Shoelaces for Josie

It’s a perfect fit. My pinky rests comfortably on my hills and my thumb sits on the humid flatlands. No, not a perfect fit…just a fit. If it was perfect, the small tear that escapes the corner of my eye would not be trailing down my cheek. I wish I had bigger hands.

I weigh the pros and cons in my head. Tallying up a list, reworking it, rethinking it, rewriting it. Pro-con lists never work. So I have five items on one side and four on the other. It means nothing, because each item weighs something different – effectively giving the side with four items an equal chance of winning the pot as the side with five items and completely destroying any mathematical chance of reaching a solution.

And so I try to decipher which will bring me happiness. Happiness? Who needs to be happy, really. It’s an antiquated concept of the 50s poodle skirts and the 70s pot smokers. Maybe instead we should focus on finding a place that hurts the least instead of a place that brings the most happiness.

Here? Or there?

But I’m going to give ‘er a good ole jolly go, and today? The seven things Christmas means to me. The seven things I always remember around Christmas. The seven things that will likely be with me until the day I step both feet into my grave. They’re in no particular order. Well kind of. But not really. Only just a little.

7. Old ladies singing Christmas hymns in their wobbly, old-lady voices. Off-key. Loudly. And out of rhythm. They can’t hold “Gloooooooooria” near as well as they used to. We all know it. The neighboring communities in a three county radius know it. It’s just that – well – no one has ever told them that.

6. Over the hills and through the woods…Grandma’s house! My grandparents lived in a red house with white shutters on a dead-end road. They had a horseshoe drive, a wood-burning furnace and a pair of great couches that you could sink into and never come out of. Actually, that’s just because they were really old. I think they still have them. If Grandpa hadn’t been a rancher, he would have made a really great banker.

5. Lights. Sometimes, if we were really lucky, we would get to drive around our town at night and look at all the Christmas lights. I dearly loved that. Our little town did a bang-up job on Christmas lights. So much so that they held bus tours, and the out-of-towners would all come in and see the sights. Last Thanksgiving, my trip to an obscure little Montana town was highlighted by the fact that the town didn’t use street lamps to illuminate the walkways…just Christmas lights. I guess I still dearly love them.

4. Pouring cows. Moving cows. Chasing cows. Dad had six kids for a reason. Slave labor! Christmas break was always spent with the cattle. Sometimes even on the holidays, we’d be working cows. I can still remember freezing my toes off in the icy blast of an Iowa winter wind. Those were the days when we’d throw a corral up, pen off six or eight, pour them, shuttle them back out to the pasture and run in six or eight more. Wait…I just realized why I’m short. I was frozen as a child! The cold stunted my growth!

3. Turkey. Ham. Duck. Rabbit. One year we even had goose, I think. But never beef. We ate beef 363 days of the year. Christmas dinner was for something special. Mashed potatoes and homemade noodles and mom’s red, white and green Christmas salad. It was Jell-O with whipped cream, but man did it look cool. Rolls, sweet potatoes (It wasn’t until I moved to Washington that I discovered sweet potatoes actually could be good.) and stuffing. Ooo, and pie. I love pie. Pie is my favorite. If I could – well, no – I wouldn’t marry pie, but I bet I’d date it for eight years.

2. It’s A Wonderful Life. So it’s from the 1940s. So there’s some ridiculous movie called Elf that gets played on the television all the time. So Jimmy Stewart isn’t supposed to be a favorite actor of someone my age. Well he is. And I don’t like the movie Elf. And the Frisbee was invented in the 1940s. It was a very legitimate decade. There’s just something about George Bailey telling old man Potter off that makes me happy. “You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn’t, Mr. Potter. In the whole vast configuration of things, I’d say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider.”

When he gets into school, I’ll scold him for coming home with a black eye and then enroll him in boxing class. Maybe I’ll even let him take martial arts classes so he can be just like Chuck Norris. But I won’t let him have a punching bag in his bedroom, only one of those practice dummies. Or his brother Mooner if I accidentally screw up and have a second real human kid.

As junior high hits and he enters that whole “I hate my momma” stage, I’ll dump him out of my truck when he mouths off and make him walk three miles in the snow to get to the ranch. If I live on a ranch. If not, then I’ll dump him three miles outside of some stranger’s ranch, tell him to hoof it there and exchange some good old-fashioned hard work for room and board. But only for three days, because even if I don’t live on a ranch, there’s lots of good old-fashioned hard work he can do in exchange for room and board at my house. But I’ll be living on a ranch, so it’s not like I’ll be one of those extremely cruel parents who turns her kid out to depend on the mercy of strangers.

When he gets into high school and starts to talk about football and dating girls and drinking booze, I’ll tell him to shut his face because my answer won’t be any different than when he was whining about the same things in junior high. And then I’ll tell him yes to the girls, but only when he turns 16 and on the strict condition that no hookers are allowed. The football still gets vetoed, because with a name like Sundance, he’s going to have to do more than play football to prove his manliness. I’ll tell him he can wrestle steers out on the range instead. And then I’ll tell him that if he really wants booze, he can have a beer out of the fridge. He’s going to get his hands on it anyway, and I think future-momma-me would rather he didn’t ask some meth addict outside of the five-and-dime to pick him up a case. Partly because meth addicts are scary but mostly because Sundance would probably give him a $20 and a case of beer is only $15.99 – $13.99 if you get in on a really good sale.

The other ones though? I can handle them. Daddy-long-legs aren’t spiders to me. They’re just daddy-long-legs. And other types of small spider species I can handle squishing the guts out of. Which is why I found myself perched precariously on top of the table, green-striped sock peeking out from under my jeans with shoe in hand to swoop in for the kill.

I’d been prepared to let the little guy dart about the ceiling all he wanted. Not because I was having a rare “save the spiders” moment but simply because I didn’t feel the effort necessary to put a notch on my spider-killing gun was worth it. Office Woman had other ideas, however, and demanded I kill it on the grounds that I weighed less so it was safer for me to climb on the table to do the deed.

So I did. Arm outstretched. Shoe poised. Smash…SmasH…SMASH! And can you believe it? The sucker darn near fell down my neck. I hopped back with a rather girly and somewhat embarrassing shriek, forgetting I was on top of a table and almost toppled to the floor. I’m not sure how I would have explained that to Big Boss if I would have had to turn in a broken neck on workman’s comp…

I did not fall, however, because I have super awesome balancing skills (also known as massive arm windmilling and heaving forward in a most ungraceful manner to maintain the table-top position). Ultimately the spider died at the hands of my shoe…rather the feet of my shoe…? And I have added another duty to my office position, and I’ve kindly asked them to term it “Spider Slayer”.

I remember one of the first times I really earned my Grandpa’s respect. I was helping him and Grandma round up their cows over at Bethesda. Cows that can only be described as..wild?…yes, wild. Why it was only us three, I do not know, but we chased them around and around and finally, we’d just gotten them to the gate and they were starting to mill around and getting ready to make another break for freedom. I could see them getting ready to try and gun for the openings, and I got so absolutely ticked off that I exploded all over the place. I’m talking total fireworks. I was yelling and screaming bloody murder and running around and banging my whip on the ground and in their faces…and I won. They went through the gate. Cows: 800,000 Redhead: 1…but it was the 1 point that counted, man.

That was totally irrelevant, by the way.

Where was I? Oh yes, things always going wrong and people getting hurt and just general chaos erupting whenever Grandpa was on the scene. I particularly remember one day when we must have been working cows (weird, I know) and Brother and I were setting up a corral. It was a day that Grandpa was *helping* us. Things were tense, we were in a hurry, the cattle weren’t cooperating – so a typical day. Brother and I were carrying corral panels and one of them dropped smackdab on my foot. I yelped in pain and remember whining some such plaintiff to Brother, “You…person! That was my foot, and it freakin’ hurt!”

His response? “Yeah, well, we’re working with Grandpa. Getting hurt always happens when you work with him.”

He was right. He had no sympathy for my bum foot, and why should he? I’m sure he’d been hurt a bazillion times too.

These days, it’s wheat harvest and pea harvest and garb harvest. I just returned from the south-central valley of the state where pea harvest is more done than not and the combines are rolling through the wheat. I nearly drove off the road three times on the way back home yesterday and only one of those times was because I nearly fell asleep.

I don’t really know how to describe what harvest means to me – a sense of accomplishment, I suppose, even though I no longer run on a harvest crew. There’s something so calming and beautiful and right in harvesting for me. It’s the culmination of a year’s worth of work, decisions, prayers. It’s preparation for the winter to come and cashing in on the annual payday.

I’m being glass half full about harvest here. I’m aware, well aware, of how harvest rolls for those on the crew. It’s long, long days followed by another continuous string of long, long days. It’s hard, dirty work, fuses run short, things go wrong and, sometimes, a person begins to wonder why they didn’t go into accounting or the coffee business or retail.