by Ree Drummond
But Sally wasn’t chuckling back. Her eyes turned into lethal lasers, the kind that could only emanate from an angry gestating female, and she fixed them on Tim, her prey, before replying with four beautiful, crystal clear words: “I’m pregnant, you idiot!!” Then she stalked off, found her husband, and enjoyed the rest of her evening.
Today, despite the wrinkle with Tim, Sally and her husband are close friends with our whole family. Tim is happily married to Missy, and they have two grown children. Missy does a stellar job keeping Sugar Lips in check by both celebrating his naïvely indelicate nature and kicking his shin under the table when the need arises. And what Tim burns to the ground with his very occasional faux pas, he more than makes up for with random acts of kindness.
Oh, and an update! I never did get that sour bag Sugar Lips warned me about. It sure is a good thing he said something.
Drummond Family Nicknames
Life on the Farm
If there’s one thing people in agriculture know, it’s that farms and ranches are not the same thing. In layman’s terms, a farm is a place where crops are grown to be sold, while a ranch is a place where animals graze, eventually to be sold. There are exceptions to this rule (for example, farms can raise animals, too), but crops versus cattle is the general distinction. Or, to use a line from Oklahoma!: “One man likes to push a plow, the other likes to chase a cow.” People sometimes make mention of our family’s “farm” because that’s a more commonly used term for a place in the country, but ours is definitely a cattle operation—a ranch through and through. However, for a good ten years, we did actually have a farm in southern Oklahoma, about a four-hour drive from our home ranch. And back in the old days, for about three weeks every summer, the whole fam damily—Ladd, me, Tim, Missy, my in-laws, and all the kids—would head there together for some concentrated, cramped, crazy Green Acres-style fun.
The farm in southern Oklahoma grew only wheat, but not for the purposes of harvesting and selling. It was planted solely to graze cattle on—an alternate approach to the way we do things here on the ranch, where cattle graze on the grass that grows naturally. There’s no huge difference in the end result of cattle that graze on wheatgrass versus regular grass; it just diversified our resources a bit—in other words, you should really ask Ladd to explain, because I have no idea what I’m talking about. (I tried.) Effectively, our farm in southern Oklahoma was pretty much a ranch with some wheat pasture—but we called it the farm to keep things simpler. Anyway, while Ladd, Tim, and their dad, Chuck, took regular short trips to the farm throughout the year, a three-week continuous stretch in the summertime was always necessary so they could knock out a bunch of intensive work in a short period of time.
During those summer stretches, the mom (Nan), the wives (Missy and me), and the six kids would pack up and head south with them. The menfolk needed the company of their ladies down there, after all. Oh, and the menfolk needed food—lots and lots of food. Finally, the menfolk most certainly needed extra hands in the form of their offspring; it’s a well-known fact that people in agriculture (whether farmers or ranchers) procreate not just to carry on the family name, but to ensure a stronger, more dedicated workforce. Ladd neglected to tell me this when he proposed.
We’ve since sold our farm, and because of this, the memories from that place are so precious to me. The kids were all very young when we took these farm trips, and in the late afternoon, after all of the work was done, we’d sit out on the porch and watch the kids run around and play. The workdays were long, hot, and grueling, so Nan fashioned a makeshift swimming pool out of a big fiberglass horse trough so the kids could splash around and cool off—sometimes in their underwear, often less. Missy would drink sweet tea, I’d sip white wine, and Nan would smoke cigarettes, and we’d just sit and soak up that relaxing feeling that comes when you’re far away from all the chores of home. Never mind that we had just as many chores down at the farm; somehow they felt like vacation chores to us.
What didn’t feel like vacation was how early we had to get up during these farm trips. Since it was the height of summer—and in hot, dry southern Oklahoma, no less—the guys had to start work especially early so they could avoid working cattle in the hottest part of the day. That level of heat is hard on the working crew, but it’s even harder on the animals. So on a typical morning on the farm, the alarms would start blaring at about 3:30 a.m., and then the hellish grind would begin: We’d wake up the kids, get them all to brush their teeth, round up their work gloves, socks, jeans, shirts, boots, and hats. Half the clothes would still be in the dryer from the night before, and we’d always curse ourselves for not laying it all out before bed, but of course we’d all been too exhausted. Some would wake up chipper, others would wake up cranky and cross—and that’s just the adults I’m talking about. The kids would display the same range of moods, and by the time they all headed out on their horses about forty-five minutes later, I felt like I’d been put through the wringer.
I should point out that at our house on the farm, the layout was such that Tim’s family of four shared one bedroom, our family of six shared another bedroom . . . and the two were connected by a single Jack-and-Jill bathroom, God have mercy upon us. (Chuck and Nan had their own bedroom and bathroom, but they’d kinda earned that luxury.) Today, considering that three of my four children are more than six feet tall, I can’t conceive of such a sardine-esque arrangement . . . but even back then, ten humans sharing one bathroom was an exercise in patience and insanity, and I truly can’t believe we’re all still speaking to one another. I mean, who would have thought that when I happened to wake up at 1:00 a.m. to go to the bathroom that one night, my brother-in-law would have already had the same notion? (Learn to lock the door, Tim!) And I can recall two separate times that Missy walked in while Ladd was showering. Why do bad things happen to good people? Again, I can’t believe we’re all still speaking.
Sometimes, to get away from the house for a bit in the late afternoon, I’d leave the kids with Nan and ride along on the ATV with Ladd when he went to check on the cattle. The scenery was unbelievably gorgeous—vast fields of fresh wheatgrass in the most saturated kelly green you’ve ever seen, with Black Angus cattle scattered here and there like polka dots. On the flip side, the smells were really, really gross. I’d begun to notice that cow manure at the farm smelled much stronger—and much, much worse—than cow manure on the ranch. Not that cow manure ever smells like roses, but something was amiss here. It was concentrated and overwhelming, like an entire can of cow-manure-scented air freshener had been emptied in one go. After my ninetieth comment on the stench, Ladd finally told me that it was because of the wheat, which has a certain composition of nutrients that makes manure particularly malodorous. Only he explained this fact using three simple words, as only Ladd can do: “Wheat shit stinks.” My husband has always had a way of cutting to the heart of the matter.
We had birthday parties at the farm. For reasons I don’t want to analyze too much, several of the Drummond kids have summer birthdays, so we’d bake chocolate sheet cakes, get balloons at the local gift shop, and wrap gifts ranging from life-size Hulk hands to shiny new monogrammed spurs. Tim would always chase down the birthday kids and give them swats, one for every year of their life—doubling that number if they screamed or resisted. One summer, we’d been too busy to make a sheet cake for Todd’s birthday, so we went to the local supermarket and grabbed premade cupcakes with icing so blue it actually glowed. I still swear that the blue food dye must have been faulty, or a novice baker must have added too much, because all twelve of us had bright blue lips and tongues for the rest of our time at the farm. The cowboys were worried we’d experienced a radioactive event at the house when they showed up to work the next morning—but we explained that Todd’s Cookie Monster birthday cupcakes were to blame.
Everything was more concentrated at the farm: living quarters, manure smells, blue food coloring . . . and weather. Storms at the farm always seemed much more volatile and vio
lent than the ones at the ranch, and one evening toward the end of a summer stay, a wicked one started brewing. It came from out of nowhere, and once Ladd, Tim, and Chuck saw the amount of rain that was falling, they looked concerned. Turns out some cattle they’d worked that day were grazing in a tricky spot on the farm that’s prone to flooding, so they hurried to saddle their horses and head to the remote spot.
Minutes after they pulled away with their horse trailer, the sky above the house turned a disturbing shade. Anyone from the Midwest knows this color well—it’s a mix of pink and gray, with a little green and dread mixed in. It only happens when the oxygen is being sucked out of the atmosphere by a forming tornado, and it always strikes fear in the heart. Nan, Missy, and I tried to check the radar, but the satellite was down and smartphones hadn’t quite been born yet. So as the wind picked up, we gathered the kids and took them to the pantry, the most interior room of the house, to hunker down. Chuck called right after we pulled the door closed, and told us that Ladd and Tim’s horses were belly deep in water as the brothers were trying, in lightning and stinging rain, to herd the cattle to safety. Chuck wanted us to check the weather—which we couldn’t do. Then the call dropped and we had no choice but to wait. And pray. (And eat the whole box of graham crackers on the bottom shelf.)
Thankfully, everything turned out okay that evening. The brothers got all the cows to higher ground, and got themselves and their horses safely out of the storm. There was a confirmed tornado at the farm, but it only briefly touched down in an open pasture that was nowhere near the house. The men and the women had braved the storm in two very different ways, and all the creatures under both of our care were safe. And later, when everyone was back home under the same roof, we spent a few minutes swapping stories of our respective experiences . . . but that was only the beginning of that night’s adventures.
We still had to fight over who got to take the first shower . . .
Did She Just Say “Dick”?!?
One of the most defining characteristics of my mother-in-law, Nan, was her mysterious combination of sophisticated elegance and rural, no-nonsense practicality. Physically speaking, she was a supermodel-level stunner: almost six feet tall, thin and willowy, with an innate sense of style that could only be described as God-given. She’d throw on a knee-length camel coat with slim jeans, a fitted tee, a perfect scarf or beads (or both) that tied it all together, and then slip some kind of tasteful animal-print mules on her size 10 feet. If I’d tried to wear what she was able to pull off, it would have been just sad, but Nan completely rocked everything she wore. She carried herself with the kind of grace that suggested a well-behaved, cultured upbringing. Her soft-spoken nature only added to the allure.
All of this fashion sense and refinement belied the fact that Nan had grown up on a large cattle ranch in a vast, isolated area of northern Oklahoma. Save for her parents, two siblings, and one beloved Border collie, she didn’t have a lot of daily interaction with other humans. A lover of the outdoors, she generally helped her dad with the ranching operations, tilled and weeded his enormous garden, and spent her spare time staring at the clouds and thinking about her future traveling the world. (Spoiler: She married my father-in-law in college and moved straight to his ranch thirty miles from where she grew up. Life is weird.)
I started to notice this juxtaposition with Nan—this mix of otherworldly elegance and country girl pragmatism—as the first year of my marriage to her son unfolded, but my younger sister, Betsy, while visiting me one weekend, was treated to a delicious crash course. Betsy’s experience with my mother-in-law had been, up until that point, centered around wedding events and the kinds of get-togethers that two families engage in when they’re becoming acquainted. Her perception of Nan was skewed heavily toward the elegant side of the continuum; she saw her as a beautiful woman, polished and pure, which of course she was. Until she wasn’t.
It was the dead of winter when Betsy came for her visit, and Nan had invited us to drop by her house on the ranch to have some hot chocolate and say hi. After hugs and niceties, the three of us sat down at the kitchen island, where Nan served cocoa in her grandmother’s china. Considering it was a bitter-cold day, she began to regale us with memories and stories that took place on the ranch in previous winters, and Betsy and I settled in for what we thought would be a collection of idyllic tales involving snowmen, toasting marshmallows, and horses wearing hand-knit argyle sweaters.
Nan’s first story (which wound up being the only story) involved one winter many years earlier, when the temperature dropped quickly and wound up setting record lows. A wintry mix of heavy snow and slick ice covered the countryside, and while horses and cattle are surprisingly tough in such conditions, care has to be taken to make sure the animals have all they need to weather the storm. My father-in-law worked the ranch himself, with no cowboys except his three very young sons, and to ensure his livestock withstood the cold snap, he had to take hay and feed to all the pastures so the animals would have nourishment and warmth to get them through a brutal, blizzardy forty-eight hours. “I went out to help him,” Nan explained, “and when we got to the South Big South [a pasture on the ranch], we saw a bull standing perfectly still and not following along with the others.” Evidently the bull looked like he wanted to join his bovine friends, but for some reason, he wasn’t able to take any steps. “How sad,” Betsy and I both remarked. “Was he sick? Confused? Crippled?” (Another spoiler: He was none of those things.)
“Chuck and I finally pulled up to him in the feed truck and got out,” Nan continued, her lithe fingers tucking her pewter hair behind her ear. “And it turned out that the bull’s dick was frozen to the ground.”
Come again?
“Wait . . . what?” I asked, setting down my teacup.
“The bull’s dick was frozen to the ground,” she repeated.
Betsy’s hands gripped her cocoa more tightly. “Wait . . . what?” she asked. I was glad she chimed in, too, because I didn’t want to ask a second time.
“The bull’s dick was frozen,” Nan said again. “It was frozen to the ground.” It was like she was speaking to two young women who didn’t understand the language or dialect she was using, and she thought that by simply repeating it, they would somehow be able to assimilate the horror of what they had just heard. And the thing is, Nan wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t trying to be funny. She wasn’t trying to shock us. She was matter-of-factly informing us that a bull in the South Big South, through some turn of events I’m still not sure I understand, had been caught unprepared when the temperature dropped suddenly, and a certain part of his anatomy had come in contact with the icy ground. And the two (the bull and the ice) were joined together in a very unholy matrimony.
But Nan wasn’t finished. “We tried to chip away the ice, but his dick wouldn’t budge. We were afraid his dick would get frostbite, so we wound up getting thermoses of warm water from the house and pouring it on the ice until his dick came loose.” Dick, dick, dick. I’d never before heard the word “dick” so many times in short succession in my life. Betsy’s eyes were the size of the saucers underneath our teacups of now-tepid cocoa, since the bull story had gone on for quite a while. There were explanations of why the bull’s . . . anatomy had been so close to the ground to begin with, and what happens to a cow’s teats when the same fate strikes, and I was queasy by the time it was all over. Ultimately, Nan’s story had a happy ending: All the livestock on Drummond Ranch got through that snowstorm okay, including the bull and the various aspects of his . . . anatomy.
It wasn’t that my sister and I had never heard the word before. It wasn’t that the word offended us. It was that Nan used it with such conviction, and in such a clinical, matter-of-fact way. And that she looked like a supermodel while using it. It was all so fascinating. I, for one, didn’t see that story coming. When our visit concluded, Betsy and I gathered our things. Nan gave her a big hug and told her she hoped she’d come visit more often.
Once we were in my v
ehicle and I started the ignition, my little sister had but one comment: “Did she just say ‘dick’?”
Hop Aboard the Chuck Wagon
My father-in-law’s name is Chuck. He’s one of a kind, a rare breed, and he definitely makes life more interesting. (And exciting! And unpredictable.) I consider myself to have completely lucked out in the father-in-law department, and I wouldn’t trade him for the world. Still, being a part of Chuck Drummond’s life is a little bit of a ride. I’m not exactly sure what kind of ride it is, either. A roller coaster would be too volatile. A merry-go-round would be too calm. So I’ll just say it’s a never-ending trail ride . . . but on this trail ride, the Chuck Wagon is leading the way.
Anyone who’s seen Chuck on my TV show (and certainly anyone who’s met him in person) knows he has a distinctive voice that’s impossible to mistake for any other. It’s rough, coarse, raspy, and gravelly. Reports from the old days indicate that no babies could stay asleep on Drummond Ranch as long as Chuck was on the premises. It’s hard to describe it in words and really has to be experienced to be believed, but imagine placing a normal male voice in a blender, then adding rocks, tobacco, scrap metal, diesel fuel, and a shot of whiskey, then pulsing for a few seconds. And that is the sound that comes out of my sweet father-in-law’s mouth when he speaks, whether he’s expressing love, spinning an old yarn, or barking an order to someone on the ranch. His voice does come in handy, because we always know when he’s in the room. (Or, let’s face it, county.)
My father-in-law cherishes his family, particularly his grandchildren. He requested twelve and got six, so he has twice the amount of love for each of them. Now, this doesn’t mean that he’s treated his grandkids with kid gloves . . . on the contrary, he started taking them to work with him on the ranch when they were very young, and he expected them to work even harder than the cowboys. He taught them the ropes, and he wasn’t afraid to give them on-the-job “training” (using the voice I described above) if they weren’t moving fast or trying hard enough. I’m convinced this toughened the spirits (and sharpened the skills) of all the Drummond grandchildren, girl and boy alike, in a way that nothing else could. If you can withstand a hollering grandpa whose voice sounded like it was birthed in a rock quarry, you can face most anything in life.