Kathy Brasby Blog
Decoding
When our younger son turned 13, he informed me that, although he needed a new bottle of shampoo, he did not want the cheap stuff he'd been using for years. “I want manly shampoo,” he announced. I understood he might not want to use foofoo shampoo like lilac or rose,...
Dead or alive?
When our hobby farm was at full capacity, we milked several Nubian goats every day. One morning, when I started chores in our milking room, my 4-year-old daughter climbed onto a large wooden feed box at the back of the room and peered behind it. "Mom, there's a cat...
Pecked Out
The hen had left the nest in the morning, leading her weaving thread of chicks behind her as she investigated the landscape that she hadn’t seen in a month. Setting on a nest of eggs takes commitment and the willingness to stare at a wall for a month. The hen was...
Another idea passed
The secretary and I were the only two women working in this shop. There’s something about rubbing elbows with a bunch of guys that gives you willies at night. Let me explain. The secretary was deathly afraid of mice. This was not a good thing to reveal to a bunch of...
Like a tree in the mist
My younger brother was a high school wrestler, which made for an interesting lesson in the folly of letting siblings mature. His first practice of the season came shortly before my visit home from college. We hadn’t seen each other in a little while and he...
Skunk escape
When the trapped raccoon turned out to really be a restless skunk, people got a little antsy at our house. If you’ll remember my story, we thought we were trapping the raccoon who had eaten our duck’s eggs a week before hatching. We trapped a skunk instead. Once the...
Our thief
The nest was empty. After almost four weeks of waiting - four weeks of fluffy yellow duckling dreams - all the nests were empty. The ducks had done their part, filling four nests with beautiful eggs. And now some varmint had raided the nests. Raccoon. We were sure...
No more postcards
One summer I blended a bright idea about how to get more mail with a chain letter opportunity and sideswiped a poor teenage girl. I was 14 at the time and wanted to bring mail into the house that was addressed to me. So when I ran across a 4-H list of places I could...
The Christmas Pickle
Late on Christmas day several years ago, we bundled our family into the car and headed for a ski trip in the Colorado mountains. The gift-giving had been trimmed back so that we could enjoy this ski outing but my husband wanted to do something special for the family...