I hear her voice in the mornin’ hour, she calls me / The radio reminds me of my home far away / Drivin’ down the road, I get a feelin’ / That I should’ve been home yesterday, yesterday.
– John Denver
If you grew up as I did, you read this quote to the melody of John Denver’s most famous song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
While “home” recalls different settings for all of us, for me, it’s the Idaho mountains. It’s building fences and hunting with Dad and gardening with Mom. It’s tuning in to the local radio station at 6 a.m. and learning we still had to walk to the bus stop because they only canceled school when temperatures dropped below minus 20 degrees F. And it’s laughing at the “potato” references because, near the Montana border, we’re in “cattle country.”
And though I’ve worked with the Ogden family of magazines since 2013, none of these magazines represents the totality of my upbringing more than Grit. Really, I’ve never found a magazine anywhere that better exemplifies this lifestyle than Grit does.
It’s knowing the difference between a rainbow trout and steelhead (read “Live-Fire Steelhead“). It’s harvesting from the garden and preserving it in canning jars for the winter (“Puttin’ Up for the Winter,”). And it’s family preparedness as basic wisdom, not paranoia (Seed Money).
As I settle into this opportunity as editor-in-chief, and as I celebrate my upbringing and current home in eastern Idaho, I’ll reference my experiences and memories in editor’s letters, articles, and recipes alongside those of our talented writers. Check out “25 Cents” in the July/August 2026 issue of Grit for my recollection about summer jobs before I was able to work legally. I also expand upon the feeling of “coming home” in “Keep Your Mansions; I Have My Mountains.”
Grit thrives on writers and editors hailing from different areas of the United States. While hunters in in the western U.S. will clamber through the Rockies for mule deer in September and October, those in the South will seek white-tailed deer in November and December. As Jenny Underwood was submitting her article on using nettles, I trekked down to the river to photograph my local stinging nettles and then compared those jagged, spear-like leaves to the rounder leaves of her Ozark wood nettles. I’ve never seen the variety of puffball mushrooms that Bruce Ingram encounters in Appalachia, even though I’ve stomped on many mature “western giant puffballs” to watch spores waft like smoke beneath my boots. They don’t get nearly as big here in the Rockies.
Thank you for riding by my side as we travel the trails and dirt roads that represent Grit. I look forward to representing Idaho, the United States, and all of you as we explore the “grittier” side of rural life.
