WATFORD CITY, N.D. — I hope everyone has that one aunt or grandma or neighbor who has a coveted item they make and distribute to their loved ones that you all fight over.

In our lives, her name is Aunt Kerry and she comes bearing gifts. And those gifts are jars of Emma’s Dills, a family recipe that she saved from being lost to the generations.

Aunt Kerry was out to the ranch last weekend to visit and make the delivery of her wares. She’s my dad’s big sister who married and relocated to a ranch near Lemmon, South Dakota, but this ranch is where she grew up and learned to make those pickles from her aunt Emma or her mother in the tiny kitchens of the ranch houses where they raised kids and fed them and fed them and fed them.

I’m a woman who returned home, but growing up, I wasn’t naïve to

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