by Kathy Brasby | Jan 27, 2020 | Country life, Family, Humor, Stories
The hill outside our house was a quarter-mile long, declining at a 45-degree angle. What would you do if you were 14 and had a bike? And a hill?
We lived beside a gravel road with the next neighbor a mile away. Our house was at the top of the hill. This hill could have been a major obstacle to youth with bikes.
Caution?
Caution was not such a buzz killer in those days. Before drifting cars was a thing, I was drifting on my bike.
Bikes for our family were always lean and mean. Dad picked them up at farm sales, and I, being the oldest, always got the latest find. My old bike then passed down to my brother, and so on down the line.
My favorite bike was a stripped-down black boys bike with no fenders, one speed, and coaster brakes.
Exactly what I needed.
My sister, Ann, was six at this time. The right age to join me. Not too big to mess with my balance and not so small that she’d get hurt too much if my plan didn’t work out.
I Had A Plan
Of course I had a plan. I would set Ann on the crossbar of my bike, and off we’d go. No helmets, no seat belts, no common sense.
Ann needed a little training before we took on the big hill. She had a way of panicking and twisting the handlebars. That interfered with good drifting.
I taught her many things in those days, so this was just part of the deal for an older sister. My job was to expand her horizons. Teach her to overcome.
She caught onto her bike responsibilities after a while: no panicking allowed. Trust me, I told her. When in life are you more confident in your skills than at 14?
We practiced
We practiced for several days before we tackled the hill. She was like a little monkey attached to the handlebars, her legs wrapped around the crossbar. She was a good learner. Obviously, I was a great teacher, too.
When she was ready, and not before, we scheduled our first outing. I wasn’t irresponsible.
We rolled my stripped-down black bike out onto the gravel road and she climbed onto the bar.
The Big Day
I powered the bike down the hill. Our speed increased until the fields on either side of the road were a blur of green. The summer air rushed past my face and bits of her hair blew into my teeth.
We got to the bottom of the hill, and then I stomped on the coaster brake and twisted the handlebars.
The rear wheel of the bike slid around the front and then, gravel spraying as the bike shifted direction, we were facing uphill. My sister the monkey had clung to the bike frame perfectly.
We cycled back up the hill and tried it again. It turned into a pretty exciting summer of bicycle drifting.
For the record, we both survived.
And, for the record, I’d never let our grandkids pull a stunt like that.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jan 20, 2020 | Country life, Family, Humor, Stories
There’s no accounting for personal tastebuds. What my son relishes on his dinner place, my daughter disdains.
That’s even true with our chickens. Nothing makes our little flock of chickens giddier than salad-making day because they get the ends of the celery, the heart of the lettuce, the skins of the celery.
I’ve seen a hen snatch a piece of green pepper in mid-air and scurry to the far corner of the coop to devour in private. They seem to be two-legged garbage disposals.
My family’s response to any food they don’t like is to gift it to the chickens. There’s no accounting for pleasing the palate sometimes.
When I was on one of my health food kicks, I often served couscous. I really liked couscous because it cooked up fast and it was supposed to be good for you. I didn’t evaluate taste much.
I served couscous several times before I noticed that the dish of couscous came off the table with one spoonful taken out: mine.
“You don’t like couscous?” I finally asked my husband.
“I call those grit-grits,” he said. “Give them to the chickens.” He’s not southern, as you can tell.
Chickens like couscous. They finished off the whole bowl faster than eight-year-olds eat ice cream. Couscous ranked right up there with leftover rice and carrot peelings. Top tier in chicken cuisine.
One day a basket of produce came our way, which included artichokes.
I was determined to learn how to serve artichokes to my family, so I did the logical thing and Googled artichokes.
You can grill artichokes. Boiling them doesn’t add any flavor, I learned. Butter must be added. Uh-huh.
Steaming artichokes was also acceptable, and so was roasting.
The options sounded so routine, like offering garden peas or green beans.
I made a special dipping sauce and put my find on our table.
Did you know that artichokes are the edible immature flower of a cultivated thistle? Being the daughter of a farmer, I should have asked why anyone would grow a thistle. Dad devoted his life to fighting the thistle wars. I’ll bet roasting and boiling the pests might have appealed to him.
But remember, I was the one who overlooked the couscous reject
But remember, I was the one who overlooked the couscous rejection for months.
My thinking was more along the lines of “Why not? It might be fun.” In other words, delirium.
A little coaching on how to eat an artichoke was in order, but I made it quick because the kids were glazing over from starvation, eyeing the hamburgers and not my artichokes.
They did try the artichoke leaves after I glared. Once.
“Feed those to the chickens,” my son said.
I’m less heartbroken over a failed dish when someone gets some good out of it. If that’s the chickens, so be it. We do get to eat their healthy eggs, so I think it works out ok.
The next night, I noticed that the chickens had eaten the bits of cauliflower and leftover iceberg lettuce. But the artichoke leaves remained on the ground.
So the chickens could stomach broccoli stems, dry biscuits, carrot tops, and cucumber peels.
Artichokes, those edible thistle flowers, were scorned by the chickens. They did have some discernment.
My husband called couscous “grit-grits” but it’s pretty obvious that to the chicken palate, artichokes are worse.
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 16, 2019 | Cats, Country life, Family, Humor, Stories
Navigating what a child says is sometimes like wandering through a corn maze after dark. It’s a little spooky and easy to mistake a corner for a dead end. Or vice versa.
Here are a few examples. This is strictly a no-name and sometimes changed-gender report for protection (mine, so I don’t get hammered by an adult child. They don’t always think these memories are as noteworthy as I do.)
I was showing a two-year-old boy around our barn. We had some black-and-white kittens tumbling around bales of hay.
“What do you call those?” I said, pointing at the kittens. I wanted to teach the difference between cat and kitten.
He stared. “Penguins?”
Another time, I was fixing dinner for the family when one of our kids wandered into the kitchen.
“What’s that?” he asked, studying the pan on the stove.
“Hamburger patties.”
He tilted his head. “Can I call it sook?”
Yep, he ate sook for supper.
On a similar note, the same kid helped me bake muffins one day. I used a whisk to mix the ingredients, and soon the batter stiffened. He lifted the whisk with the flour and sugar and oil clumped onto it.
“Look, I have a lunk!”
He ate quite a few lunks after they baked.
Another day I took a little one shopping at the local drugstore. She carried five pennies into the store and laid them on a shelf for some unknown reason. After we left the store, she discovered her loss. Of course, we had to backtrack in search of her loot. We searched up and down aisles, especially shelves at five-year-old height, but could only find four pennies.
I finally laid the law down. “We need to go.”
Her shoulders slumped as she shuffled toward the door. “I’m going to miss that penny.”
There was the child who came to her mother with her head hanging low. Kids never take disappointment lightly. She wore her sadness like a wet raincoat. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
Uh-oh. Wouldn’t you imagine broken lamps or flour scattered across the kitchen? Maybe the dog lost in a sea of bubbles in the bathtub?
“I’m sorry, Mom, but I can’t fly.”
How did she figure that out? It’s better not to ask.
Then there was this discussion over scrambled eggs at the breakfast table. Fork in one hand, my son asked, “Do you know what a Gurgler is?”
I like to encourage investigation, but I had to admit my ignorance.
“They’re a machine that sucks down people and things,” said the young one.
“Yuck,” I said.
“I hate to tell you this, but if you meet one, you’ll die.”
“Oh, no!”
“But it’s OK because they live on the other side of the world.”
“Good.”
“Mom,” he said. “They’re on the movies.” He rolled his eyes while I wondered what movies he’d been watching.
Then came the day when the same kid rushed into the kitchen, his arms flailing and his face red and hot. “Mom! Betsy says I’ll get wigworms if I drink my potty!”
Um, I can’t even unpack that statement. What would you say? I said, “Then don’t.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 2, 2019 | Country life, Humor, Stories
Colorado winters can range from warm to blizzard – and this is in a single week. In our rural area, residents debate over when to overcome the storm and when to give up and stay in. Some people don’t give up easily.
For example, I had just moved to a small farm town a few months before a smothering blizzard struck. The wind was throwing fistfuls of snow into the air outside my cozy office, and I could make out ghost-like fronts of stores hidden by the storm.
It was an excellent day to stay inside. Which, obviously, was what all the farmers in the area thought because the street was packed with their pickups. They’d come to town to swap stories and drink coffee during the storm. Inside, of course.
I have another story about persevering in a winter storm.
I was a teenager celebrating the snowstorm that had swept through our farm the night before. School was canceled – the reason for my celebration – and our family was sipping hot chocolate.
Today was calm. We gathered around our heater and celebrated the notion of a leisurely day without the mad rush to catch the school bus.
Then Mom noticed a milk truck lumber to a stop at the top of the next hill.
Our house sat at the top of a hill. The dirt road that skirted our property continued down a draw before rising again to the top of the next hill a mile away.
At the top of that next hill sat a shiny milk truck, rocking with indecision. The large semi-trailer contemplated its regular route.
Blocking its way was the heavy snow that had been driven into the draw. Whiteness had blotted out the road in the valley, and none of us had any idea how deep the drifts were.
The truck gathered itself like a sprinter in the blocks, rocking forward and back.
We didn’t have time to pop the popcorn, but we all gathered around windows to watch the show.
“Don’t do it,” Mom said.
“Go for it!” said one brother.
The other brother countered: “He won’t go.”
The truck rocked forward and back with indecision and then took recoiled before barreling down the hill.
The valley suddenly exploded in white as the truck entered the drift.
“He won’t make it,” Mom said. The snow flurry continued, though. The truck was making progress, we thought.
But then, as the flakes filtered back down to the ground, we could see the truck. The snow had draped itself victoriously over the hood and gripped the doors. The truck hadn’t gotten a quarter of the way through the valley’s snowpack.
Dad trekked down in his tractor. Unlike over-confident milk trucks, tractors can go about anywhere. Some neighbors came, too, and together they managed to tow the truck back to its starting blocks.
Dad reported that the snow was packed like concrete around the engine.
In Colorado winters, sometimes it’s fun to slog to town to drink coffee and swap stories with the other travelers. And sometimes it’s wiser to park that milk truck and wait for another day.
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 18, 2019 | Cats, Country life, Family, Humor
Many years ago, I was a country woman who was milking goats, feeding out bucket calves, and raising kids.
My husband had constructed a nifty room in our barn with a door that closed tightly, allowing me to heat the room and keep out all the barn cats. Barn cats get addicted to freshly squeezed milk and make themselves a leaping, milk-seeking nuisance. I kept them out, or they were all over the room, even trying to dip their paws in the milk bucket.
Photo by Remmington Wanner on Unsplash
This particular morning, I entered the milking room with my four-year-old daughter and brought in the first milking doe. My daughter perched herself on a large feed box.
I had just started squeezing out milk when my daughter said, “Mom, there’s a cat back there.”
Ugh. There were not supposed to be any cats in that room. If a cat got trapped in the room, it couldn’t get out. How long had it been there?
I was afraid to ask. “Is it dead or alive?”
She studied the gap between the box and the wall. “Dead. Can I pick it up?”
No!” Good grief.
My husband always seemed to be working 40 miles away from home when these ugly situations came up. It sure would have been nice to turn that dead cat over to him. But, no, I was home alone.
Well, me and a curious preschooler.
“Leave it alone,” I said before she got any more ideas. You need to understand that this girl had once gone with me when I had a baby goat autopsied. She begged the veterinarian to let her watch the procedure and nearly got her nose cut off because she peered so closely into the body.
He was willing to show her the location of the lungs, the stomach, the liver after she asked a tumble of questions.
My point? This girl wasn’t traumatized by a dead cat.
I toyed with the idea of leaving the project for my husband, but I really didn’t want that dread hanging all day long. Besides, my daughter would probably want to sit with the dead cat until her dad got home.
Better get it over with. I finished milking the goat, took the milk into the house, and gathered my supplies. Trash bag. Check. Hand sanitizer? Face mask? Gloves?
I marched back to the barn with my little girl hot on my heels. She wasn’t about to miss this next step in her veterinarian experience. What a kid.
I leaned slowly over the feed box, my breath wheezing through the face mask. I had put a mask on my daughter, but she had slid it on top of her head. Sigh. Next, she’d be snapping the rubber band between her fingers. Not too concerned about this mess.
I was more concerned. I did not want to see roadkill in my milking room, but I finally focused my view into the gap.
There, tattered and soiled, munched and bent, was a purple and white stuffed cat toy.
She was right: it wasn’t alive.
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 28, 2019 | Country life, Family, Humor, Stories
I don’t like to go fishing. I respect those that do and am sure that I am missing out on a ton of fun. I am saying this so none of my love-to-fish friends mail me a catfish in a padded envelope.
Several years ago, some of our kids were invited to a special party at the local fishing pond. They couldn’t drive yet, so guess who had to go? 
I thought I could set up a seat at the water’s edge, get out a book and a cold drink, and enjoy the late summer afternoon while all the children flung hook and bobber into the murky depths. That didn’t sound so bad.
I settled into a comfy lawn chair and had read a couple of chapters when I heard my daughter shout. She stood on the dock, pole held high in the air, fish squirming at the end of the line.
Great. She’d caught a fish. Notice: no exclamation mark in these comments.
She wanted me to bring the tackle box. I jammed the bookmark in place and marched through the thick grass to the dock.
“Look at my fish! We gotta get the hook out before it gets hurt.”
What could get hurt? The fish? The hook? My reading time?
I set the tackle box on the rough wood of the dock and gazed into the tangle of hooks, bobbers, weights. How did one get a hook out of a fish?
She sensed my confusion. Or just got impatient. I’m never sure which. “Grab those pliers, Mom.”
OK, I knew pliers. I lifted the metal tool and held it out to her.
“I can’t do that,” she said with a voice that sounded like the whine of a jet engine starting up.
Like I could? “I don’t fish,” I said. Clearly, a boundary was in order here.
“I’ll hold the fish, and you get the hook out,” she said, gripping the squirmy fish in her nine-year-old hands.
Um, I don’t get hooks out. I stared at the fish, which gaped back. This was no time for a “who blinks first” contest. Do fish blink?
I drew a deep breath. Parenting involves more courage than you’d think. Extricating a hook from a fish’s mouth ranks pretty high on my “don’t want to do this” list, but it had to be done. I stepped closer.
My daughter squeezed the fish’s mouth open, and I raised the pliers, trying to find the right grip. Stalling.
And I got hit in the face with a blast of green pond water.
I looked up to see my five-year-old son standing a few feet away from me, holding a stained and wrinkled paper cup.
He gazed at the fish while I glared at him.
Then he saw me staring, and he shifted his weight. “I grabbed the cup from the edge of the pond,” he said. “And I scooped up some water.”
Why?
“I didn’t want the fish to die before you got the hook out, and I thought it might take a while,” he said.
“So, you scooped up the water and threw it in my face?”
He shrugged and tossed the cup down. “I missed.”
I still don’t like fishing. Don’t mail me catfish.
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