Ree Drummond - Frontier Follies

To my funny family:

Thank you for making me laugh, smile,

roll my eyes, jump for joy, cry, rejoice,

pull my hair out, and crack up.

I love you all so much.

MAMA

Contents

I love stories of everyday life. Its why I mailed my grandma letters during my childhood when she lived only twenty minutes from my house, wrote cards to my high school friends when we all went to separate colleges, and sent my mom wordy weekly emails when my kids were still babies, once the electronic medium became a thing. Ga-Ga and my mom saved all their notes and messages and shared a pile of them with me a few years ago. I had to laugh at the kinds of things I used to scribble to them about. They were most often short anecdotes about something weird the family cat had done, funny exchanges with my brother, or quirky things Id observed about a friend or one of the kids. It was always news, but it was simple, local newsfrom me, the reporter in the field.

This same penchant for sharing the everyday is exactly what drew me to blogging back in the old days, when Alex, my oldest, was just seven. (Shes twenty-three now!) Daily life on our familys ranch was positively peppered with these funny stand-alone happenings, and I simply couldnt keep them in my head any longer. Thank goodness blogging came along when it did; my mom wouldnt have had room on her computer for that many emails. My grandma would have had to build a storage shed to hold all the letters.

Frontier Follies is a silly celebration of the everyday moments of my life in rural America, and every single story youll read is true. From marital disagreements with my hunky husband (and what I do when theyre going on) to out-there conversations with my mother-in-law, from disturbing incidents involving skunks and shotguns to my best friend praying the Rosary over my belly to keep me from having an epidural, Ive spent the past year tapping my memory for these tales that are sure to make you chuckle (or even just feel a little better about your own wacky family).

This book is not a sustained narrative, except in the sense that love is woven throughout. Real life is woven through, too, and I share some real reflections about marriage and parenting that I hope youll be able to relate to (particularly if youve ever had teenagers in your house... for an extended period of time... day in, day out... pandemic parenting, anyone?). Im including a handful of classic stories that used to be on my blog ages ago (and added a lot more detail to them), but most of the essays in this book are newwhich is what made the writing process so much fun for me. The memories and stories kept coming, and I let them pour onto the page.

To keep things up to the minute, in addition to stories from the old days of our family, I also take this opportunity to share some new, unexpected developments in the Drummond house... as well as things that are in the works. The timeline of this book spans almost twenty-five years, so I cover a lot of ground!

What I hope you gain from this collection of tales is a renewed sense of enjoyment over the everyday moments and laughter of life. I hope it helps you dig up some of those quirky old stories from your own family, and I sure hope it makes you smile.

L add and I have the unenviable advantage of having had a really awful first year of marriage, which has made most marital years since seem like a walk in the park! Now today, at the ripe old age of Im-not-telling (okay, fifty-one), I can put most of these newlywed struggles into perspective and say that awful is an exceedingly relative term. We didnt experience terrible tragedy or loss, and our basic human needs were met. But still... its an interesting phenomenon to look back on ones first year of marriage with ones husband and be able to agree that it absolutely excelled at being lousy.

We had a beautiful wedding. That was the easy part. But during our honeymoon in Australia, I developed an inner ear condition (a result of the fourteen-hour flight from Los Angeles) that made me constantly dizzy and also prevented me from being able to walk in a straight line. This was slightly inconvenient for a young bride who wanted to be vivacious and glowing, but my equilibrium was kaput and I couldnt do anything about it. In addition, Ladd couldnt find anything in Australia that he (with his palate of a nine-year-old) could bear to eat, so he was baseline hangry the entire trip. We rented a car that made Clark Griswolds Family Truckster look like a Mercedesan absolute nightmare for Ladd, who would rather not be the center of attention on any highway, especially an international one. To top it off, Ladd experienced huge losses in the commodity market over the course of two September days, which caused a sizable decrease in equity. This didnt concern me too much since I didnt really understand it, but from his perspective, it might have pulled the rug out from under his plans for starting out life on the ranch with his vivacious and glowing (not) new wife. We went home from Australia a week early.

When we got back to the ranch after our honeymoon, I found myself disoriented as a new resident of the countryside, and I had no idea where and how to get my bearings. I loved Ladd and wanted to be with him and his Wranglers more than anything, but I struggled to acclimate to my new rural reality. Horses stared at me through our bedroom window at night; I thought they were serial killers. Bobcats ransacked our trash; Id never known this to happen during my upbringing on the golf course. A family of skunks moved in under our house; I smelled them every time they rubbed their stinky backs against the rough parts of the foundation, like a scratch-and-sniff book in hell. And the mice in the wallsthey chewed and crunched on things in the night just to try to make me lose my mind. It worked.

When we were engaged, Ladd and I had talked about letting nature take its course once we were married, and five weeks after the big day, I found out I was pregnant. I guess Ladd and I both had missed the day in health class when these points were driven home, but somehow we both thought it would take a little longer? But it didnt, and I found myself both with child and without trash service at the exact same time in my lifea really unfortunate combination. The food aversions started before the six-week mark, then the morning sickness (which was actually all-day sickness) hit just about the time my mom called to tell me that she and my dad were getting divorced.