The Message

The good old country pony reared on me. Two days later he was out of here. My friend from the north, who knows nothing about horses and thinks I’m a barbarian for riding them, said, “That’s quite extreme, isn’t it?” Not the fact that he reared on me. The fact that I gave him away for doing it. But I can’t blame her for thinking that. Apache had been coming along very well. Even my daughter Jamie said, “He reared one time and you gave him away?”

“One time” being the key words here. I hear it in my head, a wise old man’s warning, a smart mother’s admonition, “That’s all it takes is one time.” I have no patience for dangerous acts of rebellious ponies. Even if it was only once. Maybe if Apache was for me. Maybe I’d chalk it up to being caused by one of many things that might have been wrong, or that I might have done wrong, and keep trying—I was too easy on him and he thought he could get away with it. Ponies test. It’s their job. Or maybe he needs his teeth done and his mouth hurt. Or maybe I put too much pressure on him because he’s so dead quiet—it would be easy to assume he knows more than he does and he couldn’t comply, so out of frustration, he took a tantrum instead.

But, excuses and reasons aside, he wasn’t for me. He was for Kelly. I was riding him to make sure he was safe for her. I was riding him for just this reason—to make sure he wouldn’t do something dangerous like rear or buck when he got a bee under his bonnet. It took me eight months to find this out. Kurt kept telling me, “Let her ride him!” But my gut kept saying no. I made jokes about how I wanted him for myself. He was so easy to ride. Easy on. Easy off. Just grab him. He stays put wherever you place him. You don’t even need a halter on him. I was even thinking about hopping on him bareback, something I haven’t done since I was a kid.

But he had that little stubborn streak. It was nagging at me like how a hair feels on the back of your tongue when you’re not quite sure that it is there. It’d been a long time since he pulled a combo but I had the feeling that he wanted to. It took me two years to let Kelly ride Doc. And that turned out to be two wasted years because Doc never does anything wrong. I’m one of those nervous mommies. I wouldn’t let Kelly eat hot dogs until she was ten-years-old because it’s on the list of the top ten choking foods. Well, I let her eat them because I didn’t want her to be on the list of kids-at-school-who-get-picked-on, but I watched her like a hawk. I hovered over her while she was chewing and one time, when she made a funny face, I jumped up, knocked my chair over and prepared to perform the Heimlich maneuver. “Mom!” she rolled her eyes. “I just licked my lips!”
Horses are dangerous enough animals in the best case scenario. But I had to admit that two years was a little ridiculous. And so I stepped it up with Apache. I called my sister in New Jersey whose daughter is older than Kelly and told her, “Get Erin down here ASAP. I need her to ride the hell out of this pony.”—there’s nothing better for getting a good broke horse than having a tough kid ride him all over the place. I hurried up and started riding him every chance I could get so he would be ready for Erin to take over when she arrived. And then he reared.

I thought he was going to go over backwards on me. We teetered up there for long enough for me to think about the little girl out in Oklahoma who was just killed on a horse who reared and flipped over on her but it was probably only a split second. I didn’t even have time to drive him forward. The minute his feet hit the ground, I jumped off, whacked him, and called for Kelly’s helmet. I got back on him so he wouldn’t think he got away with it and walked him to the round pen. I got off him again and worked him from the ground. But I was doing this for the new owner. I already knew it was over. I wasn’t keeping him. There was no point to ever get on him again because I was never going to let Kelly get on him.

Talk about flipping, Kurt flipped his lid when I told him I was going to give him away. He said he’s tired of giving away horses and selling them for less money than what we paid for them. But I am painfully honest. I could never sell Apache to someone and not say that he reared. Even if he reared only once in eight months. The buyer who would be attracted to this horse would be someone with kids because he’s so dead quiet. I’d have to say it. And buyers would think it was worse than what it was. They’d think he was a rearer, when the truth is, he may not ever do it again.

My honesty is the reason I wasn’t able to sell Doc when I tried to unload the old guy a few years back. One of the reasons I wouldn’t let Kelly ride him was because I was afraid he was too big for her and so I decided to sell him and look for a pony. He was twenty-one at the time and could have passed for twelve. Most sellers would have thrown away his papers and said he was younger (hence, all the older horses for sale who do not have registration papers) but not me. I also told them every little detail. Once he tried to kick the dog. He did it one time when Pup-Pup ran up behind him when he was eating but now they think he’s a kicker. Sometimes he’ll walk away from you when you go out to catch him. Now they think he’s hard-to-catch, when the truth is, all you need is a piece of baling twine to go get him and it’s never taken longer than a few seconds. He’s a little arthritic. Now they think he’s three-legged. I guess I can’t blame them for thinking the real story is way worse than what it is. Because the truth is, horse sellers have a bad reputation. They’re about as bad as car dealers. But God rewarded me for my honesty. Doc didn’t sell and Kelly started riding him. She’s been riding him all over the place ever since and he is a bombproof wonder horse. But he’s getting up there in age and Kelly wants to ride him harder than I think he deserves. I’d like to retire him soon. Which is why we bought Apache, the good old country pony.

I gave Apache to my friend Karen who is an excellent horsewoman and a good home. Whatever she does with him, will be the right thing. But I still felt bad. I started second-guessing myself. Should I have worked with him some more? He only did it once. He’s so nice. And he’s gorgeous. I really liked him. And he liked me. When Harley chased him, he ran to me and hid behind me like I was his mommy. I felt like I betrayed him. Was he scared in the new place? Should I have given up so soon? What kind of cowgirl am I anyway?

Then I got a message. My friend’s daughter, Amber, who is one of Kelly’s best friends, had a bad accident. The two of them learned to ride together. In fact, I have a picture of them right here on my desk, riding double on Minnie when they were just four-years-old. And now Amber, a little tiny thing at barely sixty pounds, got hurt. Her horse reared up and flipped over on her. My friend Sissy, her mother, held her limp daughter in her arms and tasted fear and dread like no mother should ever have to experience. Across the country, I stepped into her shoes and my heart started beating out of my chest.

Later, I couldn’t help thinking about how coincidental the timing was and this message that I had been given. If I had any second thoughts, after this, I know I did the right thing, listening to my gut. Because all it takes is one time.

Amber Markus is out of the hospital now and on the road to recovery. She is a tough cowgirl and is in everyone’s thoughts and prayers from Oklahoma to New Jersey and Virginia.

The Broom in the Country

There is a bird’s nest on the column on our porch. It was there last year and a bird had her babies in it and now she’s back again. Or a different bird moved in. I’m not sure.

It is a miracle of modern construction. I expected at least to find it askew the next morning after we had tornadic winds the night before but it stayed stuck up there like gum on a shoe. There are dirt splatters on the rafter and the ceiling around it like she put it together with spit. There are bits of hay and stems. She’s got a horse hair up there. A long piece from a tail or it could be from my own head. I pat my head as if to check if I am missing something. I am watching her from the rocking chair. I don’t know how she gets any sleep with us in and out all night. Since we’ve been trying to quit smoking, we made a new rule that there is no smoking in the house. I figured if we have to go outside every time we light up, it would be hard to smoke so many. The porch light is on more than it is off. If one of us is not out there smoking, the other one is. I began to move things outside. There is a basket with magazines. There is a candle. An extra pair of glasses. A pen, my rock collection, and of course, an ashtray. The bird must be exhausted.

I am surprised she came back to use the nest with us out there smoking our brains out. Talk about bad neighbors. We even got a couple of cats here. But they can’t climb up the column because it’s made of plastic. It is actually quite genius, where she put her nest, under the porch, behind the eaves, on a house belonging to me.

It could have been Effie’s house. Effie knocks birds’ nests down with her broom. One time she nailed one with her shoe. “That’ll teach him for making a mess on my truck,” she said. Effie’s turquoise pickup truck is her pride and joy. She parks it under one of those metal carports they sell in farmer’s fields and empty driveways next to insurance offices and music shops for $595 installation included.

My girlfriend told me a story, (another city girl gone country, and so we often swap stories about how we came to be loving this country life), about when she was a girl and she spent her summers at a farm in upstate New York. She told me about how the girl who lived on the farm, let’s call her The Farm Girl, picked up a broom, and my friend, who sat on a crate in the barn aisle picking her nails, expected her to do what most people do when they pick up brooms--sweep the floor. Suddenly The Farm Girl raised the broom above her head and swung it at a bird’s nest that was built on a ledge over her saddle. Baby birds scattered like a jar of pennies fell and broke open. My friend screamed. The Farm Girl was genuinely surprised to see her reaction and offered to scoop them back up and place them back in the nest. They might survive. If you don’t touch them, the mother bird will never know. The Farm Girl crawled on her hands and knees and gathered up the pieces of the nest while my friend sobbed and shook her head. The Farm Girl molded the pieces back into a bowl-shape like she was making a piece of pottery and placed it back onto the ledge above the saddle. “See, see, it’s just like it was before,” she assured her. She pushed one of the hairless birds onto the basin of a shovel with the toe of her boot, lifted it to the nest and dumped it in. My friend wailed louder. She vowed she would never be that kind of farm girl. I nodded.

And then the mice tore up our grain, chewed holes in our saddle blankets and left droppings all over the place like chocolate sprinkles on a cone. The humane traps were all talk and no action. We consulted with each other over the phone. How to do this? What was kinder? The classic mouse trap, a sticky trap or poison? I opted for the poison. I didn’t need to see the beseeching face of a mouse looking up at me and wiggling his nose to please come and save him, or a body flopping around in a panic, half dead because the bar on the trap missed and only got a limb. No, if I had to do it, I didn’t want to see it.

After the dogs died and before I got The Big Stupid, there were larger rodent problems, possums, raccoons, something big I couldn’t figure out what it was, and a fox situation. There was a copperhead (See “The Do-Nothing Technique) plus coyotes howling out back who I was sure were having fantasies about a Minnie the Pony dinner with all the fixin’s. And the birds. Just like in The Farm Girl’s barn, they crapped all over the hay, on the trophies on the shelf, on the jars of Corona and Kopertox and on my saddles. White bird dung dried to a dust and blew all over the place, coating cracks and crevices like baby powder when a wind came in. I swept it up every day. But I didn’t sweep away any baby birds. I tried to scare them from coming in by hanging up owls like the kind you see dangling in the big doorways where the DOT keeps their sand and road salt. But birds are smart. They never fell for it. They kept coming in and making a mess all over everything. I covered all my stuff with plastic tablecloths and Hefty bags. I thought about The Farm Girl and even though I could never do what she did, I stopped thinking she was so mean.

Eventually Kurt came to the rescue and spent one of his days off cutting boards and fitting them into the spaces between the wall and the roof like a jig-saw puzzle. There would be no more ventilation through the eaves but there are enough gaps and openings in that barn that we could seal the whole thing up with caulking and still get plenty of air. Then we stood back and watched. A bird flew over and slammed on the brakes. He hovered, scratched his head like what happened, flapped his wings and took off for the trees where he should have been in the first place.

Maybe he told the bird on the porch about me. A kind lady lives there. She saved a copperhead once. The only thing you have to put up with is some second-hand smoke, but hey, it’s a perfect spot, on a perfect little porch, on a perfect little house. The only thing they’ll do on that porch with a broom is sweep it.

The Fly Swatter

Nobody can kill flies like I do. I just wake up, walk into the kitchen, some flies are flying around getting ready to annoy me, and wham! wham! wham! Dead. Three in a row, dead as doorknobs. I don’t even have to be fully awake to hit my target. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I land one. That’s a really good success rate. I have a technique but I’m not going to divulge my secret unless you beg me.

My family up north couldn’t care less about prying it out of me. It’s useless information to them. They live in places with windows they never open. It’s a permanent seventy degrees there all year long—heated in the winter, air conditioned in the summer. And there are no livestock around so nothing to attract flies. They don’t even own a fly swatter.

Coming from there, I was shocked at the amount of flies I got when we first moved out to Oklahoma. And it didn’t get any better when we moved to Virginia, first to the Amityville Horror House and then to here. The flies were all the same in the country. Relentless terrorists who zeroed in on the rim of my coffee cup the minute I put it down. They’re about as bad as roaches, disgusting-wise. Think about what they walk on.

I kill so many of them I’m tired of wasting a whole napkin to pick them up. Can’t leave mangled fly bodies around. I wish I could say that I also have a technique, maybe a swift flick of the wrist that stops their hearts without decapitating them or scattering fly limbs and broken wings, but no, fly murder cannot always be accomplished neatly. There’s often a clot of guts left behind and the first phase of clean-up is to remove it with half a napkin. I follow with a disinfect by wiping for a minimum of thirty seconds with my cleaning rag soaked with Pine Sol. Well, that thirty-second thing is not true. But I do use the Pine Sol.

You’d think the flies were smart, the way they hang around on the door hoping to hitch a ride inside when you come in. There they are, hovering out there, like vultures, walking up the glass, congregating on the molding, just waiting for their chance. And then, zoom! They rush inside and land willy-nilly on the kitchen counter or the back of a chair or the rim of a coffee cup. I get the fly swatter. I won’t be able to relax until I put him out of his misery. He’s got about ten seconds left. I don’t know why they don’t spread the word to the others. There is death in here. It is much safer outside in the barn where there’s horse manure to land on and half-eaten cat food Lovely the Barn Cat left behind. All those cows next door, why, you’d think they’d be having a heyday. But no, they’ve got to come in here.

I’m also in charge of getting rid of the ladybugs, stink bugs and spiders. I try not to kill the spiders. I tell Kurt, “Spiders are our friends.” But he’s scared of them. I can barely get him to get it together enough to hand me one of his humongous size twelve-and-a-half steel-toed work boots when I am standing guard over one because I can’t take my eyes off it or else he’ll get away and I, reluctantly, have to kill it. Some of them look mean and you know they bite or they’re just too big or fast to catch and carry outside. So I’m watching it and I’m motioning with my hand, “Com’on, com’on, give me a shoe, give me something!” But my back-up, Kurt and Kelly, are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Finally I grab a magazine and I smack it. Now I have to rip the back page off and throw it away.

You’d think I’d be scared of bugs, coming from the city. And being a girl. But nope, not really. I’ve been known to whack a cockroach barehanded if I spot one running across my kitchen counter. You can’t let a roach get away. You’ve got to kill him any way you can or else when you get up to go pee in the middle of the night, you flick on the switch, and suddenly find yourself with a hundred roaches scattering in all directions. You’ve just got to think of the long-term picture and not your short-term revulsion. Just get the job done or else it’ll get worse.

I guess that’s how I got the job of bug eradicator around here. It’s not really fair. It’s a dirty job. But someone’s got to do it.

Edited to add: Kurt wants me to clarify that I am roach savvy because of past experience, not because I have them now. I grew up in Jersey City in apartment buildings where it was not uncommon for them to spread from one apartment to another depending on the tenants. Here, we have flies, stink bugs, ladybugs, spiders, chiggers, ticks, various beetles and assorted insects I am not familiar with, but no cockroaches.

A Little Bull Calf Needed Help

Today I saw a miracle. Kelly came running into the house, “There’s a cow being born! Hurry!” I grabbed the movie camera and ran to the other side of our garage where Eldon and Pearl’s cow pen is. There was a cow in the chute and Eldon and his nephew, Jackson, were behind her. They had our baseball bat. Attached to the baseball bat were ropes. The other end of the ropes were attached to the calf’s legs which were sticking out of his mother. Kurt was on the outside of the pen holding a board steady.



They pulled with all their might and the calf plopped out onto the ground. I was relieved to see his chest moving. I think the fall helped him to breathe. The mother cow turned around, sniffed, and seemed to wonder, “How’d you get here?” She immediately started licking him. Pearl and I ran to get warm water and towels for the men to clean themselves off. Neighbors came over to see. The sun was just starting to get lower in the sky, warm on the calf’s wet fur. Everything was still, except for our excitement--a handful of neighbors who saved a life using a baseball bat and ropes.

Everything is Broken

All my tools are broken. I can’t get anything done on the farm if I don’t have the proper tools. Kurt is out there right now trying to fix the riding lawn mower. He said the battery is as dead as a doorknob. He said we left the key on last winter and it drained it dry, plus the thing has been jinxed from the get-go. I don’t know about that. Maybe he doesn’t realize all the mowing I did in that other place we lived which was 53 acres of jungle on steroids. But I’d have to say, even though this could be jinxing things, that I got my money’s worth out of that riding lawnmower.

In addition to the dead battery, it has a flat.

The dually wheelbarrow, the big mama, also has a flat. This is a problem concerning the weeds. They fill up a wheelbarrow fast, especially those beachy-looking things the previous owner planted everywhere. They go great with the pool but you have to get rid of the straw-like stalks before the new growth comes in and they’re bulky. They take up a lot of space in the wheelbarrow causing me to make many trips down to the gully to dump them on the manure pile. It’s not the trips down that’s the problem. It’s the trips back up. I try to do big steps so I don’t have to take as many. Sometimes I have to stop and rest before I get to the barnyard.

Before I knew the dually had a flat, I filled it with chickweed that was running amok around the house, threatening to crawl right up the foundation and rip the shutters off the hinges and possibly cover us all so that before long we’d be living in a vine-covered cottage. That’s what we’d call it. A chickweed-covered cottage doesn’t sound so pretty.

I got it all filled up and then started to go but I was huffing and puffing halfway across the yard. That’s when I realized the tire had a flat. Kurt was at work and the bike pump is mysteriously missing so I had to call him up and have him walk me through filling it up with the air compressor. This involved finding an extension cord that was long enough to reach an outlet. Air compressors are heavy. You don’t want to move one unless you have to.

The extension cord was buried under towing chains which were wrapped around the wheels of the generator, which last time I heard, also had a flat. I lifted the generator, even heavier than the air compressor, untangled the chain and pulled it out. Then I pulled out the extension cord. With plug in hand, I climbed over the Christmas tree stand, a milk crate filled with assorted tools, and boxes of things we bought but never opened like weather stripping and flood lights. I knocked over a box of nails, crushed the hose to the swimming pool by stepping on it and wedged my foot in between a toolbox and the metal shelves because it was the only place to stand. But I made it to the outlet. However, the cord wouldn’t reach. No matter how much I tried, stretching and tugging, it was an inch too short.

The whole time Kurt was talking me through it. I had the phone on my ear. He said slowly, like I am three, “Go...back...to...the...generator...and...see...if...the...extension...cord...is...caught...on...something.”

It worked. I got the cord untangled and plugged in. It stretched across the garage at eye level, a big loop you now have to crawl under, while simultaneously crawling over things, if you want to get to the other side. It appears, to the uneducated eye, that the garage needs a good cleaning. But Kurt knows where everything is so don’t touch it.

Now Kurt had to tell me how to hook up the hose to the actual machine. “See the nipple on the end?” he said. Let’s just skip over the next part because he thinks he’s funny.

I pulled the sleeve back on one of the round brass things that was sticking out of the air compressor and pushed the hose onto it. When I let go, it popped off and hissed like a wild snake. A big gust of air hit me in the face. I screamed. I tried again but it kept popping off. I cried, “It doesn’t fit!” After a number of attempts, we realized a piece of rubber around the end of the hose needed to be pushed back to expose the nipple fully. Finally, I got it on and I pumped up that wheelbarrow like no tomorrow. In fact, I got scared. “It’s not going to blow up is it Kurt?”

This is what we’re dealing with.

So the riding lawn mower is broke, the dually wheelbarrow keeps getting a flat, I couldn’t get the push lawnmower started or the weed-whacker. The farm truck won’t start otherwise I would have pulled it up to the beachy things and just thrown them all in there. Kurt’s not happy he’s got to fix all these things but I told him, I’ll do the work, you just get it going for me, that’s all you have to do. I don’t mind doing it if I have the tools to do the job but I can’t be climbing over generators and nearly hanging myself up on cords every time I get the urge to pull a few weeds.

Later, when I went out there, Kurt and Kelly had the garage all straightened up. I think he realized it was in his best interests to let me get to things now that I know my way around an air compressor.

The Artist in the Family

The new look of this blog was created by my daughter Jamie Ferraioli, aka Green Girl, who stuck to her dreams and is an artist now. It’s so good to have an artist in the family!

Now if only Kelly would become a car mechanic or a vet, we’d be all set….

Please check Jamie out at: www.magicbeanbuyer.etsy.com or www.greenlovesyou.blogspot.com

Signs

Even though I wrote that big long post about deciding to become a writer, I was still grappling with it. Then I started getting signs. These signs have been in the form of other writers inspiring me. I’ve often been inspired by other writers but this time it’s been right in a row. Bam, bam, bam! Here is what I stumbled across just in the last week or two:

There was an article in this month’s The Writer about Michael Perry who writes essays about the country life like I do. Right off the bat I got excited because I learned he’s had a ton of colorful jobs just like I have—forklift operator, nurse, cowboy—just to name a few. Although he’s afraid of horses. Still…

We have a lot in common. The more I read, the more I exclaimed, “That’s me!” But I was most excited when I read that he only took one college creative-writing class and is self-taught. Just like me.

I’m not saying I’m anywhere near as good as he is. I’m still learning, trying to catch up because I’ve quit a hundred times to become a telephone operator, nurse’s aid, cowgirl and all those other jobs I’ve had. But if he can do it, I can do it. That was number one.

Then in Parade magazine I read about Frank McCourt. I’m Irish too. But that has nothing to do with it. A little voice in his head said, “Don’t settle for less. Find what you love and do it.” But he became a teacher because the voice also said, “Yeah, but that won’t buy bread.” Sounds just like me. He trudged along doing his second choice until he couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t know whether he couldn’t stand it anymore or he just couldn’t do it anymore. But he retired after 30 years of teaching, went home and wrote Angela’s Ashes. It was a bestseller. McCourt was 66.

In The Roanoke Times I read about a local guy who’s originally from New Jersey like me. His name is Scott Loring Sanders. He was the family breadwinner. And yet he quit his job to go to school and become a writer. I can’t imagine what his wife thought. Divorce? I don’t even have that kind of pressure on me. I’m not the family breadwinner and yet I’m hesitating. Sanders has more confidence in his little finger than I have in my whole body.

His first novel, The Hanging Woods, just came out and a second one is due out next year. His number one rule is: Stay disciplined. Meaning, don’t stop.

This may sound corny but I feel like God is sending me signs. So I’m going to keep going.