Otter Ranch

09/05/2026

A little love for the readers this Saturday afternoon.

Dolly Parton singing Brandi Carlile’s “The Story.”

Then Edie Brickell taking on Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

That ought'a do it.

I’m in the kitchen cooking.

Ribs going. Wings waiting. Pots bubbling. Music too loud. The whole beautiful mess of feeding people is underway.

Tonight, we’re cookin for a righteous little gathering at our dear friend Chris DeLong's grandma's place, bringin Bowling for John’s to make some noise.

And maybe that’s enough for one good Saturday in a little Minnesota town.

Cook for people.

Play good music.

Show up for yer friends.

Keep the strange, beautiful little places in your community alive.

Food. Music. Friendship.

Turn it up!...

We’ve got cooking to do.

09/04/2026

MISGUIDED ANGEL— A Lyric Memoir Vignette
by Wayne Stephen, 2018

This afternoon, driving home from work at a little French restaurant in Bay City, Wisconsin, I was winding through the bluff country along the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, listening to The Current.

A song came on.

And, as songs sometimes do, it opened a door I wasn’t expecting.

I had to pull over.

I cried for a little while.

It was a good cry.

The kind filled more with gratitude than sadness.

It took me back to 1996.

I was working at Palomino Euro Bistro in downtown Minneapolis. The restaurant was connected to the State Theatre, and every once in a while that proximity came with a perk.

I scored two incredible tickets to see Cowboy Junkies.

I took my big sister, Melody.

She had never heard of them.

That was part of the fun for me. I got to bring my sister into my world for a night—dinner at the restaurant where I worked, then into that beautiful old theater for her first show at the State.

We sat together in the dark and listened to those somber melodies and strange, beautiful lyrics.

Then they played “Misguided Angel.”

Melody reached over, grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

She didn't say anything.

She didn't have to.

There were tears running down her cheek, and I knew exactly where she had gone.

Jay.

Our brother had died nine years earlier.

Something in that song belonged to him. Or reminded us of him. Or gave us a place to put him for a few minutes.

Whatever it was, Melody felt it.

So did I.

That night became one of my favorite memories with my sister.

Nearly twenty years later, Melody and I were standing together in her kitchen in Mesa, Arizona.

I'd cooked dinner for her. She loved when I cooked for her.

By then, she was nearing the end of her life and fighting cancer like a badass.

We didn't talk much that night. We ate. We cleaned up. We stood side by side doing dishes.

And then a song came on Pandora.

“Misguided Angel.”

Melody reached over.

She took my hand.

And squeezed it.

Just like she had twenty years before.

Neither of us said anything at first.

We didn't need to.

Jay was there again.

And now something else was there, too.

Eventually Melody said:
“Wayne, ever since that night at the State Theater, Misguided Angel has been one of my favorite songs. It’s not the sad song people think it is. It’s a beautiful song, for reasons I don’t really understand."

Eight years later, driving alone through the bluff country, the song found me again.

So I pulled over.

And I cried.

For Jay.

For Melody.

For that night in Minneapolis.

For that kitchen.

For two hand squeezes, twenty years apart.

And mostly, I think, because Melody was right.

Maybe some beautiful things don't need to be understood.

They just need to be held onto.

09/04/2026

We're over here at the Ranch working on the Huckleberry Hound wings this morning: wild huckleberry, apple cider and fresh lime for the acid, with deeply charred ginger and cracked black pepper.

Charring the ginger first...key. This flavor profile is coming together beautifully.

09/03/2026

THE HALF-MILE INTO TOWN—A New London Vignette (as submitted to Hippocampus Magazine)
By Wayne Stephen

I've lived here five years now.

New London is one of those little Minnesota towns that prolly should've disappeared a couple of times by now.

It didn't.

The reasons for being here just changed.

The Crow River powered the mills. The mill became an honest-to-God industry, producing flour that traveled far beyond this little town. Then that era ended. The mill came down. The fish hatchery came in.

Another New London.

Agriculture changed. Businesses came and went. The railroad came and went. Highway 9 became the artery running straight through the middle of everything.

And New London kept finding another reason to exist.

Somewhere along the way, this tiny town developed an embarrassment of riches where art and music are concerned.

It's actually kinda ridiculous how much musical talent is packed into New London and the surrounding countryside.

Then there are painters. Potters. Writers. Theater people. Makers. People quietly doing remarkable work in barns, garages, studios, old storefronts and living rooms.

That didn't happen entirely by accident.

Bill Gossman (potter, musician and former mayor) he was part of that transformation.

I didn't know Bill.

I just missed him.

But I've gotten to know his family, and after five years here I've heard his name enough times, in enough different rooms, to understand that some people leave a town differently than they found it.

You see the fingerprints.

New London figured out that you didn't have to bulldoze the character out of a small town to give it a future. Art and music could be part of the economy. So could the river. Old buildings. Little shops. Giving people a reason to come downtown on a Saturday afternoon.

Eventually people started coming here for different reasons.

The river and lakes, sure. But also music, art, theater, coffee, beer, food, festivals and whatever weird little thing somebody decided to try this year.

New London became, for lack of a better term, a tourism town.

But it never completely surrendered to being one.

There are still farmers and tradespeople and shopkeepers mixed in with the artists and musicians and weirdos. People who know what field belongs to whom. People who fish because they want fish. People who will drive twenty miles to hear somebody play guitar and then stand around afterward talking about whether we're gonna get enough rain.

Maybe that's why the place survived.

It didn't reinvent itself so much as keep adding another layer.

And there's room for another one.

Not "growth" in the Chamber-of-Commerce, put-up-a-condo-and-call-it-progress sense.

Pragmatic growth.

Keep what works. Protect what's beautiful. Fix the stupid s**t.

We live about a half-mile outside New London proper, on the Back Bay of the Middle Fork of the Crow River. It's the house Rayn lived in as a teenager and where she later raised her son.

Now it's ours.

The Bungalow on the Crow.

At least that's what we call it when it isn't simply a house occupied by two humans, three cats, two dogs, and the little fu***rs crawling around inside the walls and cupboards in the middle of the night.

We're New London.

But technically, we ain't New London.

It's sort of a hamlet, if you will. A little neighborhood just outside downtown.

And lately I've developed a ritual that takes me from one to the other.

I walk into town.

Partly because my badass e-bike needs repairs I can't throw down for right now.

Mostly because I'm on the mend, sporting a brand-new titanium fu***ng ankle while the other arthritic wheel isn't exactly thrilled about carrying the extra load.

So the half-mile into New London has become my self-imposed physical therapy.

Almost every day.

I'm also a writer.

And as a writer, I'm bound by a certain duty of observation.

In my case, obsessively so.

I notice s**t.

What somebody planted. What they stopped mowing. A boat that hasn't moved in three years. A new sign in a window. Water levels. Roadkill. A beer can in the ditch. Which house has tomatoes coming in.

Who waved.

Who didn't.

I can't really turn it off.

Walking is gasoline on that particular fire.

I'm moving through this half-mile at three miles an hour instead of twenty on the bike or fifty in a car.

And I don't just walk.

I walk.

Heel. Toe. Push.

Relax the hip.

Don't limp.

Don't compensate.

Dorsiflexion.

My boy Chris (the PT at the local clinic, badass dad and great son of Mankato) s always singing about DORSIFLEXION.

So I think about my gait.

I focus.

I relax.

I fu**in' try.

And sometimes I think about the old Chinese men I used to see every day when I'd pass through Chinatown on my way to work in San Francisco.

They walked slowly, hands clasped behind their backs, never seeming particularly interested in getting anywhere quickly.

I used to marvel at them.

Now, all these years later, with a titanium ankle in New London, Minnesota, I'm trying to walk like them.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Looking at everything.

This particular half-mile gives me plenty to look at.

There's a meadow across the highway from our house. Then another just down the road toward town, on my left.

That one belongs to Quinn the Eskimo's dad.

I don't know if Quinn actually convinced his dad to stop letting somebody harvest the grass twice a year, but something changed this year.

They let 'er go.

And I am fu***ng HERE for it.

Goldenrod has taken over whole sections. There are these crazy thorny plants with gorgeous purple flowers and armored leaves that are starting to turn yellow. Grasses going to seed. Bugs everywhere. Birds dropping in and disappearing.

And the deer love it.

They can step off the edge and just vanish.

Nobody planted a wildlife refuge.

Somebody just stopped cutting the field.

Walking between those two meadows, I inevitably get that old Stealers Wheel song stuck in my head.

Except I've changed the lyrics.

Meadow to the left of me...
Meadow to the right...
Here I am...

Stuck in the middle of you.

Those two meadows always send me to Watership Down, the award-winning animated film.

I dont always know why exactly.

Then I hit the Hell-Turn and remember.

Because this lovely little country stroll is also dangerous as hell.

Highway 9 runs straight through town.

Not beside it. Not around it.

Through it.

Right after the meadow, the road takes a dramatic bend. Semis come rolling in fully loaded and are somehow expected to transform themselves into polite little 30-mile-an-hour citizens before reaching the houses and downtown.

They don't always pull it off.

You hear the testimony all day.

Jake brakes screaming. Engines groaning. Thousands of pounds of truck discovering a little late that New London has arrived.

I've learned to pay attention on that curve. Listen for what's coming. Know where I can get farther off the road if I need to.

I call it the Hell-Turn.

Shoutout to the people living in the two houses there for continuing their impressive streak of not having a drunk driver or semi come through the living room....Yet.

Survive the Hell-Turn and you're downtown.

This morning I walked down to the river and falls.

The water is lower than I've ever seen it in the five years I've lived here.

The falls aren't falling.

The creek is barely moving.

Water that normally tumbles through the center of town has become shallow channels, some maybe eight inches deep.

And there, in that little ribbon of water, the fry were schooling.

Hundreds of tiny fish.

I stood there and watched them.

Because that's what I do.

And somehow my brain went from New London, Minnesota, to the Colorado River.

Because that's also what my brain does.

I thought about Mexican farmers at the ass end of that river. All that water getting used and diverted along the way. Agriculture. Cities. Golf courses. Swimming pools. Scottsdale made impossibly green in the Sonoran Desert.

And somebody downstream gets a trickle.

Different river.

Different problem.

Still.

Water makes you think about who is upstream.

Eventually I turned around and started the half-mile home.

Heel. Toe. Push.

Dorsiflexion.

And somewhere along the way, another thought I've had a hundred times returned.

We need a goddamn sidewalk.

Or a trail.

Something.

A safe pedestrian connection between our little hamlet and downtown, eventually connecting the neighborhoods northwest along Highway 9.

I don't know what the answer is. Trail. Sidewalk. Reroute something. Make Highway 9 less insane. That's for people who understand such things.

I know this much because I walk it.

New London doesn't need to become something else.

That's sorta the point.

It's already managed mill town to hatchery town to this strange little arts-and-music-and-tourism town without completely sanding off the people and things that made it New London in the first place.

Maybe the next great civic achievement is considerably less romantic.

A sidewalk.

Let the local brainwizards and passionate civic folks figure out how to get the state to pay for it.

I'm a writer, not a highway engineer.

I just walk the thing.

So I walked it home.

Past the Hell-Turn.

Past Quinn the Eskimo's dad's meadow.

The goldenrod was moving a little in the breeze. The purple thistles were still doing whatever the hell those magnificent prehistoric-looking things do.

I watched my feet.

Heel.

Toe.

Push.

Dorsiflexion.

Then I'd forget about my feet and look at the meadow.

Then remember my feet again.

That's pretty much the whole exercise.

Walk.

Look around.

Try not to get run over.

Get a little stronger.

Notice some s**t.

Tomorrow, I'll prolly do it again.

09/01/2026

An Old Evinrude— A Midwestern Vignette
By Wayne Stephen
Late Summer 2026

I walked into New London today and passed a house with a beat-up Alumacraft sitting on a trailer out front.

Hanging off the back was an old Evinrude.

If you grew up around lakes in the Midwest, you know that name.

Evinrude.

Those old two-stroke outboards were everywhere. Alumacrafts and Lunds. Fishing boats tied to s**tty wooden docks. Tackle boxes under the bench seat. Gas tanks with the little squeeze bulb. That smell of gasoline, lake water and two-stroke exhaust.

Seeing that old motor today made me think of something I hadn't thought about in years.

The Rescuers.

Evinrude.

The dragonfly.

God, I loved that little fu**er.

Bernard and Miss Bianca are down in the Louisiana bayou trying to rescue Penny, and when they need to get somewhere fast, they put Evinrude to work.

A dragonfly....named Evinrude.

Which is fu***ng brilliant. Ole Evinrude built his first outboard in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so somebody at Disney knew exactly what they were doing.

And The Rescuers was fantastic.

It was dark. Weird. A little scary. Madame Medusa was legitimately awful. A little girl was in actual danger. And somehow a couple of mice, an albatross, a bunch of swamp critters and a dragonfly were gonna straighten the whole thing out.

But poor Ev.

Jesus Christ, they worked that dragonfly.

Powering their boat. Running messages. Getting chased by bats. Flying all the way to New York.

Every time they needed something, Evinrude was buzzing his ass off somewhere.

Poor bastard probably saw Bernard and Miss Bianca coming and thought, in his best Norwegian-Milwaukee accent:

“Oh, fer f**k’s sake. Not dese two again, den."

Anyway.

Saw an old Evinrude on the back of an Alumacraft today.

Hadn't thought about that dragonfly in prolly forty years.

They really ran that poor little bastard into the ground.

Cheers, Evie

09/01/2026

Turns Out I Was Paying Attention
A Remembrance
By Wayne Stephen

Wendell Berry
August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026

Thank you, Wendell Berry.

For the poems, the essays, the farming, and spending a lifetime reminding us that land matters. Place matters. People matter. And maybe the earth was never ours to spend.

And thank you, Mrs. Klein.

She was my 11th grade English teacher, and she made us dissect Berry's The Peace of Wild Things.

I don't remember what I wrote about it. I don't remember what Mrs. Klein said about it. But I remember the poem.

All these years later... I think I finally understand why.

When the human world becomes too much, Berry goes outside. He finds water. Birds. Wild things.

And he notices something about them.

They aren't afraid of tomorrow.

The heron isn't lying awake imagining what might happen next week. The deer isn't doomscrolling the future. They live inside the day they've been given. They eat. They rest. They move through the world without carrying the horrible human burden of imagining everything that could go wrong.

Berry finds peace among them because, for a little while, they remind him how to be where his feet are.

Man, do we need that poem now.

We carry the whole fu***ng world around in our pockets. War. Politics. Climate. Cruelty. Somebody screaming about something every five minutes.

Berry wasn't saying don't care.

He was saying we can't carry all of it every minute of every day.

Sometimes you gotta put the goddamn thing down.

Go outside.

Stand by some water.

Listen to the birds.

Watch something alive that has absolutely no idea what the hell we're all arguing about.

Then come back.

Thank you, Wendell Berry.

And thank you, Mrs. Klein.

Hah...Turns out I was paying attention.

08/31/2026

Money Buys Margin—A Cultural Essay
By Wayne Stephen

“Money can’t buy happiness.”

That’s 100% Grade "A" bulls**t.

Or, at the very least, it’s something we’ve repeated so many times without thinking about it that we’ve turned it into bulls**t.

Of course you can’t literally buy happiness. There’s no Happiness aisle at Costco. You can’t order twelve units of contentment from Amazon and have inner peace delivered by Tuesday.

But you can buy an awful lot of the s**t that gives happiness a fighting chance.

Like fixing your car.

When that car is how you get to work, and work is how you pay the rent and keep the lights on, getting the transmission fixed can change your entire goddamn month.

Money buys food. Not just enough calories to keep you alive. Good food. Fresh vegetables. Fruit. Fish. The ingredients to cook something beautiful for people you love.

Try walking around Whole Paycheck (Whole Foods) with forty-three dollars left until Friday and tell me money has nothing to do with well-being.

Then there’s health care.

Good insurance means getting sick can remain a medical problem instead of immediately becoming a financial one. Maybe you even get dental and vision, because somehow in this nation we’ve decided teeth and eyeballs are luxury accessories that aren't actually part of the human body.

You can take a vacation if you have money. Not because sitting on a beach magically makes you happy, but because sometimes a human being needs five goddamn days where nobody needs anything from them.

You can travel. Get a passport. Buy a plane ticket. Take a train through another country. Eat dinner somewhere you don’t speak the language and realize the little patch of Earth where you happened to be born isn't the center of civilization.

Even getting outside costs money.

Hiking boots. Tent. Fishing pole. Bicycle. Kayak. A quality warm coat. Wool socks.

Nature might be free. Getting into it often isn’t.

Books cost money. Concert tickets cost money. Museums, paint, guitars, theater tickets. All that stuff we call culture and then act like everybody has equal access to it.

And education?

F**k YES, money buys education.

It doesn't buy intelligence. It doesn't buy curiosity. It sure as hell doesn't buy wisdom.

But education? Absolutely.

It can buy the house in the better school district. Preschool before kindergarten even starts. Tutors when your kid falls behind. Music lessons. Sports fees. Art supplies. Summer programs. College visits. A decent computer and reliable internet.

Hell, it can buy a quiet bedroom with a desk.

Think about that.

One kid is doing algebra at a desk in their own room. Another is doing the same algebra at the kitchen table while somebody makes dinner, a little brother is yelling and the television is on, all while the L Train is rattling the entire apartment building.

Both kids might be equally brilliant.

They aren't studying under equal circumstances.

And it keeps going.

Money can pay tuition. Or make tuition a hell of a lot less terrifying. It can make an unpaid internship possible because Mom and Dad are covering rent. It can pay for childcare while somebody goes back to school. It can mean working twenty hours a week instead of forty while taking classes.

And maybe the biggest luxury of all:

You can f**k up.

Drop a class. Change your major. Take another semester. Move home for six months. Try something and discover you're terrible at it.

Try again.

Being poor doesn't make somebody less intelligent or less capable. But it can make failure incredibly expensive.

We love calling education the great equalizer.

Sometimes it is.

But we sure as hell don't give everybody the same starting line.

And then there’s access.

Money buys that too.

We confuse available with accessible all the fu**in time.

The good grocery store is there. The university is there. The dentist is there. Yellowstone is there. The museum is free on Tuesdays.

Great.

Can you get there?

Can you afford what happens once you do?

Can you take Tuesday off?

Money gets you into better schools, better neighborhoods, better doctors and sometimes just better rooms.

The internship. The conference. The city where the jobs are. The dinner where somebody knows somebody.

America loves to talk about opportunity.

But an open door doesn't mean s**t if you can't afford to walk through it.

And then there's time.

We don't talk nearly enough about how much time money buys.

You can pay somebody to fix the furnace instead of losing your entire Saturday figuring it out yourself. Buy dinner when you're exhausted. Pay for childcare. Get a hotel room when the pipes burst.

You can even buy yourself a few months away from a s**tty job while you figure out what comes next.

Which brings us to something even bigger.

Money lets you say no.

No, I won't work for that.

No, I won't live there.

No, I don't have to stay with you.

No, I don't have to tolerate this.

That's not happiness.

That's freedom.

And money buys an astonishing amount of freedom.

It even changes punishment.

A $300 speeding ticket can be mildly irritating to one person and financially devastating to another.

Same offense. Same ticket.

One person writes a check and forgets about it.

The other might be deciding whether the ticket gets paid or the refrigerator gets filled.

So maybe the thing money really buys isn't stuff.

Money buys margin.

A little space between the rent and the paycheck. Between getting sick and going broke. Between making a stupid decision and ruining your life. Between exhaustion and rest. Between being stuck and having another option.

And that's one of the things people who've always had some margin can easily miss.

Being broke isn't only about not having things.

It's about having no fu***ng room.

The car breaks down and there isn't another car. The water heater dies and there isn't $800 sitting around. Your kid gets sick and there isn't another day you can afford to miss work.

Normal life keeps happening.

There's just nothing between you and the edge.

Now, the old saying does contain a little truth.

Money can't make somebody love you. It can't create a real friendship. It can't give you character. It can't make your children call. It can't resurrect your mother. And it can't tell you what the hell any of this is supposed to mean.

Rich people can be absolutely miserable. Poor people can experience enormous joy.

Both things are true.

But neither proves that money doesn't matter.

People have been arguing about the good life for thousands of years. My man, Aristotle had a word for it: eudaimonia. Basically, "its human flourishing."

Not being happy every minute.

Living a life where you actually have the chance to become fully human. To love people. Participate. Learn. Make things. Grow. Have some purpose. Have some dignity.

And that's awfully hard to do when you're drowning.

It's difficult to contemplate the meaning of existence when the fu***ng transmission just went out.

So fine.

Money can't buy happiness.

But it can buy safety. Health. Time. Education. Experiences. Choices. Access. It can buy the ability to survive a mistake.

And maybe most importantly, it can buy something you usually don't appreciate until you don't have any:

Room to breathe.

Money can't buy happiness.

But poverty sure as hell can steal it.

08/30/2026

Damn. I just watched this for the first time.... enjoy, friends, and git after this Sunday.

“Light of a Clear Blue Morning” by Dolly Parton featuring Lainey Wi...

08/26/2026

At Least I Still Have Dolly— A Personal Essay
By Wayne Stephen

My mom called me Wayne Stephen. Not all the time. Wayne was fine for normal business. But when something mattered, when I'd f**ked up, when she needed my attention, it was: Wayne Stephen.

So I suppose it's fitting that I'm writing this one under that name. Because this one is about my mom. And my sister Melody. And Dolly.

Celebrity deaths are strange.

These people don't know us. We don't know them. Robin Williams didn't know me. Robert Redford didn't know me. Dolly Parton sure as hell didn't know me.

They're celebrities. That's all.

Except, that's not all.

They were just there. In our living rooms and movie theaters. Coming outta the radio. Riding around in our cars. Attached to people we loved and places we lived and versions of ourselves that don't exist anymore.

So when one of them dies, I don't think we're necessarily grieving them as if they were family. Sometimes we're just grieving the part of our own lives they carried.

And Dolly carried a lot of mine.

I had Dolly for fifty-five years.

Her voice. That smile. That laugh. The ridiculous hair. And yes, those magnificent breasts. We're not going to pretend they weren't part of the whole glorious package just because she's gone.

And while we're here, I've had one burning question for about fifty years:

Who the f**k is Jolene??

Seriously.

Who is this woman that DOLLY PARTON is worried she can't compete with?

I've spent most of my life trying to picture her.

That's gotta be one helluva redhead.

Anyway...

Dolly understood something about femininity that a lotta people still don't. She didn't apologize for it. She exaggerated the hell out of it. The hair got bigger, the heels got higher, the clothes got tighter, and the b***s stayed spectacular. And somehow none of it made her less serious.

Dolly knew exactly what she was doing.

Dolly made some old-fashioned things look pretty damn good, too.

She made staying married to one person, and actually seeming happy about it, sexy again. Loyalty was never presented as sacrifice with Dolly. She made it look like a choice she kept making.

And somehow, Dolly made Christianity sexy.

I'm an atheist. But more than once, listening to Dolly talk about God, grace, forgiveness and whatever she believed was waiting for us on the other side, she damn near pulled me out of retirement.

That's how much I trusted Dolly.

Not enough to get me back in church.

But enough to make me wonder what she knew that I didn't.

Underneath all that rhinestone architecture was somebody people trusted. She was vulnerable without seeming fragile. Kind without making a production outta being kind. And there was an authenticity to her that survived an industry that normally beats authenticity out of people.

I'm just gonna say it: Dolly Parton was the bosom of America.

I know how that sounds. I mean it.

There was something about Dolly that people felt safe in. Maybe it was maternal. Maybe it was Appalachian. Maybe it was that enormous femininity she carried around without shame. Whatever it was, people leaned toward her. She could be sexy as hell and still make you feel safe.

My mom gave me Dolly, whether I wanted her or not.

Momma Donna spoon-fed me that whole world of country music when I was a kid. George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Porter Wagoner. Hee Haw....And Dolly.

George Jones wasn't just somebody my mother loved. George Jones was THE voice in our living room. His records were part of the house. That voice was just there, as ordinary and permanent as the kitchen table.

In 1979, when I was in second grade, The Possum came to Mankato. Mom finally went to see him. I remember her coming home early. She was devastated. George had been so drunk he couldn't perform.

I can still see my mom sitting down at our kitchen table and letting out this heavy sigh.

“Well, at least I still have Dolly.”

Then she got up and put on Hello, I'm Dolly. I'll always remember "Dumb Blonde" being the first song to play.

That's it. That's the memory. I don't remember what I was doing before she came home. I don't remember what happened afterward. But I remember my mom at that table, and I remember Dolly coming out of the speakers.

Then came 1980.

For my generation, 1980 was a marker. I was only a kid, but looking back, you can almost see the line there. The seventies ended and something else started. And that was the year 9 to 5 came out.

That mattered in our house because suddenly Dolly wasn't just part of my mom's country music anymore. Everybody knew Dolly. There she was with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. That song was fu***ng everywhere.

Dolly had escaped the category. Country couldn't hold her anymore.

And the remarkable thing is that she didn't seem to change much to make that happen. America just finally caught up to her.

But there was another Dolly in our family.

My sister Melody had the deep Dolly.

Mom had the fun Dolly albums. The ones that filled the house. The Dolly with the big personality and the songs a kid could grab onto before he understood much of anything about what they meant.

Melody went further down with her vinyl. The records where you started finding the other Dolly. The darker Dolly. The songwriter who could take you into some pretty goddamn lonely places and wasn't particularly interested in making sure you came out feeling better.

That's where I learned something about her that eventually became much more important to me than the hair, the jokes, the movies, or even that extraordinary voice.

Dolly could fu***ng write.

Melody knew that Dolly. And 'cause Melody loved her, I got that Dolly too.

That's the strange thing about music in a family. You think yer just stealing records from somebody's stack, hearing something through a bedroom wall, sitting around while somebody else decides what gets played. Then forty or fifty years go by. People die. And suddenly those records aren't records anymore.

They're people.

My mom is in Dolly for me. So is Melody.

After 9 to 5, Dolly was simply there. For decades. And that's strange to think about now because almost everything else changed. My mom got older. I got older. People I loved disappeared. Whole parts of the world I grew up in don't exist anymore.

But you could always put on Dolly.

Everybody knows Jolene. Everybody knows I Will Always Love You. Everybody knows 9 to 5. But those aren't the songs I've been reaching for.

I've been listening to Daddy. My Tennessee Mountain Home. The Bargain Store. Coat of Many Colors. The Grass Is Blue. Just Because I'm a Woman. Little Sparrow. Mountain Angel.

The deep Dolly. Melody's Dolly.

And one more.

Down From Dover.

That's the one for me.

Jesus Christ...

A young woman is pregnant. The man who said he'd come back hasn't. Her family has turned on her. She's alone and scared and waiting for somebody we already suspect isn't coming.

And Dolly stays right there with her. She doesn't clean that s**t up.

That's what gets me about that song.

Dolly wrote about people who weren't always doing okay. People whose lives had gotten messy. Women especially. She knew shame. She knew poverty. She knew what people whispered about.

That's part of why we trusted her.

I dunno, I'm probably trying too hard to explain something I've simply known since I was a kid.

Dolly felt safe.

My mom knew it. Melody knew it. I knew it before I had words for it. And apparently millions of other people knew it too.

Yesterday, I didn't really get to grieve Dolly. I had a special event to prep for. Food to make. A room to get ready. People depending on me. Then service.

Anybody who's ever worked an event knows what that means. Once it starts, you don't get to have much of an interior life. You move. You solve the next problem. You feed people.
So Dolly had to wait.

It wasn't until around midnight, after everything was over and the noise of the day had finally stopped, that I sat down and started writing this.

And then it hit me.

I wrote til four in the morning, went to bed, and dreamed about Dolly.

Of course I fu***ng did.

Then I woke up early, with almost no sleep, and came back to this. Because I wasn't finished with her yet.

Or she wasn't finished with me.

And now, sitting here tryin to finish this love letter to Dolly, I keep seeing my mom in 1979. Not some grand cinematic version of her. Just Mom, sitting at the kitchen table, pi**ed off and disappointed because George Jones couldn't keep his s**t together long enough to sing for her.

That heavy sigh.

"Well, at least I still have Dolly."

Then she gets up, puts on the record, and there's Dolly.

And now Melody is in there too. Her records. The deep Dolly. The sister who helped teach me where to look after the rhinestones stopped sparkling and the songs got harder.

Forty-seven years later, I'm doing pretty much the same thing they did. Putting on Dolly.

Down From Dover this time.

And trying to finish a love letter I apparently needed fifty-five years to write.

Mom, wherever you are...

Melody, wherever you are...

I still have her.

At least I still have Dolly.

Yeah.

I still do.