Frontier Follies

by Ree Drummond

  Speaking of taking the kids with him, it’s always been Chuck’s firm belief that guys on a ranch should never, ever have long hair. This is purely practical from his perspective: Long hair gets too hot, it looks messy, it collects dirt and grime, and it doesn’t serve a purpose, which is basically Chuck’s measure for everything. He himself has had a buzz cut since 1957, back when they were actually in style, so to him, it’s really the only haircut a man (or boy) needs to have. As my two boys were growing up, I learned the hard way never to get too attached to their soft wavy curls, because if they spent more than two hours with Chuck, he’d run them by the barber shop to get a fresh buzz. Even today, now that both Bryce and Todd are fully in charge of their own hair destiny, their grandpa still threatens to haul them down to the barber shop (or cut it in their sleep) if they let it get too long. They know he means it, too.

  Chuck is nothing if not a miracle; my son Todd says, “Pa-Pa’s invincible and is gonna live forever, as long as he has all the Baby Ruths and Diet Pepsi he needs.” He smokes two packs a day and has had two bypass surgeries, a shoulder replacement, a broken neck, two kinds of cancer, eye surgeries, and several other orthopedic procedures. He takes a licking but keeps on ticking, just like an old Timex watch. And he doesn’t really believe in sleeping much: “The human body really only needs ninety minutes of sleep per night,” he once told me. He believes this, by the way (even though he definitely gets a little more than that in reality), and no amount of newfangled data about the importance of REM sleep and the health benefits of a good eight hours a night will sway his real-life experience. He eats too much sugar, gravy is his favorite food group, and Diet Pepsi is his coffee every morning. He really shouldn’t have lived as long as he has . . . but I’m so very, very grateful he has.

  Chuck and I share a love of food, but his love borders more on obsession. I’ve never seen a person so motivated by what he’s going to eat each day; while he’s finishing up one meal, he starts thinking (and asking) about what his next meal’s going to be. He is literally incapable of keeping himself from eating a slice of pecan pie the night before Thanksgiving, and by a slice, I mean he’s eaten half of a Thanksgiving pie the night before, then panicked about what he was going to tell Nan the next morning. My mother-in-law used to quietly phone and ask me to limit the chocolate sheet cakes I made for Chuck, because he always had a hard time not eating half of it in one sitting and she couldn’t bear to watch it. He and Nan were completely mismatched in this regard, as she hardly cared about food at all. And somehow, in a cruel twist of fate, she married a man who liked to have hours-long conversations about it. Bless her. I like to think she’s enjoying Heaven, not just for the obvious reasons (paradise and all), but also because she doesn’t have to talk about food with Chuck anymore.

  My father-in-law’s generosity has always been one of his trademarks. When Ladd and I were engaged, Chuck began gifting me with iron skillets. They weren’t wrapped in gift packaging or given to me at any sort of wedding shower or occasion. He’d just hand them to me in passing, saying something along the lines of “Here, I got you an iron skillet.” He was simply building the arsenal that he knew I would eventually need on the ranch in order to survive. Over the years, I began to notice that the skillets were getting bigger. The last one he gave me won’t even work on a normal home stove; the only way a person could have a fighting chance of cooking with it is over a large inferno at a campout. Chuck knows I’m not big on camping, but he isn’t even trying to get me to camp. He was just uncomfortable knowing that there was a size or shape of iron skillet in existence that I didn’t yet own. Ditto on all the oversize spatulas, slotted spoons, and potato mashers he’s thrown my way. Practical gestures are Chuck’s primary love language.

  Along those lines, my father-in-law has always been supportive of my career endeavors. When my first cookbook was released many years ago, I was invited to appear on QVC (the home shopping channel) to promote it. This was one of my very first TV appearances, and Chuck made sure he was home and parked in front of his TV thirty minutes in advance of my segment. The show I appeared on was In the Kitchen with David, a popular Sunday special that features pots, pans, appliances, and clever kitchen gadgets galore . . . and not only did he watch my six-minute segment, he also watched all the other segments on David’s three-hour show. By the time the episode was over, Chuck had called QVC and placed orders for three of every single pot, pan, appliance, and clever gadget he had seen that day—a set for me, a set for him, and a set for my sister-in-law, Missy. The boxes arrived daily over the following two weeks, and I still have that darn pineapple slicer today. It sure is handy when I can remember to use it.

  Excess generosity is never more at play with Chuck than in the summertime, when farm stands start popping up in Oklahoma and Kansas. He loves driving out into the great beyond and coming back with a produce haul, whether it’s fresh corn, ripe tomatoes, or juicy peaches. Of course, he lives alone now and though he does enjoy cooking for himself, he only needs a small handful of each—but Chuck would never be content buying three or four ears of corn at a time. So I’m usually the lucky recipient.

  “Ree,” he grumbles over the phone. “I’m heading out to get some corn . . . you want some?”

  “Oh . . . well, yes, Chuck! I’d love that!” I respond. I do this not because I love fresh corn (I do), but because there’s no way I could bear to crush his spirit by saying no. But then I regret not saying no, because a few hours later he’ll park his pickup by my back door and tell me he got me twenty dozen ears or something. I thank him and cook or freeze what I can, but often wind up divvying out what I can’t use to friends and organizations. I guess the whole purpose of the exercise is for Chuck to have a reason to go buy truckloads of produce, because giving a loved one fresh produce really is one of his true joys in life. I guess that’s worth my making a few extra stops to drop off corn around town.

  My father-in-law is a rolling stone, resolved not to collect a hint of moss. Chuck is happiest being busy and having tasks, certainly since Nan passed away, but the truth is, he’s always been like this. Ladd and his brother Tim joke—but they aren’t really joking—that they try really hard to make sure Chuck has plenty of regular ranch work, fence work, and improvements to supervise, because if he doesn’t, he’ll create an enormous project just to have the work to do—and he’ll hire five or six guys to help him get it done. “Dad creates work,” they say, shaking their heads. They’ve lived it their whole lives.

  Or, even better, he’ll locate a little piece of land that he thinks Ladd or Tim should buy, and he’ll “accidentally” make an offer on their behalf without talking to them first. It’s often said about Border collies that if they don’t have a job or activity, they can get destructive. Well, if Chuck doesn’t have a job or activity, things can get expensive. I try always to help out by telling Chuck if I have any needs, large or small, around our homestead. I’d rather he bring me a little dirt for a raised flower bed than decide to rebuild all the fences on Drummond Ranch. (He probably has sketches of those fence plans in his bedside table.)

  Ladd and Tim are grateful to have learned so many invaluable lessons from their dad. He’s a true old-time rancher, and as much as he likes to keep things stirred up around here, there’s no one who knows more about the cattle business than Chuck. The Drummond kids all think Pa-Pa is a legend—and I agree. My eyes always light up and my heart leaps a bit when I see him—because he’s such a huge life-force in our family. He’s been through it all, he’s seen it all, and while we sometimes have to laugh at the larger-than-life character that is our dad/grandpa/father-in-law, we make it a point to cherish the moments . . . the conversations . . . the stories.

  And the corn. Always the corn.

  A Tale of Two Families

  I grew up on a golf course.

  Ladd grew up on a cattle ranch.

  My dad doesn’t own a pair of jeans.

  Ladd’s dad irons creases in his jeans.

  I spen
t summers swimming at the pool.

  Ladd spent summers working on the ranch.

  My dad put artificial hips in patients.

  Ladd’s dad pulled calves out of cows.

  I slept till noon on Saturday.

  Ladd slept till 6:00 a.m. on Saturday.

  The Smiths had a service pick up their trash.

  The Drummonds burned their trash.

  My mom cooked for the church youth group.

  Ladd’s mom cooked for hungry cowboys.

  My mom took us to church.

  Ladd’s mom took them to church.

  I went to operas with my mom.

  Ladd went camping with his mom.

  My mom borrowed eggs from the neighbors.

  The Drummonds didn’t have any neighbors.

  The Smiths ate dinner at six o’clock every night.

  The Drummonds ate dinner whenever they got

  home from working on the ranch.

  The Smith kids got their driver’s licenses at sixteen.

  The Drummond kids started driving at six.

  Ways We Are Alike

  Lots of love

  Moms were tall

  Movie fans

  Football fans

  Moms were great cooks

  Dads worked a lot

  Both families went to New York City to see Broadway shows in the summer of ’82. (Smith kids loved it; Drummond kids didn’t. Ha ha.)

  A Rich Inner Life

  It’s been two years since we lost Nan, my mother-in-law, to cancer. It was terrible and awful, and it’s taken our family a while to dig out of the grief . . . but I’ve found that over time, the hole in my own heart can easily be filled by accessing a special little bank of Nan memories that I’d been saving away since she entered my life over twenty-five years ago. Man, was she a dandy.

  I was lucky to have been the first real daughter figure in my mother-in-law’s life. She’d raised three sons in the country, and while there was a bit of a learning curve before she knew exactly what to do with me, we very quickly became good friends. Back in the early years of my marriage, Nan would call me (on a landline, mind you) almost every morning. I remember a few months after our wedding, I told Ladd that I’d figured out that if I wasn’t necessarily in the mood to chitchat early in the day (and I sometimes wasn’t), I’d better not pick up the phone, because I’d be in for a good hour-long conversation with his mom. Her calls usually came before 8:00 a.m.

  But the thing of it was, what Nan wanted to talk about usually wasn’t trivial. I always think about the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “Small minds talk about people; average minds talk about events; great minds talk about ideas.” On my mother-in-law’s morning calls to me, she definitely talked about ideas. Maybe it was as simple as the color wheel and what made her tick in terms of primary and secondary hue combinations—and how her love of nature drove which colors she chose to wear or decorate her house with. Maybe it was about a scripture, or a story from her rural childhood, or an observation she’d made about the way animals interact with each other at different times of year. I never knew what topic was waiting for me on the other end of the line. It was a surprise smorgasbord every time.

  Nan told me stories about when she first met Chuck, the son of a rancher in a neighboring county—how he gave her and her cousins a ride home from college one weekend, how he kept checking her out in the rearview mirror during the eighty-mile drive, how she decided that he (at five foot eight) was way too short for her (five eleven), and besides that, he was sure to go into his family’s ranching business . . . and that was definitely not what she wanted to do with her life. Nan wanted to travel the world, join the Peace Corps. She had things to do, places to see.

  She told me how Chuck eventually won her over with his perseverance. When they were dating and he would drive to visit her on her own family’s ranch, he’d have to pack three spare tires because he’d almost always get at least one flat on the way. Nothing was going to stop him from seeing her, and she was attracted to that determination. She talked a lot about their marriage: What it was like being married to a “determined” workaholic rancher, and how important she felt it was for her to be Chuck’s strongest support. She said to me that she watched how hard Chuck worked, how much he struggled to keep the ranch together during some very difficult years, and how discouraged he would sometimes get. “I always felt like it was my job to dust him off, prop him up, and give him strength so he could go right back out into battle the next day,” she’d tell me. Being a wife (and fierce ally) to Chuck was Nan’s life’s work—this was so clear. It was her holy calling. As a young wife, this set a powerful example for me.

  My mother-in-law had a rich inner life, which gave birth to some far-flung theories. For example, she launched a yearslong effort to paint everything on the Drummond homestead in browns and other earth tones so that (her words) if enemy aircraft ever flew overhead (in rural landlocked Oklahoma, mind you), the house and barns wouldn’t easily be spotted. This was the opposite of everything Chuck and his sons believed in: Fences and pens were always to be painted bright white, and they loved to slap bright red metal roofs on barns and other outbuildings. But not Nan, who was so intent on blending in—not just in a crowded room, but at her exact longitude and latitude. “You just never know!” she always said. Ladd and I live on their old homestead now, and I still peek out the window with unease if I hear the sound of a plane. It makes me laugh, and it makes me miss my mother-in-law.

  Nan, a devout Christian who read the Bible but steered clear of religious institutions in her later years, was suspicious of movies that featured any goblin or ghoul that won the heart of a child. So whether it was E.T. or Casper the Friendly Ghost, my mother-in-law was skeptical. She posited that if there was a Satan, and she believed there probably was, he could possibly reach people by desensitizing them to demons and evil spirits during their childhood. She wasn’t saying this was proven or even necessarily that she believed it . . . but Nan was happiest living in a world of possibilities, where she was basically optimistic but always curious, sometimes dubious and suspicious. I listened to these theories of hers with great interest. I thought some bordered on wacky, but I loved the way her mind worked. She looked at things in such a nonlinear way.

  She had her unintentional funny side: Nan inexplicably referred to electric back massagers as “vibrators” and didn’t seem to understand that the word she was using was usually reserved for a very different kind of electronic device. When she and I were helping to clean out the house of her own mother-in-law, Ruth, after she moved to a retirement community, we discovered an entire hallway cabinet filled with nothing but back massagers. These are often given as one-off Christmas gifts, and Ruth’s entire family network must have been under the impression that she suffered from chronic muscle tension, because there were thirty of them, minimum, in all shapes and sizes. Because Nan was responsible for divvying up decades of Ruth’s belongings to family, I listened over and over as she called Ruth’s grandchildren individually and asked them to come by and grab three or four of their grandmother’s vibrators. I loved my mother-in-law so much, and I respected her, and correcting her was never something I wanted to do. So I just let her do (and say) her thing. (The mystery and brilliance of Nan was that I was never 100 percent sure she wasn’t in on the joke. But no mere mortal would ever be able to tell.)

  One time when Nan, my sister-in-law Missy, and I were flying to Denver for a cookbook signing, I passed Nan a (quarter-size) Airborne tablet along with a bottle of water. “Break it in half,” I told her, intending for her to dissolve it in the water so that it could be drunk. A minute later I saw Nan across the aisle of the airplane, head near her knees with her hand over her mouth. Afraid she was having some kind of attack, I leapt over to her and saw that foam was pouring from her lips. She’d broken the tablet in half and swallowed it—with a big swig of Sprite instead of water. I guess she’d never heard of Airborne before that day. She burped the whole trip.

&n
bsp; Nan said “humble” with a silent “h” but she pronounced the “h” in “herbs.” And she sounded out every word and syllable of “Worcestershire” (wore-sess-ter-shi-yer) because she assumed the correct pronunciation (worse-ter-shur) was people just being lazy with their speech. She never wore the same solid color of pants and shirt (whether black, red, or white) because she was very tall and very thin, and said she never wanted to look like a column. I could go on and on and on.

  Nan’s life was defined by family, and was forever changed when she lost her oldest son. Todd, Ladd’s brother, was killed in a car accident a couple of months before he was set to head to college (Ladd was a young teen when it happened). I never knew Todd, so Nan filled in the blanks about him—who he was and the loss she suffered when he died. Sometimes she’d mention it in a passing, wistful thought; other times, she’d let the tears flow. She told me that when Todd died, she responded in the months and years that followed by rejecting anything in life that she perceived as trivial: She dug up all her flower beds and removed decorative color and patterns from her house. She stopped playing bridge and gave up going to social events in town because she just didn’t see the point of idle chatter when her whole world had been upended.