Heather S. Ingemar's Blog, page 19

“Songbird” Available Now!

I am proud to share with you all my latest song, “Songbird:”

Enjoy!

Transitions

As my time draws near, I realize things must change. The trick is, like many wise people before me have said, learning to embrace the change as it happens.

I am not certain, yet, what these next few years are going to hold. The growth of a family can be chaotic, challenging, and a juggling act on the best of days. I always will love the stage lights, the applause of a live audience, the rush of belting out that first line of lyric with your heart and soul behind it… Because I am a musician, a performer. Only now I must learn to wear a new kind of hat, one requiring a lot more maintenance and care and time than I am used to. It is foolish of me to not accept the fact that my career will get redefined.

And that that’s okay. Because it doesn’t change who I am.

Each day draws me closer toward the end of the chapter, and after a year of much self-questioning, doubt, understanding, success, defeat, and change, I am looking forward to that next page. I have been so busy trying to make my own way, I feel I have lost sight of the trees. I have spread myself a bit too thin (as I always seem to). Now it is time to focus: on family, on music, on sharing joy. Now it is time to make the moments count, whole and full and complete, instead of participating in a mad rush to accumulate a myriad of half-full seconds. I am looking forward to simplifying. I am looking forward to learning more about myself.

All of this experience called ‘life’ is just one big journey to discovery. We wait and we grow and we mature, until suddenly, we bloom…

Nesting

Some people believe in the phenomenon known as “nesting,” and some don’t. After the last two weeks, I have to say I definitely believe! It is one of the weirdest things I believe I’ve experienced. Very out of character…

Let’s just say I was never issued my “domestic goddess” card. I’ve never been fond of housework. I always feel like there’s so many other, better things I should be doing, like practicing, writing music, helping my husband with the farm work, helping out with mechanicing on our rigs, mucking out the barn, or the like. I tend to see housework as one of those “necessary evils” of the world, and firmly believe that cleaning out icky kitchen sink traps would be an apropos punishment for traitors and terrorists. I openly admit it: being a domestic goddess is just not my thing.

But the last two weeks?

I’ve vacuumed and swept the floors.
I’ve kept caught up on the dishes, to the point I’ve even washed a bunch by hand when they wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher.
I’ve washed a bunch of baby clothes, blankets, and the like, and reorganized the baby’s clothes drawers.
I reorganized my closet.
I tidied up my computer hutch, sewing area, and music cabinet.
I scrubbed up the bathroom.
Outside, I thinned our radishes and hand-weeded all five of our rows of corn.
I organized and sorted my tea collection.
I found a better way to store said tea.
I washed the doors. (Yes, I Washed. The. Doors.)

And this is all in addition to the daily/weekly duties of laundry and dishes and garbage detail that somehow, I’ve found enough energy to keep up with. Not to mention the music things (getting those new songs recorded and ready for release!) I’ve accomplished. Hell, I’ve even done a bunch of baking (two batches of cookies and a batch of blueberry muffins)!

It’s quirky and strange, but I am enjoying this feeling of productivity. I just can’t help but wonder what task I’ll come up with next…

If you have been pregnant before, what quirky sorts of things did you find yourself doing as your time drew near?

“Gypsy Song” available now!

Stay tuned for more music releases…

“I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting. And didn’t really lose.”

I don’t know where to begin.

This young man passed away a few days ago, and I believe the world just lost one of the brightest spirits it’s ever seen. There’s so much hurt and ugliness out there… I’ve talked about it before, how it’s so easy to get caught up in the terrible darkness of every day life…. But this kid shows us that there’s so much more out there than that. There can be so much love. So much beauty. So much light. We just have to choose to see it.

If you can, I urge you to listen to Zach Sobiech’s story:

And when you’re done, take a listen to his musical legacy:

I never knew you, Zach, but your story and music has touched me beyond words. I don’t think you ‘lost’ at all. If anything, the world lost something precious and rare when we lost you.

The Fragile Thing Known as Life

I always try to be flexible and take things in stride. That’s one of the reasons why I wasn’t upset to find four little cows in my basement. And, J was right: they were cold. We didn’t have any other way to keep them warm, so the makeshift bed next to the furnace was about the only option.

“They all came within an hour of this storm,” my husband explained. “I went over to feed and there they were. I never would have found this guy if the girls hadn’t been avoiding that edge of the barn…” He petted one of the sorry little bodies and continued to relate how the rain had come so fast, the ground basically liquified. Fearing for the new calves’ lives, he’d hitched the small trailer to the tractor and manned his own rescue mission, loading them in one by one to get them somewhere dry– and fast. He had been just about to head back when he noticed the cows walking around the edge of the concrete platform of the barn, an area they never bothered to avoid before. He hopped off the tractor to investigate.

“He was buried up to his eyeballs,” my husband said. The massive amount of water sheeting off the barn roof turned that platform edge into a pit of mud treacherous for an hour-old calf trying to follow his mom into the shelter of the barn. Like quicksand, it sucked at his still unsteady legs, and the more he struggled to free himself, the deeper he sank. Until he grew too exhausted to fight.

But the rest of the herd knew he was there and alive, and they refused to walk over him. Cows are polite like that.

“He’s really lucky you were there to save him,” I said.

“Yeah. But he isn’t out of the woods yet…”

Unfortunately, pretty much the only thing you can do in these situations is wait and see. Some calves will surprise you; you’ll be positive they are dead, and then they’ll rally if only for the reason that they know someone is rooting for them. And some get it in their head to give up after the least trauma and nothing you can do will change their mind. Those are the worst. Farmers, especially those who work with livestock, often have a gentle, caring heart housed under that gruff exterior. They love their animals, and understand on a deep, often instinctual level that the animals in their care must be happy and well to be profitable. Ranchers know the cold, hard facts of life and death, and yet they will still walk over fire and brimstone to save a fighting baby calf most veterinarians would write off as a lost cause. And that’s hard. It’s heartbreaking when you do everything in your power… and the animal gives up.

Once, we had a first-calf heifer who was having birthing issues. Poor girl was panicked, and though we tried to get her caught in a speedy manner, she ran us around for five precious minutes. At last we got her in the barn and secured in one of the stanchions — a simplified chute that catches their head so they can’t get away. She knew we were trying to help, and she stood so very still as my husband stripped to the waist and went to work. The calf had presented badly: they are supposed to arrive with both front feet first, and this guy had one foot back, lodging his shoulder behind the cows pelvis. I was helpless to do anything except comfort the cow, and I watched as J worked for forty long, tortuous minutes to get that calf free. I could see in his eyes that he knew it might be futile, but he kept working.

After what had been too long, the calf slipped out. My husband dropped to the ground and began performing bovine CPR. In vain he tried to recusitate the little body.

But the little one was already gone.

That was the first time I’d seen my husband cry. After taking care of the cow and closing up the barn, we went back to the house to clean up. We sat down on the edge of the tub and held each other. And what can you say? Sometimes life, despite your best efforts, has other plans.

But like I said above, sometimes animals will surprise you. Another time, we had a badly presented calf in a first-calf heifer, and all you could see was his swollen little nose. J was positive the calf was dead — if they present head first and their face swells, it means they’ve suffocated. So we caught the cow and he set to work pulling the calf.

It was a big calf, but he finally came free. When the baby slid out onto the ground, J knelt to check for vitals, not expecting anything.

And then the little guy let out a feeble moo!

My husband wasted no time helping the little guy expel the rest of the fluid from his lungs and getting him up so he could nurse. We kept them both in a separate pen for a while in case there were complications, but amazingly, there were none. The little guy grew up to be a healthy cow.

This is an installment from my serial, “A Baby in the Basement: My Life as a Cattleman’s Wife.” Catch up via the Serials page.

The Backstory, part II

At first, I hated living in Idaho. The autumn day we arrived, it rained sheets and buckets; I remember looking fearfully out the back car window at the cliff edge we scaled. Grandma lived miles out of town, on an old gravel logging road that slithered up the face of a mountain. I remember asking my parents if we would fall, which they casually dismissed as silly because it was ‘just’ rain. Looking out the window at that sheer cliff, dropping steeply some thousand-odd feet to the river below, I had my doubts. Roads were supposed to be flat, with street lights and signs and yellow and white lines marking where the cars were to go. Above all, they were not supposed to be gravel and dirt!

How little I knew.

I remained skeptical for the rest of that year and into spring of the next. Like most children uprooted from their familiar lives, I missed my friends, I missed my old house, and I despised the difference in routine. Not only did Grandma live outside of town, the town was so small that if you needed anything special, you had to drive an hour to the next town over to get it. But then spring came, and with the warmer temperatures came a thaw in my outlook. Because springtime is when babies arrive, and nearly every one of my grandmother’s fifteen mares was with foal.

I remember that first birth. It was dusk, the rains had made the grass green and the lingering clouds took on a soft pink glow. Grandma and Mom took me by the hand, and we walked down into the lower pasture where Amy, a sweet-tempered chestnut, turned and fidgeted with the early stages of labor. With a huff, she lay down, and Grandma quietly led me to where I could see as she explained the mechanics of how a baby horse was born. I remember watching in wonder as two feet emerged, followed by a little white nose. In short order, the rest of the foal’s body slithered out onto the green grass, his brown coat slick and shiny with fluid. His mama got up and began cleaning him off, urging him to his spindly feet, and we watched as he began to nurse.

He looked just like one of my favorite model horses, and so when Grandma told me I could name him, there was no hesitation: “Speeding Bullet!” I crowed. What better name for that amazing little foal than the best name for the fastest horse in the world that a five-year-old could think of?

Suddenly, country life was cool. It meant horses and sunshine days and in short order I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else. I learned to ride (although not extremely well), enrolled in 4-H, and vowed I would always live in the country. While all my friends couldn’t wait to leave that little rural community, I wanted to stay. When I was twelve, my parents and I took a family vacation to Yellowstone, and on the way through Montana I saw my first cattle drive.

Watching those cowboys and cattlemen, I was envious. I wanted that so bad. Grandma never liked cows (she insisted they were stupid), and I had only seen them rarely at the county fair. But those herds in Montana were beautiful. Coats glossy in the sun, gentle eyes looking right in the car window as they crossed the road under the watchful eye of their herders… I wanted that. I wanted to do that. Never mind that I had no idea why cows got moved from pasture to pasture. Never mind that I had never seen one up close. I still wanted that life, and after we came home, and Mom and Dad filed for divorce, I filled my daydreams with barbed wire fences and horses and noble cattlemen who watched over their gentle herds. I even went so far as to declare I would never date a man who didn’t want to own livestock in the country.

Then I became a teenager and life got really confusing for a while, as I’m certain it does for most young adults. My parents’ divorce was finalized (a messy, drawn out process), I was a social outcast in school despite having a couple really close friends, and I struggled to make sense of the world. Music became more and more important to me — it kept me sane through the emotional trauma of my parents’ breakup — and when I realized I had a talent for it, I wanted to study it and play it professionally… And country life gradually ended up on the back burner, because (at that time) you couldn’t be a musician and live in the country. As it came time for me to attend college and choose a career path, I had resigned myself to a life in the city. My first night spent in my dorm room bed, I stared out the window at the light-polluted sky I could no longer see the stars of. I felt a little like I had just given up on something I couldn’t pinpoint, but I attributed it to a touch of homesickness and filed it away for later.

The next day the resident assistant had organized a welcome barbecue, and I shyly hung on the fringe. Everyone seemed so much older, and I’ve never been that good at interacting with crowds outside of a music performance situation. One young man — who also seemed on the fringe, though he obviously knew some of the people there — kept glancing my direction. I didn’t introduce myself; I was still seeing a boy from back home, and I didn’t think it would be appropriate to associate with another guy. That didn’t stop the attractive young man, though. The next day we met in the hall and I learned his name was J. He was someone I really wished I could get to know. Something about him seemed familiar, though it took me a few weeks of observing him before I could place it:

He was a farm boy.

So I did everything in my power to avoid him.

He was just too nice, too smart, and too familiar. He was friendly. He was a gentleman. I knew I’d get myself in trouble if I didn’t watch out. His family owned a cattle farm they had homesteaded back in the 1800s. I used to eavesdrop on his conversations with another of the farm boys also living in the dorm and I was fascinated. I couldn’t help it. He liked music, he liked books, he liked the outdoors. We seemed to have so much in common, and I found myself wishing he would be bold, all the while knowing it would be a recipe for disaster. And I would try, again, to avoid him, with no luck. Everywhere I went, it seemed like he was there.

Then I got dumped. It was the worst feeling in the world, and I holed up with my music and my homework for three months, trying to piece together why relationships fail. You can only subject yourself to so much misery, though. Eventually I decided to get on with my life, and I began hanging out more in the common room.

And J was there.

We got married the next year in my grandmother’s rose garden. The next day my husband and I returned to the farm, and my cow-sense education began.

This is an installment from my serial, “A Baby in the Basement: My Life as a Cattleman’s Wife.” Catch up via the Serials page.

On Having Children: Thoughts and Linkage

This article, “Having Babies {In Opposite World},” is Fantastic.

I was talking about this the other day with one of my friends and we were musing on the phenomenon that when people find out they automatically assume that you’re absolutely, totally MISERABLE or WILL BE MISERABLE! Not necessarily so, peeps. Not necessarily so. Certainly there are moments of absolute panic and terror and fear when I sit back and realize, “Good LORD, Do you really think I can handle being a Mom??,” but I have been blessed in many ways by my unexpected pregnancy:

I have found new respect for my body — I actually LIKE myself now!
I relish in the fact that my body seems to be well built for this task, and I cherish it since I was certain that this was a closed and locked door.
I have the joy in knowing my husband and I can share our generations-old farm and lifestyle with another, and I have peace in the fact that my husband and I will not be the last of our family.
I have proof that there are still miracles on this earth every time my son-to-be kicks me or squirms inside my womb, and I have awe for the fact that I have been able to witness, first hand, the Creation of a new Life from particles tinier than the period at the end of this sentence.

I am well aware that children are not for everyone, but my experience so far? Amazing. Wonderful. Beautiful.

The sad part is, this idea that you will be miserable is so prevalent in our culture. That friend I mentioned up above? She deals with the same thing every day, but she’s not pregnant. She has a food allergy. I have other friends who deal with chronic disease. I have friends who are getting married, and still others who are short of money or are taking on debt so they can get education or get their business up and running….

And we are all supposedly “miserable.”

Shouldn’t we do something about these nasty little assumptions? Life is not necessarily what it appears.

Gypsy Song cover art!

(Hopefully) Soon to be released…

The Backstory, part I

It was the worst late-spring storm I’d seen in a while. I was on the highway heading home after a long week of college classes and I fought to keep my little car on the road. Water sheeted across the windshield despite having the wipers on full blast. As I neared home, soft hail began to coat the edges of the window and collected on the edges of the road. Despite it being mid afternoon, the sky remained dark. At last I approached our turn-off, and with grateful relief hurried to park my car in the familiar little garage.

I grabbed my purse and book bag from the passenger seat, and hesitated at the garage door. The storm had intensified. Frigid air howled against the old boards. I pulled my coat close and made a mad dash for the basement door of the humble Sears & Roebuck farmhouse I shared with my husband. The sloppy ground nearly slid me into the basement door.

I tumbled inside and breathed a sigh of relief. Made it. I paused to listen; the wood furnace crackled away but the upstairs remained unusually silent. It was possible my husband was out feeding the cows across the creek. I started up the stairs.

The front room was warm and dark. I paused on the threshold to let my eyes adjust. I nudged the basement door shut, and the recliner across the room creaked.

“Honey?” I asked softly.

“You’re home. I’m glad.” He sounded sleepy. I rounded the corner into the living room and found him curled up in a couple blankets.

“You look like you’ve had a rough day,” I said, setting my bags down on the couch.

He nodded and stretched. ” Rough night, too. How are the calves?”

“What calves?” I hung my coat up on the coat rack.

He blinked at me. “You didn’t see them?”

I shook my head.

“They should be down in front of the furnace.”

I gaped at him for a moment before hustling back downstairs. As I rounded our workbench toward the furnace, sure enough, I saw four fuzzy, black bodies in various states of slumber stretched out across a multicolored mat of old towels.

Four little Angus calves. In my basement.

My husband’s hand squeezed my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him follow me. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said as he quietly approached them and began rubbing their sides and checking their vitals. “They were just so cold, this was the only way I could think to warm them up.”

“By all means,” I said, squatting down to pet the nearest one. “No problem at all.”

* * *

I didn’t know much about cows in the beginning other than they were big, docile, and tasted good between two sides of a bun and slathered with ketchup. My family had been removed from the farming lifestyle for a couple generations; Grandma’s father had homesteaded in the harsh but beautiful prairie of northern Canada, but the family had moved into town when she was young and never gone back, choosing to run one of the first 24-hour gas stations there instead. As a consequence, while she maintained her respect for the humble office of the farmer and instilled it in her children, they still became city folk. And so I grew up knowing very little about life in the country.

Until I was five years old, that is. When my Dad’s duty term in the Army was up, we elected to move to the mountains of northern Idaho, where Grandma had a few acres and some horses.

This is an installment from my serial, “A Baby in the Basement: My Life as a Cattleman’s Wife.” Catch up via the Serials page.