by Kathy Brasby | Aug 19, 2014 | Stories
Sometimes a mom needs to re-examine the smart remarks when the kids get older.
Here’s what I mean: Few things torque a tall teenage boy more than having to slide his long legs into a cramped front seat of a car.
Or so it seemed when my son, all 6’1” of him, stuffed himself into the driver’s seat of my car.
“This is crazy. Who can get into this?” he asked as he shoved the seat to its far limit.
Moms need smart remarks in these instances. When the kid towers over you, outweighs you, and knows more cool technical terms than you do, snappy remarks are important in the arsenal.
So I fired a smart remark back. “Well, it is not my fault you have such long legs.”
I settled into the passenger seat feeling certain that he’d settle into his seat with his hands on the wheel and his mouth shut.
Then we stared at each other.
My husband is two inches taller than I am, but my legs are two inches longer than his. I stand 5’9” – fairly tall for a mom.
“Um, maybe it is your fault,” my son said.
Yeah, maybe it is.
Looks like I need a snappier comeback.
by Kathy Brasby | Aug 5, 2014 | Stories
Last week I wrote about Goats in Love but it was only part one. Story number two may top it.
Rocket, our daddy buck, spent a lot of time alone pining for his girlfriend. Now the girlfriend varied from week to week, but Rocket was always ready.
Rocket’s pad also paralleled a small pasture where two does lived. One day I noticed that one of the does, Lulu, was ready to meet Rocket. The other doe, Maybelle, was oblivious.
I did mention that Rocket was always ready, right?
I opened the gate and Rocket roared into the pasture, legs churning in a blur like Wiley Coyote chasing the roadrunner.
Rocket, as we already established, had more hormones than brains. Chanting “hey, good lookin’” as he flew past me, he focused his loving gaze on Maybelle. Not Lulu.
A female goat not in the mood has no interest in a hormone-fueled buck. Maybelle saw Rocket racing toward her and took off like a jet. Her legs were churning faster than his.
I watched the pair flying around the perimeter of the pasture, legs spinning. Rocket’s head was up as he enjoyed the beauty of his new girlfriend. Maybelle’s head was down; she had no time for anything but a panicked gallop.
Meanwhile, Miss Lulu was sending little air kisses and twirling her tail like a string of pearls.
As the racing pair headed down the backstretch, their path took them past Miss Lulu who by now was flashing her lashes like a neon sign.
I did not know a thundering buck could make a 180-degree correction without turning inside out but Rocket did it.
Suddenly, he was bringing roses and chocolate to Miss Lulu.
And Maybelle leaned against a fence post, heaving for air while her life passed before her eyes.
With goat romance, when it’s not your time, it’s not your time.
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 29, 2014 | Stories
I’ve decided to declare this time as Valentine’s season for goats because, well, if you have to ask you may not understand.
Of late, I’ve been seeing these adorable YouTube videos of baby goats cavorting with great joy. If you’ve seen those, your appetite may be whetted toward goats. Well, you need to know more.
If you haven’t heard about goats in love, you are woefully deprived.
In our goat herd, we usually keep our buck – the future daddy – separated from the does so we can control when the babies come.
One bright fall morning, one of our girls had put on her high heels, lipstick, and Chanel before sashaying along the fence line she shared with Rocket the buck.
Rocket got the message: she was in the mood. Rocket was always in the mood so he pushed his manly head through the fence to sniff her fragrance.
When I saw the hearts drifting into the air above those two, I collected Miss Elinore and brought her into Rocket’s pen. She wiggled her hips and lightly danced from the gate to the fence line so that she could lean against Rocket.
Just what he had hoped for, except for one thing.
Rocket’s massive head, and I could not make this up, was stuck in the fence.
He pulled and twisted while Elinore was nearly doing a pole dance beside him. His front legs were like pile drivers pushing into the ground. His cheeks would have turned red from the exertion if not hidden by that thick buck fur. No go. He was stuck.
The love of his life was at hand and he couldn’t get his head out of the wire.
I gotta tell you that it’s hard to cut fence wire when you’re laughing that hard.
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 22, 2014 | Stories
This is not another of those cute cat stories that make the Facebook rounds, largely because I think cats are as unfathomable as two-year-olds. Or teenagers.
Clara the cat joined our family as the responsibility of our teenage son. Somehow the connection seemed poetic.
We already had a cat. Snickers was the responsibility of our college-age daughter who is moving out soon.
Maybe a little cat overlap could work as long as I had no responsibilities.
These cats’ problem wasn’t sashaying over my desk, waving a tail before my nose, knocking my glasses across the room, tromping on my keyboard — but I digress. Their problem was each other.
Neither liked the other.
Their owners thought they’d get acquainted and then play together.
Ha.
Responsible teenage son decided to comb and clip the tangles from Clara’s long hair. So he held her in his lap while he worked.
Clara growled at Snickers as though Snickers controlled the comb wirelessly. Every time the tangles were pulled, she snarled a little louder. When one tangle needed extra work, she suddenly launched a full-scale mauling on Snickers, who hadn’t bothered to ignore the hair styling party.
Bet he regretted that.
The cats seemed to like yowling at each other more than parading over my computer cables, scattering papers and nestling into the paper-thin space between my printer. Digressing again…
One evening we heard this now-familiar guttural noise rising from near the dining room table. Clara and Snickers were flopped on the floor just out of batting distance from each other.
You could hear cat swear words in those growls but neither moved.
My son wandered onto the scene, watching the two combatants throw insults and threats without shifting their leisurely positions.
“Weird,” he said. “That is the laziest cat fight ever.”
Wow. Even more unfathomable than teenagers.
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?
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.
