Dear Reader,
I have been in South Dakota for 2 months.
When you first move to a new place you are only thinking about the new and exciting things. You think that you have left your old life behind and you have an entirely new personality. New habits, new friends and new adventures.
But at right about week three you start getting the moving blues.
I suspect my blues were a combination of finishing my job and adapting to a new environment at the same time. While I was eager to be free of the office and hunching over my laptop like Gollum over his precious, the ripping away of an outside structure was enough to make me feel like I was having an identity crisis for a week. I would wake up at night wondering if I had remembered to inform my replacement about certain things or I would catch myself about to text my old team to check in on things, only to remember that “the things” were not really my business anymore.
Oddly enough, sometimes I caught myself wanting to just sit in the office for an hour just so I would have a quiet place to send my freelance queries to magazines or try to bring some kind of order to my life with my notebooks and planners spread out everywhere. It makes me laugh at the many times I walked down to a coffee shop to work just for a change in scenery because my brain balked at being in the same place for any longer.
With not a lot of things to do, I quickly filled my time with things around the house. It kind of felt like I was an intern again just making myself useful with anything I could find, washing dishes, folding laundry, cleaning stalls, little things to just keep the ranch flowing. Within a week I had gotten myself promoted to stall manager.
I also got to attend a few brandings. Some I missed because I wasn’t feeling well or was finishing up some work obligations, but there were some days I chose to stay home to make sure I was caught up on some things and to do a reset on the house since everyone had been on the go for the last few weeks with brandings.
One night I realized that I was frustrated because I didn’t feel like I could do the things that I wanted to do because of other things that I felt like I had to do. Which is exactly the thing that I thought I was supposed to get away from when I moved to. Instead, I felt like I was spending as much time staring down at my phone, fretting about all that I had to do, and not even enjoying the new change in life that I had been praying for, for so long. That night I decided to go ride my mare who I had only ridden maybe twice since I been here. The timing wasn’t ideal, I still had things that needed to be done, but sometimes the things to be done never end and you just have to prioritize.
Reminding myself that I have free will and do have some power over my situation takes a lot of work and self-control, and I don’t succeed at it every day. I have also learned that just when I am spiraling because everything feels wrong, my skin is so dry, and the wind just won’t stop blowing, that I probably need to eat something and drink some water. Not having the structure of a 9-5 really makes me forget to eat and drink when I need to.
We did a mini road trip for Father’s Day. We went to Bad Lands National Park. You can drive through this park and take in the scenery and wildlife from the comfort of your car, which was nice on this rainy day. Later that week my grandparents came to visit. We did all of the tourist things, Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Badlands National Park, Little House on the Prairie things, with some brandings sprinkled in. Seeing someone experience South Dakota for the first time reminded me how quickly I had taken the rolling hills and endless sky for granted.
This year the fourth of July felt a little different, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it. We spent the day driving my grandparents back to the airport with a stop in Desmet to visit the Ingall’s home. Then a dash back across the state to get things ready for people to come over to watch fireworks. Usually, we spend the day frantically cleaning the house and mowing the lawn before people come over for fireworks. Then people start to trickle up the drive way, with chips, drinks, and plenty of fireworks. And once the sun went down, we would douse ourselves in bug spray to watch the fireworks in town and light some of our own. Maybe this year was different because not all of the regular people were there or maybe it was just the lack of humidity.
But the glow of the fireworks from town while the radio played old country songs was still the same.
From the Rancher's Daughter's Desk 