by Kathy Brasby | Jan 20, 2015 | Stories
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 of it. We knew raccoons darted in and out of the nearby corn fields, waiting for the ears to start to ripen before they ripped them free with those crafty little hands and gorged themselves.
The same mask that makes a raccoon cute to most stuffed-animal connoisseurs signaled something different to us on our hobby farm. We saw them as little thieves.
And now one had dashed our hopes of a crop of ducklings.
“I’m going to get a humane trap,” my husband said, his arms folded over his flannel shirt.
We found one at the local farm supply store and set it up.
On night one, we failed to put any tempting food in the trap. Nothing happened.
On night two, we realized we had set the plate too tight after the critter ate our bait without springing the trap.
Night three caught our cat.
We tiptoed into the barn after night four. The trap had been dislodged from its spot and the dirt floor was plowed and furrowed. We couldn’t see the trap, now hidden behind some metal leaned against the wall.
Finally we had scored.
We rushed around the barrier to gloat over our raccoon.
“Whoa,” my husband was leading the pack and he stopped with the gang piling into his back.
“What?” The youngest couldn’t see past the mob and started to push her way forward.
The crowd could have stepped aside but we were all busy rushing away.
All because our raiding raccoon, that detested varmint, turned out to be a raiding skunk instead.
Next week: what to do when a skunk is angry and trapped in your barn.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jan 13, 2015 | Stories
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 write for free stuff, I wrote.
I got a cardboard chart illustrating how to tie 10 different knots. I got a full-color brochure explaining why Angus were the better breed and another brochure touting Herefords over Angus. But the key piece to my story was the free postcard with a close-up shot of a goat with a big green ear tag.. Yeah, compliments of the ear tag company.
At about this same time, my mail included a chain letter. This one promised the chance to get fun postcards from all across the company.
All I had to do was send a postcard to the first name on the list, add my name to the bottom, and send the letter out to several friends. I did the calculations. By the time my name got to the top of the list, I had a chance of 18 postcards.
Why not give it a try once?
After all, I had a free postcard.
So I mailed the ear-tagged goat to the top name on the list, a girl who lived somewhere in Oregon.
And I sent off my chain letters.
I never got a postcard. Nada. None.
I never did another chain letter. And I’ll bet the poor girl who got the smiling ear-tagged goat didn’t either.
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 16, 2014 | Stories
Our pool table resided in the basement, piled high with boxes of outgrown clothes and books to be donated.
I listed the pool table for sale. That way the boxes could go away.
A young man showed up with his buddy.
I had asked $35 for the pool table because I had bought it for $25 at a yard sale. But it was a slate top pool table and connoisseurs liked that idea.
So this young man examined the slate and did a verbal fist pump. “Slate! I can sell this table anywhere for $200.”
I smiled. I just wanted it out of my basement and wouldn’t mind getting my $25 back.
“Would you take $30 for it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, I need to come back with a pickup. Could you hold it for me?”
“Sure, if you pay today.”
He studied the table and his buddy. Perhaps the $200 sale loomed before him. “I wonder if we can get it home now.”
So they jumped into the project. My help was finding all the pool balls, which I carried to their vehicle, a dented and rusty old station wagon.
They sweated and struggled and leaned against the stairway walls several times. Finally they and the table emerged from the house.
With more grunting and groaning, they hoisted the pool table onto the top of car.
“We’re good now,” the new buyer assured me.
Later, I watched them pull out of our driveway in a cloud of white dust. They had tied the table onto the top of the car, running the ropes through the windows. I didn’t get to see them shimmy through the windows to drive away.
And I thought my $30 sale was a whole lot more secure than his planned $200 sale.
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 2, 2014 | Stories
I’ve had two black eyes in my life. They both came in events so innocent that I can share the stories later.
That’s pretty amazing in itself.
I blame the first one on needing to pick up an elective class in my last semester of college. I chose an auto mechanics class for women.
The class unraveled the mysteries of internal combustion and banished all ideas of needing to replace lug nut valves on my car. Amazing class.
One of our projects was learning how to change the oil on our cars. It’s not that hard to do. Really.
Something that helps is having the right tools, which I didn’t have and didn’t want to spring big bucks for. So I made do.
Making do is a key element in too many of my stories, I’ve noticed.
But I digress.
I had a pipe wrench to loosen the oil pan drain plug. I clamped the wrench on the drain plug and then hammered the handle with whatever I could find. A hammer. A lead pipe. A big rock.
The wrench was beginning to move as the drain plug loosened. And then something happened.
“Something happened” could be my motto, now that I think about it…
But the wrench popped loose and bounced off my cheek. I could feel something warm below my eye and assumed I had knocked loose a contact lens.
So I made my way into the house to retrieve the lens.
Um, no, the lens was fine. But I had a one-inch gash from the errant wrench.
And the next day I had a Nike-swoosh-quality black eye.
I’d love to tell you that I learned not to make do. Or not use the wrong tool.
But my absolute best solution to this problem was when I married a top-quality mechanic who never let me change the oil again.
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 25, 2014 | Stories
Never had the first snow of the season been so anticipated as it was by our neighbor who was armed with a new snowblower.
The day came, of course. The first snow.
On the plains of Colorado, snow often comes as crispy shards driven by a dry wind. This snowfall was one of those.
But our neighbor rushed out to his driveway as soon as the swirling snow could be seen.
We heard the roar of the engine and rushed to the window. This wasn’t to be missed.
He started at his garage door and opened a dry path to the street, turning the blower around and aiming for the garage again. As he walked, the whispy snow flying out of his blower’s tube rose in the air and shot downward with precision.
Back onto the path he had just cleared.
Our neighbor finished the driveway in that same fashion: clear a patch and blow new snow onto it. Maybe the motto of the snow blower is never look back.
But, at the rate he was clearing things, he could enjoy his new machine all day long. Not bad for a new snow toy.
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 4, 2014 | Stories
When the phone in our bedroom chirped, I opened one sleepy eye to check the time. Yep: 2:12 again.
Every night for months, at 2:12 am our phone emitted a sound like a choked cat.
Our phone ruled from the top shelf on the headboard of our bed in those days.
And generally my husband slept through it all.
But this night, as I was checking the time, he made a muffled growl and reached up for the phone.
I watched his arm snake upward. Then it lost its GPS settings and fell limply onto the phone which skittered off the shelf and onto my husband’s head with a solid ka-chunk.
“Oh, Honey,” I said. “Are you all right?”
He said, “Mmm..gr…..uhhhh” and started snoring again.
I did check for blood as I lifted the phone off his head.
I expected bruises in the morning. “Is your head OK?” I asked him just before he headed off for work.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
There are hard heads and there are heads harder than Mount Everest. Especially when it comes to 2:12 am choked cat wake-up calls.
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