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 | 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 | Nov 7, 2022 | books, Hope, Mystery, Stories
I just made progress on My NaNoWriMo Book! So far I’m 25% complete on the Week 1 phase. 22 Days remain until the deadline.
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 20, 2022 | Hope, Reviews
Recruit of Talionis by C.J. Milacci
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Too often dystopian books project only darkness and defeat but Recruit of Talionis plunges the reader into a dark world where the characters move through difficult times with courage, determination, and faith. They find hope in spite of the circumstances.
This is a great book to offer to teens and young adults—or anyone who enjoys reading this genre. Well written and full of unexpected turns.
View all my reviews
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 10, 2022 | Hope, Humor
Although we assume we only need hope when horrific things happen in our lives, we’re wrong. We need hope every day because things go wrong. Not always horrible things but wrong things can be enough to derail our goals or dump us into a “why bother?” mood. Part of the daily grind.
Photo by Ryan Franco on Unsplash
You know the daily grind. Maybe the car sounds sick and your budget can’t stretch. Or maybe the kids are sick—on the day of your big meeting. Maybe traffic is like driving in mud and you need to get to that appointment. Maybe your food order got lost or a now -former friend just blasted you on social media.
These are the sorts of things that can steal away our hope for the day. But we can turn our day around. We can decide if the wrong thing sends us into the pits of doom or if we can send that wrong thing into the a holding tank to become a story.
As I’ve told my kids more than once, “Either this is going to work out or we’ll have a great story to tell later.”
Humor helps us find hope in the daily grind because it turns the wrong thing into something that we can laugh at.
Maybe my stories will make you chuckle and help you look at troubles differently. Because, sometimes, things aren’t as bad as they seem. They’re just on their way to becoming a great story.
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by Kathy Brasby | Apr 7, 2015 | Hope
“You have to help me with this,” my mother said, swollen with a belly containing my younger brother. “I can’t do this alone.”
I pulled away from her. Dad had heard dogs in the night and chased them away, but not before they had torn into the lambs my older brother and I were bottle-feeding.
Death seemed to hover near the little shed where my lamb lay and I, at age 5, had a pounding heart and heavy feet.
Mom held out the glass bottle with a black nipple stretched over the mouth. “You have to help me.”
I gripped the warm bottle, the sweet smell of milk tickling my nose, and followed Mom out the back door of our farmhouse, across the yard and into the low shed where the two lambs lay in a bed of thick yellow straw.
My brother’s lamb struggled to its feet and searched out the bottle Mom held.
My lamb lay on its side, too weak to get up. I had named him Johnny and I whispered his name while stroking his wooly head. I tried not to look at his raw leg, slashed open by dogs’ teeth. It smelled like death to me.
I dropped into the thick straw, smelling its sweet scent, and lifted his tiny head. He could still suck on the bottle so I held it for him, his head cushioned in my lap.
He drank most of it and then closed his eyes and slept.
We trekked to the shed three times a day for weeks to feed little Johnny. He gained strength and soon was able to stand while he took his bottle.
In that time, my brother was born and then Mom took me aside. “You’ll have to change the name of your lamb,” she said. “We’ve named your brother ‘John.’”
I nodded quietly. The deed was done; the baby had been named.
So I didn’t argue with my mother about renaming Johnny. But, after all my lamb and I had been through, I didn’t do it, either.
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