WATFORD CITY, N.D. -- It's a great week to be alive on the ranch. The sun is shining, the snow is melting, and the smell of the sweet, muddy, brown ground reminds us of the green that's promised in the coming months.
Yes, when March finally rolls around, the future gets a little brighter and a whole lot dirtier around here. While the calves are getting ready to be born out in the hills along our gravel roads, ranch dogs are discovering things they buried in the snow months ago (that's where my good glove went), wool caps get replaced with ball caps, coveralls with jeans and heavy coats with barn jackets, lightening the load so we have a prayer of managing the weight of half the ranch stuck to the bottom of our boots.
Yes, it's muddy out here. Muddy and slushy and full of water running down from the dam, the crick and the snowy trees, getting stopped up by earth and ice that hasn't melted yet, creating little lakes just the perfect size for flooding the insides of my nephew's rubber boots.
Because when the sun shines like this after a long winter, we all seem to push it a little far.
I mean, walk onto any campus in North Dakota today, and if the weather is above 35 degrees, you'll likely see someone in flip-flops or shorts.
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If it hits 50, well, get your tank top and your cooler, because we're grilling out tonight.
Yes, we all seem to have our rituals when the warmer weather finally comes around.
When I was a kid, the first warm day of the year was designated to following the creek behind the house as far as it would take me, fascinated by how fast it moved, swelling out of its banks and becoming a temporary river. I wished so much that it would stay that way into the summer, deep and rushing and just perfect for swimming or floating on an inner tube with my best friend.
Kids can't be trusted in weather like this.
I have so many examples of this, but watching my 7-year-old nephew gather sticks outside my house and then wading knee deep in one of those temporary rivers in an attempt to make a dam reminded me of my little sister and her plan to turn her favorite sled into a boat.
Yeah. It's her favorite story to tell, because she likes to wonder out loud why the heck no one had the sense to stop her, as if anyone could tell her anything, even if we were paying attention.
But anyway, she had it figured out. In her mind, there was no reason a sled wouldn't float, I mean, it's built just like a boat ...
And so there she found herself, out in the middle of the big puddle that forms every year on the road when the culvert's still frozen, little Alex in rubber boots and a rain coat sitting soaked way past her belly button on a sunken sled.
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I'd like to say we learn our lessons about giving in to spring fever as we get older, but then I wouldn't tell you about the giant slip 'n slide that my roommates and I created out of contracting plastic in the backyard of our college house on the first warm day of the year.
Or that every year my dad climbs to the top of a hill in a search for a dry spot where he can lie down with his face to the sun and take a nap.
Or how many times I've had to walk back to the barnyard with the man because he pushed it a little too far on his first four-wheeler or pickup ride out in the soggy spring pastures.
What other season in what other part of the world has that much power over us?
I look out the window to find my nephew sitting on a big rock and dumping half a lake out of his rubber boot, whistling and singing to himself so loudly it floats in through the open doors of this house, and I'm thankful for the winter, because I can't imagine a world without these muddy, messy springs.
Jessie Veeder is a musician and writer living with her husband on a ranch near Watford City, N.D. Readers can reach her at jessieveeder@gmail.com .
