by Kathy Brasby | Feb 11, 2024 | Reviews
The Topic of Hope
I’ve been giving hope a great deal of thought lately and so, naturally, I cued up the movie I am Legend last night. I’m becoming more fascinated with dystopian stories because they wrestle with the idea of hope in what looks like overwhelming darkness.
The story begins after a cure for cancer goes sideways and turns into a lethal virus that turns most humans into vicious zombies. A few people are naturally immune, and our story focuses on Robert, a military virologist, who lives in Manhattan with his dog. Sam is his only companion.
Robert has worked out a healthy daily routine. Each day, after conducting experiments to find a cure, he drives the streets of the city announcing via radio broadcast that he will provide food, shelter, and protection at a specific location.. He spreads hope to any survivors.
As long as he remains in the daylight, he’s safe. The Darkseekers are the zombie types who can’t tolerate light. The movie uses symbolism of darkness vs. light.
At this point in the story, Robert exudes hope in a city savaged by the effects of the virus.
When Sam dies after an encounter with Darkseekers, our hero exchanges hope for rage. He gives up. His experiments aren’t working. His companion is dead. He’s plunged into despair.
The Revenge Plan
Robert puts together a clumsy revenge plan, aiming to kill as many Darkseekers as possible before they kill him. Of course, he unleashes this plan at night.
He’s rescued by a woman and boy who heard his daily radio broadcasts and came. Anna becomes the new hope in the story. She and Ethan are on their way to a survivors’ camp in Vermont.
Robert has now decided hope is useless. He’s sure no one else has survived. He rages at her: she’s a fool for thinking otherwise. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, as far as Robert can determine. There is no hope.
Back in 2007, when I first saw the movie, I am Legend was a horror/zombie story to me. But now I see through a different lens.
My Changes in Life
I’ve endured a lot of loss since that time. Some things I assumed would be a part of my future are now gone. I understand Robert’s loss of hope when his companion died and his experiments kept failing. He wanted to fix the world by curing the virus. When Sam died, the future abruptly dimmed to black. The darkness looked to have won.
But that’s not the way of hope. It impressed me when Anna credited God for guiding her to Robert. In the end, she was the one to declare to other survivors that there was still hope.
A dystopian story can illustrate movement from darkness to light, from loss to life, from revenge to renewal. Bleakness does not get the last word for a Christian who believes in God’s renewal and light and life.
Hope is the confidence that the light wins. That God wins.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jan 16, 2024 | Country life, Hope, Winter
C.S. Lewis makes a point about the weather: enjoy it! We might argue that the arctic cold in Colorado this week (I saw -20 at one point) is beyond enjoying. It’s only worth complaining about.
We might be wrong.
I have livestock which means I have responsibilities. The other morning, I pulled on a battery-powered vest, insulated coveralls, hat, gloves, heavy boots and trekked to the barn to check on my animals. They were enjoying the weather a lot more than I was.
The dogs raced through the snow, tackling each other and then shaking off the snow to run again. Goats came racing out of their barn to gobble the hay I threw in. Not a lot of complaining there.
Lesson to be learned
As I walked back to the house, the sun was rising over the frosty horizon, hazy as though I was looking through a window smeared with Vaseline. Ice crystals in the air gave an other-world look.
Photo by Xander Brown. Taken near my location.
A little later, the rising sun pushed light through those ice crystals like a prism to form a sun dog. A sundog is different from a rainbow. You see a rainbow when you look away from the sun but you see a sundog when you look toward the sun.
The colors were more subtle than a summer rainbow but formed a triumphant set of parentheses around the sun.
The river that flows near our house was also clogged with huge chunks of ice. Hardships? Maybe.
Frigid Hardships
What struck me was how, in the middle of something tough like arctic temperatures, there is still beauty around us if we look for it. Like the sundog.
And those chunks of ice in the river will be long gone soon. These hardships are temporary.
My animals knew it and were celebrating the weather. God’s creation amazes me with its beauty and resilience.
C.S. Lewis was right. We can enjoy any weather.
(Thank you to Xander Brown for sharing his photo of the sundog near our town.)
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by Kathy Brasby | Sep 15, 2023 | Country life, Humor
And There They Were
I didn’t notice when the attack of the mini toads began. One day I took a walk along a small creek and tiny toadlets darted from blades of grass to stems of weeds to tiny stones. The first one surprised me. The second looked cute as it bolted across the path.
By the tenth – nay, more – I was getting concerned.
Just how many of these were there?
I have watched many take-over-the-world movies, so I knew the routine. One movie, Kingdom of the Spiders, is seared into my brain because of the ending. The movie followed the invasion of spiders gone rogue. It ended with our hero hiding in a farm lodge overnight. He turns on the radio in the morning to learn how the invasion was stopped but hears nothing but static. Duh-duh-duh-duh.
Duh-duh-duh-duh
So he pries boards off a window to discover that the lodge and his entire town are encased with spider webs. Trapped like Frodo in Shelob’s web. Another duh-duh-duh-duh as the credits rolled.
I laughed at the ending, but I was re-thinking my response as I watched toads pop up everywhere. They started out small enough to hide under a penny. But they grew.
Soon my window wells had a dozen toads hiding in there.
Well, not hiding. Unable to get out. How had they gotten in there?
And, really, where had they come from?
The Tadpoles
My research says they started out as tadpoles. Well, this was the year for unusual rain, so that made sense. But I was sad that I had somehow missed seeing the darting little tadpoles in puddles. Those fascinate me.
Tadpoles turn into toadlets. Toadlets turn into toads. Gobs of them.
I wish I could tell you I started counting, but I didn’t. I noticed toads every time I took a walk and assumed I was seeing new ones. Soon, I was certain there were hundreds. Thousands.
OK, a kajillion of them.
I started asking friends. They confirmed they had a bunch, too. They wouldn’t confirm a kajillion, but I suspected. If I didn’t have a kajillion on my little farm, then together we must.
Friends were concerned. Which meant they were lamenting toads lost to mowers, car tires, and stomping toddlers. I think they were lamenting, anyway. It was hard to tell with the fist pumps.
One friend declined to have the rest of us visit, just in case we carried toad seeds on our shoes. She didn’t have any baby toads and didn’t want any. Although her adult kids had toads, so she’s likely infested by now, anyway.
I mean, how do you turn down the grandkids coming to visit? If little ones don’t bring colds, they probably bring baby toad seeds.
The Only Comfort
The only comfort with the toad invasion of 2023 is that as the toadlets grow in size, they diminish in number. I can’t explain that either, but it explains why toads aren’t used in math books to illustrate the number kajillion. (What do they use, anyway?)
I take comfort in the other thing: toads don’t spin webs and can be a useful ally if the spiders ever go rogue.
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 19, 2023 | Country life, Family, Hope, Humor
This morning, I buckled on my sharp shiny sword and stepped out the door to do battle with the monsters growing at the edge of my property. I had postponed this for weeks, but it had to be done before the day got any hotter and the monsters got bolder.
The cult movie, The Little Shop of Horrors, featured a sentient carnivorous plant named Aubrey II that fed on human blood. My own monsters were threatening to swallow vehicles for the moment before moving on.
I wasn’t sure if my plants were carnivorous but why let them keep growing?
Was the dog safe? The chickens? See why I needed the sword? [spacer height=”30px”]
Prone to exaggeration
Because I have been known to exaggerate, I need to clarify that my sharp shiny sword is really a DeWalt cordless pruner, but hey, tomayto, tomahto.
This pruner can cut through three-inch limbs, so I strapped it on and headed for the monster forest surrounding my wood pile. Oh, the irony.
We’ve had a Seattle kind of year in normally arid northeastern Colorado. Really. We usually get about fifteen inches of rain a year while Seattle gets more like 34. Flip-flop those this year and you get the idea why the monsters were so eager to stretch into trees.
They’ve been thirsty forever and finally gulping gallons of rain.
Gulping gallons
This year, entire stacks of wood have disappeared within their jungle. Maybe devoured by the hungry dripping teeth of the Aubrey II’s out there.
Just for clarity, these are more like hybrid Aubrey II’s. Some people call them wild sunflowers. But potayto, potahto.
These guys are threatening to blot out the sunlight and swallow not only the log splitter in the yard but the privacy fence. The uncut logs. My entire house.
Last month’s hail storm left dents in heavy metal but didn’t even bruise these plants.
The trunk of several were bigger than my wrist. Huge by wrist standards.
I started by gripping the base of one and pulling in case it didn’t have a good root system. Maybe they’d all fall like dominoes and my work would be done.
As it turned out, if they could stand up to the pounding hail, my grip was a mere annoyance and no more.
I was kind of afraid of that.
Out came the sword. (Remember: tomayto, tomahto.)
Wrong choice
I should have worn a hard hat instead of gloves because it turned out the sword was mightier than the monster. The sunflowers began falling with a crash onto my head.
Imagine sunflowers succumbing to my trusty sword (humor me here) and slamming onto the ground. Or me, depending which was closer.
It was usually me.
Domino effect. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Onto my head. (That alone may explain this post. Brain injured.)
I now have a pile of slain sunflowers by my driveway. The monsters had surrounded an old coffee table, two tree stumps, and a tomato cage.
And, boy, am I glad that I got those rescued.
That’s my report for today and you can believe whatever you want. Just like The Little Shop of Horrors.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 10, 2023 | Country life, Humor
When we released the lions into my pasture of abundant grass this summer, my little herd of goats was distressed. In fact, they gave a whole new meaning to panic attack as they huddled along the fence line and refused comfort from their comfort food: animal cookies.
To my eyes, the recent additions to the pasture were tail-swishing, cud-chewing 350-pound calves. To my goats, they were tooth-baring, evil eyed, growling lions.
Whatever
The calves ignored the goats, but could the goats ignore the calves?
The milk goats, usually annoyingly docile and cuddly, suddenly decided that not only did calves look lions, so did I.
At milking time, they usually crowd at the door ready for their sweet feed and animal crackers. But the day the lions came, they cowered at the fence line.
Clear across the pasture from the barn. The fence line that was much closer to the lions than the barn.
Yay For Animal Crackers
I took animal crackers out to them, only to watch these lion-crazed goats run away from me. These were the same goats who made any pen repairs impossible because they stuck their noses in my face. Nose to nose. Really.
I bribed them with animal crackers, which must have looked mildly familiar, because one finally stretched her neck to sniff.
I snagged her collar, and we made a slow, stiff-legged trip to the barn. Away from the lions but she didn’t seem to notice that.
The two remaining milkers fled to the far corner, but one goat followed me: the only one who wasn’t yet being milked. It made me wonder if producing milk was related to mental collapse.
Their Mental Collapse
The one who followed got her cookies just for being smart.
I thought the milkers would relax once the first goat got her turn at the sweet feed. They were usually jealous creatures. But, no, that day I had to lure in the second one.
The third one seemed more relaxed. But remember that these goats thought a calf was a lion, so what she seemed to be was definitely not what she was.
I brought a bucket of sweet feed for her plus an abundance of animal crackers.
Bribery Worked A Little
She was happy to eat sweet feed, but it took three tries before I snagged her collar. I had sweet memories of this girl following me anywhere. Pre-lion.
We got halfway across the pasture (remember this is away from the lions) when she decided that to escape. She reared into the air and twisted her body.
I held her collar in one hand and a bucket half-full of sweet feed in the other.
When she reared, I had a thought:
Ugh. I’m going to get grass stains on my best jeans.
And, as my feet tangled and the ground was approaching, I had another thought:
Do NOT let go of this collar.
Beware Of The Jungle
The abundant grass served as a soft pillow for my landing. I got to my feet and here’s my report: I did not let go of the collar and I didn’t even have bruises the next day.
The lions have now turned into calves, and my goats will condescend to eating animal cookies. All is well in the jungle.
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