by Kathy Brasby | Apr 15, 2014 | Hope
Communication is such a fragile thing.
I was blending the butter and sugar for cookies when younger son wandered into the kitchen.
“Where’s that neck thing of Dad’s?” he asked.
“Sore neck?” I pointed to the drawer under the microwave where I knew my husband stored a fabric neck wrap. He would toss it in the microwave for a minute or two and then pull out a warm cloth that felt heavenly on sore muscles.
“No, it just feels good.” So Son began rummaging through drawers while I continued to toss ingredients into the mixer for cookies.
I had just finished adding the flour when he floated another question my direction. “How long do you set the timer for?”
I placed the cookie sheets on the counter, surprised that he hadn’t already snitched a spoonful of the dough. “Eleven minutes.”
The oven was warming and I quickly dropped cookie dough onto the sheets, ready to push them into the oven.
I sometimes suffer from squirrelitis, that ailment which causes me to be distracted by every movement or sound. But apparently not when I’m making cookies.
I didn’t notice the microwave running until I had the last cookie in place.
I hadn’t noticed the smell, either.
“What—“ The microwave timer still had 5 minutes on it and burnt rice smell was wafting into the kitchen, overpowering cookie dough scent.
My husband had come in search of the stink. He scooped up the neck warmer with a wooden spoon and threw it out the front door onto a snow pile.
“What were you doing?” I turned to our son, who was standing with wide eyes. “You’re supposed to heat that neck warmer for maybe two minutes. How long did you set it for?”
“You told me eleven.”
Huh? We stared at each other for a moment. “I thought you meant the cookies,” I said.
We laughed then. But I’m sorry to say that even the smell of freshly baked cookies couldn’t overpower the smell of burnt rice.
Communication is such a fragile thing.
by Kathy Brasby | Apr 1, 2014 | Hope
We called it Canal Street for a reason, even though its official name was Fletcher Street.
But it took a newcomer just one rainstorm to understand Canal Street, where water from the entire town met to form a rushing river from curb to curb.
As April Fools day approached one year, my staff at our little newspaper decided to capitalize. We wrote a story about Canal Street.
Canal Street, according to our account, had been selected to have a dam built to hold back the rain water. We described the benefits of blocking rain run-off.
We included a photo of a dam against a big lake to illustrate the intended project.
We had quotes from engineers and government officials, funding numbers and a project timetable.
A bold headline was pasted on the story and we published it, with a disclaimer at the end: “April Fool’s Day!”
The worst part about this was that nobody said a word to us after publication. Not one word.
After the initial disappointment, our staff debated. Did everyone get to the punchline and laugh?
Or, worse, did nobody read the article at all?
Or, even worse than that, were we the April Fools that year?
by Kathy Brasby | Mar 25, 2014 | Hope
When I saw the pictures on Facebook commemorating the woman who sewed tiny teddy bears for her pet mouse, I knew I could take on this topic.
You know. Mice.
I’ve never sewed teddy bears for a pet mouse. Here’s why: I don’t sew and I don’t keep pet mice.
I trap them.
That’s the hard line, I know, but I have my reasons.
Beyond mice seeds in the pantry, I mean.
Reason #1: There was once a mouse drunk on warfarin. He climbed the drapery in my living room, tottered across the top of the rod, and continued on when the rod ended. He fell to the carpet, staggered to his feet, and then toppled to one side.
I expected to see four legs in the air and X’s in each eye.
Not the sort of memory that makes a pet mouse look cuddly.
Reason #2: When my family moved to our current rural location, we had to carve our homestead into an alfalfa field. We put up a new garage and house.
We hadn’t factored in field mice.
So our older son would jump into his little pickup to go to school only to watch mice climbing up the gear shift and out of the glove box.
Think Birds, only four-legged.
Not cute.
Reason #3: The annual influx of mice from the nearby fields once the weather turns bad keeps our cat busy – and crumpled mouse bodies laid outside our bedroom doors. Gifts, I guess.
So, when I see a mouse darting across the far corner of the utility room, the one thing I don’t think of is “sew that buddy a teddy bear.”
by Kathy Brasby | Mar 4, 2014 | Hope
I’m all for devoted mothers but this teetered at the ridiculous line.
We live on a hobby farm and at one time had a brace of Moscovy ducks. I had to look this up but did you know that a group of ducks can be called a brace, badelynge, bunch or a flock?
While we’re discussing names, a male duck is a drake and a female duck is a …. duck.
That seems wrong, somehow. Not only are the females blessed with the job of keeping the eggs warm for a month while staring at the blank wall of a barn, but they don’t even get a special name.
Brace yourself for this story about a duck badelynge which resulted in a bunch of ducklings added to our flock.
Phew. Couldn’t resist but I promise I’m done with those names now.
Probably.
But the great thing about our ducks was that they were wonderful mothers. Springtime would bring us several mother ducks leading a line of fuzzy yellow babies, a la Make Way for Ducklings.
One day we stumbled onto a nest of eggs. Maybe this was a whole brace of eggs. I’m not sure. We couldn’t count them all.
With two ducks sitting on them.
We guessed the two ducks had started nests close together and the eggs had merged into one gigantic nest. Yeah, weird.
So the mothers sat on their eggs together. At least they had someone to talk to while waiting the coming ducklings.
Twenty-one ducklings hatched.
But there aren’t DNA tests for ducklings (well, not on our farm for sure) and we had two ducks with all these babies. Who belonged to whom?
It didn’t turn out to be a problem. The two mothers led the way with a long winding line of yellow fuzzy ducklings waddling behind. A long line.
We had added more than a bunch to our duck flock. We’d collected a whole badelynge.
Don’t you think those mamas deserved a more amazing name than duck?
by Kathy Brasby | Feb 25, 2014 | Hope
I’ve heard of husband eyes but hadn’t really experienced kid eyes until the Christmas tree deal.
This eyes thing shows up when someone is sent to a location to look for something and they can’t find it.
My older son, who is now a husband himself, tells me that his wife accuses him of that. He told me that after he went looking for a box in a storage room.
“It’s not there,” he told me when he came back. “Although I’m told I have husband eyes so you might want to look.”
I found the box.
This came into play recently when our youngest daughter came home from school to ask, “when did you take the Christmas tree down?”
“Three weeks ago,” I said.
“No way.”
Yup. So she pulled her younger brother away from alien attack in the computer room. “When did Mom take down the Christmas tree?”
He looked up, his eyes wide. “The Christmas tree is down?”
They waited until their father got home to verify this amazing discovery. “Dad, did you notice that Mom took the Christmas tree down?”
He met both their faces with a calm smile and patted our daughter on the shoulder. “Did I notice?” He grinned at them both with that confident look that fathers get when they know the answer. “Did I notice? No.”
Family eyes. They all have it.
by Kathy Brasby | Feb 11, 2014 | Hope
I wasn’t this nervous during the birth of my first child or when I gave my first presentation in sophomore speech class.
The day I started my running program was not a day for public consumption.
I downloaded an app on my iPhone ( C25K Free) which promised to get me from a couch potato to a 5K run in 8 weeks. I selected my running playlist. I signed up for Strava, a GPS service that could track my runs by distance, trail, and time.
In short, I stalled.
But the day came. I had already decided on a secluded trail where nothing but hawks and crop dusters could watch me run.
Yeah, there was a crop duster that day. A small yellow airplane made at least three passes over me while I staggered through the training.
Fortunately, I had thought to wear a baseball cap and I just kept it tugged low.
Nobody could see my face.
The training app featured a sweet voice calmly cuing me: “Start walking now.”
I was good on the walking part. I strode out confidently for five minutes and then my sweet trainer said, “Start running now.”
I knew I only had to run for one minute on this day and so I stepped right out.
When waiting out a labor contraction or that last minute before the Friday bell releases you for the weekend, sixty seconds is an eternity.
And it’s even longer than that when you’re running and you’re out of shape.
I have never been so glad to hear my trainer speak again: “Start walking.”
I thanked her. Out loud. The hawk didn’t care.
App or no app, those were welcome words.
Ninety seconds go by fast when you’re trying to catch your breath and the trainer, with that voice that now sounded more like she didn’t care much, said, “Start running now.”
I survived. But then, just for the record, I survived labor and the sophomore speech, too. Amazing.
