by Kathy Brasby | Jul 15, 2014 | Stories
It’s taken an amazing amount of time for me to realize that my sister is my twin.
There are eight years and two brothers between us – which explains why this took me so long to figure out.
I overlooked the more obvious: we’re the same height and our eyes are the same color.
And the fact that we both like to be unique and unusual could be explained away for a time.
The most glaring piece of evidence to this point had been our frustrating tendency to order the same food at a restaurant.
We do not like this.
We want something unusual so, when we both study the menu and come up with the same selection, we glare at the other. This even happens when each tries to avoid what we’re sure the other will order.
But the final straw came last week when a text message alert blew on my cell phone.
Among my choices for a text message alert sound is one entitled Sherwood, which is supposed to sound like a horn blown in the forest.
You know, Robin Hood and all that.
It’s not the most obvious of choices for texts, which was why I chose it.
But when I checked my phone, I didn’t have a text message. I was busy so just stowed the phone and went on.
Oh, I forgot to mention that my sister was with me.
We were both busy.
And then Sherwood announced that I had a text message again. I checked and I did have one this time.
My sister narrowed her eyes. “That was your text message tone?”
“Yes.”
“The same one I picked?”
Well, that explained the earlier Sherwood tone I had heard and ignored. It was on her phone.
I stared at her and it finally came together. We were twins.
How else could you explain this?
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 8, 2014 | Stories
After we moved onto our first little farm, we went shopping for a dog. Every farm needs a dog.
Lord Scooter of Fairfield was our pick – a registered Cocker Spaniel offered free by the breeder because he was the last one left in the litter and she needed him to go to a nice family.
You know how sirens should go off with the word free? No sirens.
We were told we could register our puppy and received the paperwork which we completed – including his name – and sent it off. The paperwork was only $25 and worth it, right?
Scooter was a sweet little brown dog and, as he meandered his way through puppyhood, we began to wonder when his long cocker spaniel coat would come in.
One of the boys on the school bus informed our daughter that, “That ain’t no cocker spaniel. He looks like a Labrador.”
Well, she sniffed when she told him that we had the paperwork to prove he was a Cocker Spaniel. AKC registration. The real deal.
And we waited for the beautiful hair to come in.
Which never happened.
We had, I am pretty sure, the only registered AKC puppy in the county who was officially a Cocker Spaniel but who looked an awful lot like a chocolate Labrador.
We learned later that the neighbor’s dog may have scaled the fence a couple of months before the puppies were born. Maybe.
Well, Scooter was free. And we were a nice family. Gullible but nice.
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by Kathy Brasby | May 13, 2014 | Stories
Because my nephew was a tall strapping young man with a healthy appetite, we got to pop open the can of grass jelly.
I had prepared the meal for our family plus my nephew but decided we might be a tad bit short of food. I knew he ate like a linebacker.
So I scoured the pantry for a can of something to add to the meal at the last minute.
I spied the can of grass jelly.
This can had come from an oriental specialty market in Denver as part of a class project. We had been assigned to purchase items and peruse different foods.
We got to see live squid and aquariums where goldfish (well, they looked like goldfish) could be netted and bagged for the next meal.
We saw cans of exotic peppers and bags of noodles.
And cans of grass jelly.
My can ended up in the pantry for a time like this.
I pried off the lid to find a dark gelatinous mass. It reminded me of cranberry sauce in the can at Thanksgiving.
So I tipped the can and let the cylinder of jelly slide into the plate. I sliced it like cranberry sauce and served it with the rest of the meal.
There were questions. Lots of questions.
But I encouraged them all to be daring and taste it. My nephew twisted his mouth to one side.
“What is grass jelly?” he said.
“I don’t know. But it is food,” I assured him.
He nibbled the chunk on his fork. “Food? This tastes like it was made out of motor oil.”
Everyone dumped their helping back on the serving plate. And that was the end of the grass jelly experiment.
Except my nephew won’t come to a meal at my house without checking my pantry.
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by Kathy Brasby | Apr 8, 2014 | Stories
Not long ago I noticed that I have a slight fear of heights.
The seeds might have been planted when, as a child, I didn’t climb the trees clear to the top like my brother did. I may have missed an opportunity to immunize myself to heights at an early age.
A photo opportunity during my reporter days took me to the top of a grain elevator. Those tall white cement tubes stood at least 100 feet tall and the manager who offered me the photo shoot also offered me a rough elevator ride to the top.
But that was nothing compared to watching him jump from one elevator to the next. The distance between the two was two feet or less – an easy jump any time except when seeing a 100-foot drop under your shoes.
I did it.
Twice. Coming and going. And got some spectacular aerial shots of our little town.
But my heart pounds a bit just telling the story.
But things got worse once I had children. Our family visited some beautiful bluffs one day and I got to watch my offspring scrambling up and down the rock formations.
That was OK until we all wanted to see how far up we were standing, on the top of the bluffs.
If the elevator was 100 feet, this bluff fell down 200 feet. I don’t know, maybe more. You lose that assessing ability when your eyes fog over.
I scooped up the four-year-old and found myself wanting to hang onto the belt of the other two, even if one was 8 and the other was 14.
And then I had to watch the Fellowship of the Ring gang run across the Bridge of Khazad-dum, a pencil-thin bridge through Moria. Yeah, yeah, I know it was a movie and, yeah, I know it was totally computer generated.
I still hung onto my chair as though the entire fellowship might slip over the edge into oblivion.
Heights.
If I had another chance to jump two feet over a 100-foot drop, I might give the camera to my brother.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 18, 2014 | Stories
I knew I had an issue when I looked out the back door of my new office to see my trailer house rolling down the highway.
I had been commuting 30 miles a day to the new job, waiting for a moving company to take my little trailer house to a new location closer to my work.
The nice thing about moving a trailer house is that you really don’t have to pack much. In fact, I hadn’t even bothered to drain my water bed yet.
I had instructed the moving company to give me some advance notice before they hauled the house to the new place.
They’d promised they would.
And they didn’t.
I jumped in my car and raced after the trailer house, which was being backed into its new site by the time I got there.
The crew hooked up all the lines and the foreman wandered over.
“I thought you were going to call me,” I said.
He shrugged. “I guess nobody did.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a full waterbed in the back of that trailer that I intended to drain.”
He studied the house for a long moment, searching for cracks in the back wall. Then he shrugged again. “Well, that explains why it was so goosey in the back end while we were on the highway.”
Good news: the bed didn’t come out the back wall of the trailer. Bad news: it did come off the pedestal, resting against the back wall.
There is a moral to this story. When you’re 20-something and think you don’t have to drain your waterbed till the last minute, sleep on the couch a few nights instead.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 11, 2014 | Stories
They were almost bookends. I watched my husband and teenage son stroll into the convenience store while I kept guard on the gas pumping into our SUV.
Both wore spandex cycling shirts in blazing yellow with all sorts of advertising slogans plastered in place, paid for by many cycling sponsors.
Souvenirs of a recent biking race.
And our son stood as tall as his dad now, with dark hair that matched his father’s.
Yep. Bookends.
And sweaty ones.
“Are we going home now?” Our youngest daughter hung her 12-year-old head out the window.
“We have to get their bikes loaded on top,” I said, “and then we will.”
She shook her head. “How far did they ride this morning?”
“About 30 miles.”
“Glad it was them.” She hopped out of the car. “Can we go inside? I want to buy a snack.”
“Sure.”
We found her snack and then came back outside. The SUV had been moved to the curb in front of the store and my husband, still wearing his yellow cycling jersey, was bent over the engine compartment with the hood raised.
That was so like him. He was probably checking the oil. He took good care of details.
The thought of how well he cared for his family welled up in me and I walked up behind him to give him a hug and kiss from behind.
My arms were out for the embrace when I stopped.
This was not my husband.
This was my son. Bookends, remember?
I never told him how close he came to a snuggly hug and kiss from his mom. I have always been pretty sure he really didn’t want to know.
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