, but tonight your husband has the kids for a cousin sleep-over so you only have to worry about the business of eating, drinking and dancing along to good music.
My little sister and I, we had one of those nights. The Turnpike Troubadours were in the big town for the state fair and so I got dressed and then re-dressed and then I dressed her in the outfit I was going to wear (before I changed my mind) and we left our daughters home with a “Sleepover To-Do List” that included a “Chad Makeover” and “Mario Karts” and a “Movie Night” and for some reason, “Bird Watching.”
I’m not sure they got to the bird watching portion of the evening but judging by the way my closet looked when I returned, they definitely got to the makeover part of the program. (Also, there is photographic evidence of my husband wearing my floral skirt and a shawl with his feet crammed into my pink wedge heels that I will cherish for the rest of my life, indicating that maybe they all had one of those nights too…)
Anyway, my little sister and I, we didn’t plan on staying out all night. It’s very possible that we could have taken to the grandstands, sipped our drinks and tapped our toes, clapped at the encore and called it a night. But maybe the fact that we could pick the restaurant and not have to order a kids’ meal made us feel a little more free. That and the fact that we ran into some friends who called us down a bit closer to the stage to sing along and pretty soon the music moved us right into the front, standing up against the rails and chanting “One more song!” along with the hundreds of people behind us.
Who did we think we were? 22?
Apparently. Because after that one more song, we didn’t go home. Nope. We found another place to listen to music. And then another place to dance. And then, well, that’s about where the blisters started shouting “Hello up there,” and we decided to call it a night, but only after a quick stop at the corn dog stand. I had to trade shoes with my little sister to make the walk back to our ride, like Cinderella, I had run out of time…
But isn’t that what little sisters are for? To lend you their shoes in desperate times. To borrow your shorts and new shirt and belt. To obsess over a band together. To dance like dummies. To share a hotel room and get home too late and laugh off embarrassing moments and to really listen to the lyrics of the new song you love on the drive home. Like silently listen through the whole thing to understand why it means something to you.
Anyway, I’m recounting all of this to remind you of that person you have in your life. You likely don’t need to be reminded; you likely talk every day. But maybe it’s been a while. Maybe you need to schedule a supper. Or a concert. And also, I want to tell you that you can have nights like this. Maybe the late night-hot-and-humid-blister-feet version doesn’t appeal to you, but there is a version out there waiting for you to forget the bills and the broken air conditioner. There’s a version that you’ve been putting off because you don’t think you can be that person anymore. Or maybe it’s too much of a hassle. There’s a version that allows you the space to leave the kids with someone you trust and go be the version of yourself you used to so freely be, before you found all the reasons not to be her…
Even if it’s 1000 degrees and 100% humidity. Even if you stay up five hours past your bedtime.
The smell of wild onions seeps through the closed doors and windows of the pickup I’m driving pointing back west towards home. It’s the time of night in the summer where it’s too late to be light, but it is the kind of light that turns the clouds pink and gives the sweet clover halos. It’s the time of night in the summer where you wish it wouldn’t end, the day, the light like this, the colors, the cooling down of the air. The season.
I’m driving home with my daughters in the back seat of the pickup. They look out the window at the power lines and ditch sunflowers whizzing by and as they look their legs are getting longer, their skin is a new shade of brown, their hair lightened by days in the sprinkler. Little wildflowers.
I smell the wild onions and suddenly I’m a little wildflower too in the dog days of summer, digging up the sweet salty roots with the boys on the side hill over the barbed wire fence outside the yard of my country school. We’re fresh off summer break, called back to desks and times tables and drinking milk out of little paper cones from the big machine. Before that, every day was like recess.
It’s 95 degrees and the air conditioning in our house can’t keep up and I’m an adult now and I am married and so we are the ones tasked to fix it. But we are hot and it’s July and maybe we could load up the kids and head to the lake, but instead I turn on the sprinkler so the water sort of hits my tomato plants and sort of hits the inflatable pool and sort of hits my bare legs as I sit in a lawn chair sucking on a red popsicle and flipping through a magazine. My daughters splash and slide and make game after game out of the running water. And occasionally a horse fly bites my ankles, and occasionally my daughters holler about a bug in the pool, but it’s summer on the ranch and we wave off these aggravations and carry on with basking and splashing away a Sunday afternoon.
I meet my husband in the shade cast by our deck in the slowly sinking sun. I plop in a chair next to him and the smell of diesel exhaust and sweat and it reminds me of all the good men who ever worked out here on this place in the heat. He’s one of them and the gratitude for that, well I carry it in my bones. He sips a beer and takes off his hat, leaving a band of sweat on his forehead and the salt and pepper hair around his head smashed down. We talk about the yard and the swather he worked on today. Tractors around this place, they don’t run for long, but it’s time to cut hay and so this is the task. Alfalfa and sweet clover and all the tall grasses mixed in, we’ll roll it out in a few months when we find ourselves on a different planet, covered in white, dressed thick from head to toe to shield our skin from 20 below.
But that frozen place doesn’t exist today. Today it is summer, and the dogs are panting under our chairs and those loud grasshoppers are clacking in the tall grass and we slap at that horsefly again and discuss what to put on the grill. It’s too late to be light and we should wrap up the day, but we linger a bit longer and let the words slow between us because the breeze feels nice….
Which brings us back to the air conditioning as we watch our daughters play. We tell one another how they’ve grown as if we both haven’t been witnessing it together.
They run to us then, someone fell or someone’s cold. We wrap each one in a towel and the smell of their damp skin and the wet grass smells like our childhood too. Weren’t we just kids out here. Aren’t we still? Together under the sun, heading in. Heading home.
And now for a story I shared a few years back before we put nice gate latches on all the new gates thus releasing me from the gate-closing-rage I experienced as a young woman on this ranch…now if we could just do something about the wood ticks.
Recently I went on a walk to close some gates in our home pasture and check a couple juneberry patches.
Juneberries are a special treat around here. Like wild mini-blueberries, if they show up, they show up around this time to much fanfare for those of us who know people who make pies.
Juneberries make the best pies in the world. Probably because getting to them before the frost kills them or the birds eat them up is so rare, and the entire task of picking enough of the little purple berries sends you to the most mosquito and tick infested, hot, thorny, itchiest places in the free world, so finally making and tasting a Juneberry pie is like completing some prairie, culinary, ironman marathon.
Only better and more gratifying, because, well, pie.
Anyway, my little stroll before sunset was only mildly successful. The gates on this place were made to be shut only by Thor himself. Or the Hulk. Or some hybrid of a bear-man. By the time I grunted and groaned, used my entire body weight trying to push the two posts together to maybe, possibly, for the love of Dolly Parton, stretch the three wires tight enough to get the little wire loop over the top of the scrawny post, I was sweating, cussing, bleeding and wondering how I missed the yeti that we apparently hired to fix the gates on this place.
I called Husband on my cell phone (who was inside the house with the baby, like twenty yards away) and told him there’s no way in hell I’m ever getting that gate shut and that shutting the gates was his job from now on who do you think I am what is this all about who in their right mind makes gates that tight good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart.
And, if you’re wondering, the gate on the other side of that pasture went about the same way…
Anyway, on my way I did in fact locate a big ‘ol juneberry patch. But the best berries, of course, were hanging out about fifteen feet above my head at the very tops of the bushes. And to get to them I had to wade through thorny bushes up to my armpits. But some of those thorny bushes had raspberries growing on them, so that was a win.
I proceeded to eat every ripe red berry I could find, even the one with the worm on it, which I discovered after I put it in my mouth and crunched.
So that was a loss.
Yes, the raspberries, worms and all, were within my reach. The juneberries, not so much. But tonight I’m going to see if my husband might want to come with me to back our old pickup up to that bush, stand in the box, brave the mosquitos and pick us some berries.
Because, well…pie.
Anyway, when I got home I discovered that apparently wading up to my armpits in thorny brush to pick raspberries was not only a good way to accidentally eat a worm, but, even better, it’s a great way to acquire 500 wood ticks.
I came home and picked off a good fifteen or so. Stripped down to my undies, checked myself out in the mirror, sat down on the chair and proceeded to pick off at least five more.
After a shower, when I crawled into bed I wondered out loud to Husband what time of night I would wake up to a tick crawling across my face. He made a guess. I made a guess.
But we were both wrong.
At about 12:30 am, just as I had drifted into a nice slumber, I was indeed awoken by a tick, but it wasn’t crawling across my face. No.
It was crawling toward my butt crack.
Thank good gawd sweet mercy Martha Stewart, I cut him off at the pass!
I guess, if we need a moral of the story, dessert tastes better when you truly suffer for it…
Then up to the old combine to scratch her back or something…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 