Tag: country life
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What You Can Get Away with on a Farm or Ranch
This column was originally published February 12, 2014 Farm and ranch residents may not have a grocery store or WalMart located only minutes away, but there are some advantages to living out of town including things you can only get away with in the country. It’s universally acceptable in the country if a kid pees…
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Preserving a Favorite Summertime Tradition
One of the greatest pleasures of living in the country is picking berries and preserving them in jams and jellies to savor all year. Nothing says a country summer like a therapeutic couple of hours walking around on sticky floors from making batches of wild berry jams. And there’s nothing more gratifying than opening a…
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Ridin’ Shotgun
Most farm and ranch outfits have a dog around the place. Our dog Pepper, gets to go along to help feed cows in the winter and check water and cows in the summer. It’s all fine and dandy if there are no other passengers because then Pepper has the whole passenger’s seat to herself and…
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Full Moons
Even though a full moon tends to wreak havoc on my sleep, I can’t resist looking admiringly at the moon every month. It doesn’t always look the same and sometimes it’s more beautiful-looking than others. I usually struggle to get enough sleep when the moon’s out but not shorted enough to curse it for keeping…
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One of My Favorite Summer Perks
One of the advantages of living at an elevation of 5,300 feet in the Black Hills of South Dakota is that we have cooler nighttime temperatures and very little humidity. (That can be good and bad though–we joke we live in “the high desert.”) We can get away with living without air conditioning most of…
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Living the Simple Life
I thought my household needed to be simplified so I read Living the Simple Life by Elaine St. James. I was amazed to learn that I didn’t need to buy the book. It just verified that I should have written it. My family has been doing the majority of the book’s suggestions for years, which…
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Bringing the Story of Christ’s Birth to Life
Many times during the winter months when we have chores to do at the barn for our heifer calves, my mind is full of wonderment about our barn. It was built by my husband’s great grandfather in 1914 and is three stories tall. I love admiring the markings left from the tools that made…
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Cowboy Logic Camping
My husband told our kids once, A campground is about as close to living in a city as you can get, when they mentioned how much they liked staying at a campground. Considering the way we choose to live and the idea behind camping, I had to agree with him. Experiencing the outdoors and connecting…