Last week marked my 10th wedding anniversary to the Man of the Ranch. As is our custom with momentous occasions, we celebrated by staying home, doing our chores and — since it also happened to fall on Thanksgiving — eating turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy.
In other words, it was a day spent much like most of the others we’ve experienced as a couple.
I’ve written before that when I married my husband, I knew I was marrying not just a man, but a way of life, and while I wasn’t scared to commit to him, committing to a place and an occupation felt more complicated. I’d been an itinerant musician for most of my adulthood. Could I really settle down and stay in one place, especially when that place was literally the most remote county in the contiguous U.S.?
December marks another important anniversary. Almost exactly 14 years ago this month, I pulled into the tiny prairie town of Bison, South Dakota. I lived in Michigan until I was 13 years old and after that moved every few years until arriving here.
That means I’ve now lived in South Dakota longer than anywhere else, which is difficult to comprehend, as I still feel I’ve just arrived. I’m not alone in that feeling. To most folks here, I’m a newcomer and always will be, but from the perspective of places this body of mine has traveled, South Dakota now houses more of my joys, sorrows, triumphs and all the mundane in-betweens than any other physical location.
Home is a topic I’ve spent more time thinking and writing about than any other, probably, because for a long time I feared I would never find it. I recorded an album the year before I left Minnesota titled, “The Road Home.” In interviews about the recording, I posited that perhaps the road WAS my home, as I felt I came home to myself every time I got on stage to play music.
Or maybe music was home? I wasn’t sure, but I remember during those interviews being scared home would never be a place or even a person, and that made me very, very sad.
And then I moved here, not planning to stay long, hoping to regroup from the relentless travel, but instead finding everything I’d been searching for. The working title for my first book was actually “Finding Home.” The publisher changed it to “Accidental Rancher,” but nonetheless, all the promotional material for the book described my journey to the prairie as a homecoming. In fact, while I agreed that calling the process “accidental” was cute, catchy and seemingly accurate, I resisted the title at first because, well, nothing about arriving here felt accidental. There was just too much magic in all the ways things shouldn’t have worked out but did for it to be an accident.
Last weekend, I did a book signing event at a wonderful little bookshop in Spearfish, South Dakota. As is almost always the case when I do book events, I had a reader ask, “So how exactly did you meet your husband?” And I answered, as I always do, “We were the only two single people in our age range for 100 miles in any direction … So naturally everyone thought we should get married. Can you believe it actually worked out?”
People ask this question because I haven’t written much about the time between when I arrived in South Dakota and when I got married, and I sometimes wonder if I ever will — I still can’t believe some of the story myself, and I lived it.
In his book, “Of Time and Memory,” Don Snyder writes, “Let us hope that we are all preceded in this world by a love story.”
On Thanksgiving Day, my anniversary, looking across the kitchen island at my kids watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade while I mashed potatoes, I thought of this quote. They are lucky, and so am I, that sometimes a love story isn’t told, but lived.
