Tag Archives: writing

Let us be bored.

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Last night while I was folding laundry, my daughters wandered out into the living room on a pretend mission to escape something. Edie, my oldest, was dressed in overall-shorts with a little toy fox stuffed into her front pocket. Rosie, well, she was dressed as a granny, complete with big glasses, a bun, sensible shoes and a stick horse as a walking cane. I listened to their conversations a bit to see where the game was going, laughing to myself at Rosie’s grandma voice and her commitment to her character. When I asked her if they could stop for a minute so I could take their picture (they were so stinkin’ cute) Rosie replied, “Well, make it quick deary, my back is killin’ me!” Which tracks, I guess, for a granny.

So did the extra pair of underwear, flashlight and cardigan that Rosie packed for their pretend adventure. But what really put the whole thing over the top was when I looked to where they were playing in the kitchen to find Rosie snoring, eyes closed, standing up. Because, well, grannies get tired.

When these girls play, I tell you, they play. And it’s the best.

Because it’s their job.

When my first daughter was just a baby, I heard one of my more seasoned mom-friends say this in a conversation we were having about parenthood. In all the expectations we have laid out for our children, the schedules and the lessons and the homework and the chores, their number one priority should be to play. It’s a sentence that runs through my head when I’m feeling overwhelmed with the variety of choices for after school activities and completing extra homework, wondering now, especially as the kids are getting older, if I’m failing them by not putting them in travel basketball or hauling them to every youth rodeo in the region. It’s not how we were raised, but that was in the olden days. What are we supposed to be doing for our children now that we have access to a world full of expert and non-expert opinions?

Well, I have an opinion too I suppose, and it’s that the very best thing we can do for our children is to let them be bored.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a scheduled play date and paid-for weekly activities as much as the next mom. There’s a place for this on the schedule too. But the most fun I had as a kid arose out of no schedule at all, just an endless afternoon stretched out before me, with nothing but my imagination to fill it. But that was back before there was a choice otherwise. We had a handful of channels on TV and, gasp, we had to watch the commercial interruptions in our 30 minute after school episode of “Garfield and Friends”. Might as well just go outside and see what’s floating in the crick.

It happened fast, in less than one generation, but here we are raising kids in a world, where, if we allow it, they can be thoroughly entertained at every turn of a moment. I mean, has anyone ever found the bottom of Netflix or YouTube? Never. It’s up to us to turn it off so they can tune into that part of their little spirit that guides them toward an interest or a passion or, heck, just the opportunity to learn how to turn inward and rely on themselves in the quiet moments. More than my daughters’ basketball career or math grades, boredom is the thing I worry about failing them most.

Taylor Swift Concert…..

Now, I’m not saying that I turned into a professional fallen log fort-maker because of all the time I spent at the crick when I was a kid, but I did hone my songwriting skills singing at the top of my lungs pretending I was in a Disney movie where I had to learn to survive in the North Dakota wilderness alone. I learned that I like making up stories. And I liked performing, even if my audience was the squirrels I was terrifying and my little sister who was following a quarter mile behind me. And I learned it meant a lot to me to be there to witness every quiet turn of the season. It taught me gratitude. It taught me how to be alone and be ok with it.

Anyway, I realize I’m reflecting on this from a parenting perspective, but maybe even more importantly it’s a reminder to do the same for myself now that I’m a full-blown adult with adult responsibilities. Because in this season of life and parenting, boredom doesn’t exist. But it should. We should demand it of our lives as much as we demand anything else. I am saying that here to remind us all. If a kid’s job is to play, who said we had to take a promotion?

In a few weeks the weather will turn and I am going to put “wander the hills” on my to-do list. Because, like my daughters last night, I need the opportunity to escape in my mind once in a while. And lucky for me I was a kid in the ‘90s, so I know how to do that.

Chad and I are working to get our “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” podcast back in circulation now that the house project is a bit more under control. Until then, take a listen to an interview I did about music and ranching and motherhood while I was in Elko with “The Art Box”

Forever’s in the Saw Dust

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Us, in the olden days…

When my husband and I were freshman in college at the University of North Dakota, I used to
visit him in his small, stinky dorm room in Walsh Hall and he would make me tuna salad
sandwiches.

This seems like a silly way to start things off, but every single one of us is living in the ordinary,
everyday moments here, and February has drug on and left us with March and more routine
and I think there’s something to say here…

Recently, our little routine has been intercepted by a home remodeling project. Our plans,
homework and furniture are covered in a layer of sawdust as the girls and I help my husband
where we can between work and school, laying flooring, handing him tools, holding boards and
picking playlists heavy on the Taylor Swift. He’s been working hard to finish a project that, for
so many reasons, some in and some out of our control, has drug on through years. It’s finally
the time to wrap it up and so here we are working supper around hammers on the kitchen
table, and evening snuggles next to the table saw.

Take note of the fireplace ‘decor’

This house of ours seems to be a structure changing and growing along with our lives together.
Maybe only a poet could draw the comparison eloquently, but when it was just the two of us,
new in our marriage, it stood as a brand-new cozy cottage in this valley full of hand-me-down
furniture and the dreams we had for our lives here. I remember the first night we spent
together in this house. The waterline hadn’t been dug yet and our upstairs bedroom still had
walls to put up, so we lived downstairs in what was going to be the guest room and we just laid
there, side by side, looking up at the stars out the new window with no blinds.

Fast forward through the years and those two extra bedrooms are now home to dozens of
stuffed animals, puzzles, games, art supplies, night lights, baby dolls, twenty to twenty-five
Barbies, a couple Kens, one Christoph and their dream wardrobe/house/barn/car/camper.
When we were in the planning phases of this house, we didn’t have children and I wondered if
we would regret the staircase or the hardwood flooring if they arrived. Then my friend
reminded me that they would only be babies for a blink of an eye, and that you make your
space what it needs to be along the way. And so here we are taking that phrase quite literally,
adding an entryway to catch the mud, cow poop and the occasional bottle calf at the pass. And
we’ve added a pantry too, because out here so far from the grocery store you need to have
more on hand.


Which led us to where we are now, expanding our living and dining room so we
have more space to host gatherings and holidays, putting our bedroom back on the main floor
and turning that old bedroom loft into an office space for all the paperwork that piles up when
you find yourself smack dab in the middle of middle age.


It seems ridiculous and over the top when I lay it out here, our little cottage in its first form
would have worked perfectly fine for us through any stage. But looking back, I doubt we could
have helped ourselves given my propensity to dream and his to make things. And that’s how
we’re in what is turning out to be, after all these years, a quite beautiful sawdust covered
predicament.

Which brings me to the tuna-salad-sandwich my husband made last weekend during a break
between laying the floor and me taking the girls to 4-H. I sat at the kitchen counter and talked
with him about grocery lists and schedules and mundane things you only say out loud to
someone you’re married to because they listen in a way that’s sort of not listening and that’s
just what you need sometimes. While I chattered, he made his way around the kitchen
gathering ingredients and carefully chopping and mixing—the tuna, the celery and then the
onions, followed by the mayo, the mustard the salt and pepper and some other things I’m sure I
didn’t catch. I looked up and joked, “you sure make a big fuss over a sandwich,” to which he
replied, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.” And it was that ordinary moment
in the middle of February in the middle of marriage in the middle of our lives that flipped the
mundane to affection and then to deep gratitude.

He handed me a plate with two slice of toast, and offered, as he always does, for me to serve
myself first before he stirs in the jalapeños and I guess what I’m trying to say right now is that
sometimes we look for love and forever in heart shaped boxes when maybe the best of all of it
is hidden among the years of tuna fish sandwiches and saw dust.

That’s all. That’s all I wanted to say. If you need me I’ll be sweeping and then vacuuming and
then sweeping again…

Us, these days…

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.

Oh, Christmas Tree

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Thanksgiving weekend we completed the great Christmas Tree hunt tradition at the ranch. Nature melted the snow away but held on to its cold and wind and so we thought we better get out in the hills before we needed to borrow the neighbor’s snowmobile. So we bundled up the troops and headed out to a spot in the home pasture where we spotted a cedar we thought might work on one of our rides this fall.

It didn’t take long to find it again out there stretching toward the sky among the scrub brush and thistle, the bottom three feet of its trunk rubbed bare by the deer.

Now I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a potential Christmas tree out in the wild is not the same size as a potential Christmas tree in the house. My daughters, standing under the boughs of the 12-foot tree standing in its natural habitat declared the tree “tiny” before helping running up a tall butte after their cousins and sliding down on their butts.

I’ve been in this same situation for years now, so I knew to save my argument about it being too big to fit in the door. And I didn’t say a thing about how it will take up our entire living room. And not a word was spoken about how we need to work on getting the house addition done just to display this tree. It’s not worth it and it doesn’t matter to my husband anyway. If he thinks the tree will fit the tree will fit.

And so, with the help of my dad and the tarp straps that my husband always magically seems to have in every nook and cranny of every vehicle and every pocket of every jacket he’s ever owned, we strapped the world’s-most-perfect-Christmas-Tree on to the back (and top) of our ATV and puttered on home to the house where we nearly pulled the front door off its hinges dragging it into the entryway to thaw out.

But, alas, the hinges stayed put and the neighborhood (a.k.a my parents and my little sister’s family) filed in a few minutes later to get in on the spectacle of getting that thing through the house, propped up in the tree stand and screwed to the wall without any of us, tree included, losing any limbs.

And yes, you heard it right, after all these years as adults who cut wild Christmas trees from the wild prairies, and one year where the tree nearly took out my oldest daughter while she spun innocently in her Elsa dress in the living room, we have learned to skip past the hazard and just screw the tree to the wall right away. 

Is it weird that our giant Christmas tree ritual has become a spectator sport for the rest of my family, complete with bloody marys and snacks? I don’t know what’s normal anymore.

At any rate, the tree is up and it smells beautiful, the way a cedar tree should and not like wild cat pee like that one unfortunate year we only speak of when we have the tree thawed out inside and can guarantee it hasn’t happened again. These types of issues don’t occur with the plastic tree sane people take out of storage year after year says my mother over her first sip of bloody mary. Since her kids have been out of the house for years, she’s been basking in the Martha Stewart Magazine tree that she’s always wanted. Tinsel, coyote pee and abandoned bird nest not welcome.

Also, kittens. Kittens are not welcome, which is a problem because we happen to have one and that was stupid timing and also another good reason to put a few more screws in the boards connected the tree trunk to the wall.

Anyway, Merry Christmas. I hope your traditions are bringing you as much joy as they are hassle. If you need me I’ll be looking for that dang elf…

November at the Ranch

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November is a busy month at the ranch. Not only are we getting ready for the impending (or continuing) winter, but November is the month for roundup, working and checking our cattle and selling our calves. It’s one of my favorite times of the year because it’s one of the rare times that I allow myself to drop everything and focus on the ranch.

One of my jobs is to make sure that the people (who also drop everything to help) get fed. And that there is hot coffee and cookies out in the pens so we all have an excuse to take a few minutes to break between tasks. This is about as important to me as anything because it forces a slowdown during a moment in time that makes everyone who owns these cattle a little anxious. Because a day like shipping day is the culmination of all the work the family has put into caring for these animals–rolling out hay in the winter, fixing water tanks and fences in the spring, watching for and tending to trouble during calving season and keeping them on the best grass in the summer, free of hoof rot and pink eye.

This year we lucked out with a couple nice weather days where you could only see your breath until about noon and then we could take off a layer or two. My sister and I keep our daughters   home from school on the day we ship and sell calves so they can be a part of the grand finale. They ride along to the sale barn with a bag full of coloring sheets and snacks to sit next to Papa and our old neighbor and watch our calves go through the ring. I wonder what they’ll remember more, the sale or eating the pizza buffet and playing in the arcade in the big town after?

Unfortunately, for Rosie and everyone around her who she scared to death, it will be falling off her pony during roundup, an unpredictable incident that left me questioning all my parenting decisions. Things like this don’t happen to kids who live in the suburbs. And kids in the suburbs don’t go to the arcade smelling like the sale barn.

Maybe all we’re doing when we bring them along is solidifying the idea that marrying or becoming a professional YouTuber or a computer programmer is a safer life choice. Because is there a YouTuber or computer programmer in the history of the world who makes small talk with the community vet for two hours while he puts his arm down the backside of 120-some cattle to confirm they’re bred and then invites him over for lunch only to discover that your new kitten has somehow got herself stuck INSIDE THE WALLS OF YOUR HOUSE!!!??

Not a good look for that specific house guest.

But seriously. Anyone ever had to cut open a wall in your house to retrieve a live animal? I don’t want to admit this, but in the history of my life on this ranch, it wasn’t the first time.

Turns out that kitten was just after the dead, rotting mouse that had somehow also discovered the secret wall portal. When I tell you that feline stunk, I cannot stress it enough. And when I tell you that squirmy little barn cats don’t like baths, I also, cannot stress it enough.  

Yes, life on the ranch is messy and volatile and this time of year can make us as grateful for it as we are anxious about it. Because we can control the calf market about as much as we can control the weather and that pony trotting across the field with his reigns dragging…

What are we doing here? Well, all I can say is we’re doing our best, and learning plenty of lessons along the way.

Next up? December and keeping that kitten off the Christmas tree.

Letting go of expectations

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Letting go of expectations
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It rained all day yesterday. It was the kind of melancholy soaking that only October can do right. The sky was part deep blue then part glimmering, then part rainbow before turning slowly back to the gray before the night.

I had paperwork to do and so I did it, begrudgingly at first, then sort of grateful for the kind of task where I don’t have to think, I don’t have to create a new idea or form a cohesive thesis. No human interaction or compromise, I just needed to pay the bills, count the numbers and settle up.

Recently I heard a famous person say that being an actor is constantly hoping you get invited to the party, constantly hoping you measure up against the competition, hoping to catch someone’s eye, hoping to be picked. I am not an actress and I am far from famous, but I found myself nodding along because some part of it I understood as a writer and a performer pursuing the best way to convey a thought or a feeling in a way that resonates. Bonus points if it’s catchy so that people listen and ask for more, not for the sake of fame, but for more ears so I might get more work. Some days it’s inspired work. Some days it’s exhausting.

Yesterday it felt exhausting. And so I welcomed the paperwork because I couldn’t think of one inspired thing to say, except the rain is nice.

Earlier in the week I took a two-hour drive to a big town to drop off my taxes because I was pushing the deadline and the mail wasn’t quick enough. I walked into the building dressed in a ballcap, flannel and my red sneakers and placed an envelope in the hands of one of the well-dressed receptionists. The envelope was fat and filled with calculations on what it costs to be creative while raising cattle and kids and fixing up people’s houses. Numbers that are supposed to outline if being unconventional is worth it.  I wondered, as I drove away from that tidy building with big-windowed offices, who I would be if I had a job like that. I certainly wouldn’t be wearing these silly sneakers on a Monday afternoon. Since I was old enough to make big life choices for myself, I’ve wrestled with the idea of what success means. Is it money? Status? Approval? A big house with well-kept kids and swept floors? That picket fence everyone refers to and hardly anyone owns?

There was a time in my life I thought it might be more like the above and less like sitting in a chair in the basement of the Legion Club in my hometown, an old steakhouse turned tattoo shop asking the young artist to draw yellow roses on my arm, one for my husband, two for my daughters, six for the babies that never got to be born… And yellow for the holding on part, like the ones in the barnyard my great grandmother Cornelia planted nearly a century ago. The ones we never tend to, but choose to bloom regardless…

Twenty-something me would have never dared do it, worried about what people might say, worried about my future employment being tarnished by such a form of self-expression. Twenty-something me would wonder if I’m I the thing I’ll be forever?

But forty-year-old me needed a way to control something on a body that has so often felt out of my control. Forty-year-old me writes for a living and plays mediocre guitar and spends her days planning ways to help people believe in the power of the music and the canvas and the words and the movement and the way the light reflects off it all. And some days we all sit in a room and feel it together, and some days the emptiness of that room feels disappointing. But every day I get up and brush my daughters’ hair and help them pick out their clothes and tell them to hurry up and eat or we’re going to be late and then we turn the music up in the car and sing along loud to all the ones we know because we all know how to do that. I we all know how to sing.

And at night, before I lay down in bed, I shower the day off of me and step out to see a body in the mirror reflecting scars and lines and soft flesh slowly turning back to its winter shade from the lack of sun we’re supposed to hide from anyway. I’ve never listened to that rule and I suppose it shows. I will get up in the morning to do it all again, brush my hair and then my daughters’ and on and on with the schedule of the days. And sometimes I’ll stop and wonder who they might become, it’s fun to imagine, but not as much fun as watching and enjoying who they are right now. I think it’s time I give myself the same grace…

Because right now I’m like the October sky, part melancholy and part rainbow. Part rain and part glimmering sun, dark and light parts, part unpredictable and part steady and maybe, finally now, wholly unconcerned with expectations…

Growing their wings

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Rosie, my five-year-old, fell off her horse for the first time a few weeks ago. I made plans to drive my oldest and her best friend to bible camp for the day and so my husband took Rosie on a ride to the east pasture on our trusty old gelding named Cuss. They were going to check some fences, water and the cow situation and I was going to send Edie off to pray and play along the little lake by Epping, ND. These were just our morning plans.

And because there’s never a dull moment around here, on my way home to the ranch I met my husband driving the horse trailer back to the barn, with little Rosie tucked up next to his arm. We stopped in the middle of the road the way we do on the place, rolling down windows and checking what’s new and before I could utter a “How’d it go?” Rosie, with a fresh, small scratch on her chin, leaned over her dad and proudly announced, “I got bucked off!!!”

My husband just sorta calmly looked at me then from under his palm leaf cowboy hat and dark glasses, his lips closed tight and slightly pulled back toward his ears, his tanned arm resting casually out the open pickup window. Unlike his wife, who’s jaw was on the floor of my SUV while my eyebrows reached up to the ceiling, he doesn’t have many big expressions that indicate what’s going on in his head. But I knew this one. This one meant that it was true…

Well, at least partially true, because everyone knows that old horse can’t and won’t buck. But he did make a bit of a dramatic effort when climbing a hill and that’s what put poor Rosie on the ground.

And I wasn’t going to tell this story because in this day in age there are plenty ways you can be shamed as a parent, especially when you dare to be honest about anything that doesn’t resemble picture-perfect moments topped off with themes, balloon arches and gift bags for everyone. But I decided to share it today in case it helps someone. Because Rosie was just fine. Chad calmly tended to her, helped her up and made her feel taken care of in that moment. When he assessed that her tears were more out of fear than pain and realized that it was a fair hike back to the house, he asked her if she was comfortable getting back on her horse or if she would like to ride with him on his. She wanted to get back on and so she did, but Chad took her reigns and led Rosie and her old horse home safe and sound.

In the hours and days that followed my husband and I assessed and re-assessed the incident in our heads and in conversation with one another. And even though she was alright, we felt terrible about it. We wondered what we could have done differently, if she was too young to be out there, if we are bad parents, if she’s going to be afraid now. Did we push it too far? But what’s the cost of being overly cautious with them? And, the most important question, should we get our kids bubble-wrap suits?

When parents like us (I think we’re called geriatric millennials now, which I don’t appreciate, but I digress) talk about parenting-musts like car seats and helmets, unsupervised play in the neighborhood until dark and not putting our kids in the gooseneck of the horse trailer for a ride to the next town, we tend to respond with phrases like “Ah, we all lived through it,” which, when you think about it, is the privilege given only to those who lived through it.

There are reasons for rules.

But there are no official rules when it comes to parenting, especially parenting your kids on a working ranch. And so it’s hard to know sometimes—especially when you screw up—if you’re even close to the right track or if you’re bouncing up over that far hill with Cuss.

And I wish I could tell you that my husband and I came to an enlightening agreement, making our own ranch kid parenting playbook that I could lay out for you here, but we didn’t. And even if we did, I wouldn’t share it, because, put simply, it would be ours and ours alone. You don’t need to hear from us all the ways you could improve or change the way you love and care for your kids. If you’re a good parent, then you’re assessing that for your family daily. I know we are. Oh, and one more thing I want to make sure I add –our kids are living, breathing, heart-beating, mac-and-cheese snarfing humans who are begging us every day to help them grow their wings stronger so they can fly. I’m sure I’ve said it before here, but this summer alone my kids have outdone my expectations of them. Not necessarily in the room cleaning, Barbie pick-up categories, but in the ways they ask us to trust their capabilities. At the beginning of the summer, just a few short months ago, I planned to lead Rosie on Cuss through the barrel pattern at our hometown kids rodeo and she absolutely wouldn’t have it. She knew she could do it on her own, and she did. Who are we to let our own fear hold them back? Holding too tightly to the reins has consequences of its own.

But man it’s hard isn’t it? To watch them grow up and stretch farther into this world that’s so beautiful and unpredictable. But who would they become if we could guarantee their safekeeping? They would live through it but what kind of life would they live?

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be searching Amazon for that protective bubble suit, for my kids and for my heart, just in case.

Honoring the women who made me who I am

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Greetings from Nashville where I’m deep in the woods of recording an album. I’ve been here since early Sunday morning (like 4:30 in the morning) where I blew in on the back of a major thunderstorm and will be working out these songs until the end of the week.

I’ll share more about this experience, but for now I’m focused on the project and will be tracking vocals all day for the next few days.

In other music news, it has been a busy couple weeks of performances where I’ve had the honor of speaking to rooms full of women across the state as they celebrate Mother’s Day and spring and just good ‘ol fashioned fellowship at a variety of brunches, all so sweetly planned and executed.

So that’s what this week’s column is about, specifically about my hometown event where I was overcome with emotion and gratitude looking out at the room full of women who have had such special impacts on our community.

No podcast for this week as I’m not sure I’ll be able to fit it in, but I’ll sure have lots to talk about when I get back. Also, I heard Edie wrote me a note to read when I get back home and it says something like “Never ever ever ever leave me again!” so now you know how she feels about this situation. Rosie? Well, she’s had some really great days and mostly just wants to know what I had for supper and also if i am going to get her a treat while I’m here.

To which I say “of course!”

Honoring the women who made me who I am

Recently, I had the honor of sharing stories and singing for the Lutheran Ladies in my hometown at their annual Sunday brunch. They were celebrating this sunny spring afternoon with tiny cucumber and egg salad sandwiches, homemade mints, and a tea bar. Each table was decorated and set by different women who stood up to introduce their guests and explain the stories behind the centerpieces and dishes, silverware and place settings.

I had come off a week that sent me back and forth across the state to speak and sing in front of rooms full of people I had yet to meet, and I was, if I’m being honest, exhausted. I got ready that morning with a little apprehension. Truthfully, performing to a room full of people you know is sometimes the most nerve-wracking. I wondered if I had anything to say that they hadn’t already heard.

My mom, little sister and I were invited to sit at our neighbor Jan’s table decorated with her childhood cowboy boots, a vintage lunchbox, and themed around her grandmother’s colorful old ceramic pitcher.

This woman was raised right alongside my dad. Her mother, who was at the table as well, was my grandma Edie’s best friend. Sitting next to her was the grandmother of one of my best friends. Next to me was Jan’s daughter, who used to come to play at the ranch in her beautiful pink boots of which I was so envious.

I’m setting this scene here for a purpose, and I’ll take a moment to explain, as it took a moment for me to realize the significance as I stood up in front of those women that afternoon, behind my guitar talking about the crocuses blooming on the hilltops and holding my grandmother’s hand on a hunt to pick a perfect bouquet.

I told them a story about my great-grandmother Cornelia’s yellow roses that still bloom in the barnyard. Then I moved on to a bit about community and how our role is to help build it, like my great-grandma Gudrun — an immigrant from Norway, just 16 years old on her way across the ocean to raise crops and cattle and 12 children on this unforgiving landscape — did.

It was then that I realized, looking into those familiar faces looking back at me smiling and laughing, or closing their eyes and nodding along, rooting for me, quietly encouraging me, that the lessons I was offering that afternoon were lessons I learned from them.

As is my motto, I felt like I had to say something then. It sort of washed over me, and out of my mouth came an effort to thank them, not just for their collective spirit, but for what their perseverance and individuality has meant to this community and to girls like me trying to figure out what it means to grow up here.

I got home that evening and had a chance to reflect a bit on the fact that there was more I wished I could have articulated, so I want to say it now.

These women, they are leaders and caretakers. They show up, they bring food, they stay to put away the chairs and wipe the counters and offer a laugh or advice on the way out the door. They have vision, they’re loyal, they’re feisty, they’re elegant and artistic, just like the event they put on that afternoon. They’re teachers, coaches, handywomen and true friends who will say what needs to be said and who hold secret recipes to casseroles and bars and that boozy slush she serves every Easter.

When I tell stories and sing songs about strong women in North Dakota, I am singing about them. And their mothers. And the daughters they’re raising. I grew up in this small town under their gaze, under their care, under their expectations, or I was raised alongside them, or I am getting to know them, happy they’re here.

Some of them wash and put away the dishes, some of them stop at Jack and Jill for the doughnuts, and some of them make tiny sandwiches and homemade mints and bring the good dishes. You would think those things are small things, but I will tell you now that they are not.

They are big things, rooted in the unspoken rule that you show up the best possible way that you can. And if you can’t, they’ll wrap a plate up for you. If you forget for a moment what you’re made of, if you let them, if you listen, they will remind you.

When I grow up

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Today I want to share a piece that closes out my book “Coming Home.” I wrote it when I was still in my twenties in our first year back at the ranch. I was seeing this place through new eyes, realizing what time can do to us, clinging tight to the things that made me as I was discovering them again.

Those gray hairs I talk about are pushing through strong and I realize in the re-reading, I didn’t define what “grown up” actually means. Is it now? Is it ever?

I grab my flannel and go look for crocuses.

This week on the podcast I sit down with my oldest daughter, Edie, to talk about what it means to be an adult. And why kids like the mud. And yetis. Listen here or wherever you get podcasts.

When I grow up

When I grow up I want to be the kind of woman who lets her hair grow long and wild and silver. When I’m grown I hope I remember to keep my flannel shirts draped over chairs, hanging in the entryway and sitting on the seat of the pickup where they are ready and waiting for me to pull them on and take off somewhere, the scent of horsehair on the well-worn sleeve.

When I grow up I want to remember every spring with the smell of the first buds blooming on the wild plum trees what this season means to me. When I grow up I pray I don’t forget to follow that smell down into the draws where the air falls cooler the closer you get to the creek and the wind is calm.

When I grow up I hope I don’t find I have become offended by a bit of mud tracked from boots onto the kitchen floor. I hope I keep the windows open on the best summer evenings with no regard for the air conditioning or the dust, because a woman can only be so concerned with messes that can be cleaned another day, especially when she needs to get the crocuses in some water.

When I’m older and my memory is full, I hope that the smell of damp hay will still remind me of feeding cows with my dad on the first warm day of spring when the sun warmed the snow enough to make small rivers to run on our once frozen trail. I hope it reminds me how alive I felt wading in that stream while he rolled out the bale and I tested the limits of the rubber on my boots.

And when my hair turns silver I hope I remember that my favorite colors are the colors of the seasons changing from brown to white to green to gold and back again. I pray I never curse the rain and that I don’t forget that next to the rosy flush in my baby’s cheeks, rain is my favorite color of them all.

Yes, when I’m old and my knees don’t bend the way they need to bend to get me on the back of a horse, I hope I’m still able to bury my face in her mane, to run my hands across her back and lean on her body while I remember the way my spirits lifted as she carried me to the hilltops.

I hope I recall how the first ride of spring made my legs stiff, my back creak and my backside sore, even as a young woman with muscles and tall boots.

Yes, boots! When I am old I hope I will wear my red wedding boots every once in a while and remember how I stood alone in them out in the cow pasture as a young woman waiting for the horses and wagon to come over the hill and take me to the oak tree where my friends and family gathered and the man I loved was waiting to marry me.

My red boots will remind me, so in all the shuffle and lost things that become our lives, I hope I remember to save them.

And as I watch the lines form on my husband’s face, little wrinkles around his eyes from work and worry, I hope I remember to say something funny, to tease him a bit, so I might be reminded again how he got the most important ones, the ones that run the deepest.

Yes, when I’m old and my hair is silver and long and wild, I hope those things that made me—the dirt turned to mud, a good man’s laughter, the soft breath of my child asleep on my chest, the strong back of a horse, the rain that falls on the north buttes and the scent of summer rolled up in a hay bale at the end of a long winter—will be there to see me out, happy and softened and weathered, just like the flannel I’ll remember to leave draped over the chair…

The Girls of Spring

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This week on the podcast we catch up on getting back on the horses in the spring, my dad’s horse-whispering skills and some of our epic horse wrecks. Which brings us to wishing we didn’t know how it feels to hit the ground when we watch our girls ride the big horses by themselves. We also catch up on my Nashville plans and how Chad had to rescue me once again from the side of the road. Listen here or wherever you get podcasts.


Today it’s raining. Not a winter rain, but a true spring rain, one that smells like dirt turning to mud, one that lingers to soak the ground, not a lick of wind, it feels warm even though it’s barely above freezing.

Last Sunday I took my daughters out to the hilltops to look for crocuses. I knew it was probably a bit too soon, but when the first calves of the season are born and the snow disappears from the high spots, it’s time to check. And we did find some, though they were still sucked up tight into their buds, not quite ready to open up to the sun. But that was good enough for us. We’ve waited all this time, we could wait one more day. These are the rituals that come with the seasons, and they take patience.

Our hike around the hilltops on that 60-degree day found us next in the barnyard to greet the horses. After winter months out to pasture and bribing them in for scratches with oats and sweet feed, it was time to put on their halters and brush off their thick coats and get reacquainted.

In these moments, it seems like last fall was a lifetime ago, back when their coats were sleek and shiny and us humans were confident on top of them. It’s been months since we last saddled up the girls’ old geldings. Seven months now that I’m counting.

Seven months is a long time in the life of these little girls. Since then, both have turned another year older, they’ve stretched out inches, they’ve built new muscles and found the answers to new questions. They were ready to see what they could do with these horses now that they were all grown up.

Seven months in old-sorrel-horse-years has made them better, more understanding, a little more gray around their muzzles, and just fine with the task of trotting and turning around the still-sorta-muddy-but-dry-enough arena.

My husband and I stood shoulder to shoulder in that dirt watching our daughters get tested for stubbornness and will by their animals. I think we both held our breath, equally excited for the months ahead and lonesome for those springs that have passed, replacing our tiny, chubby, giggling daughters being lead around the pony pens with these creatures, lanky and independent and capable enough to do it themselves.

Oh, I know from experience, there’s nothing like being a young girl out here on this ranch in the spring! Nothing. The possibilities stretch out before you like that creek full of spring runoff, winding and glimmering and equal parts rushing and patient. Everything around you is waking up, and you can go out in it because you’re a part of it, reaching your bare arms up to the sun, unfolding out of your winter bud like that crocus today.

This spring, my daughters will take to the trees behind the house without having their mother as their guide. They will find a favorite, secret spot, they will wear down their own trails. They will take their baby dolls along and pretend they are mothers out in the wilderness. They will build forts and bring picnics and pick ticks off their jeans and drag mud into the house, and the world outside these doors will turn green as their skin turns brown and their hair turns gold.

They’ll scrape their knees running too fast on the scoria road, they will slap at mosquitoes, they will fight about silly things that are their most important things, and they will come in crying.

And they will have each other and their horses and the hilltops and the budding wildflowers blooming along with them. That’s all I ever wanted.

That’s all I ever wanted to give them.