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 ..read more

Recently, while scrolling through Instagram hoping to see cute pictures of my friends’ families on the 4th of July, I ran across an ad for a tank top that’s designed to hide the skin that folds at my armpits. The product’s praises were being sung by a woman who looked like she was on the Olympic swim team. She caught me then, innocently going about my life never thinking about the skin that folds at my armpits until that very moment and now, well, now that I know about it, I guess I should hide it?  It’s summer and I’m a 40-year-old woman living in the age of social media. Around e ..read more

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 getti ..read more

At night, in the summer, we sleep with the windows open and so the chirping of the birds wakes me up in the morning. It’s alarming how much they have to say, how loud they seem after so many months of quiet skies. I’m listening to them right now as I type, the chirping of the birds and my cat on the deck making his presence known through the screen door. Last week he brought one of those birds to that door mat, reminding us of the order of things. The order of things is ever present here at the ranch. A few days ago I took my daughters on a walk with me to the east pasture stock dam—out the ..read more

Well, my giant branding-day roaster made it through another year, but how is it that I haven’t figured out the right proportion of roast-beef-to-person ratio after all these years of hosting branding day lunch? Turns out five total beef roasts is too many to feed 23 adults and ten children. And one whole watermelon, two packs of strawberries and two packs of grapes is about five watermelons and five hundred strawberries and grapes short. Also, I forgot four pounds of slush burger in the fridge, so apparently “Would hate to run out you know,” is the old Lutheran Church Lady proverb that I tru ..read more

Can you see the rainbow?” The text pinged my phone while I was on hour eight or twenty of laying in my bed with the flu. My husband and daughters had been gone all day for our niece’s graduation, but I had to skip it because, after months of dodging it, it was my turn to be sick. But my little sister, Alex, who lives right over the hill on the other side of the barnyard, wasn’t going to let me miss an opportunity to see a rainbow, a good remedy for the pukes. Earlier that day she snuck in to put cookies and fresh baked bread on my kitchen counter, trying to be sneaky, but forgetting that my ..read more

Photo by We 3 Bs Photography I remember the first time I witnessed the northern lights. As memories so often go, I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember stepping out of my parent’s car in the driveway at the ranch and my dad telling me to look up. I was 9 or 10 or 11 or 12, one of those ages that blend into one another in childhood, and it was spontaneous, the way things like the northern lights used to be before we could predict them in the way we do now, announcing their arrival on an app or a website or a social media post to help others experience it. Which is a lovely perk of the ..read more

“The person who invented pants is really smart,” my oldest daughter’s voice chimed in from the way back seat of our Suburban. “Yeah, you’re right,” I responded, not really that surprised that the comment came out of silence and, also, out of nowhere. She’s eight and that’s her resting state. “Right because people used to just wear tiny chaps over their privates. And maybe not even over their butts!” And that was her little sister’s contribution to the conversation as we rounded the corner to school drop off, just another Tuesday under a cloudy sky. Only this one was a little perilous because ..read more

Welcome to the warm-up North Dakota. As I write this the rain is soaking the grass and I swear it’s turning a neon green right before my eyes. We had ten calves yesterday, and likely a half-dozen or so more will be born in the rain. But they won’t mind, they will be licked clean by their mommas and kept in the protection of the tall grass and they’ll wait for the sun so they can stand up and buck and kick and run, just like us people it seems. Waiting for the sun to launch us alive again. When you’ve lived on a piece of land for most of your life, you become a part of the rhythm of things. Yo ..read more

In 1915 my great grandpa Eddie staked his claim on this ranch where we’re now living. He got married and headed off to war. When he arrived back in Bear Den Township he proved up his claim, planting some trees, flax and wheat, building a barn and putting up fences. Cornelia and Eddie’s Children Over the course of his lifetime he would watch his crops grow, his wife die too young and his children make their own mark on the land he laid claim to. He would meet a couple grandchildren and serve them his famous buns, tell them jokes and scruff their hair before leaving them all behind in death to ..read more