Frontier Follies Read online

  Dedication

  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

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Marriage

  Our Worst First Year

  Love in the Time of Rubber Snakes

  Places to Hide Rubber Snakes (for Your Favorite Sweetheart to Find)

  I Do Dishes When We Argue

  All I Wanted Was a Doughnut

  My Top Five Favorite . . .

  Ladd and the Gala

  Cheatin’ Movies

  The Love Robot

  Love Robot Chili and Cornbread Muffins

  Devil Woman

  What Do You Do with Girls?

  Twenty Interesting Things About Ladd

  Motherhood

  Pride, Prejudice, and Epidurals

  Ten More Interesting Things About Redheads

  Placenta Fail

  Sword!

  “Funny” Family Injuries on Drummond Ranch

  Our Great Homeschooling Experiment

  Adventures in Children’s Time

  Scaring (and Scarring) the Kids

  Wrong Mother

  Mom Report Card

  Misophonia

  Wannabe Town Kids

  Special Deliveries

  Viral Parenting

  The Absolute Best Sandwich I Made During Quarantine

  The Whole Fam Damily

  Sugar Lips

  Drummond Family Nicknames

  Life on the Farm

  Did She Just Say “Dick”?!?

  Hop Aboard the Chuck Wagon

  A Tale of Two Families

  A Rich Inner Life

  Country Life

  Anything for a Date

  I Really Hate Summer

  Gardening Heartbreak

  Horses on Drummond Ranch

  Shopping in Bulk

  Stockin’ Up

  Bull, Interrupted

  The Lodge Tourists

  Dogs, Dogs, Dogs

  Dogs and Cats on Drummond Ranch

  Cowboys Are Real

  Cowboy Colloquialisms

  New Territory

  Pawhuska vs. the Hamptons

  Behind-the-Scenes Trivia from My Cooking Show

  Left in a Man Cave

  Stayin’ Humble

  Say Hi to Garth!

  Bonus Kid

  Herman

  A Funny Thing Happened at My Cookbook Signing

  A Drummond Family Quiz

  My Idea of a Good Time

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Ree Drummond

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I love stories of everyday life. It’s 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 I’d observed about a friend or one of the kids. It was always news, but it was simple, local news—from 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. (She’s twenty-three now!) Daily life on our family’s ranch was positively peppered with these funny stand-alone happenings, and I simply couldn’t keep them in my head any longer. Thank goodness blogging came along when it did; my mom wouldn’t 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 you’ll read is true. From marital disagreements with my hunky husband (and what I do when they’re 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, I’ve 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 you’ll be able to relate to (particularly if you’ve ever had teenagers in your house . . . for an extended period of time . . . day in, day out . . . pandemic parenting, anyone?). I’m 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 new—which 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.

  Marriage

  Our Worst First Year

  Ladd 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 I’m-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 didn’t experience terrible tragedy or loss, and our basic human needs were met. But still . . . it’s an interesting phenomenon to look back on one’s first year of marriage with one’s 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 couldn’t do anything about it. In addition, Ladd couldn’t 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 Griswold’s Family Truckster look like a Mercedes—an 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 didn’t concern me too much since I didn’t 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 Wrang
lers 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; I’d 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 walls—they 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 didn’t, and I found myself both with child and without trash service at the exact same time in my life—a 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.

  From there, I balanced vomiting and sobbing with driving to my hometown several times a week to check on my dad, all while my husband was working double time on the ranch to hold everything together. My poor cowboy was stressed, preoccupied, and depleted. When I was home, I could hardly stand to cook because everything I previously loved to eat made me want to curl up in a ball and suck my thumb. Except sucking my thumb made me nauseated, so I had nowhere to go. I felt guilty for not being present for Ladd. I had serial killer horses stalking me at night. I had a flat tire every three days. The smell of laundry detergent rendered me incapable of doing laundry. There was basically no escape from queasiness, concern, and confusion over how utterly bizarre a turn my life had taken in just a few short months. Life on the ranch ticked along . . . and the mice in the walls, they kept on a-chewing.

  On a very superficial note, and I’m not lumping this into the list of reasons that our first year of marriage was the worst (though it certainly didn’t help my daily outlook), I wound up not being an attractive pregnant person. If Instagram had existed back then, which it blessedly did not, I would not have been one of the pregnant women who posted beautiful, hazy maternity photos with my hands making the shape of a heart over my rounded, taut belly. If I posted a maternity photo back then, it would be of me bouncing along on the John Deere riding lawn mower Ladd had given me for a wedding gift months earlier, hair in a neon pink scrunchie on top of my head, twenty pounds heavier than on my wedding day, neck sunburned, wearing a maternity T-shirt with the sleeves cut off because I was always hot. Yes, that was the sex goddess I had morphed into by May 1997, less than a year after we were married. And while Ladd was sweet about telling me all the right things, I couldn’t help but wonder if he wanted a refund.

  Long story short and fast-forward: Our baby Alex was born, Ladd didn’t lose the ranch, my dad pulled out of the fog of the divorce and eventually remarried, and I never wore my pre-pregnancy jeans again. I don’t even know what happened to them; maybe the tornado I forgot to tell you about—it also happened that first year of our marriage—blew them to another state. I hope they found a good home. We went on to have three more children, the ranch settled into a more healthy place, I started an unexpected career, and Ladd and I have always reflected (and laughed) about how far we’ve come from that shaky first year of matrimony, when the tears, vomit, and breast milk flowed abundantly.

  You know what else is funny about our worst first year of marriage? And again, this is highly superficial: I’d absolutely kill to weigh what I weighed back then, when I was bouncing along pregnant on that John Deere riding lawnmower.

  Life is interesting!

  Love in the Time of Rubber Snakes

  Ladd and I scare each other with rubber snakes. We’ve done this since very early in our marriage, and I don’t recall exactly when or how it started. I also don’t remember who started it. And honestly, it doesn’t matter at this point; this madness has gone on for years. It’s one of our primary love languages, it’s how we get our kicks, and one of us is going to cause the other to have a heart attack as a result of it—which will be very hard to explain to our loved ones, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Scaring each other with rubber snakes is the funniest non-funny thing in the world. Also, it’s escalating.

  I remember in our earlier, sweeter years, the fake snakes were made of bright, unnaturally colored rubber that smelled like swimming pool floaties, which made them seem not scary at all. One might find this kind of fake snake at dollar stores or in McDonald’s Happy Meals, and they weighed about the same as a rubber band. We had so much innocent fun. I’d slip, say, a thin neon orange snake under Ladd’s remote control when he wasn’t looking. He’d do a double take, jerk a little, and chuckle. He’d leave a flimsy purple snake in my bathroom sink. I’d let out a cute little shriek and giggle. We’d give each other fake little arm punches, say something like “You silly goose!” or “You kidder!” and wind up in a playful hug. We were so young, so predictable, so naïve, so thin. And we were just getting warmed up.

  Seasons passed, our children grew, and the snakes got larger. Bright colors were replaced with deeper, more realistic tones of ebony and moss, and we got a little craftier about our hiding places. We planted them on the shower floor so that when the unsuspecting spouse, usually naked and vulnerable, reached in to turn on the water, they’d encounter the slithering (not really, but the imagination is a powerful thing) serpent. We nestled them just under each other’s pillows, so that when the other rearranged or reached underneath, they’d feel the snake and jump backward in fear and panic. I even stuck one in the freezer while filming an episode of my cooking show with Ladd, then asked him (in my best June Cleaver voice) to “grab the ice cream, please, honey?” His reaction—a very subtle, startled jump—was wonderfully juicy. That it happened to be caught on camera and recorded for posterity sustained me for months. Also, he denies that he reacted at all, which makes the memory even more fantastic for me. When he starts denying that the snake pranks affect him at all, that’s when I know I’m getting under his skin.

  As we veered into our forties, we started playing for keeps, and the realistic nature of our snakes skyrocketed. I started buying them from museum catalogs and educational supply stores, where anatomical accuracy in reptilian figurines is valued. They were so incredibly spot-on that it was impossible to tell they weren’t real unless you picked one up, which you’d never do because you’d be too busy running out the door in fear. Our cute little “silly goose” name-calling became much more pointed. It wasn’t unusual for me, at the height of a fearful snake prank reaction, to accidentally cuss or call Ladd something more hurtful. I won’t go into detail, but it began with one or more of the following: M, F, A, D, P, and S.

  It’s important to note that Ladd and I, by virtue of our rural geography, have absolutely zero business joking around about snakes. Living in the country, snakes—from venomous water moccasins and rattlesnakes to harmless garter and king snakes—are a part of everyday life on the ranch. Ladd and I would no more walk barefoot across our yard at night than we would wade in the creek at any time of day—it’s a surefire way to step on either a snake . . . or a nest of them. We see snakes sidewinding across our road, I’ve encountered a good five or six inside our house through the years, and I can never forget the times a rattler has had the audacity to coil up on our porch, ready to spar with our sweet striped cat. (I guess they’re both competing for the same mice, so there’s built-in tension?)

  Anyway, what I’m saying is that if it’s very unfunny to tease your partner with rubber snakes in a normal suburban setting, it is one thousand times more unfunny if you and your partner live in the country. Early on, when my mother-in-law, Nan, discovered the dysfunctional snake thing Ladd and I had going on, she begged us to stop. “You’re going to desensitize each
other to snakes!” she’d insist. “And then when you see a real snake, you won’t think it’s real and you’ll get bit and lose a toe! Or your whole leg!” She would often cite a corresponding example of someone losing a toe or leg that always seemed to have happened in the next county over. For the life of me, I never met any of these people. But I did stop and consider what she was saying. She had a point there.

  But it hasn’t played out the way she predicted at all. Instead of numbing me to the horrors and dangers of snakes, our marital shenanigans have only served to heighten my fear of them over time, and today I’m jumpier than ever. Ladd, on the other hand, seems to have plateaued in the intensity of his startled responses . . . but not, unfortunately, in the severity or cleverness of his pranks. He has progressed to borrowing stuffed rattlesnakes from his former high school football coach, who happens to own a taxidermy shop in town. And he now places them in unforgivably believable spots: in tall grass near a fence post before my evening walks, on our porch under the garden hose, in our pantry behind the flour canister. More than ever, I scream, convulse, jump, and sometimes crumble onto the ground in terror. One time I was so startled that I kicked the taxidermy rattlesnake across the room—a curious reaction, considering I don’t think I’d ever kick an actual rattlesnake—which caused its scales to break off in sheets. I am still avoiding calling Coach DeMoss to apologize, tell him what happened, and pay for the ruined snake, although I really feel that legally, Ladd should be the one to pay. I think my case is strong here.

  Another strange offshoot of this madness is that I am now regularly, inadvertently scaring myself with rubber snakes; I don’t even seem to need Ladd anymore. Sometimes I plant one for him to find, then stumble upon it myself before he has a chance to. Or I stick a snake in a drawer for safekeeping, then open the drawer five minutes later, forgetting I’ve put it there. At this point, I’ll jump and scream if I see a belt on a hanger. I startle and shriek at twigs in the yard. Before too long, I’ll probably be terrified of dental floss. What will become of my gum health?