Frontier Follies

by Ree Drummond

  In an interesting plot twist, I have come to learn that my sister, Betsy, also suffers from the same condition. She had begun to mention things here and there that involved her son Elliot’s eating sounds, and I came clean about the M-word. After doing some research of her own, she thanked me for the diagnosis, because she had been as perplexed about her issue as I’d once been. So now, we are each other’s own support group, usually through brief text exchanges, which go something like this:

  BETSY: Elliot is eating Grape Nuts. HELP.

  ME: Oh no! I’m so sorry! Praying now.

  Another recent one:

  ME: Paige. Sofa. Macaroni with a spoon.

  BETSY: Breathe. Just breathe. Go outside if you have to.

  And one of the classics:

  BETSY: Elliot has a bag of Cheetos and he’s licking the cheese dust off of each finger one at a time.

  ME: Get out of there!!! Save yourself!!!

  Our parents must be so proud.

  Wannabe Town Kids

  Raising kids in the country is great, at least from the perspective of the mother. The growing, developing humanoids have wide-open spaces to play, and they can run around outside in their underwear—or completely naked if they want, but only (by way of Murphy’s Law) if the Schwan’s man or Orkin man happen to drive up right at that moment. (I deeply apologize to those poor gentlemen through the years. They’ve seen more than their job descriptions ever called for.)

  But anyway, country kids can fish, explore, get dirty, and learn all about nature. In the case of the boys, they can pee outside and not waste water by flushing. (Well, girls can, too . . . it’s just . . . oh, never mind.) And if the kids happen to live on a family farm or ranch, they can experience what it means to work the land, contribute to the family business, castrate bull calves, and learn how to be a part of a team working toward a common goal. (I threw in the castrate part to make sure you’re paying attention.)

  I loved being the mother of country kids. I hadn’t grown up in a rural setting and knew nothing about that kind of life until I married my husband, but there was room for them to spread out, and I loved it when they got old enough (say, around two months? Just kidding) to start riding horses and helping Ladd with ranching; I didn’t grow up with anything near that level of responsibility, and knew it was going to help shape our kids in innumerable ways. Our four hardly ever complained about ranch work when they were little, which was notable considering they’d sometimes have to get up as early as 3:45 a.m. in the summertime and work elbow deep in grime during long, sweltering days. But every experience—even work—was an adventure for the kids, and they’d always come home with a pocketful of rocks (or calf nuts—see Bull, Interrupted) that they’d collected during their day at the pens. They made incredible memories with their dad, cousins, uncle, and the cowboys in those years . . . and I’d guess they wouldn’t change their childhoods for the world.

  I use the term “childhood,” because once Alex, my oldest, became a teenager, all of this lovely, rural charm was instantly out the window. Where she’d once bounced out of bed every morning as a cute little cowgirl, eager to get to the barn and saddle her horse, when the teenage years arrived, she became possessed by a demon and getting her out of her bed was suddenly a near-impossible task. Where she once slept in cute PJs with her hands folded neatly and the corners of her mouth turned up in a hint of a smile, she was now a tall, lanky, mushy teenage lump of human Silly Putty, poured into her bed wearing mismatched sweats, with zero desire (or ability) to drag herself out of bed, let alone bounce.

  This was an overnight change, as far as her younger siblings were concerned.

  “What’s wrong with Alex, Mama?” sweet younger sister Paige, all dressed in her working gear, asked. “She won’t get out of bed!”

  “Is Awex sick?” young Todd asked. “She kinda cwanky.”

  “No,” I answered. “She just needs a little extra boost these days.”

  “Let’s go pour ice water on her!!” Bryce shrieked to his sibs, and they all laughed and ran upstairs in their boots and spurs to do just that. It went over well, as you can imagine. There were punches thrown. Which, of course, made Alex’s younger siblings laugh even harder.

  But the depth of sleep wasn’t the only difference. It was around this time, just over the threshold of adolescence, when Alex had begun to acutely notice the difference between her life on the ranch and that of her friends who lived in town. The switch flipped instantly, around thirteen years old, and suddenly her whole outlook changed. What previously had been a wondrous upbringing on a family ranch was now, instead, her plight. While she was still an upbeat, happy kid most of the time, she could be hit with crashing waves of comparison when she measured the way her summer days were shaping up against those of the “normal” kids in town.

  Her friends in town slept in, for example—at least Alex imagined they did. She wanted to sleep in, too. She thought it sounded really, really enjoyable. But again—ranch work became busier than ever during summer, and it wasn’t unusual for the kids to have to get up well before daylight four to five days a week for a good two months as Ladd and his brother Tim carried out the work of shipping cattle and weaning calves. Alex was convinced that everyone in town was sleeping until noon every day. “I’ve never slept until noon in my life,” she said. “And it’s looking like I never will!” In reality, her friends in town had summer jobs, too, and while they likely weren’t getting doused in cold water by their siblings before daylight, it was hardly the Pawhuska sleepfest that Alex was picturing.

  As her teenage years continued, Alex also became certain that all the town kids were always attending a 24-7 party that she could never go to because she always had to work cattle the next morning. Even if it was as early as 7:00 a.m. and she was hard at work at the pens, she was certain that all her friends were congregating for a pancake breakfast on a patio somewhere, probably toasting one another with ginger ale in champagne flutes with chilled pomegranate seeds floating on the surface. I gently reminded Alex that her friends couldn’t possibly be getting together for a pancake breakfast, because remember—they were all sleeping in until noon? But she couldn’t hear me. Teenage angst, fueled by manure and early mornings, can make a girl impervious to logic.

  Speaking of that: At a certain point, Alex was completely over manure. She didn’t want to see it or be covered in it anymore. Now, this was a concern I could fully understand! No matter how squeaky clean she was when she left the house, she’d come home with a dirty face, muddy boots, and manure-streaked jeans. Her friends in town never encountered manure, she regularly pointed out, let alone found themselves coated with it. “I mean, look at me . . .” She’d demonstrate, pointing at her beyond-sullied person. “Is this even normal?!?” There was always enough irony and barely there humor behind these moments with Alex that I was semi-confident she was in on the joke . . . but the lines are so thin with teenagers, I never knew when she was actually about to snap.

  So mostly I just listened. I tried to provide perspective, but what could I say? The kids did, in fact, live on a family ranch, and helping with all the chores and responsibilities is part of the package deal. For a kid on the ranch to sleep in while all the other siblings, cousins, cowboys, and dads are out doing the work would be unheard of. Also unheard of would be doing all of this without getting covered in poop. Poop, like early mornings, is simply part of the package.

  In her junior and senior years of high school, Alex got to get out and spread her wings more, playing soccer, hanging with friends, and staying in town at her BFF Meg’s if it was too late to drive home to the ranch. Now, she’d still have to drive back home in the morning if there was a big working going on, so she’d always have to weigh the pros and cons of staying out late—but at least she had options. And that’s the complicated part of being the mother of a country kid. You want them to have their fun and freedom, but they also have to be there for the work. It’s how Ladd had grown up, and I didn’t see that he was an
y the worse for wear. (He’s a little baseline in need of a nap all the time, but aren’t we all.)

  Like clockwork, Paige followed in Alex’s footsteps and hit the Silly Putty sleeping stage as well. She grunted a lot, and suddenly had zero use for her siblings, her mother, her boots, her birthright, and manure. And even though I’d just been through the entire process with Alex and had come out the other side, it was no less difficult with Paige—in fact, it was a little more complicated, because Paige was (and is) a natural debater. So instead of simply pointing out the inequities and inadequacies of her adolescence in the boonies and letting it just exist in the ether as a complaint, which was more Alex’s style, Paige would actually pose rhetorical questions to me, her mother, who in her mind was somehow responsible for all of these injustices—even though I was quick to point out that it wasn’t my fault we lived on a ranch; it was her dad’s!

  It was the worst at 4:00 a.m.

  “Tell me this,” she’d grumble, fighting tooth and nail for her right to sleep in. “How can you expect me to get up and work cattle when you never did this as a teenager?” Of course, this only served to infuriate me, especially since I wouldn’t have had my coffee yet, and I’d say something like “Yeah, well—I did ballet all the time!! Look at my messed-up toes!” Boy, I sure told her.

  And here was an exasperating but brilliant Paige tactic: She’d enroll in online summer classes through a community college so she could say she had school to do on busy workdays. She’s a slippery little sucker when she wants to be!

  The good news is, the girls made it through, and it didn’t take them long after being away from their comfortable nest to appreciate the merits of home. They look back at old photos of the cattle working days with their siblings and cousins, and they laugh and happy-cry at the memories. They jump in and help Ladd on the ranch when they’re visiting home, which makes his day every time. And ironically, Bryce and Todd are in the same teenage years now that caused Alex and Paige so much agriculture-related consternation . . . but since they’re both seriously pursuing football, they’re having to split their focus between that and ranch work, which leaves almost zero time for girls.

  And that’s just hunky-dory with me!

  Special Deliveries

  We never get UPS or FedEx deliveries at our house on the ranch. This is a harsh reality of country life for me, right up there with no trash service and no meal delivery service and no cable and . . . I’ll stop there. Our place is simply too remote, too far off the beaten path, and the drivers for the various carriers have gotten accustomed to leaving our packages in town rather than bringing them all the way out to us. For the longest time, they’d leave our packages on the doorstep of any Drummond residence they happened to encounter in the area; I guess they assumed we all got together for dinner every night and figured our packages would make their way to us pretty quickly. I always used to worry about a distant Drummond cousin opening up my shipment of bras or something.

  Around ten years ago, as I was working in my garden, something unexpected happened. I heard the loud rumble of a vehicle and looked down our road to see who was coming. To my shock and surprise, it was a big brown UPS truck—a sight I’d never seen on our property before. I was covered in dirt and tangled in tomato plants, so I simply waved from a distance as the driver hopped out of the truck. “Hi,” he said, waving back. “I’m new!” He left a small package on our front porch and, as quickly as he’d appeared, hopped in his big brown truck and drove away. It was the funniest, most random moment, and I just couldn’t square it. What in the world? The UPS guy had come to our house! I couldn’t wait to tell Ladd. This would totally consume our dinnertime conversation that evening. I might put it in the church newsletter!

  Once I’d cleaned the garden mess off my hands, I retrieved the package from the porch and took it in the house. I hadn’t been expecting anything specific, but since it was addressed to me, I opened the small box . . . and discovered a teeny, tiny action figurine inside. The thing was smaller than a thimble, the return address was from Japan, and I had no idea what to make of it. So I set the little guy on top of a stack of miscellany on the kitchen counter and went back out to the garden to pull more caterpillars off my tomatoes.

  The next day, I got home from a big supermarket run and found—again, to my utter surprise—another UPS package sitting on our front porch. “What in the actual heck,” I laughed to myself. “This is insane!” The idea that the UPS truck had made the long drive out to our house the day before was confusing enough; that it had just happened again and that it was only to deliver another single, small package was completely puzzling. I never dared return to the ranch after a trip to civilization without at least eight bags of supplies with me; after living this way for several years, a minuscule delivery like this seemed so inefficient. I opened this second box and found a teeny, tiny helmet that looked suspiciously similar to the action figurine from the day before. When I compared return labels, I saw that it was from the same shipper in Japan. What a (now ongoing) mystery this was!

  Over the course of the next ten days, no fewer than eight more small, individual UPS packages would be delivered to my house—yes, on eight different days. When I wasn’t home, they were left by the door. When I was home, I insisted to the well-meaning UPS driver that life didn’t have to be this way for him. I explained that all drivers before him had made it a practice to leave our packages in town, and in no way did I expect him to regularly make that drive. “That’s my job, ma’am,” he said with all the conviction of a soldier before driving away from me for the umpteenth time. He’s not going to last to the end of the month, I thought as I watched the dust trail form behind him.

  As for the contents of the eight most recent packages: More figurines. More helmets. A few accessories. All teeny tiny. All meticulously wrapped and shipped individually from Japan. And along the way, I solved the mystery: Seven-year-old Bryce had taught himself how to pull up Amazon on my desktop computer . . . and he and five-year-old Todd had gone on a teeny, tiny action figurine shopping spree (well, the shopping spree wasn’t teeny tiny; the figurines were) and had selected the “I want my items as they are available” option—to the detriment of a certain UPS truck’s tires. It seems the shipper took that request very literally, and had packed Every. Single. Separate. Piece—bubble wrap, tissue, tape, the works—in different boxes. And the sad thing is, the charges for each of these items were really relatively low. UPS spent way more in airline fuel and gasoline getting them to my house than Bryce—I mean I—ever paid for the items themselves.

  I changed my computer password that evening. And the new UPS driver didn’t, in fact, last the month. I hope he’s happy and well, wherever he is. I haven’t seen a brown UPS truck on our homestead since.

  Another delivery truck adventure happened a few years earlier, and involved FedEx.

  I should back up and explain that all our kids learned how to drive vehicles at a very young age. They drove only on the ranch, never on the highway, and by the time they were six or seven, they were pretty adept at driving around the ranch as needed. One day Alex, our oldest at eight years old, was starting Ladd’s big Ford feed truck. He was in the house on a phone call and had asked Alex to take his feed truck to go round up the ranch horses for the next day. As she’d done a hundred times, Alex hopped in the big truck, started it, and waited a couple of minutes for it to warm up.

  During that two minutes, in a completely unexpected development, a FedEx truck—which, again, I’d never seen on the ranch before—had not only pulled into our homestead from out of nowhere, it had parked sideways right behind Ladd’s big Ford feed truck. At that exact moment, Alex put the truck in reverse and backed up confidently—smashing right into the passenger side of the FedEx truck and leaving an enormous crater. She must have been completely shocked at the collision, considering there had been no one else within twenty miles of the truck when she’d opened the door to get in a couple of minutes earlier. So she did what any no
rmal eight-year-old driver of a big Ford feed truck would do: shifted into drive and quickly fled the scene of the accident. She was so scared and shaken that she didn’t know what else to do—so she hid the truck in the cattle pens, then got out and ducked behind the horse barn to hide. On the lam at eight years old. The country can be such a cold, unforgiving place.

  Ladd heard the crash and sprinted outside, where he was quite surprised to see a mangled FedEx truck sitting close to where his feed truck used to be, its engine still running. The driver was by now standing outside the truck, physically fine but totally confused.

  “Someone just hit my truck and drove off,” he said, a dazed look on his face. Just then, out of the corner of his eye, Ladd noticed Alex squat-running back to the house, taking a side route behind the garage. He pretended he didn’t see, and helped the driver fill out an accident form. Poor Alex has never gotten over the sound of crunching FedEx aluminum. And again—we’ve never seen a FedEx truck on our homestead since.

  These days, I make it a point to use The Mercantile as our official shipping address. It eliminates confusion, saves fuel, extends the life of tires, and prevents unnecessary insurance claims.

  Home delivery isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be!

  Viral Parenting

  It was five days after the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic had begun to reveal itself when my entire family returned home to the ranch. Alex’s employer in Dallas sent everyone home so they could work remotely, Paige’s college classes were moved online, and Bryce’s and Todd’s school and sports were suspended for the semester. (And we had some extras in the form of my nephew Stuart; Alex’s boyfriend, now fiancé, Mauricio; and our foster son . . . more about him later!) So in the matter of less than a week, a comfortable routine I’d just begun to wrap my head around (and become quite fond of)—one that involved my being at home largely by myself all day—was turned on its head.