by Kathy Brasby | Jul 22, 2019 | Family, Humor
You know how these projects get started. It’s like If You Give a Moose a Muffin. First, you want a muffin and the next thing you know, you’re buying pool noodles.
Mine got started when I opened a kitchen cupboard to notice a two-quart bottle holding about two inches of gray powder. Like this bottle had beamed in from my neighbor’s house or something. Why hadn’t I noticed this waste of space before?
Worse than one useless bottle was the other jars also holding minuscule amounts of things. Pasta. Petrified cranberries. Old keys. Green lumps.
You get the idea.
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
I dumped contents I couldn’t identify and found jars that actually matched. The cupboard shelves look marvelous now. All labeled and sweet.
New problem: the big empty jars loitering on the counter. I didn’t have room to bake, so I did consider making the loiter zone permanent. But that’d never fly with my cookie boys.
I have a closet of sorts where I put extra jars. Because I would rather write about it than do it, I have ignored this closet for years. There are quart, pint, and half-pint jars perched on shelves with more laying on top of jars. Quit cringing.
I have my first baseman glove close by when I open this closet.
It was a Saturday morning, and I really had lots of exciting things scheduled, like watching a movie, reading a few chapters, eating fudge – important stuff like that.
But maybe I should find a place for all those jars hogging space on my countertop. I got the softball glove and eased open the door. Landfills were more organized than this closet.
I started unloading shelves. That would save a lot of glacier sliding.
Going for the sympathy angle here, I have to tell you that I had a lot of jars. I’m talking innumerable. Countless. Profuse. Multitudinous. I’m closing the thesaurus now.
Buried at the back of one shelf was an instruction manual for a landline phone from 2004. We haven’t had a landline in eight years. There is history in that manual. I’ll bet the kids remembered that phone and would want the manual as a nostalgic reminder.
I uncovered a little fountain with a plug-in pump. It didn’t work, but I think it was a birthday gift from one of our kids. Maybe Mother’s day. More sweet memories.
I found notes for the dishwasher we installed in 2006. A memoir of our early years in our house.
There were six pint jars labeled, “Peach. ’09.” I remembered the box of peaches that I’d turned into peach jam. Apparently, I hadn’t remembered long enough to serve any of it.
You know the cans of cranberry sauce you can buy for Thanksgiving dinner? You slide the can-shaped sauce onto a plate and slice it. Well, ten-year-old peach jelly looks just the same. Slice and serve.
I now have two different cupboards organized. But I reminisced over the items hiding at the back of the shelves.
So I called one of the kids. She’s married now, a responsible adult, but maybe I could still trick, er, influence her.
“Hey, I’ve started a time capsule for you. I found the most amazing gems in the closet,” I told her.
“Really?” She sounded more like I had called to tell her the grass needed to be mowed.
“I think you should scoop them up to preserve all those memories.”
“If I come over, Mom, it would be to scoop those things into a trash can. And I think you can handle that yourself.”
Kids. You teach them to think independently, and what do they do? Not collect vintage peach jam, that’s for sure.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 15, 2019 | Family, House rehab, Humor
You may know that I have helped rehabilitate several sad houses. My sister and I work together sometimes, and other times I help out my husband, the construction genius.
We have bought some forlorn houses together and given them new life. It feels good. Most of the time.
But buying an old house is a little like the first vacation you took together after you get married: you’re not really sure what you’ll discover.
Photo by Tania Melnyczuk on Unsplash
I’m not going to tell you about our first vacation together. It wasn’t as wild as this story.
The house was a foreclosure followed by an eviction – the ugly kind of eviction where a crew entered a packed house and emptied it.
The crew was instructed to remove everything from the house and deposit it in the garage. They left the garage door open, which was a signal in the city to come and take whatever you want.
This house isn’t in the city. It’s in a small town that’s pretty honest. Nobody took anything. Lucky them.
For six months, nobody touched that stuff in the garage. When we bought the house, we got the garage contents, too. Yippee.
The garage was literally (and I am using this word properly) full, floor to ceiling, front to back: overstuffed. We didn’t know what we’d find in there. Treasures, we hoped. Maybe expensive gems? Antiques?
We didn’t really hope for that. We assumed the eviction crew would have pocketed the good stuff.
Still, we needed to get the garage emptied out. So we started tunneling.
We found an end table with a broken leg. We found a brand-new starter that my husband nabbed. We found an old trunk that went to our daughter-in-law.
Some of the kids got to help. Under protest. They called themselves servants. We called it paying off their room and board and clothes. No digging in the garage, no birthday cake. That kind of enticement.
We were on an archeological dig but without the little brushes and shaker screens. We found the obligatory metal bed frame. Those seem to be left in every garage we’ve ever acquired.
We uncovered an old wedding album and a big envelope of x-rays. I might have an imagination, but I couldn’t make that up.
As the kids dug toward the back of the garage, they picked up a scent.
“Maybe it’s a body,” said our son. He’s always hopeful for creative bloodshed.
His sister wasn’t intimidated. “I hope it’s on your side of the garage,” she said.
They tossed aside more trash and kept digging deeper into the garage. “Think we can get this finished today?” I asked. I’m about using conscripted help for all they’re worth.
They ignored me, but they did keep excavating.
The smell morphed from a faint scent to a definite stink. When it crossed over from stink to stench, the kids bailed.
“Your turn,” said our daughter. “You said you wanted to get done today.” Kids are so good at throwing your words back in your face.
I could say I took a deep breath and started in, but I didn’t. Would you take a deep breath with that stench? Me, neither.
I put on a mask and gloves and goggles. I pulled junk out of the way and discovered our treasure.
Some yo-yo (and I’m saying this in the nicest way) had pulled a frozen turkey out of the freezer at the eviction, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and dumped it in a trash can at the back of the garage. For six months.
Foolishly, I compared buying an old house to going on your first vacation. It is nothing like that.
Buying an old house is like an excavation site with a tomb curse.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 8, 2019 | Country life, Humor, Stories
As we get to know each other a little better, you may realize that I live on a hobby farm. This includes a few goats, chickens, rabbits, barn cats, and ducks.
I also sometimes fix up houses with my sister to flip. A recent project was more demanding than a hungry toddler.
This all began the morning when I was running late for work and I needed to turn out the ducks for the day. I found a duck egg lying on the ground beside the ducks’ water tub, a forlorn brown egg caked in mud and grass.
I didn’t have time to coddle this egg, no matter how sad it looked, so I did the next best thing: I grabbed a fast food napkin from my pickup, wrapped the egg, and threw it in my purse. I’d take care of it later.
Photo by Kathy Brasby
Somehow a purse seems out of place among all the power tools, so I left it in my pickup while we worked. For two days.
When next I rummaged around the abyss of my purse, there was the egg, still wrapped in the napkin. My sister, Ann, and I were on our way to the hardware store. I handed the egg to Ann so I could find keys.
“What is this?” She held it between her thumb and forefinger like it was a dead mouse.
“An egg,” I said. “Just hold it.”
“I don’t want it.” And she put it in the glove box.
Fresh farm eggs have a coating of something that poultry people call bloom. The coating keeps the egg fresh without refrigeration for a long time. Commercial eggs are generally washed which removes the bloom, requiring the eggs to be refrigerated.
The magic of bloom was why there was no rotten egg in my pickup.
A few days later, we took my pickup to the Chinese place for lunch.
“I think I’ll leave my wallet here,” Ann said. Upon opening the glove box, she caught the napkin-wrapped duck egg. “Haven’t you done anything with this yet?” Speaking of Captain Obvious….
“No, I forgot where it was.”
“Well, get it out of here.”
When we got back to the project house, I put the egg with a plastic bag of supplies that I planned to take home.
At the end of the day, Ann claimed the plastic bag so she could wrap her paintbrush. “How did your egg get in here?”
She didn’t sound curious like you’d think with that sort of question. She sounded like I’d hidden a dirty diaper in there.
“Oh, I’ll take care of it.” I grabbed the egg and put the egg in a box I needed to take home.
The next morning, the egg was still in the box at the flip house. Somehow it then got moved to another room and covered by boards and trim. If you think I’m admitting to that move, you’re nuts.
“We need to get these rooms cleaned out,” Ann said a day later. She started hauling things out, so I grabbed stuff, too. When we got the boards moved, I spotted the box. Of course, Ann walked by at that moment. “Is that your egg?” she said.
She made it sound like I was storing soggy seaweed or something.
“Yeah. I lost track of it.”
“You and that egg.”
I carried the egg to my pickup again and put it in the glove box. I’d toss the egg when I got home.
Four months later, a police officer pulled me over for a license plate check. “I need to see your registration and insurance cards,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” I opened the glove box. My faithful egg was still nestled in its muddy paper blanket. I realized in a flash that the magic of bloom isn’t very reliable after four months.
I tried to explain. I really did. But the officer backed away slowly with one hand doing a halt motion and the other squeezing his nose. You’d think I was holding a hand grenade.
I haven’t let Ann check my glove box now for a long time. Just in case I forgot something.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 1, 2019 | Family, Humor
When Facebook added Sibling Day to their long list of reasons to post on their social media site, I knew it was time to tell all.
You might imagine my siblings are cowering as though a bomb is about to drop near them. You don’t know my siblings. They are preparing their own bombs to send my way.
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
Today’s post will have to do with my sister. She’s eight years younger and my first impressions of her were not good. When she arrived home from the hospital after her birth, I was at school. All day, going through my classes, I imagined coming home to a cute, round-cheeked Gerber baby. Instead, there was this useless red little thing lying on my parents’ bed. What was this good for?
Ah, but I found out!
By the time she was four, I had the perfect subject for my experiments. Don’t be thinking needles in her ankles or any weird science. My method was aimed at making her smarter. More well-rounded. Better equipped.
It started with subliminal learning. I wanted to know if that stuff worked. Well, at four, my sister was the perfect subject because she fell asleep before I did. Plus, she knew next to nothing so any new learning would be obvious. And she was conveniently close by.
So, when she’d fall asleep, I’d whisper a fact to her over and over. I needed to find out if she learned while she slept. I chose a list of the order of the planets. Because everyone should know those, right?
To this day, she still knows the order of the planets. So do I, for that matter. She doesn’t thank me much for this amazing feat, though.
Subliminal learning worked so well that I started teaching her new words I was learning. Like the meaning of annihilate.
I heard it in history class and wanted her, too, to know the meaning of total obliteration.
She had nightmares after that.
Speaking of nightmares, when I had a literature class studying Edgar Allan Poe, I figured she ought to hear some of those stories. The Tell-Tale Heart, with the murdered heart pounding under the floorboards, kind of affected her.
She didn’t care much for The Cask of Amontillado either. We didn’t use the term freaked out in those days, but you get the idea.
She was five by then. You’d think she could handle it. As if I thought about how it would affect her.
The day came when she was not so open to being educated. Who’d figure that she’d like posters of Donnie Osmond over stories from the American Revolution? Pictures of cute boy singers began popping up on our bedroom walls.
And she got stubborn. We shared a room and one night I, in my great wisdom and older-sisterism, told her to shut off the light since her side of the bed was closer to the light switch. She refused. I offered practical advice like, “I’m not doing it.” She out and out refused.
And then she fell asleep. The choice was clear: sleep with the light on and win the argument. Or give in. I shut off the light.
She got defensive, too. I liked to call her sweet names like Squirt or Kidlet or Dork. One day I said, “You’re a Silly Willy.”
After all the educational nuggets I had shared with her, after all the intelligence I had groomed, after all the Edgar Allan Poe….. That girl reared back and glared at me.
“Don’t call me names, you Big Ape.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Jun 24, 2019 | Country life, Humor, Stories
There are times when a plan comes together a little too well, and my search for cats fell in that category.
We have a hobby farm that includes a barn. And mice. Lots and lots of mice. Herds of mice. Pastures of mice.
You think I exaggerate?
Well, I went in search of some nice cats for the barn. They didn’t need to be sweet lap cats. In fact, barn cats a little on the wild side make great mousers.
So when I saw the poster, I thought I had struck gold.
Free cats. On the wild side. The photos on the poster were of three lovely orange and gray cats. Cute cats and I was okay with a little on the wild side.
My son and I were running errands when I found this treasure. With just a little searching, we found the girl with the cats. “Do you still have them?” I asked.
Raised eyebrows, wide eyes, and an open mouth should have clued me in. “Do you want them?” She was breathless.
I was still so impressed with the ease of finding free mousers that I just said, “Yes.”
“Great! I’ll tell my dad.” She scampered away, and I turned to my son.
“I’ll finish up here, and you go with them. We can put the cats in the car and go home.”
He followed the girl, and I finished my work. When I walked into the parking lot toward our car, I spotted my son at the edge of a small group
Why was there a small group gathered around a large cardboard box?
The girl’s father was at the center, snugging the last piece of shipping tape over the flaps on the top of the box. A bystander said, “If they can’t get air in there, they might die.”
The father stepped back from the tap-dancing box and brushed his hands together. “That wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
My son turned to me. “He had welding gloves on when he put the cats in the box.” Welding gloves are long leather armor against sparks leaping from a welder. Apparently, they are required for cats a little on the wild side.
I think the gloves should be in my lighting-the-grill repertoire, but I digress.
I didn’t want to think about why the dad needed welding gloves.
By now, I was near enough to hear scratching inside the box. A lot of scratching. The sort of demonic scratching that threatens to claw through trees and steel walls.
“A little wild?” I said.
My son shrugged. He likes cats, and he hoisted the box into the back of the car. “It’ll be okay.”
I watched the box rattling with cat rebellion and muted yowls.
“What if they get through the cardboard?”
“I guess we open the doors and bail out ’til they escape.”
That was comforting.
The family that advertised the cats had disappeared like Frodo after he slipped on the ring. Poof. I would have, too.
And so we drove home. No sounds until we got to our barn. Some things can’t be explained.
We laid the box on its side in the middle of the barn, so the top faced away from us. We were about to unleash hungry lions. Cheetahs with teeth. Slashing claws and steel teeth. We were fools but not that bad.
I peeled off the tape while my son stood guard. Behind me. He was less a fool than I was.
I had donned my own leather gloves and goggles like I was going into a snake pit. Longing for a helmet – or a proxy – I lifted the flap.
Orange and black exploded before us. A wild yowl rattled the walls, and we saw a cloud of fur and teeth. The cats burst out of the box, across the floor and, in a millisecond, out the open back door.
“I vote we call them Blur and Streak,” my son said.
“I vote we call them gone.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Jun 17, 2019 | Humor, Stories
I’ve found that carrying some of my childhood assumptions into adulthood has caused me significant challenges.
You knew that I’m talking about mint plants, right?
In my childhood, there was a mint plant by our front steps that was so spindly and yellow that I assumed mint was a weak plant that needed tender care.
Fresh mint
So when we moved to our current home and I was choosing plants for the front flower boxes, I picked up a lone mint plant out of nostalgia. I lifted the tiny plant to my face at the store, and solemnly promised to care for it better than the one from my childhood.
This was an amazing promise considering I can cause the death of plastic plants.
But I am happy to report that I kept my promise. That single mint plant took over the entire flower bed in two years.
My mind went back to the spindly mint plant from my youth. The one that stood alone in the shade of the house with no other plants around it.
Yeah, the mint had grown in a plot closely akin to the far side of the moon. Nothing else could grow there.
About that time, I learned that there are many varieties of mint. Peppermint. Spearmint. Lemon mint. Chocolate mint. And they like to cross-pollinate, which probably means they then grow even faster. Can you imagine if you planted lemon mint close to spearmint and all the baby mints grew up to taste like……mint?
I discovered in my research that there is a variety called woolly mint. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, I could, but I didn’t this time. It’s also known as apple mint, which begs the question of how apple and woolly are synonyms.
Mint is considered a little invasive. Like kudzu is a little invasive. Or mosquitoes. Chilling, isn’t it?
H.G. Wells, in his book The War of the Worlds, described a Martian red weed which, in his story, took root on earth and choked out all rivers and swaddled trees and fields. Not unlike mint. He might have based Martian red weed on mint for all I know.
I fear that mint left untended could take over entire neighborhoods. I hope my neighbors aren’t reading this or they might start dumping zucchini at my doorstep.
I can imagine a movie coming: Invasion of the Spearmint. Or maybe The Woolly Mint Cometh. Not sure which one might grab the most viewers. My guess is neither.
My single mint plant is now in a contained area where its family still tries to conquer the grass on the other side of the barrier.
One summer evening, we had a violent rain and hailstorm roll through. Afterward, we stepped outside to the pungent smell of mint in the air.
“Oh, no! ” My daughter said. “I hope the hail didn’t kill the mint.” She takes after that naive child in me.
My son drew in a minty breath. “An atomic bomb couldn’t kill that mint.”
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