The Best Dog Ever--Motley 2006 to 12-20-13

The UPS man left packages at the door. He has no idea he had to step over my dead dog. Motley is wrapped in my mother’s blue and yellow quilt waiting for Kurt to get home to bury him. My mother would like that I used her quilt. He’s a big dog with a big heart. Kurt’s going to need to dig a hole with the tractor.

I feel guilty even though I knew in my gut the time was right. He was suffering. Not badly yet, but suffering nonetheless and there was no fixing him. It was only going to get worse. He had kidney failure. The vet was never able to figure out what it was from but I remember the vet in Virginia warning me after he survived parvo that he might have organ problems down the road. I also blame other things. I think maybe I gave him too many vaccines. What if it was the Roundup I sprayed on the driveway? It drives me crazy not knowing why. I thought if I knew what caused it, I could save him. The vet said these things happen.

I first noticed something was wrong back in the summer. He was panting heavier than I thought he should be. Everyone said it was pretty hot out. But you know. When you love an animal, just like a child, you don’t even have to be a mother—you just have to love—you know when something’s wrong.

He should have died twice before. When we adopted him, he was the only one in a kennel full of maybe forty dogs at the dog pound who didn’t get put to sleep that week and thrown out on the landfill in back. I was looking for a new dog and hoped to find a brindle since my old dog who had died was a brindle, but I didn’t expect to find one because brindles aren’t common and I only get my dogs from the shelter, narrowing the field even more. But there he was waiting for us when Kelly and I went in there. He was part of a litter of strays, about four months old. The other three looked like Shepherd mixes but Motley had floppy ears and a golden brindle coat. I pointed to him and said, “Can I see that one?” The animal control officer opened up the cage, snapped a leash on him and pulled him out. He promptly flopped down and fell into the cement trough that ran length of the kennel, head first, upside-down. If he could speak, he would have giggled and said, “Oh gosh.” He lay there, belly exposed for rubbing, little pecker out, and tail thumping. I said, “I’ll take him.”

Since he was a stray, I had to leave him at the pound for a few days to make sure his owner didn’t come and claim him. When I went back to pick him up, they told me they’d meet me out in the parking lot with him. I stood outside my truck excitedly waiting. All of a sudden I heard earth shattering yelping. “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” I thought, ut oh, don’t tell me that’s my dog. The animal control officer appeared from around the corner of the building dragging Motley in the dirt. He was scared and didn’t know how to walk on the leash. I ran over and picked him up. He immediately stopped howling.

I drove directly to the vet and got him a check-up and shots. When we got home, I had to carry him into the house even though he was pretty big already at maybe thirty or forty pounds. He didn’t know how to climb the stairs. He had been a stray and didn’t know anything about living with people but he liked being with us right away and padded behind me from room to room. Wherever I went, he quietly followed.

The next morning he was sick. Though I never had a dog with parvo before, I knew right away that’s what it was. I just knew. I brought him right back to the vet’s office and it was confirmed. We thought he was going to die then. Parvo is often a death sentence. But after a hospital stay, IV fluids and a lot of good care, he made it. We didn’t know how lucky we were. This dog was a gift from God. He did nothing wrong. Nothing. He had one accident in the house when we were housebreaking him and never peed in the house again. Even if he had to puke, he’d run to the door to do it outside. He was only a pup when we got him but he never chewed anything, never snuck up on the furniture, jumped on the door, or tore up the garbage; heck, you could leave a steak on the top of the garbage and he wouldn’t touch it.

I didn’t have to tie him up. He stayed right by my side wherever I went, trotting along when I did my chores. I went out, he came out with me. I went in the house, he came in the house with me. He never chased anything. Scratch that. He would chase critters out in the field but the minute I called him back, he’d slam on the brakes and turn around. Even if there was a bunny a few feet away, I’d say, “Motley…. No….” and you could tell he was thinking about it, he wanted that rabbit, oh man, he wanted that rabbit, but he wouldn’t do it. What dog does that?

Sometimes I’d be outside doing something, gardening say, and I’d look up and realize I haven’t seen Motley in a while. I’d stand up and look all around and if I still didn’t see him, I’d get nervous. I’d call him and if he didn’t come, I’d start whistling and screaming, “Motley! Motley!” Then all of a sudden I’d turn around and he was right there, standing quietly behind me the whole time. Just standing there. He never said a word.

He never went near the road so we didn’t have to put in the Invisible Fence we had planned to get. Didn’t even go in that direction because, simply, we told him no, and we could open the door and let him out by himself if it was too cold for us to join him and he’d come right back to the house when he was done going to the bathroom. One time we forgot him out there. He was so quiet, he didn’t let us know that he was ready to come back inside and we forgot him! I found him the next morning all curled up on the welcome mat patiently waiting for us. We cried, “Why didn’t you tell us Dopey?!” (Meaning, at least bark like a regular dog) and he wiggled all around us, happy we finally showed up.

He stopped at the door and waited for me to wipe his feet—actually lifted all four feet up for me, first the front ones, then the back ones. He didn’t jump on guests or on their cars when they came over. They’d get scared because he’d get so excited he’d go barreling out when someone arrived and they’d be like, “Whoa! Whoa!” and put their hands up. I’d say calmly, “Don’t worry, he won’t jump on you.” He’d stop short and stand there, tongue hanging out, tail wagging. He got along with the horses and followed us on rides around the property. He got along with the cats and babies and even the UPS man. Everyone loved him. We could leave him home alone and he wouldn’t do anything wrong and we could take him with us in the truck (Wanna go bye-byes?!) and we’d have to help him up unless he got a good running start because he wasn’t very athletic and he’d sit in the back seat and rest his head on the top of my head, drool, and watch the road.

He was so pretty, whenever we took him out, people stopped us and asked, “What kind of dog is that?” They thought he was some exotic purebred. We’d say, “He’s a Pittsylvania County Dog Pound Dog—this is what you can get when you save a life,” or if we were in a joking mood, we’d make something up. “He’s an Italian Shimalaya Tiger Dog.” They’d say, “Ooh, I never heard of that breed before!” We’d say, “It’s rare. This is the only one.”

When Kelly and I came home from the dog pound that day and told Kurt we picked one, he asked, “Can we return him if we don’t like him?” I said, “Kurt!” I was mad. He wasn’t going to give the new dog a chance because he was still thinking about our other dog who had died and who was a very good dog. But it wasn’t long before I overheard him in the other room talking baby talk to Motley and rubbing his chest. Motley would sit up on his haunches next to Kurt’s desk like a circus poodle waiting for a treat, this big 85 pound galumph, and Kurt would peck on the computer with one hand and rub Motley with the other hand and Motley would balance that way for as long as Kurt kept petting and cooing. Then he’d flop over.

I feel bad because a dog like this should live for a long time.

I also feel bad because he had no say in the matter; in his euthanasia. I had to make the decision for him. What would he have chosen? Animals live in the present. He was still wagging his tail. He wasn’t crying out in pain. But he was distressed. He was shaking, almost convulsing at times, and breathing heavy. His tail would start thumping if you went over to comfort him, but his shaking would actually get worse because his heart beat faster because he was excited we were petting him. I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack and in a way, I wished he would have a heart attack so I didn’t have to make the decision. But I could see it in his eyes, the way he looked at me beseechingly, and I knew what I had to do.

I think of euthanasia as the last gift we give our beloved pets. If you don’t use it until it’s too late, what is the point? Still, I felt like a traitor as I told him, “Good boy, good boy,” holding him on my lap, caressing his head, knowing he trusted me, as the doctor put the needle in.

I’d like to end this with one of my clever little reflections, circling back to the tractor perhaps, or something symbolic about the blanket, but I can’t. I can’t stop crying. Because he was the best dog ever.

A Heathen in the Parade

I’m pulling a float in the Halloween parade. I was just going to try to make it this year. Not make the float. Just get there this time. It’s something I’ve wanted to go to since I moved here—a small-town parade, my small-town parade, people waving flags, floats decorated with cobwebs and zombies, the high school band and horses with riders dressed as headless horsemen, marching down Main Street, past Bud’s store where you can still get Chiclets and Peanut Chews, the ice cream parlor, the firehouse, the feed store with the pigeon coop outside, the gas station that’s never opened and only takes cash, and a handful of antiques stores.

There used to be a beauty parlor but she moved out. That saved me because, though I liked her, especially since she had a horse, I didn’t like the way she was cutting my hair. I haven’t had a good haircut since my cousin Eric died twenty years ago. It was even worse when I was in Virginia and went to a place called Beulah’s House of Beauty, which was out in the middle of a cornfield and had a deer head mounted over the shampoo station, if that tells you anything.

Beauticians are funny. They’re like blacksmiths. You spend a lot of time with them and if you’ve got a halfway decent personality, you get a good bullshit session going. That’s how I wound up moving to Oklahoma in the first place. I blame it on the blacksmith. My beautician knew about it because she knew all the dirt on me including that I’m an ex-go-go dancer and one time I drank the holy water in church because Susan Donohue and I thought we could get to Heaven faster that way, but it wasn’t her. The blacksmith was the culprit. This was right around the time that the Internet came out. He just let it slip one day that his parents bought eighty acres in Virginia and it was dirt cheap. Eighty acres! You have to be rich to buy eighty acres in New Jersey! He told me to go look at a site called Realtor.com and that’s what we did right after supper that night (we were excited—only having an acre and three-quarters and four horses on it was tight, to put it mildly) and sure enough, he was right. Land was cheap down there. You could buy a few acres down there for the price of a haircut up here.

Right away we knew we were moving. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder if I would miss my family—we were forty-five minutes away, it wasn’t like you could just run over for a cup of coffee, what difference would a few states make?—or to worry about what we would do for work. I never had a problem getting a job before. The only reason I did that go-go dancing gig was for fun. (To be honest, I also bought a new car.) I actually had so many jobs that I won the award at my high school reunion for having the most jobs. They were colorful ones too. I was a dog catcher, a telephone operator, a donut maker, a groom at the racetrack, an editorial assistant; I worked in a health food store, furniture store, mental institution, and I sold vibrators to bored housewives at home demonstrations, kind of like Tupperware parties but dirty and funny... Anyway, you get the picture. Worrying about getting a job made as much sense as worrying I might tumble down a mountain in Nepal while on a hike. It just wasn’t in my reality. Plus, we thought it might be fun to open a tack shop.

But we weren’t going to be stupid and not look at any of the other forty-nine states in America. There were a lot to choose from! We ruled out all the cold states. We ruled out the states with expensive hay. The NFR was on. That gave us some ideas. The cowboys had cool names like Cord and Dusty and Blake. Sometimes the announcers did a little background story on them. They lived on big spreads with the ranch names over the gates—not just a little sign at the end of the driveway—wore cowboy hats even when they weren’t riding, and ate chili and chewed tobacco. Since we wanted to be cowboys, we thought it would be a good idea to move to one of those places where the cowboys were at. Texas and Oklahoma had the most entrants in the NFR, so we picked the one that was the cheapest—Oklahoma—and moved there.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know where Oklahoma was, much less that it was windy and there was nothing to do there except go to church and rodeos. I felt like we were in one of those late-night movies where the family breaks down out in the middle of nowhere but luckily there’s a motel up ahead. This family is really dumb so they are not rattled by the neon sign flickering, the tin can clattering across the parking lot, or the broken soda machine with the bloody handprint on it. The father says, “Hello? Hello?” and the children skip around to the backside of the building where red dirt and tumbleweeds blow, litter is all tangled up in the barbed wire fence, and there’s a fresh cigarette butt crushed on the ground but no one is in sight. You know how this movie ends.

We were out of there before the year was up. Moved in, put up a big sign over the gate at the end of the driveway—Smokin’ Bandits Ranch—unpacked, opened a tack shop, ate a bowl of chili, and then took the sign down, packed up, sold all the tack for half of what we paid, and hightailed it out of there.

Then we went to Virginia. This was where the blacksmith said to go in the first place. This was the place! Virginia was on the East coast. There would be more of a Jersey influence in Virginia. In Oklahoma we weren’t wanted. One time someone told us, “Go home you fucking Yankee,” when we complained about buying a set of bum tires. We didn’t even know we were Yankees until we moved there! The Yankees we knew was a baseball team. We were hurt. We were so excited when we bought those tires….

There would be more of our kind in Virginia. People moved down there from Jersey all the time. Look at the blacksmith’s parents! Plus they had old houses. Old houses with antebellum porches, farmhouses with metal roofs, Victorians and Greek Revivals and cabins and all the antiques to go with them. Right up my alley. And it was pretty. The rolling green hills and red barns and churches with steeples looked fake, they were so pretty.

But a number of factors came into play that made me realize almost right away that this wasn’t the place either, though it took us seven years before we finally gave up. Number one, we were Yankees there too. Number two, we moved next door to the Evils. Number three, there was nothing to do there either except go to church, and since we were broke—no one was hiring telephone operators, dog catchers, or donut makers, or buying flooring (I suspect it was our accents—they didn’t trust us—and then the economy crashed)—we couldn’t even afford to drive to the apple festival.

A couple of times I hitched a ride with one of my few friends to a writers’ thing, but even there, in a room full of big readers who you would think would have open-minds (and maybe they did, I was too scared to find out), I didn’t have fun. It was more of what Virginia is all about—church and old farmhouses, meaning Christian and historical fiction. There was no edgy stuff about bartenders named Chickie who has a Shel Silverstein poem tattooed on her back, eats a macrobiotic diet, and sleeps with the dishwasher when she has a bad night, like what I write about. So I was afraid to be myself. I never brought my good stuff to read. I edited myself too much when I was composing—I’m a heathen! How can I write this stuff?! I should be writing about Margaret Spoonacher who saved the Battle of Whatever when she deflected a bullet off the metal hoop in her skirt! Therefore, no fun.

You’ve got to be yourself if you want to have fun. You also have to be yourself and stand up for what you believe in, if you want to sleep at night. I didn’t like it that I was afraid to say something when someone referred to a black person as “colored,” like this was still 1960, or that I didn’t speak up when the local pastor called gays evil, or that I was scared to say what I really thought when my neighbor bragged about the little puppy mill she had going. Oh, they’re so cute, was all I could muster, feeling like a hypocrite. I didn’t want to rock the boat. Yankees have a bad reputation for moving south and then trying to change the way people do things. I didn’t want them to think I was doing that! I was even afraid of writing a letter-to-the-editor. What if they don’t like me? What if they don’t like what I say? They won’t buy flooring from us and they won’t invite Kelly to Krystal’s birthday party!

I probably would have died from a bleeding ulcer or loneliness if my mother didn’t get sick and make me want to go home. The ironic thing is, just like in The Wizard of Oz, everything I was looking for was right here. There was cheap land in South Jersey the whole time. It’s the country down here with rodeos and red barns and cornfields. There are churches, if you want, but you don’t have to have them, and there are even churches that not only welcome gay people, but don’t pull that “hate the sin, love the sinner” shit, churches that don’t believe there is anything at all wrong with being gay. I go to writers’ groups and apple festivals and Saturday is the Halloween parade and we have money to put gas in the tank so we can pull those goblins and zombies on a float covered with cobwebs.

I always read my stories out loud to Kurt before I put them on my blog. He said, “You’re going to publish that?” He was surprised because he knows that I have been worried about what people might think about me being an ex-go-go dancer. He, himself, doesn’t care. In fact, being a boy, he likes to brag about it. But I’ve always worried about it. Now I’m not. That is the point of the story. I am being myself and I like it. He said, “They’ll still be your friend here.” And then, “And if they’re not, fuck ‘em!” I feel safe here.

A Surrogate Grandfather

Charlie also sells gravel. He wears plaid flannel shirts and drives a red dump truck filled with gravel—pea gravel, ¾ stone, sand, whatever you want. If you want more than what fits in the dump truck like we did, he can order you a tri-axle load. Those are big trucks almost as long as a tractor trailer. We got two of them. No one had replenished any of the gravel in this driveway probably for as long as the initial gravel was put down when the driveway was first built and it was bare in the middle and had grass poking through like sprouts of hair on a bald head. When it rained, it got muddy. You couldn’t walk on it in a pair of high heels. Heck, you couldn’t walk on it in regular shoes either so forget it if you had to go anywhere and stay clean. You still can’t walk on it in high heels. Gravel is bumpy. Luckily I don’t wear heels too often but if I did, we made a path from the deck to where I park the truck out of 12 X 12 pink patio blocks and I tiptoe from one to the other like I’m playing hopscotch.

I had to shop around for the gravel. I was relieved that Charlie’s price was competitive because I really wanted to buy it from him. I prefer to buy things local, especially really local as in right next door, if at all possible. You should patronize the people where you live, if you want your community to be strong and healthy. It’s the reason why I try to buy American-made products but that is really hard nowadays since our politicians practically sold us to China.

I got a tablet for Christmas. I read books on it. I love it but I feel frustrated because there are things I can’t figure out how to do and the owner’s manual is impossible to understand. It’s in English but it may as well be in Chinese. It is full of typos, slang, bad translations, and the print is too small to read even with my glasses. This is what it says when I get out the magnifying glass:

“If you long time don’t to use this Tablet, ,in order to avoid power consumption caused damage,pls charge/play the battery once a month.”

This is why I still don’t know how to use the thing.

Luckily I don’t have to buy gravel from China. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens soon. We already get our hardwood flooring from China. Get this. We log the trees here. (Lots of logging was going on in Virginia. People who had fallen on hard times when the economy crashed were bulldozing their land left and right in a desperate attempt to try to keep their heads above water a little longer.) We send the trees on a long boat to China where they turn them into hardwood floors. Then China sends the flooring back to us where we sell it in Lowe’s. Why are we allowing China to produce our goods and sell it back to us when we need the jobs? I can’t imagine what it costs to ship something that far, that heavy—trees! It’s cheaper to send trees halfway around the world than to pay someone here, who needs a job, to turn them into floors? Or dressers. Or cabinets. All the stuff that we used to make that China makes now. Oh, that’s right, slave wages over there. And tax breaks. Corporate America needs to get just a little bit richer. Filthy, obscenely rich with not enough time in a thousand lifetimes to spend all the money, is not quite enough. Of course they’re eating themselves alive. If this keeps up, we’re going to be too poor to buy the hardwood floors they send back to us.

But I’m off-topic now.

Between the gravel and the vegetable-buying, Charlie and I have become friends. Kurt says if I can’t find a surrogate grandmother, maybe I can have a grandfather. All these years I’ve been looking for a grandmother to adopt, someone to bring a casserole to and sit on the porch and have a cup of coffee with and talk about the neighbors, the flowers, where to get mulch, gravel, things like that, like I used to do with my nana.

Pearl came close. I thought she was going to be it. But then she got scared letting us ride our horses around their fields because we’re Yankees—I suspect someone down at the church told her we were up to something—and they put up that fence. That hurt my feelings so bad it was like I had a crack in my heart. She realizes now how off track she was. We’re gone now and we didn’t do anything, we were nothing but a plus in that neighborhood, everything is safe and sound, we left everything exactly as we found it. No, scratch that. We left it better. We fixed up that house and we adopted the road and regularly picked up all the litter the Chick-fil-A lady and the chewer and the Old Milwaukee drinker threw out the window on their way home and we even cut the long grass in the ditches in front of the neighbors’ properties and changed Pearl’s light bulbs because we were worried about Eldon falling off the ladder. No, we were nothing but a great addition to that neighborhood and now they are all crying because we are gone.

It makes me kind of sad. I miss them too. But I’ve got Charlie now. I made him that sign that he has on the side of the road to sell his produce.

I noticed that he mowed the long grass around my mailbox the other day. I don’t know if he’s a coffee drinker. But he does know where to get gravel.

Not So Crazy

Before

After

There’s not a lot you can do if you hurt your back. You can’t ride the horses. Well, I could ride the horses if pain was my only concern. I can take pain if I’m motivated enough. I practically dropped my babies in a field when I was giving birth. Not really. But almost. It was at a birthing center. Not in a hospital. It was an actual house that had a kitchen with cupboards and a bedroom with a double bed and a chenille bedspread. There were only midwives. No doctors. I don’t think there was even a Tylenol in the medicine cabinet, never mind any kind of pain drugs.

I once had a colonoscopy while I was awake to save money. If you wanted to get put to sleep, you had to go to the hospital. But if you stayed awake, you could get it done in the doctor’s office and it was a lot cheaper. There was the nurse across the room, uncoiling what looked like a garden hose and passing it to the doctor who was on the other side and who was inserting it inside of me where I watched its travels on a little TV at the foot of the table. I saw the traces of lime green Jell-O in my colon which was my only meal in 24 hours. It looked fluorescent. Let’s put it this way. I haven’t eaten Jell-O since. And I’m not too fond of garden hoses.

If pain was the only factor, I’d be riding these horses. But I know that if the fractures are going to heal properly, I can’t use my back. Especially now that I am in menopause. Women lose bone density on a good day when they’re in menopause. We lose bone, we lose the ability to drop babies in birthing houses and hospitals, and we lose our car keys because we can’t think straight anymore. Sometimes we even lose our minds. You can ask any husband of a menopausal woman if she is still the girl he married or some pear-shaped woman he doesn’t recognize with her head in the freezer who he’s afraid might be searching for her gun in there.

Both my mother and my grandmother had osteoporosis but I’m pretty sure I don’t have it because I hit the ground hard and it was hard ground. It was like cement. Anyone would have broken bones. I think most people would have shattered like a teacup on a tile floor if they hit as hard as I did. So I think I have pretty good bones but I’m not so crazy that I don’t know that if I want to ride again, I have to let it heal.

Therefore I can’t open and close windows. They’re sticky.

This is a big problem in an old farmhouse with no air conditioning and thunderstorms blowing up in 60 seconds flat and then leaving just as fast. Open, close. Open, close. I have to call Kurt or Kelly. You use your back for everything! You don’t realize. Standing up from getting a pot out of the cabinet. Laundry baskets. Climbing in and out of the truck. Bags of groceries, even when they’re filled with cereal boxes and heads of lettuce. A gallon of milk. A pot of water from the sink to the stove. I can’t mow because it’s bumpy. I feel my back muscles strain when I lean down to tuck in the sheets around the bed. Of course there are all the things you expect that I can’t do anymore: emptying a bag of grain into the can, carrying a water bucket, lifting the saddle. Not that I was thinking of saddling up. But these things I was prepared for. I wasn’t prepared for not being able to put my socks on.

Kurt and Kelly help a lot but Kurt is working day and night and Kelly is working too, plus she has her kid things—4-H, FFA, barrel racing, practicing driving for her test, and of course the boyfriend. One of my neighbors asked me if that was Kelly outside painting the deck the other day. It was. She said every time she passes the house, she sees Kelly out there doing something—washing the trucks, digging a ditch in front of the barn, on the tractor, and now painting the deck. How much can I ask the kid to do?

They’re both helping me as much as they can but there’s still so much and I don’t like it when there are weeds in my petunias.

So I got out the weed-whacker. I am the weed-whacking queen and I thank god that at least I can do this because weed-whacking is one of my favorite things. You get a lot of bang for the buck with weed-whacking. When you are done, it really looks like you did something. It looks like you just got your hair cut or you baked a cake. First there’s nothing, then there’s something that you can’t help but notice. Unless, of course, you go to the girl who’s too afraid to take anything off because one time she gave Marion the Avon lady a bad haircut and that got all over town. You don’t think people are still buying Avon but they are. Down here that Skin-So-Soft is still a hot seller because we’ve got a mosquito problem. There’s only so much Deep Woods Off that you can use if you don’t want to worry about getting cancer or something. I can see using it once in a while but when you’re going out on the porch on a regular basis to smoke cigarettes and the mosquitoes are eating you alive, I go for the Skin-So-Soft. (Yes, I am aware of the contradiction of that statement.)

Back at the Amityville Horror House I weed-whacked continuously. I’d start on one end of the property and by the time I got to the other, I’d turn around and there’d be a jungle behind me and I’d have to start all over again. I can’t say weed-whacking there gave me any satisfaction. But I got a lot of experience. So I’m pretty handy with the thing. As long as Kurt starts it for me, I don’t have to use my back at all. I didn’t put the strap around my back, just held it with my arms, and stood straight. I should have done this years ago because stooping while weed-whacking with the strap around my back is probably what contributed to all the disc damage I’ve got. I was surprised at how well it worked—I wasn’t feeling any strain in my back at all. I felt it more when I was making the bed.

I weed-whacked the hell out of the place. I did around the house, the garden, the barn, the fences, the equipment that hasn’t moved in a year, the wood pile. I did all along the road; on both sides, even though one of the neighbors stopped by and said I didn’t have to do that. I let the head rest on the ground without shutting it off (because then I’d need Kurt to restart it), took off my goggles, removed my earplugs and said, “What was that?”

He said, “Let the public works guys do that. They’ll come around and mow.”

“Ah, thanks, but I kind of like doing it,” I said.

He looked at me like I was crazy. He doesn’t know me yet. He doesn’t know that I get colonoscopies while I’m awake. But I swear that I will not get on the horse.

Horse Crazy

Joke:

The doctor told my friend that if she didn’t stop riding horses, she was going to need a walker.

So she went out and got the Tennessee kind.

That joke, and all of the posts on a medical board by people who fractured their spines in accidents, a shocking number of them from falling off a horse, whose main concern was not whether they would need surgery, or even be in pain for the rest of their lives, and not whether, but when they could ride again, illustrates that we cowgirls are not just tough. Some might say we’re crazy. And perhaps they’d be right, because most of us don’t even wear helmets, never mind protective vests, when we climb onto the backs of thousand pound animals who are unpredictable at best, who really don’t want us there to begin with, no matter how much we like to think they love us, and then perform daredevil acts like race around barrels on said animal at forty miles per hour. That’s a little cra-cra if I do say so myself.

My father said for years that I was going to break my back. He said it like fathers of daughters who hang around with the wrong crowd say, “You are asking for trouble, young lady.” He said it like the mother on “A Christmas Story” said, “You’re gonna shoot your eye out.” I don’t know if he really believed it was going to happen. Not literally. I like to think he is amused by my dedication and passion, how I have to leave every family shindig early because I have to go home and feed the horses, how I have indents in my upper arms from the muscle even though I am 53-years-old, how I report the number of circles I’ve ridden and how heavy my horse was breathing. How I got back on the horse after I fell off that night.

That one through him for a loop. I said, “But Dad! You’re supposed to get back on when you fall off a horse! How was I supposed to know I was hurt that bad?”

He heard enough tales over the years—Kelly falling and getting dragged; a friend whose horse reared up and fell over backwards on top of her, causing her to get half her intestines removed; a friend who lost her ear (the whole ear—they had to scoop it up like a clamshell from the shavings on the floor) when a horse tried to scramble out of the trailer in a panic. He even saw me fall one time. But back then I was still bouncing. I got back on the horse and finished the race. I don’t think I even had a hair out of place, never mind a broken bone. In all honesty, I was kind of happy about it. It was a good story to tell. And then Shada slammed on the brakes and I went over her head and landed in a garbage can (true story) and she stood there looking at me like, what are you doing down there? She’s so good. She didn’t even run off!


I haven’t fallen lately. It’s because I’m very cautious and I don’t even get on my horse if he’s been sitting around for any length of time until I work him in the round pen a few times first. I’m talking I’ll work him for a week, knowing that I’m getting ready to blow off the cobwebs and start riding. Then when I finally get on, I’ll only walk. Another week. Then I’ll start picking up speed. Some nice easy jogs. Another week. I don’t know how long it takes me to lope the first circle.

People laugh at me. And that’s the problem. I succumbed to peer pressure. I heard people’s voices in my head (Kurt), Let him go! I heard snickering from the girl I’m always trying to catch. You know the one. She looks like you, she has a horse the caliber of yours, she’s all decked out, and she puts the pedal to the metal and beats you every time. (She wasn’t really snickering but she was there.) And so I ignored my normal mode of operandi and when I was coming out of the keyhole obstacle, I stood up in the stirrups and gave him his head. The rest is history.

Every time I ignore my gut and listen to someone else, I get into trouble. I might as well be the daughter who’s hanging around with the wrong crowd.

When I got my first pony when I was a teenager, it was what kept me from hanging around with the wrong crowd. While my girlfriends were smoking cigarettes and standing outside Evan’s Liquor store waiting for someone who would buy them a bottle of Boone’s Farm strawberry wine and kissing boys, I was on my pony. I got on that pony first thing in the morning and didn’t come home till it was dark. No saddle, a bridle that hung on by a thread, shorts, bare feet, and of course no helmet. Sometimes I had a stick to make him go because otherwise he wouldn’t. I’d meet the other girls in town who had ponies and we’d ride from Port Monmouth down to Highlands on the dirt trail where the railroad tracks used to be, parallel to Highway 36. We’d race, miles and miles, first one way, then the other, stopping every time we came to a street and then we’d hurry across. Click, click, click, click, click, went the ponies’ feet, then quiet, onto the soft dirt again. People in cars on the highway waved at us. Nowadays it’s a paved “nature trail” and the only running that goes on is by joggers in Spandex shorts and pink t-shirts that say something about breast cancer. I don’t know if anyone waves at them.

Seeing all those posters on the medical board wondering, not when they’d be able to walk again without a walker, but when they would be able to ride, made me think that this is not unlike the trouble the bad girls get into after all. It’s an addiction. They get addicted to drugs and alcohol, pills, piercings, abusive men. We’re addicted to horses. It is crazy. But at least I’m not guzzling Boone’s Farm strawberry wine.

Charlie's Garden

This is the first time I haven’t had a garden since I left New Jersey ten years ago. Even in Ferrum, where we were under attack by the Evils, I had a garden. How could I not? One of the previous owners had put in raised beds and a little picket fence with a gate. You could access it from the porch off the kitchen, handy when you needed another potato for dinner, and see it from the upstairs sleeping porch—square boxes, paths of yellow pebbles, a birdhouse with a copper roof on a post and a bee box in the corner. I sat on a green hickory rocking chair, as old as the house, a ceiling fan above me, an old metal clothesline pulley on one of the posts in front of me and looked down. That is when I wasn’t dodging bullets from the Evils’ direction. But that’s a whole other story.

I put in a garden here last spring; our first year here. It was a good spot and it was a bad spot. When you first move to a place, you never know how things are going to work out, what to put where, what to fix first, and if you need a barn or fencing, or the previous owner hasn’t left you a garden, you have to make a lot of decisions fast. You make these decisions before you’ve had a chance to settle in. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don’t. As time goes on, you tweak it. You move the pots and pans to the cabinet next to the stove. You repaint the bedroom wall. You find a better spot for the brush pile. Or in the case of permanent changes it’s too late to do anything about, you make a note, the next time you move, you won’t put the barn there, because it was too close to the house. Or not close enough.

I wasn’t even completely unpacked yet when I had to decide where to put the garden. I thought I picked a good spot. It was good because it was convenient, not far from the house, right next to the barn and hydrant. Close, but not in the way. But it was bad too because that part of the yard was in low spot. It would actually make a good volleyball court if I ever played volleyball again (I haven’t played since I was in high school thirty-five years ago but I keep thinking about it) because it’s a perfect square, surrounded by posts we put around the edges of the driveway to keep the gravel where it’s supposed to be; not spilling into the grass. It would also be a good spot to put a wicker chair and read a book under the mulberry tree. But the tree is right near the road and everyone would look at me when they drove by. They would say, “What is she out there reading again? Her husband is working like a dog and she’s reading a book!” I’d rather them see me pulling weeds and picking tomatoes so I crossed my fingers, hoped the low spot was not going to be a problem and I read my books on the deck where they can’t see me.

I did get tomatoes and zucchini but my peppers didn’t grow. This was the first time I planted something and nothing happened. To tell you the truth, I was shocked. Kelly’s boyfriend, who is a farmer, supplied me with plenty of bell peppers when mine failed, but that is not the point. Having a garden is not just about eating the delicious vegetables you’ve grown, but the magic of growing them. Plus, I can’t be dependent on Mario’s good will every time I want to make a salad.

I didn’t try again. What was I out of my mind, putting in a garden the first year I was here? It’s the second year now and we still have tons of work to do. There are still broken windows, stained carpet, and fences half falling down, tangled up in rusty barbed wire and poison ivy. That’s what you get when you buy a fixer-upper. Plus I can’t decide on a new spot.

Then it occurred to me. Why was I doing all that work when I had Charlie right next door? Charlie sells organic vegetables off a picnic table on the side of the road. He has all the important stuff—tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, corn, peppers and they are cheap. Even if my peppers had grown and could win prizes at the county fair, I was actually losing money, if you thought about it, if I didn’t get them from Charlie. It cost me more money to grow my own vegetables when you add up what it costs to buy the plants and the vegetable food and all the other stuff you need every year—it could be bone meal, new tomato cages, twine, gardening gloves because the old ones have holes in the fingers… And I’m not even including the cost of my labor! So why do all that work when Charlie was right next door and all I had to do was walk over? Not to mention the fact that I have a broken back. Which is the same reason I can’t put in a volleyball court. But I can read a book under the mulberry tree. I’ll just put a sign out there, “Not loafing while husband is at work. Back broken. Plus Charlie has corn.”

The Bull Rider

I’ve got a bull rider coming over here to pick up some rolls of carpet padding. I got all excited when I found out that’s what he did. I told him we were barrel racers. I should have told him I have a broken back from my horse bucking me off. That would have impressed him.

I just checked and he’s the one that won the bull riding Saturday night at Cowtown. Won five hundred-and-something dollars for eight seconds worth of work. Of course it takes more than that to get there. A lot more. He probably has a few broken bones himself.

Turns out, here in Woodstown, New Jersey (this is Jersey I’m talking about), I’m only ten minutes away from the longest continuous running rodeo in America. We even beat out Texas. Oklahoma had rodeos but everything was far. When parcels like my 110 acres out there were considered tiny, you can imagine that just driving over to your neighbor’s house two thousand acres away, is a trip, never mind going down 40 to one of the rodeos. A couple of times we went to Oklahoma City and Tulsa, but they were far. I always wanted to go to the prison rodeo in McAlester, but we moved before we got around to that. Still, it wasn’t as close as Cowtown is to me now. By all rights you can ride your pony over there if you wanted to. And I don’t think any of them ran continuously. Here, every Saturday night from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Cowtown Rodeo is hopping.

We got lucky when we got this place. Of course every place we house hunted there were horses because that’s what we were looking for—acreage. And when people have acreage, they stick horses on it. But I had no idea this was such a horse community. We not only have the rodeo, but we have a half dozen tack stores, feed stores, trainers, Traffic Supply, the ag center, the fairgrounds where the kids attend their 4-H meetings on horseback, and country-and-western bars where the adults blow off steam. Everyone has horses. Horses even pass by my house on their way to trail rides or the old golf course which is owned by the parks department and which you can ride on.

Truth be told, if I would have known all this was down here, I never would have left New Jersey in the first place. But I had no idea. I assumed that all the land was as expensive as it was in Jackson and when the idea came up to sell our place, take the equity and buy land out in the country, I didn’t even think about South Jersey. It didn’t even enter my head.

Kurt asked me how much padding the bull rider needed. I said, “Uh, I don’t know. But I can tell you that he won the bull riding Saturday night (not that he was bragging—I looked it up) and his name is Mike Adams.”

“Well, what’s he using it for?” he asked.

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“Did you answer the phone?”

“Well, duh. There’s no one else here, is there?”

“We’re in the carpet business and you don’t know how much padding this guy needs but you know he won the bull riding Saturday night?”

Obviously I’m a little more interested in rodeos than nylon berbers and polyester saxonies. One time we sold some carpet to the guy who wrote “Jaws.” Talking about the beach was a lot more fun too, though not as fun as when Max Weinberg’s wife came over to look at a horse. Granted, it wasn’t Bruce. But I did speak to Max himself when he called me on the phone to persuade me to let his wife buy the horse. This was a special horse. You know, the one you shouldn’t have sold. I was deciding between letting her buy him and another lady who was married to a surgeon and spent all her husband’s money rescuing animals. Even squirrels. She was in the market for another horse because all the others she bought to putt-putt around on her manicured property were the kind that break backs, if you get my drift. But she kept them. Once she got a horse, he had a home with her for life, even if he was a bucker or reared or kicked. So now she was on the search again for that perfect horse who this time was well trained and well behaved and would spend the rest of his days moseying down to the end of the driveway to get the mail and being fed apples. So I had to pick her. But it sure was exciting talking to Max.

The bull rider arrived with a fellow bull rider named Billy Love.

Turns out they only needed some padding to pad the cans he and the other bull riders practice on during the week while they’re waiting for the rodeo. He said the cans are hard. We gave him a roll of padding for free. Then I got them to sign Kelly’s hat. Kelly collects rodeo guys’ signatures. I know they thought it was for me. But it’s not. What do I look like some star-struck teenager? I mean, these boys could be my children. I don’t even think they were born by the time I was running my first set of barrels. I just wanted to support the community.

The pictures though. I’ve got to admit. They are mine. I just wish I would have gotten one of Mrs. Weinberg.