Pulling the Horse Trailer

I think I almost hit the horse trailer coming into the driveway. I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t see. It was dark. But it looked pretty close. It looked so close, in fact, that I cringed while waiting for the resulting scrape of wood post on metal. Luckily my entrance was of the soundless variety except for the slow crunch of tires on gravel and the horses whinnying to each other—You’re back! Hi! Welcome back! But it scared me.

I only thought I had to be scared going out. I exit out of the driveway onto the side road. Even though I got out the loppers before we left and cut off all the bushes that I could, widening the driveway by about a foot, it’s still pretty narrow and the street you turn on to, which I could do nothing about as far as widening, is just as bad. If I miscalculate, I’m in trouble. If I don’t turn wide enough, I’ll hit the hip of the trailer. If I turn too wide, I’ll go into the ditch. And I don’t know how to back up. It’s the reason why when the weather was iffy last month and we were supposed to go to a 4-H meeting on horseback (hence, requiring the trailer), I said, “I’m not going in this rain. I think I saw lightning. Yes, I definitely saw lightning!”

“It’s not even raining,” Kelly said, holding her hand up to the dry air. “And that was the neighbor’s headlights.”

You can’t pull the wool over her eyes. So I bribed her with the mall and then I distracted her by promising to take her to the tattoo parlor to get her cartilage pierced right after school on Monday. Hey, it’s not like I offered her a big sprawling tattoo of a skull-and-crossbones. Plus we were completely out of Victoria’s Secret underwear and Cinnabons.

The truth is, after twelve years, including trips back and forth from New Jersey to Oklahoma and Oklahoma to Virginia and then to New Jersey again, numerous times, I’m still no good with the horse trailer. It’s the backing. It’s tricky backing up a horse trailer. When you want the trailer to go left, you have to turn the steering wheel right. When you want it to go right, you turn the steering wheel left. It goes against everything I was taught. Point the nose and the back end will follow. I know, I know about the trick where you grip the steering wheel on the bottom, so that when you want to go right, your hand is actually moving to the right. But then I get even more balled up, as my mother would say. Top, bottom, left, right—where am I supposed to put my hand?! Wait, wait, I can’t think!

Throw the video screen in there that’s in the new dually, and I don’t even know where I should look. At the screen? Over my shoulder? In the side mirrors? But which side mirror? The left one or the right one, the whole mirror or that little miniature mirror that’s built into the whole mirror? Do I look ahead or should I just stop and get out and survey the situation before I go one more inch? My head is whipping all over the place like Linda Blair’s head on The Exorcist, my hand is going all over the place like the steering wheel is too hot to hold and the horse trailer is going all over the place—veering to the left, jackknifing to the right—and somehow I am getting more and more off course. Pretty soon, if this keeps up, I will have to call Kurt.

It’s embarrassing. I know I shouldn’t be embarrassed. No one who may be watching knows how long I’ve been pulling the trailer. As far as they know, this is my first trip out. I have nothing to be embarrassed about.

Kurt says just smile at one of the guys and he’ll help you. And that, in effect, is the whole problem. I’ve been smiling at the guys to get them to park my trailer for twelve years now, or letting Kurt drive (because he likes to drive and every time I think I should practice while he is with me, I’m too tired to insist and decide just to put my cowboy boots up on the dashboard and find a good country music channel instead) and so I’ve never really practiced.

Now I’m getting desperate. I’m thinking about letting Kelly do it. Of course, she doesn’t even have her license yet. But I’ve got a loophole. I heard there’s something called a “farmer’s license.” This is a special license for kids who aren’t old enough to get their real license yet but are needed on the farm to drive tractors and pickup trucks laden with blueberries or asparagus, a special permission for farm families who need all hands on deck, so to speak.

Or I can cowgirl up and just practice. And hang one of those Victoria’s Secret bras I got from the mall on the antenna. It couldn’t hurt.

My Big Truck That Takes Diesel

I get a lot of attention in the new truck. People appreciate trucks around here. Especially big ones. They really love big ones with double wheels in the back (Kurt keeps calling it a dually) that take diesel. That’s truck gas. You see that on Ice Road Truckers—the big rigs getting diesel.

I’m like that girl on Ice Road Truckers. If she can drive one of those big rigs, I can drive our dually. It’s not easy though. You have to watch those double wheels every minute. I never know where to watch! In the big mirror, or the little mirrors that are attached to the big mirrors, or the rearview mirror, or the TV screen thing that comes on when you’re backing up. Usually I like to turn around and see for myself because you can’t trust new technology. Sometimes the thing starts beeping and you’ve got plenty of room! The truck is more nervous than I am. That’s pretty bad.

I like to put on my sunglasses when I drive it because then I look really cool. Long blonde hair and sunglasses driving a dually that takes diesel. Even though I can’t see very well with the sunglasses on. Sometimes I need my trifocals. There are plenty of places to put things in that truck so I put the trifocals in one of the little cup holders in the middle and when I need to change the channel on the Sirius radio, I take the sunglasses off, put them in another cup holder, and switch to the trifocals. After I find what I’m looking for, I put the sunglasses back on.

I love that Sirius radio! I think I could quit smoking using it if I stayed out in that truck all the time because every song is good and I sing at the top of my lungs. I sing till I’m blue in the face. Which doesn’t take very long because of the smoking. But I rebound real quick. Half a song and I’m going again. I can’t help myself. There are so many good songs on. I keep going back and forth between 6 on Sixties, 7 on Seventies, and Soul Train—Motown! Glorious Motown! I haven’t heard good stuff like Sly and the Family Stone and Marvin Gaye since I left New Jersey!

I feel like hot stuff when I’m passing guys working on the side of the road. I might give my hair a little flip but I do not put on the trifocals. They stop and lean on their shovels and nod their heads like they can hear Sly too. I act like it’s no big deal—me driving this big truck that takes diesel.

Parking it is another story. I don’t know what I’m going to do when we go back to Jersey where there are no parking spots. Here, I park way out on the other end of the parking lot when I’m going to Walmart and even so, I am always partly in the spot next to me. I act like I do it on purpose. Like I was trying to take up two spots. It is a brand new truck. There’s metallic flake in the black paint. It looks like little specks of 14 carat gold for God’s sake! There’s a new BMW that I suspect belongs to the eyeglass guy in Walmart that is parked way out no-man’s land too. I don’t blame him. Who wants to get sideswiped by someone’s old beat up farm truck or have the door of someone’s mini van that has a sticker of a soccer ball in the back window inadvertently hit your BMW or your truck that takes the diesel?

Yesterday when I came out of Walmart, I saw a scratch on the wheel well. I started pushing the cart faster. What?! A scratch?! How did that get there?! I hurried up the little hill, huffing and puffing because whoever designed this Walmart did it backwards. The store is downhill and the parking lot is uphill. It doesn’t make sense. When your cart is empty, you’re going downhill, but when it’s full, you’re going uphill. So when I arrive, I give the empty cart a push and hop on and if I don’t hit a stone to throw me off course I can make it all the way down to the entrance. Weeeee! I used to do this only when Kelly was with me so whoever was looking would think I was just being a good mommy and playing around with the kid. But the last couple of times I was there I got brave and did it by myself. If there is anything I learned after losing my mother it’s that you better treat every day like it could be your last. And if that means a grown woman is going to ride around the Walmart parking lot on a shopping cart, so be it.

At any rate, leaving the store with a full cart is another story. It’s bad enough if you only needed a few things but if you came to get dog food and litter and cases of Mountain Dew, all the heavy stuff, it’s literally an uphill battle. But when I saw that scratch on my dually diesel, I was like one of those old ladies who lifts a car off a person who got run over—I suddenly had super human strength and I ran up that hill with the overloaded cart and held it with one hand while I bent down and inspected the damage.

But it was nothing. Just a little dirt. I licked my finger and wiped it off. Someone said, “Nice truck.” I stood up and looked around. It was the landscapers doing those little islands in the parking lot. They had big trucks too. One of them even had the double wheels. But no gold-flecked paint and I’m not sure about the Sirius radio. I put on my sunglasses the minute I got in and pretended like I could see when I waved goodbye.

Wood and Weeds

Two days ago we were out there doing wood. Kurt was splitting it and Kelly and I were loading it into two canvas bags we keep for wood carrying and hauling it up onto the deck near the sliding glass doors where it will be easy to get when we run out. We carried the bags to a red wheelbarrow at the top of the stairs and then rolled it the rest of the way. The hard wheel on the wheelbarrow went bum, bum, bum, bum, over the wooden 2 X 6 floor. The wheel on this wheelbarrow doesn’t have air so it never goes flat. This is the wheelbarrow that we normally use for things like mixing cement or potting soil. It’s got a shallow metal basin pitted with rust and low metal handles with rubber grips like bike handles. It’s not the most comfortable thing to push because of the hard wheel and how low it is. You wouldn’t want to be using it long term.

The one I use on a daily basis has a nice, air-filled tire and two long hardwood handles smooth and shiny from me using it so much. If I keep the tire filled, it bounces easily over all kinds of terrain. I fill this wheelbarrow with manure three times every morning. Sometimes I use it to transport weeds or bags of grain. I keep an empty supplement bucket hanging on one of the handles that I fill with junk I may find out in the gully—I was tired of sticking shards of glass and muddy plastic fragments in my pockets and then forgetting about it and washing them in the washing machine. So I thought of the bucket. It is even good for putting your hat in if you get too hot while you’re picking up manure. When I was sneaking cigarettes out behind the tobacco shed, I hid the pack in the bucket. It’s good for all kinds of things.

But my favorite wheelbarrow is the dually. I got that one for Christmas one year. It came with a big red ribbon. It is big enough to put a pony inside. It is yellow plastic and has two tires, hence the name dually, and two massive wooden handles you can barely get your hands around. It is the big mama of wheelbarrows. You don’t have to bend at all and it rolls like it’s on shocks. The only bad thing about it is it’s hard to dump because of the two wheels. You can’t just flip it over and shake it back and forth like I do with my regular manure wheelbarrow. I use the big mama for hay. Hay takes up a lot of space. Once a week I fork up all the loose hay in the shed where I break open the bales and bring it outside for the horses. If I didn’t have the dually, I’d have to make many more trips. But I can fit a lot in there. I have also used it to bring Kelly places. She hangs her legs and arms over the sides like she’s in an old fashioned bathtub and cries, “Go faster!” We tried to get the Big Stupid in it one time but he got all giddy and excited like he was caught on the couch and jumped right out and ran around the yard in circles with his tongue flapping and his tail clamped onto his butt.

I also have a miniature wheelbarrow. I bought it for Kelly back when I was trying to break her in right, when she was three and still believed me when I said picking up horse poop was a lot of fun. It is an exact replica of my red metal wheelbarrow but about the only thing you can use it for is decorative purposes. I have it half buried in the mulch in the flowerbed in front of the house and I plant petunias in it because they spread and it looks like someone was pushing it and then it tipped over and all the flowers spilled out.

Today I pushed the regular manure wheelbarrow up front and filled it with weeds. Even though we were stacking wood just two days ago and burning it like there was no tomorrow, it’s seventy degrees now and there is something crawling around the foundation that looks like chickweed but I don’t know what it is. I know it’s not lawn, that I can tell you.

You never get a break on the farm. One minute you’re doing wood and the next minute you’re pulling weeds. Sometimes it even overlaps. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get an ice storm. They’re already announcing the school closings on the TV. Eldon is out there right now pushing the spreader, weeding and feeding the lawn. I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to Kurt. I could try telling him getting wood and pulling up weeds is a lot of fun but he’s not three-years-old anymore. He won’t believe me.