by Kathy Brasby | Mar 17, 2015 | Stories
When our younger son turned 13, he informed me that, although he needed a new bottle of shampoo, he did not want the cheap stuff he’d been using for years. “I want manly shampoo,” he announced.
I understood he might not want to use foofoo shampoo like lilac or rose, but what’s wrong with strawberry and coconut? If it’s good enough to be in dessert, it’s good enough to wash hair.
But I have not yet untangled the male mind. I thought, having two brothers, two sons and a husband, I could get some insight. Why not ask them?
When my brothers were boys, they had contests to see how much fruit they could cram in their mouths. One day my younger brother stuffed so much banana in his mouth that he couldn’t move his tongue until the banana dissolved.
So, after we were adults, I cornered him. “Remember the banana incident?”
“Yeah,” he said drawing his words out like cold molasses.
“So why did you do that?” This was a prime decoding opportunity.
He lifted his shoulders. “I don’t have a clue.”
Some help that was.
One day I watched our 12-year-old son and friend challenge his 6-year-old sister to foot races. Every time the boys crossed the finish line ahead of the 6-year-old, they did a victory dance only matched by my mother when I came home with an engagement ring.
I described the scene at dinner to my husband. “Why would those boys get any joy out of beating a little girl in a foot race? They were older, faster, bigger. What fun was that?” Surely my husband could shed light on the issue.
He lifted his shoulders. “Testosterone causes brain damage.”
Like that was helpful.
Those stories clanged around in my brain as I stood with my younger son at the shampoo aisle. Still trying to learn about a guy’s thinking, I turned him loose. He was my newest study.
We came home with manly shampoo. He rushed to the shower. In the middle of the afternoon.
This was the boy who showered like the cowboys in the westerns: after every cattle drive. And we didn’t have cattle.
Still damp, he rushed out of the bathroom and held his dripping hair under my nose. “Smells manly, huh?” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” I assured him. Then he thrust his forearm in my face.
“Smell that.” Apparently he had manly soap, too. I told him he was very manly and he was satisfied.
I might ask what banana-stuffing, footrace whupping and woodsy shampoo have in common.
Apparently they’re among the pieces in building a man.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 10, 2015 | Stories
When our hobby farm was at full capacity, we milked several Nubian goats every day. One morning, when I started chores in our milking room, my 4-year-old daughter climbed onto a large wooden feed box at the back of the room and peered behind it.
“Mom, there’s a cat back there.”
Oh, great. There weren’t supposed to be any cats in that room. “Is it dead or alive?”
She studied the gap between the box and the wall. “Dead. Can I pick it up?”
“No!” Yeuck. What now? Why did my sweet husband go to work 40 miles away when it would have been nice to turn that dead cat over to him? I was home alone. Well, me and a curious preschooler.
“Leave it alone,” I added before she got any new ideas for exploration. She huffed and crossed her arms but stayed atop the box with her feet dangling on my side.
I drew in a long breath, avoiding any images of this dead cat smashed against the wall.
I had to deal with it on my own. Where there any empty feed bags around? How was I going to pick up this thing?
Maybe I milked a little slower that morning. Why did adults get to be the responsible ones?
Believing strongly in the principle that it’s better to face the horror than have it hanging over your head all day, I finished the barn chores and took a deep breath.
Hand sanitizer. Check. Thick trash bags. Check. Facemask. Check.
Back into the milking room I marched, my daughter close on my heels. She wouldn’t miss this for the world. Sigh.
I leaned slowly over the feed box and looked down the gap. There, tattered and soiled, lay a purple and white stuffed cat toy.
“You said it was dead,” I said to my daughter.
“Well, it’s not alive.”
A lesson on the nuances of words. Check.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 3, 2015 | Stories
The hen had left the nest in the morning, leading her weaving thread of chicks behind her as she investigated the landscape that she hadn’t seen in a month.
Setting on a nest of eggs takes commitment and the willingness to stare at a wall for a month. The hen was ready to stretch her legs a bit.
When we happened onto the nest in our barn, eggs had been left behind.
“Why didn’t these hatch?” the four-year-old asked.
“Not all the eggs hatch. It’s just the way it is,” I said. Meaning, I didn’t know what had happened and didn’t really care.
But I might not have cared about these left-behind eggs but our son did. He leaned over the nest, with the lonesome trio of eggs.
“I hear something.”
“What?”
It does no good for your self-esteem to realize the 8-year-old can hear what you can’t anymore. Maybe those rock bands hadn’t been so good after all…
He bent over the nest. “I hear pecking.” He studied the eggs. “There.” He lifted an egg and pointed to a hole at one end. “I hear pecking in there.”
How to explain to a child that there’s no hope? I did it badly. “The hen left already. These aren’t going to hatch.”
He held the egg close to eye. If there was pecking going on, he ran the risk of taking a beak in his iris. “I see something.”
So he convinced me. We took the egg into the house and laid it on newspapers on the floor. I’m not sure why we did either thing, but he and his younger sister studied the motionless egg. Until it moved.
Yeah, it moved.
“I’m going to help it,” he said. He began breaking bits of the eggshell. “See? It’s moving?”
Conventional wisdom said to let the chick get itself out of there but I was beyond all that. Let the kids figure this out on their own.
The chick made it. Out of the shell and into life. Its mother had moved on with a whole stream of fuzzy babies. Our son decided to raise this one.
And he did until four months later when it pecked him on the cheek and he banished it to the barn with the other chickens.
What a journey for a persistent little chick and its persistent rescuer.
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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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