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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by Kathy Brasby | Feb 21, 2014 | Seasons, Stories
The list came together one afternoon about a week after my dad’s funeral, when my mother, sister and I gathered for tea and brainstorming.
“What do we need to do now?” I asked.
We were all missing Dad, but he had passed at 90 after a year of increasing weakness and difficulty. He had died with his family at hand after many had been able to say goodbye.
Seeing loved ones leave is never easy but his hadn’t been unexpected.
Now we needed to gather ourselves.
“The funeral home took care of some things,” Mom said. “The obituary is done and we own two burial plots now.”
It had been easier to purchase two when we bought Dad’s.
“We need to send out thank you notes,” my sister said. We spent some time compiling a list, going through the cards that had come in.
“Why don’t you do the ones you know and I’ll do the ones I know?” I suggested. “Mom, you get the rest.”
She smiled. “I guess that will work.” As it turned out, that was closer to equal for us than I had guessed.
“We need a thank you note in the paper,” my sister said.
Mom wanted the recording of Dad’s funeral digitized so she could have it on a CD.
“We need to check with Medicare and Social Security,” I added. “I don’t know what needs to be done there.”
As it turned out, the funeral home took care of that.
Mom had to change the registration on their car to her name and cancel Dad’s Medicare gap insurance. So that went on the list.
“What about the bank?” Mom asked. “Do I have enough money to live on until we get things sorted out?”
We called the bank. The beauty of a revocable trust such as my parents had is that the checking account was in the trust name. All Mom needed to do was take a copy of the death certificate in to verify Dad’s passing. She had immediate access to her funds.
“I want a memorial fund,” Mom said. “For the money that was donated. Something in Dad’s name.”
I was amazed how quickly we had moved from the must-do list – things like bank accounts an insurance – to the “in memory” list.
“How about a headstone?” my sister added. That went on the list.
Before the afternoon was over, we had about 15 things to do. Most of them were checked off quickly.
It was a good thing, too, because within five weeks of that tea party, Mom was hospitalized with a stroke.
Without the list, there would have been a lot of things overlooked.
I’m not always big on lists but I’m very glad we made that one.
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by Kathy Brasby | Feb 18, 2014 | Stories
I was in full homestead mode when our youngest was young, toting him as a baby around in a backpack, cell phone on my hip and goat feed loaded in the back of the pickup.
In his first year of life, our son got to bond with the goats every day while I milked. I’d sit on the stand which elevated the goats and let him pat the doe’s shoulder while I milked.
While I sat on the milking stand, my back was to the goat’s head. Of course, my son in the backpack had full access to the goat. He patted them, laid his head on their back, tried to pull their ears.
When he was old enough to graduate from the backpack, he still had to come with me on our trips to the barn.
One day as I milked Riggy, she shifted her weight. Not a big deal with some of our goats, but Riggy never lifted a hoof. Odd but everybody twitches once in a while, right?
Then she did it again.
And so I looked over my shoulder at her head, where she had a nice box of sweet feed before her.
Sweet feed is a mixture of rolled grains. Oats. Corn. Wheat. Barley. With a molasses coating.
It sort of looks like granola.
Too much like granola, actually. For there was my young son, his head also in the feed box, chowing down the sweet feed.
He’d put his head in, Riggy would butt his head away – hence the shifting weight – and they would alternate bites.
This was the same boy who, when he was still riding along in a backpack, would lick the goat’s shoulder when he could.
I know, I know. The number of germs that boy ingested is mind-boggling.
But, to be honest, he has a great immune system with no allergies. Maybe thanks to Riggy.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jan 21, 2014 | Stories
I didn’t usually slice a sample of brownies as soon as they came out of the oven but I did this time. Good thing.
The brownies were for our evening Bible study and they tasted like I had drug the eggs through the gutter. I shoved the pan aside and threw together another batch.
And, if it hadn’t been for our older son, that would have been the end of the story.
We were in a hurry that evening, with the meeting plus my husband and I with the younger kids were leaving first thing in the morning for a two-day trip.
Our older son, at 17, was staying home. I didn’t have time to even clean up the bad pan of brownies.
“Don’t worry about those brownies,” I told him. “I’ll take care of it when I get home. Just ignore them.”
“Ok.”
He was trustworthy and I knew he’d be fine home alone. Except for one little problem.
The little problem wasn’t that he got sick. Or that he’d poisoned the dog with the bad brownies.
When I got home, the brownies pan was still setting on the stove. Empty.
“What happened to the brownies?”
He shuffled a little. “I tasted one.”
“Yuck. Those were bad.”
“They were,” he said. “But after the third piece, I got used to the aftertaste.”
“You ate them all?”
He shrugged.
I guess a cast-iron stomach wasn’t too big a problem.
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