Brazen Coons, Runaway Cows, & Substandard Ducks

There are many classic country memories - the smell of beeswax at the old country store, bidding at the stock auction, and checking out the latest tractors at the local Agway. There are many other memories - lesser known and a bit more unique.

Some mornings I’d lie in bed a while, listening to the sound of cattle & pork futures blaring on my parents’ radio. It was our redneck Wall Street stock ticker, prices fluttering up and down ever so slightly. Some mornings, though, I awoke to the sound of my dad’s shotgun. He’d be at his bedroom window, firing at the raccoons in the cornfield.

“I’m just scaring them,” he’d say as I watched him pull up his pajama bottoms. Dad had a habit of wearing clothes well after the elastic had given up the ghost, to the point that the cloth was shiny and nearly sheer. He’d fire a shot, pull up his droopy drawers, then fire again, never missing a beat.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna hit them,” he’d say as I stared at the spectacle. Since I never found a dead raccoon in the cornfield, I left it at that. But I sure wished he’d spring for new pajamas.

Sometimes we wouldn’t get to sleep all the way to the radio. Once in a while, in the middle of the night, the phone would ring. It would be a neighbor calling to tell us our cows were out again, munching their way through his garden. They had to be fetched back home, so at the sound of the telephone, everyone would automatically pile out of bed, into their clothes and wearily head down the road to be zombie cattle wranglers. Mercifully the cows only escaped in the summer, when the smell of the Thompson’s alfalfa down the road was too tempting to resist.

In the days just prior to a ‘jailbreak,’ I’d often catch the cows ‘working’ the fence line, literally climbing up the fence and pushing on it, trying to find the weakest spot. I lectured them about this, but they never listened. They kept on with their wicked ways, going for destructive, moonlit strolls until we came and got them. Some folks had uncles or brothers they’d retrieve from the local bar at 1 am. We had Midnight, Cindy, Sonny, and a few other rowdy, roaming cows.

“Get your furry butts home right this minute!” I’d hiss at them. I prayed this didn’t get back to my friends at school. While the town girls were probably out on dates, I was half-dressed and frumpy, standing in a field, arguing with a bovine gatecrasher.

“What’s it worth to you?” Midnight would inquire smugly. She was the leader, the shop steward of the cows. It was 1 am, and she was arguing with me.

“Get your butt home now,” I’d sigh, “Or I’ll tie you by the tulips.”

We often chained the cows to trees on the front lawn so they could eat the grass. We’d end up with large ‘mowed’ circles, complete with cowpies, and unmowed areas in between. It was an attention-grabbing look. Instead of crop circles, we had ‘crap circles.’ There was a flower bed in one area that contained mostly tulips, and I knew Midnight couldn’t stand them. She despised them, actually, not even daring to step on them, and eating all the grass neatly around them. We liked to put her there because she did such a good job, but I knew she hated it.

“Fine,” Midnight huffed, flicking her tail and sticking her tongue up her nose as she turned toward home. “I wasn’t that hungry anyway.”

Somehow word got out about my cattle wrangling skills (I blame my sister), and I was offered a job at the Dutchess County Fair. Not just any job, mind you, but a job in the baby animal tent. It was my first real employment, and being a cow-whisperer, I took it very seriously. Besides the usual feeding and pen-maintenance, I was saddled with the task of teaching baby ducks to walk up a ramp, grab a bite of food, then slide down the slide. This would be easy if baby ducks came equipped with at least the tiniest hint of a brain stem. I could push them up that ramp all day, but unless I crammed food right down their throats, they weren’t getting it. Suddenly the cows looked smart.

Early visitors to our tent did not get to witness cute, quacking ducklings waddling happily up a ramp and sliding down a slide. Instead, they were treated to a puppet show. I was the puppeteer, having my right hand shoved neatly up a baby duck’s butt, ‘walking’ it up the ramp, where my left hand would force feed some meal down its gullet as the right hand flicked it down the slick slide. The baby duck would choke a bit on its dinner as it tumbled down into the water, hopefully landing right side up. I’d wear a big smile and exclaim how cute the ducklings were as I shoved my right hand up the next duck’s butt. I’m sure quite a few of those ducks are still in therapy.

The Fair was a huge deal, almost the biggest fair in New York State. What made it so big was that it was within commuting distance of New York City. So every year, our little town was inundated with city folk intent on having a good old country time. Whether they stepped on us in the process didn’t matter – they were going to spend a day in the country admiring the local kitsch, littering, and stomping on our every word with the most bizarre accent. My parents still had a Brooklyn accent, but it was nowhere near as raucous and brazen as these urban interlopers. I was stunned. It seemed, also, that many of these urbanites were missing a key filter between their brain and their mouth. Every little thing that came out of their brain went directly out their mouth, with no processing whatsoever, much like the primitive digestive tract of a tapeworm. Suddenly the cows looked smart.

Eventually I had ‘puppeteered’ enough duck butts that the mere sight of me was enough to send the birds squawking up the ramp. One of my favorite activities was to watch the look on the city people when they noticed the effect I had on the animals. They’d stand there, jabbering away, their accents sawing at words like dull chainsaws. I’d stare at them. Once I had their attention, I’d motion to the ducklings. This was their cue to run up the ramp and do their thing. Then I’d watch the city slickers’ jaws drop. I’d give them the ‘you’re next’ look, and they’d skitter away, speechless.

Drivin' Me Crazy

Finally I was old enough to drive a legitimate vehicle on a legitimate road. After years of riding tractors, dirt bikes, horses, cows, and dune buggies, this was guaranteed to be a cakewalk. Just the idea of having a seatbelt, a roof, and a real road made it seem so sissy-fied.

Our grandmother, Nana, had a simple automatic two-door sedan. It was a Gremlin, as ugly as a Scotsman’s backside, but an easy car to drive. There were a few other advantages to having Nana as a driving teacher - Nana’s eyesight was fading, so she was oblivious to near misses. If something happened, she’d have to rely on my version of the story. She liked to have a glass or two of wine, which always helps one relax prior to a crash. The best part was that this would get her away from all those bundt cakes she insisted on baking. We were all quite sick of eating her damn bundt cakes.

But I had forgotten something. Having Nana teach me would be the easiest way to learn. However, the easy way was not the Irish way. Oh, nooooo. Instead, we would take a cherished, high-strung sports car, put a nervous rookie behind the wheel, and add a trigger-happy father next to her barking instructions. And just for kicks, we did it all uphill.

Dad had splurged a bit on a mid-life crisis in the form of a horrifically fussy, stick-shift sports car, a Volkswagen Scirocco. I knew about shifting from driving the farm trucks, but Dad’s Scirocco was a whole ‘nuther story. It was literally like going from a plow horse to a race horse.

I’ve met prom queens less temperamental than this car. If you didn’t engage the clutch at exactly the right time, while the moon was in alignment with Mercury, it would not only stall, it would shudder hard enough to slam your face into the steering wheel eight times, then stall.

Dad drove until he got to a big hill. Then he turned off the ignition, set the emergency brake, and got out of his beloved dream car. We switched seats.

On one side was a hay field, on the other a cemetery. He figured I couldn’t kill anyone if I went off the road there.

“Drive,” he said.

I turned the key. “Ca-chunk,” replied the car, slapping me into the steering wheel. Dad always left the car in gear. Oops. I pushed in on the clutch and held it down as I tried the ignition again. The car was now purring. Or growling, depending on your point of view.

I eased carefully off the clutch. RrrrrrrRRRrrr. A rumble, a stutter, then nothing.

“Ca-chunk,” the car sent my head smacking into the steering wheel.

“Emergency brake,” Dad growled through locked teeth. We both needed a beer. The car needed a shot of Jack Daniels. I took the emergency brake off. We rolled backward. I started again, this time from negative 5 miles per hour.

After several clutch-grinding, head-slapping attempts, I eventually got the car into first gear. It leaped and lurched up the hill like a rabid mountain goat on Red Bull.

“Second gear,” Dad held the dash at arms length to keep from smacking into it again. Another gear? Damn!

“Wwwwwhiiiiiiiine!” the car sputtered but reluctantly accepted the shift. Trees zoomed past. A squirrel ran for its life.

Thump–bucka-bucka-bucka! Gravel hit the undercarriage as we caromed off the road and across a ditch. I aimed us back toward blacktop, but the car spun on the soft sod. We missed the cemetery fence and the Traver family headstone. Thank goodness Mr. Marquardt had opted for one of those low, flat, grave markers. The rough, textured top helped us regain our traction. We came back from the dead and headed toward pavement.

“Third gear,” Dad was now grinding his teeth. More gears AND keeping all four tires on blacktop - this multi-tasking was becoming a real pain in the ass. We were back on the road but quickly running out of hill.

“Wwwwwhiiiiiiiine!” the car fishtailed a bit as I shifted, then roared forward, gobbling up the rest of the hill.

At the crest was St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. Established in 1760, to my knowledge it had never been hit by a car. Several huge maple trees held vigil, protecting it from vehicular attack. We threaded the maple tree needle and rapidly approached the church’s red front doors.

“Stop!” said Dad. I hit the brake with my right foot, the clutch with my left, and spun the steering wheel hard to the left. I figured if one of those moves would help, all three just might save us.

The car hooked left, popping a sideways wheelie, the left-side tires heading heavenward for a moment as the church steps loomed perilously close to the passenger-side door. I looked over, or down, at my dad as gravel skittered across the church patio. The car righted itself and rolled forward slowly. I peered into the rear view to see if any witnesses made it out alive.

“Look, Dad, I made a happy face!” There behind us, on the front lawn of St. Paul’s, was a big skiddy grin, complete with two eyes where the left-side tires had come back to earth.

We switched seats.

“Drive,” Nana said.

I put the unsightly Gremlin in gear and motored evenly down our sleepy, level road.

“You know, doing this for you, I won’t have time to bake your favorite bundt cake today,” Nana grumbled. “I hope you appreciate that.”

“Ca-chunk!” I thought to myself.

"Prom" is a Four Letter Word

Dad (shoved through my bedroom doorway by Mom): You know about the birds and the bees, right?

Me: Dad, we live on a farm.

Dad: Right…ok, guess we’re done!

As a teenager, it was sometimes necessary to step away from the barn and re-enter civilization. This was not something I looked forward to. In fact, I avoided it at all costs.

Flashback to my 16th birthday. A huge gift box. I open it and out spills a puff of red and white lace and chiffon. "What is it?" I ask. I was hoping for a new saddle blanket. This was not a saddle blanket.

"It's a dress," my mother replies excitedly and slowly, as if she were a missionary explaining Christianity to the great unwashed. I wear jeans and flannel shirts. Nothing against dresses, but they tend to get caught in the double clutch on the tractor.

"A what?" I ask, searching desperately for the receipt.

"A PROM dress," she clarifies right before I pass out. I had never even gone on a date. I had been asked out a few times, but since I never knew what to say, I usually just stared back or walked away. That did not go over well, and pretty soon guys quit asking. Now I had a big, stupid, fluffy dress from of all places, that ultra-vogue icon of fashion – Sears, and a mother fully expecting me to grow breasts and social skills in three months. Cupid, shoot me now.

On an even playing field, I might have had a chance. But it was far from a fair battle. I was completely unprepared to match girly wits with the town princesses. For years they had been painting their nails, tweezing their eyebrows, sharpening their flirtation skills, studying Tiger Beat, and generally obsessing about the opposite sex. Meanwhile I was shoveling chicken poo and teaching my horse how to not kill me.

A new boy had just moved to our town. At a small school like ours, where each grade averaged about a hundred people, a new classmate was big news. The even bigger news was that Bernie O’Callaghan was adorable, probably the best looking guy in our class. All the townie girls were abuzz and atwitter, eyelashes fluttering wildly, twirling their hair, snapping their gum, filing their nails, and generally making fools of themselves. I was my usual oblivious bookworm self.

Part of what made Bernie so adorable was his tendency to ignore the rules. He was not concerned about the supreme high school directive of never asking anyone out who got better grades than you. He could care less about grades, including his own. He could care less about what others thought. He was an impish Irish scalawag of the highest, or perhaps lowest, order.

Many of the top social butterflies were waiting for Bernie to ask one of them to the prom. They were, in fact, already fighting over him. Then the strange part happened. A friend of mine found out that Bernie was interested in, of all people, me. Once she recovered from the shock, she cornered me and insisted on becoming my “social coach.” She was tired of watching guys wilt in my gaze, and my insistence on spinsterhood as a career choice. So she staged an intervention.

Some of the townie girls were quite upset by the way things eventually turned out, and my friend still fears retribution, so I’ve agreed to conceal her identity. We’ll just refer to her as “Deep Prom.”

Deep Prom: You know that new boy, Bernie?

Me: Yeah.

Deep Prom: He likes you.

Me: Huh. That’s weird.

Deep Prom: He wants to ask you out to the Prom.

Me: W-what?

Deep Prom: First, though, you gotta tweeze your eyebrows.

Me: W-what?

I was clueless, more concerned with our upcoming standardized tests. Usually I’d continue to be clueless, but this time I had my mother to answer to. My mother and that big, stupid, fluffy Sears dress. So "Deep Prom" set up a meeting. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Bernie: What are you doing Friday night?

Me: Nothing. Why?

Bernie: Would you like to go to the prom with me?

Me: Ok. But why don’t we go on Saturday night like everyone else?

Bernie: Sounds like a plan.

Bernie didn’t even blink. He wasn’t aware of my tendency to reduce guys to limpid puddles by staring at them. As it turned out, he stared right back. In a bizarre quirk of nature, I had a feisty, hunky date and a dress. I was terrified.

In the name of style, we women do hurtful things to ourselves. Hair removal is right up there on the owie chart with high heels and chronic insecurity. But Deep Prom was right –my eyebrows needed a mowing. Wow, did that hurt. Now I understood why the townie girls were a bit skitter-headed. Beauty was downright painful.

I made a serious effort to get rid of my farmer’s tan and do something with my wild Irish hair. The real difference came when I put on makeup. Suddenly I had eyelashes, cheekbones, and the potential to make some townie girls cry. We were truly making a silk purse out of a sow’s caretaker.

Prom night was wonderful, even if the butterflies in my stomach did most of the dancing. A few of the town princesses, in their battle for the supreme dress, had ended up in the fashion nightmare of wearing the exact same dress. I believe the style was from Neiman Marcus in New York City. By the time they were done tearing each other apart, though, the dresses were quite different from each other, bearing various rips, slashes, and scratches, a bizarre yet compelling process of customization. My Sears dress, with its red velvet roses on white chiffon, held up just fine. So did Bernie.

I then returned to my studies.

Country Cookin'

To many, the term country cookin’ conjures up visions of barbequed squirrel, home-baked pie, and deep-fried whatnot. This was certainly not in our case in our house. Dad had a full-time job, plus the farm, plus a side job land-surveying. Mom had us four kids, a herd of cows, several horses, four dogs, a cat or two, a few hundred chickens, the land-surveying business, a snoopy mother-in-law, a house the size of a small European country, and my dad. When in the world was there time to bake pie?

On The Andy Griffith Show, Aunt Bee was constantly scuttling about the kitchen baking, roasting, or frying something. She was always dressed just so, everything ironed and in its place, even her double chin. That needy voice of hers bothered me, and Andy’s awkward bachelor lifestyle seemed suspicious, but that’s another story. I love home-made pie just as much as the next person, but no pie, no matter how tasty, is worth that amount of dysfunctional whining. Hand them each a bottle of Jack Daniels and just let them rip at each other once and for all. I’d watch that episode twice.

I’m sure somewhere there’s a country matriarch bustling about the stove daily, fussing over seven-course meals, but she’s either got an Easybake Oven, plastic teacups, and a teddy bear, or she’s baking fluffy cloud cakes for her roommates in the local psychiatric hospital. On a realistic, working farm, they would’ve hauled her outside, slapped a baseball cap on her, and had her stack hay bales in the barn for three hours. If she felt like stirring and spicing after that, go for it. Bye-bye, double-chin. Bye-bye, whine.

While Aunt Bee didn’t live on a farm, television watchers (aka city dwellers) were given the impression that all country folk do is sit around and bake peach cobbler. On our farm, Aunt Bee would have serious biceps, wear coveralls, and tell Opie to “cowboy up.”

Because of shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction, the lifestyle of the rural gourmet has been grossly misconstrued. Let’s take a look at some of the key differences:

• There’s no one person dedicated to cooking. In fact, the person who made dinner was most likely just lifting bales next to you in the hayfield. In other words, do not expect homemade pie for dessert.
  
  
• You will be expected to help. Yes, you just stacked two hundred and fifty bales of hay. Wash your hands and set the table.



• No sparkling clean kitchen here, unless you’re eating outside and it just rained. Table scraps roll downhill, and the dogs keep the floor relatively clean. Good enough until winter comes and we have time for some deep cleaning. (The coziest work in the winter is near the wood stove in the kitchen.)



• The pet you scratched behind the ear last week might now be on your plate. And he might taste pretty good. Horrible thought, right? I had trouble with that one, too. Until I tasted the chicken. It was really good.
  

This marked my introduction to what some call feminism. It was more like country common sense equality. If you could do it, then do it. If you couldn’t, you’d learn. The tractor didn’t care whether you were packing a trouser snake. Get it in gear and get the hay in, please.

On the flip side, the boys were expected to clean up and help with food and laundry. They didn’t care for it too much. So that was fun to watch.

In high school, girls took Home Economics and boys took Shop. I questioned that logic, mentioning it in passing to the principal one day. Sure enough, the next year everyone took Home Economics and Shop. While I made a few enemies that year, it was quite by accident - I never expected the principal to actually listen. I couldn’t wait to get to the real world and make some real changes. Just lasso a few flying pigs and make the world a better place. Piece of cake. Or pie.

The pizza run –
One of my favorite splurges was every Sunday night when we’d order pizza. Since we were far beyond the delivery area, we had to go fetch it. I enjoyed bringing it home, trying to get back quickly so the pizza was still nice and hot. Since there was no direct route between our house and the pizza joint, I was, for the sake of hot pizza, compelled to barrel down twisting country roads. This was as close to running moonshine as I would ever get, so I took full advantage of it. There were no police cars watching for speeding pizza runners, however, deer liked to jump out of nowhere. Swerving to avoid a deer does very bad things to pizza cheese. I’d race home in record time, only to open the pizza box to discover that the lateral g forces had had a severe, negative impact on the mozzarella. In the middle of the box, there’d be a tomatoed circle of dough. A large, frightened pile of cheese would be plastered to one side of the box. Still hot, of course.

Daddy tried -
Beyond the basic hot dogs, hamburgers, and pizza we consumed, my dad did have some interesting culinary experiments. Most dads take pride in their barbeque skills. This was BBBQ – beyond barbeque. Every once in a while he’d find an irregular recipe for cooking up homemade oddities. They always started with tremendous potential and somehow took a wrong turn. For instance:

· One year we had an over abundance of tomatoes, so he decided to make tomato sauce. Or maybe it was ketchup. Not sure which one it was supposed to be. I only knew that it was inedible. Later we discovered that our ‘Big Boy’ tomatoes weren’t the right type for canning or pickling or torturing or whatever Dad was doing to them. All I remember is staring at row upon row of mason jars full of tomato seeds, skin, pulp, and vinegar, worrying about when I’d be forced to consume their contents. Or whether the tortured tomatoes would evolve, escape, and consume me.

· Apple sauce takes lots of cooking in a big pressure cooker. If the pressure isn’t monitored and goes too high, pressure cooker parts fly in all directions, and boiling hot apple sauce follows the parts. We learned that.

· Homemade root beer was his next attempt. Absolutely flat. Not much is sadder than getting a whiff of the sweet scent of real root beer, only to be repulsed by a lack of bubbles. I wanted to find out who was giving my dad such a nutty do-it-yourself idea and knock him flat.

· The home-brewed apple cider never went flat. It did, however, distill a bit too long, eventually turning into rather potent applejack. We had to carefully remove it from the crawlspace under the house, first venting the area to release the methanol that had built up down there. I was hoping we could at least feed it to the livestock and watch them stumble around. Not much is funnier than a drunken cow slurring her words. I would be reminded of this again much later when I attended my first sorority party.

Big Red

In rural areas, city rules are bent, tweaked and twisted until they resemble country roads. Things that make sense in urban areas simply don’t apply out here. We intend to keep it that way, for good reason.

For instance, regardless of age, every able body works. If you can drive, that adds a tool to your toolbox. Suddenly you can run equipment down to the hayfield or deliver lunch to Dad when he’s cutting down trees in the back woods. Farm work tends to mature kids a bit earlier, so waiting until sixteen to learn how to drive seems just plain silly. Especially when you’re the oldest kid – Mom and Dad have been running all the errands and are anxious to put you behind the wheel. A very dented and rickety wheel, but a wheel nonetheless.

For town kids, your 16th birthday is usually the momentous day upon which your parents hire a professional company to whisk you away and teach you how to drive. The perilous, stressful business of learning to drive is administered by trained, well-medicated instructors in a well-padded, sterile environment. Mom and Dad throw some money at the issue, then go duck and cover.

In the country, there are tons of vehicles and animals upon which to practice your driving skills. After trying to get an ornery two-year-old horse to stop, finding the brakes on a car is child’s play. Your horse has already taught you a basic rule - you mess up stopping on a horse, and you will soon be sporting stitches or worse. Ye olde simple country rule – mistake=pain.

When I was about twelve, I was given an all-terrain vehicle. It was pink, had six moon tires, a massive roll bar, an earsplitting engine, and was named Maxx. It could go through nearly anything, including deep mud, water, and snowdrifts, even taking on steep hills. The butterfly choke didn’t work very well - in order to start it, you had to lean way back across the engine, putting your hand over the intake so your hand was literally the choke. Unfortunately, you had to lean directly over the exposed battery terminals, so if your arm was a bit too low and made a connection, a nasty shock would run from your elbow to your hand, now covered in fuel. That would happen only once, then you’d be more careful.

At first glance, this sounded like great fun. The only thing is, we used it more for work than anything else. Although I will admit, once you got past the chance of getting your arm shocked, being able to drive a pink ATV around was a thrill. If you ever want to keep your brothers from borrowing something of yours, get it in pink.

My first truly scary driving experience was on an International Harvester tractor. Dad let me drive “Big Red” because he said I couldn’t kill it no matter how hard I tried. It had a double-clutch that ignored my puny weight, so in order to shift, I had to jam both feet on the clutch, grip the steering wheel, and push down on the clutch with all my abdominal might. Then shift.

One day I was driving Big Red in a hayfield, nearly a full load on the hay wagon behind me, with Mom on the back stacking the bales. We were headed downhill and suddenly the old tractor’s brakes took a break. Big Red wouldn’t stop, and we were quickly running out of field. I peered back at the hay wagon, flexing and bending behind me faster and faster as we picked up speed. The bales swooped and swayed, threatening to fall off, possibly taking my mom with them. I knew she’d survive to kill me later. I yelled to her but she couldn’t hear me, probably because she was yelling at me. I tried turning Red slightly to the right, hoping to miss the trees and swamp, all the while pumping the brakes.

Tractor accidents usually look pretty ridiculous, rarely getting the respect and awe due, say, a NASCAR crash. They often occur at very low speed, with sad, silly, predictable results. A silo gets wiped out, a tractor rolls over seemingly in slow-motion to take a nap, or simply plows through an old barn as the driver bails out to safety. They’re usually more embarrassing than anything else. Especially for a young driver not weighty enough to compel the brakes to work.

Big Red lurched to the right. A few bales flew off the left side. I stood up on the cranky clutch and stomped, downshifting to slow the tractor. It was not happy, stuttering and growling, but Red did slow a bit, enough for me to turn it away from the fast-approaching trees. Eventually we rolled to a stop. I crawled off and hyper-ventilated on the ground, watching bales tumble down the hill past me.

“Are you gonna sit there all day? Let’s get this hay picked up.” Mom was apparently just fine.

Later on, when blood returned to my head, I mentioned the faulty brakes.

“Don’t be silly,” Mom said. “Your father’s never had that problem. You just need to try harder.”

The following week, Dad was hauling a full load of hay back to the barn. He was negotiating a narrow, tricky, back road when Big Red’s brakes disappeared again. The whole rig ended up jackknifed, one rear tire on the hay wagon hanging over a cliff.

The nice thing about being a grown-up is that you can send the kids home, call a friend with a big tow truck, and quietly fix your messes without anyone the wiser. And you don’t even have to try harder.

Country C-c-c-cold

Eskimos have about 30 different words for snow. So do New Yorkers, but most of them can't be printed here. On January 20th, 1961 in Poughkeepsie, NY, it was 30 degrees below zero. That day, in Washington, D.C., in a blizzard, John F. Kennedy was sworn into the office of the Presidency. He did not wear a hat and got very sick. I know this because throughout my childhood my mother mentioned it repeatedly, like it was a storm strong enough to make a President ill, especially an Irish one not smart enough to wear a hat. Seemed a mixed metaphor to me. She had several points to make, all conflicting. Hurrah, we had an Irish President, but he was still a man with rocks for brains for not dressing warmly.

Mom: Put a hat on. It’s freezing out. Don’t catch a cold like Kennedy.

Me: That was stupid of him, huh.

Mom: Are you disrespecting the greatest President of the United States?

Me: Didn’t you just say he was dumb for not wearing a hat?

Mom: And now you’re putting words of disrespect in my mouth?

In upstate New York, three feet of snow was on the ground, with more coming down. Even the blanket of snow was shivering. I had been due to be born at Christmas. It’s common knowledge that children born at Christmas time get ripped off in the birthday department. Jesus owns it and nobody’s upstaging him. Plus, in honor of my untimely timing, my mother was going to name me "Holly." I figured I’d lay low and be born in time for the after Christmas sales. Only thing was, it was bitter cold outside, so I kept hitting the snooze alarm.

By late January, however, my mother had had enough. 10 months pregnant, she decided to induce labor by shoveling snow in the driveway. In hindsight, this would have worked better if she had shoveled the hospital driveway, and if Poughkeepsie had not been a solid chunk of ice. In hindsight, this would have worked better if it were August. But we were Irish, so we were determined to give birth a month late, in a snowstorm, uphill, and sideways.

Despite most roads being impassable, the car not starting, and John F. Kennedy’s nose running, we somehow made it to the hospital, up the elevator and almost to the delivery room. Almost. In fact, when the doctor told my dad he was now a father, he denied it. “That’s impossible,” he argued. “I just got here.” He was a bit peeved that he wasn't able to pace the waiting room like the dads in the movies.

I've been trying to warm up to him ever since.

In Brooklyn, much of the cold and wind is deflected by your neighbor’s home, built within inches either next to, under, or on top of, your home. Buildings are so close you can hear your neighbor’s sneeze, perhaps even feel his moist breeze. There are many drawbacks, but one bonus of living wall-to-wall with other people is that you are never really chilly. Plant a spacious, airy house on top of a ridge in the middle of nowhere, however, and you’ll freeze your agrarian tail off. A lovely view, yes, if you make it to spring.

Winter’s like the fierce beast at the zoo – it’s great, but only when you have some serious fortification between you and it. On our windowpanes, frost would create the most magical little ice sketches. Tiny, delicate white scrollwork wending its way around the edges of the glass, the engravings were daintier than those on the finest crystal. The only problem was that they were on the inside of our windows. I thought I might wake up one morning, tattooed all over in the loveliest ice etchings.

To conserve energy, lesser-used parts of the house, like the den, were closed off. But the rooms got so cold, pipes in the baseboard heating system burst because they had frozen, flooding part of the house. Sadly, this ruined some of the best window ice engravings.

For my birthday, I’d invite some friends over for a sledding party. We’d have some birthday cake then head outside. Only as parents in the northern realm are well aware, in winter little kids can’t simply head outside. They need boots and hats and snowpants and mittens and help putting all that stuff on. They need staff. By the time my mother had finished dressing the last of the party girls and sent her out, the first one was back in for dry mittens and cocoa. It was a revolving door – warm dry ones out, and cold wet ones in. For three straight hours, Mom was hunched over putting on and taking off mittens and boots and hats on little girls. A dog wandered by, and Mom inadvertently dressed it in a parka.

One of the toughest things was getting up in the morning. Heating oil was expensive, possibly even more expensive than the treatment for frostbite, so the heat was turned off at night, or down as low as possible without risking a burst pipe. First one up (that would be me) had to build a fire in the kitchen woodstove. And before we went to school, the cows and horses had to be fed. Some mornings were so cold I half expected some of the livestock to be waiting for me in the kitchen:

Midnight the Cow: About time you got up. Get the fire going!

Me: How did you get in here?

Midnight the Cow: Door was unlocked, once I busted all the ice off it. You take milk in your coffee?

Me: Gimme my robe back.

There is no better heat than that of a wood stove. It soaks into your skin like tropical sunlight, baking chilled bones and thawing attitudes. My usual stance was leaning against a wall reading a book, my back to the stove so the heat would melt the ice in my spine. I usually had to negotiate my way past several dogs and maneuver for the warmest spot. Lady, our Dalmatian/Beagle mix, was the biggest fan of the stove. If you happened to be in her favorite spot, she would often lean on you until you moved. We took extra care not to feed her potent leftovers, since the only thing worse than a dog fart is a dog fart on fire.

Brother Bob: What is that smell?

Me: I don’t sm-(gasp!) Oh, my! That’s horrible!

Bob: Did you put something weird in the stove again?

Me: No!

Bob: Smells like something died…or is dying…

Me: Lady!

Lady had been leaning against the woodstove. That was fine when the stove wasn’t fully loaded, but I had recently restocked it with wood, and I guess she slept through that key event, until the stove got going and the scent of her own pelt cooking woke her up. Now Lady was sporting a long, brown racing stripe the length of her body, looking like someone had made a feeble attempt to ‘connect the spots’ on her fur. It was the imprint of the stove – she had literally burned a line on her fur. Being half Dalmatian, the stereotypical firedog, she was quite embarrassed, and asked that we not make this event public, lest her mother find out. I assured her that dogs can’t read. At least not Dalmatians.

There were good sides to winter. We would ice skate on the pond in the back woods. It was a mile hike each way, and the pond usually had to be cleared of snow first, and fallen logs frozen in the ice made the skating interesting, but at least we got to skate. I likened it to climbing Everest - bust your butt to get there, take a picture, then go home.

Down the road, we’d gather a few friends and play pond hockey at a nearby farm. There was an added level of excitement because this particular pond had a spring at one end that never quite froze over completely. Sometimes we’d hear a monstrous craaaa-aack! and feel the ice drop beneath our feet. We’d leap for the nearest bank, feet flailing in the air like spastic, bubble-wrapped ballerinas, afraid to touch the ice again lest it give way completely beneath us.

One particularly spectacular experience was sledding down the driveway. Dad had his own snowplow, and instead of scraping all the snow off the driveway like a sane person, he packed it down like a bobsled run, even banking the turn nicely for the toboggans. We would all climb onto sleds and fly down the drive, dogs nipping at our mittens.

Dogs love mittens, especially when stolen off a sledding kid at 15 miles an hour. We’d zip down the hill, belly side down, hands on the sled handles to steer. The dogs would race next to us, growling, barking, teeth flashing, trying to swipe a glove or a hat. If you fought to keep your glove, you’d lose control of the sled and crash, often becoming a speed bump for the sledders behind you.

Brother Bob: Dog on your left!

Me: What? Car?

Bob: No – DOG!

Lady the Dog: Grrrrr…woof! (snap!)

Me: Mayday, mayday! I’m under attack!

Bob: Give her the glove! Give her the glove! Let it go!

Me: I’m going down! Aaaaagh!

I tuck my head as my body slams into a snowbank, missed by inches by oncoming sledders. My sled continues down the drive without me.

Sometimes it’s best to forsake the mitten to the beast, even if it means catching a cold like Kennedy.

Ow, Christmas Tree

My grandmother was proud of her fake tree. Feathery white aluminum with blue ornaments, I secretly giggled that it was a Hanukkah bush. I never said so because she had a nasty left hook. Each year she'd retrieve this faux ode-to-joy from under the house. Since she never took the ornaments off, and since it was a whopping 30 inches tall, all Nana had to do was whip its trash bag cover off, plunk the thing down in her living room, plop down in her recliner and sigh, "Merry ding-dong Christmas. Now fetch me some Kichels and rub my feet." I looked on in horror, not just at the thought of touching her feet, but at the idea that Christmas could be so grossly disrespected.

Shiny silver trees were probably quite stylish back in the city, where everything was chrome and quick. However, out in the country, things were a bit different. Chopping down our own Christmas tree had been a tradition in our family since I was knee-high to a pine cone. We kids would have an early breakfast and head out at sunrise, hiking through the pastures, northward to a pine forest, carrying rope, a hacksaw, and lunch. The rope was for tying up my youngest brother and dragging him through the snow when he got whiny. The hacksaw came in handy at lunchtime, trying to digest whatever Mom had made for us. To be honest, we couldn't tell if it was stale since by then it was frozen solid.

I remember singing Christmas songs, mostly to make sure the hunters didn't mistake us for deer. If I sang just right, kinda nasally, it would vibrate my nose and heat it. Early on I had learned not to rub my nose to warm it up. In low temperatures, the tiny hairs inside the nasal passage often froze, so if you rubbed your nose, you'd send icy needles into the sensitive lining of your sinuses. The blood would then drip onto your jacket and Mom would be furious.

It would take all morning just to reach the pine forest, longer if we heard a wolf or bobcat. After lunch we would choose a tree to bring home. This took a while because there were four of us, and in our short, frozen lives we had never agreed on anything. Eventually the boys would pick a really tall tree, maybe thirty to forty feet high. Since I was the oldest, it was my job to climb up and lop off the top of the tree with the hacksaw. Taking just the top of the massive tree made my sister happy, since we weren't really killing the tree, just maiming it. The tree would later die of bug infestation brought on by the decapitation, but again, she would point out, we didn't kill it – the bugs did. (She's now an attorney.) My brothers loved making me climb the thirty or so feet in the air to trim the tree. Try as I might, I was never quite able to hit them with the tree as it fell.

It was then time to tow the vegetative carcass home. We'd take turns pulling it with the rope, back through the woods, even through a small stream. In a Norman Rockwell painting, this is all so very quaint and rustic. In reality, it was, like many family traditions, a royal pain in the ass.

On the long haul back, one of us kids would start whining how we didn’t need a live tree, why we couldn’t do something like Nana and have a measly fake one. This was high treason, or considering the situation, ‘tree-shun.’ I would argue tradition, but truly, at that point, freezing, exhausted, I was in the minority. At least the arguing kept us warm until we got home.

Surprised and a bit taken aback to see all four of us alive and intact, ourparents would welcome us home before retiring for the night. Tradition held that we couldn't eat until the tree was up in the living room. Unfortunately, upon arriving at our house, the tree would somehow grow a foot or two wider, too wide for the doorway. We would push, shove and cram the beast until we had shredded the entryway and cracked enough branches to make the poor tree look like the cows came home right over the top of it.
Some years there was no snow, and the tree would become caked with mud, leaves, and whatever else we ran over. This could be a real problem when we went through the cow pasture. We'd get home a little after sundown, and the lack of daylight made it especially hard to spot any unusual attachments before the tree was inside the house. After getting it upright and tied to the curtain rod, we would notice an unusual odor. Cowpie ornaments don't do well in the heat of a living room, but at this point, we were too exhausted to take the whole thing back outside. Instead, we’d knock off the big nasty chunks, spray some Lysol, and call it a day. Most people turn the least attractive part of the tree toward a wall. We did, too, and it was usually the side sporting bits of cowpie.

Some of the ornaments we weren’t allowed to handle until we were much older. They were antiques, carefully handed down from the time of the Depression. Dark, worn, and fragile, for years I thought we kids weren't allowed to touch them because you could catch 'depression' from them. Why we put them on our tree I had no idea. Perhaps, I reasoned, to appease the gods of depression. I wondered how the ornaments felt, making it through decades of strife, poverty, and difficult times, only to be placed in a ragged pine tree right next to cattle droppings.

As I sat there listening to my brothers argue whether the tree was standing up straight or not, I'd get to thinking how I couldn't wait to have my own kids so I could share this family tradition with them. Whether they liked it or not.

Santa Unwrapped

One Christmas Eve, just as my teddy bear and I were toddling off to visions of sugarplums (whatever the hell those are), Dad took me aside.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Is this about the birds and the bees?” I asked.

“No!” he stammered. “No. It’s about Santa.”

“Is he ok?”

“Yes, he’s fine. Well, no, actually, he’s not.” Dad sighed. “He doesn’t exist. Your mother and I have been um, covering for him all these years.”

It figured. If the pizza man wouldn’t even deliver to us, why should Santa? But I was finally in on the secret. It was quite the letdown, finding out Santa’s true identity. On the bright side, it was a relief to know a jolly, corpulent stranger couldn’t actually waltz into our house any time he wanted.

I had always expected the dogs to nail Santa, cornering him before he could make it back to the chimney, or at least ripping a chunk out of his gaudy red suit. Their lack of diligence had worried me. At least now there was a logical explanation.

“Now that you know,” Dad sighed, “Get down to the basement and start wrapping.” I soon discovered why he had told me at such a young age, and why elves are so short with everyone - gift-giving can be a real pain in the ass. Even with four kids and a limited budget, my parents still went all out, buying us toy upon toy upon toy. As a result, I suddenly found myself toiling in a dank, dark bunker, wrapping eleventy little bundles of retail joy for my brothers and sister. I had just been introduced to the ugly, sweaty underbelly of Santa.

It was confusing, knowing how strict our parents were, yet how generous Santa seemed to be. Why be so ornery all year long and then pile on the toys? Looking back, I would have traded several candy canes in December for a few kind words in August. Eventually this keepsake family tradition would be better explained to me in my college psychology class, in the chapter on parental guilt.

As my back began to throb from wrapping, my parent’s crankiness became more understandable. Until recently they had been handling all this toy business by themselves. Now they had little me to help in their dirty work, and I quickly reached the point that if I saw one more Chatty Cathy doll, I would decapitate it.

It was especially weird wrapping anything for me. The next morning, I was expected to be surprised and joyous at such remarkable gifts, when all I really wanted for Christmas were some painkillers and a hot shower. Yes, I was growing up. And seriously considering converting to a religion that involved a bit less manual labor.

No wonder Santa used elves – they never grew big enough to overtake him. And at the North Pole, there was no way for them to escape without dying of exposure. The big guy sure knew what he was doing. But with all those high-pitched, whiny voices and a serious lack of quality entertainment before satellite television, I don’t know how he made it through the year without bountiful amounts of Scotch.

Beads of sweat soaked my bunny-suit pajamas as I lugged sleds, a doll house, several bikes, forty-seven damn dolls, even a cannon, from their hiding places in the basement. Sweat poured from my body because our traditional Christmas Bonfire to Roast Santa’s Ass was heating the house to nearly ninety degrees. My back ached from wrapping such a huge pile of guilt gifts. Suddenly this holiday wasn’t so jolly. More than a cheery wee elf, I resembled a clammy, muttering troll.

In a few hours, my littlest brother would be screaming at me to wake up, bringing the dogs in with him to jump on the bed and pound on my still-suffering muscles. I was tempted to use my newfound powers of x-ray vision to tell him what each of his presents were, but I figured since Santa no longer had my back, I was pushing my luck with my parents. They not only knew if I’d been bad or good, they wouldn’t wait until next Christmas to smack me for it.

It was a few years before I got any assistance in my elfin basement dungeon. My brother, Tom, was only a year younger, so I expected his help the following year. But apparently since I was doing such a terrific job on my own, my parents neglected to share the Santa-less truth with him. I soon realized that if I didn’t settle down, I’d be curling ribbon and gilding boxes solo until my siblings left for college.

For years after that, when my siblings would write their Christmas lists, I’d pray they’d ask for nothing heavy. Instead of bikes and large mechanical contraptions, I’d extol the virtues of stock options and cash. They never did catch on. Or it could be that they knew exactly what was happening, and enjoyed putting me through Noel hell.

Years later, I looked back at our weird traditions. Our tilting, teetering tree, cut and dragged from our back woods, with most of the ornaments hanging within three feet of the ground, since that’s how far up we little ones could reach. We’d bunch up wads of silver ‘icicles’ and launch them at the top of the tree, creating piles of wrinkled silver dangling in oddish garlands. And every time our mom regaled us with one of her Santa Isn’t Coming This Year scream-athons, I had Bing Crosby crooning It’s Beginning to Look a lot like Christmas in my head. An odd song-association, yes, but part of my own personal holiday tradition carved from hours in our holiday basement sweatshop. I wasn’t real keen on hauling so many toys from the bowels of our house, but if that’s how our parents showed their love, so be it.

Besides, picture-perfect holidays are always suspect – it’s like that one flawless house on the street, with the housewife wearing a smile stretched so taut across her face you expect her teeth to implode. We're quietly aware that all her emotional baggage is crammed tightly into one closet. Open that closet door and bam! Emo-armageddon.

Having a bit of goofiness in the preparation comforts me, since I’m far from perfect myself. I figure if flaws are allowed to wander about like cattle, they will be less likely to build up in a closet somewhere and stampede through our lives unexpectedly.

Besides, the first Christmas was a mess, too – no vacancies, hay everywhere, guests arriving days late, and snoring farm animals. Never mind the gifting headaches - what could you possibly get someone whose father is God? Did you even bother wrapping it? I mean, he probably knew what you were going to get him before you did.

When viewed from a distance across decades, most old, family traditions seem quaint. But for a moment, put yourself in Mary’s place – nine months pregnant, riding a donkey, married to a guy who didn’t even have the presence of mind to call ahead to reserve a room. I’m pretty sure Mary uttered a few words too spicy for the Bible. But she got through and everyone’s happy for that. (For the second kid, though, I'm sure she did things way differently.)

Many of our own Christmas traditions were probably nerve-wracking or simply stupid, but we made it through, and now we can all sigh and think of them as quaint. So odd little traditions don’t bother me so much anymore. Mostly because they’re in the past, and I now have access to Santa’s best Scotch.

When we get obsessed with the stereotypical postcard Christmas, straining to make our holidays faultless, we’re basically guaranteed to be in a foul mood by Boxing Day. The real Christmas is not tidy packages under a perfect tree, a silent night, a shiny home. It’s getting an emotional handle on the holidays, a firm grip on love in whatever odd form it may take, and holding on for dear life. Because before we know it, we’ll have New Years and Valentine’s Day staring us in the face. And from what I had just discovered about Santa, I figured the Easter Bunny wasn’t gonna be much help.

Mom's Recipe for a Traditional Holiday Meltdown

As kids, we never doubted there was a Santa. We did, however, worry that he might not make it past our parents. For some reason they were both out to get the chubby guy in the weird suit.

Dad created the lovely tradition of a Christmas Eve Bonfire for Santa. Right before bedtime he'd build the most glorious blaze in the fireplace, flames leaping and licking the top of the firepit. "Let's make it nice and warm for the fat man," he'd chuckle as he brought in more firewood, his eyes glowing red by the light of the inferno. Helpless to intervene in Santa's roasting, we kids would gloomily head off to bed, hoping against hope that Saint Nick's suit was fireproof.

But compared to our mom's traditions, Dad's meddling was child's play. In the month before Christmas, as the big day approached, Mom's temper would get shorter and shorter, and the vein on the side of her forehead would get bigger and bigger, like some sort of bizarre Advent calendar. Day by day, her desperate grip on sanity would tighten into a deadly stranglehold. She would bark orders quicker than ever, her sharp, practiced tongue clipping the ends of her words off almost before they left her mouth. I would stare, transfixed, at the vein as it popped and bobbled in time to her protestations. That may explain why I didn't hear much of what she said. The coronary traffic jam on her temple was much more interesting.

Sometimes she got so mad at us she couldn't even tell us what we did wrong. The anger would boil up in her face to the point she was speechless, and we’d stare, blinking and clueless. If we ran, we’d be cut down in our tracks. Stay and we risked mental annihilation. It was almost amusing, seeing her so mad that she nearly forgot why. But we dared not smirk, lest we found ourselves assigned to some hideous task like cleaning the chicken house, or scrubbing toilets, or the worst – scrubbing the chickens’ toilets.

Suddenly she’d remember what had piqued her anger, catch her breath, and launch into a tirade, sparks spitting from her mouth. Dogs would dive for cover, birds would make a beeline south, and we kids would scramble for an alibi or excuse or dark corner, all desperately seeking safe haven from the storm.

I figured the thought of a chubby, cheery guy dropping in uninvited, tramping soot and reindeer poo through her living room, and probably raiding the fridge must have really made Mom nuts. After all, she already had Dad for that.

About a week before the big day, as the four of us kids re-enacted our traditional holiday squabbling, she would finally come unglued. "That’s it! Santa’s NOT coming to this house this year!!!" At first we were terrified. Santa always brought the best toys. Without him, all we had were bunny-suit pajamas from Nana and educational tedium from Mom and Dad. We would do everything in our power to placate Mom, petrified that the big guy would pass us by.

Then one year we figured it out. My brother had recently given the cat a bb-gun enema. We thought for sure he'd get coal or worse. Instead, Santa brought him more ammunition. My sister had spent the entire fall semester staring oddly at classmates just to creep them out, and when Christmas rolled around, she got twenty-three dollies with stares just as creepy as hers.

I called a sibling meeting and shared my suspicions. We graphed our naughty vs. nice annuities, and compared it to our gift receivables. The truth was out – good or bad, you could set your watch by the fat man. Mom must have simply been jealous that Santa gave us cooler toys, and she was conniving enough to garner a couple weeks of household peace by pretending she could stop him from coming. The knowledge that she was bluffing was kid gold.

Still, it was scary to defy her. The first year after we knew, we at least pretended to be good. But we no longer quivered in our beds, sweating the daily errors of our ways. To be on the safe side, we carried on the family ritual of superficial fear and cordiality. When Mom raised the traditional holiday roof, we struggled to look scared, but we had found an inner peace knowing Santa didn’t listen to her. Her bombastic tirades were now merely a harmless holiday habit, much like fruitcake, only louder.

Santa made it every year without fail. Even Dad’s attempts to roast him didn’t shake us anymore. We knew the big guy would never let us down, except once, when my little brother asked for new parents. But that was probably because he forgot to say 'please.'

Country Pumpkins

For a kid in the country, life can at times be lonely, especially at Halloween, when your lack of human contact translates directly into dismal candy poundage. Trick or treat all you want with the cows - they don't hand out tootsie rolls. Most of them don't, anyway.

The kids in town had it easy - they'd walk from door to door, scoring a Hershey bar or pixie stick every 8 seconds. They’d haul in enough sugar to last until Easter. But in the country, Halloween was, sadly, a non-profit industry. With the houses so few and far between, there was simply no way to accumulate a decent amount of candy, even with a parent driving you around. We still went through the routine, out of a ridiculous sense of ritual, although many traditions were altered a bit, for survival's sake.

The first tradition to tweak was the costume. Creativity was worthless- there was little reason to make or buy a fancy costume if you were just going to bury it under a parka anyway. We looked like lurching balls of yarn. If someone asked me what I was for Halloween, I'd reply, "I am cold!" That usually shut them up, and sometimes they'd even throw in some 'pity' candy.

Neighbor Lady: Oh, my – what are you dressed up as?

Me: I'm the tooth fairy, ok? Got any chocolate?

Neighbor Lady: Your pretty costume is all covered up by your jacket.

Me: Could we move this along, please? I’d love to stand here in the sleet and chat, but I can’t feel my toes.

The focus was instead on survival. Your costume would consist of as many layers as possible, for several reasons:

1. warmth – in upstate New York, sub-freezing temperatures in October were routine. We often had snow on the ground. Try wearing a Tinkerbell outfit and battling frostbite at the same time. My Aunt Marge did it once, but she had a huge jug of Gallo wine.

2. anonymity – with a ski cap pulled low across my brow, a scarf across my face, and a Sears polyester bubble-wrap parka pouffing out my torso like the Michelin Man, I was basically encased in an arctic burkha. No one would know it was me taking my little sister trick-or-treating, so no hassle at school for that. That wasn't me - that must've been her handler from the zoo. Humiliation could hurt as much as frostbite.

Plus, bundled up like that, I could murmur naughty invectives at people because they couldn’t tell what I was saying, my words muffled much like the linguistically challenged who burble at us via speakers at fast-food drive-throughs. Behind a Montgomery Wards ski mask and several layers of scarves, a cheery "F**k you!" was often mistaken for a "Thank you!"

3. protection - many dogs liked to play "Pull the mitten off the kid and make her drop her candy." Usually they'd settle for a glove or a hat, giving us a chance to escape. We kept extra, expendable clothes in the car to share with the next mutt we ran into.

However, nothing, nothing could deter Farmer Hornbeck’s guard goose. It was fast, loud, and frightening - honking, flapping and charging at us full throttle, wings akimbo and utterly outraged. It was quite adept at pulling off mitten after mitten, then going after your ankles. We kept candy corn in our hands to distract it, throwing the candy for it to eat in order to buy some time to reach the safety of our car. You knew if it attacked your ankles, you were going down. Then you were doomed, because no one would dare venture out of the car to save you. You had to lie still in the cold mud, hands about your face for protection, and wait for it to stop pecking at you and waddle away.

Neighbor Lady: Oh, my, look at you, all covered in mud – what are you dressed up as?

Me: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, ok? Got any chocolate?

Neighbor Lady: You should be more careful, dear. You got your pretty costume all dirty.

Me: Could we move this along, please? I’d love to stand here in the sleet and chat, but I can’t feel my freakin’ toes.

All this for a tootsie roll, or, heaven forbid, if the people were anti-sugar, a tiny bag of carrots or a toothbrush. At least Charlie Brown got rocks. You could do some damage with those.

While Mom drove us door to door, Dad stayed home and scared the living daylights out of any visitors. Actually, he did that every day, but Halloween was special.

Dad would put sheets over the small trees that lined the driveway, turning them into ghosts, but not really fooling anyone. The yard looked more like a redneck clothesline than a herd of spooky ghosts. I wanted to put a few cows in the front yard, paint them red and put duct tape on them – now that would be frightening, or at least be abstract art that could potentially win us government funding. But I guess that was tweaking tradition a bit too far, so we settled for Dad’s lame tree ghosts to spook any trick-or-treaters wandering our way.

What our Halloween visitors didn't realize was that one of the tree ghosts was actually not a tree at all, but rather my dad, under a sheet, pretending to be a tree ghost. They would drive slowly up our driveway, looking at our fierce horde of tree ghosts, exclaiming how they were soooo unscary, ha-ha, when suddenly one of the tree ghosts, usually Dad, would leap at their car. Everyone in the car would scream, wet their pants, and try not to drive off the cliff.

Did I mention the cliff? We lived on a ridge, and the driveway was shaped like a fishhook, angling across a huge front yard, the downhill side of it dropping off steeply. In daylight, the drive alone was enough to scare people away. Add darkness and a freaky dad-tree-ghost to the mix, and visitors simply never came back.

While Dad was busy 'greeting' people at home, we would trudge from farmhouse to farmhouse, braving fierce dogs, spooky cats, and creepy people, just to get a sticky, clumped popcorn ball that would immediately begin to suck lint from our clothing. My little sister often sat on hers, gluing herself to the car seat. At the next stop she'd realize she was stuck and squeal "Help meeeee!" I'd have to yank on her, hard, to release her from the firm grip of the sticky ball. Often the two of us would fly out the car door into the dirt, whatever goodies we had gathered spilling out into the darkness, our arctic padding saving us from injury. Mixed blessing actually, since I got to pull really hard on her arms, on the pretext of 'helping' her out of the car, and not get in trouble for it.

My sister once literally disappeared. She had been walking behind me, half a popcorn ball still stuck to her bottom, screeching just to keep warm, "Wait uuuuup! Wait uuuuup! Wait uuuuup!" when bloop! Gone. Nothing but serene, peaceful quiet.

Three miles down the road Mom noticed how quiet it was, realized Chatty Kathy was missing, and made me go back and find her. Turns out little sister had missed a step on a narrow walkway and had been swallowed up by a snowy ditch. The only thing that saved her from falling further into an icy crevasse was the sticky popcorn ball on her butt. It had caught in a crack and stuck, much like an ice axe would dig into the snow, saving its hiker from plummeting down Mount Everest. After sorting through her candy and discussing my fee, I pulled her out and we trudged on.

Because there were no streetlights, quite often it was incredibly dark. Pitch black, blanket-across-your-face dark. Sometimes we were lucky enough that the full moon was out, shining on the snow, so we could see our fingers shaking and be reminded how freaking cold we were.

By this time, if we could gather enough strength, we would start fighting in the car, and, if we were lucky, Mom would 'punish' us by turning the car around and going home. Then we'd eat all the candy left over from the people who didn’t visit our house anymore because my Dad had frightened them away. Why we ever left the farm is beyond me. Tree ghosts had much more fun.

Plague of the Tourists

Every fall they came, just to stare at leaves. And shoot deer. When you live alongside nature, it’s hard to understand: one - why people travel so far to see it, and two - why they want to kill it. I’m speaking, specifically, of the he-tourist hunters and she-tourist leafers from New York City.

Maybe we only saw one side of the situation. Perhaps there was someone in New York City who needed a break from these obnoxious people and said, “Here’s a gun. Why don’t you go upstate and wander in the woods awhile? Maybe we’ll both get lucky. Oh, and take the missus. She can stare at trees and annoy the locals.”

We lived near enough to the city that we were inundated with city-idiots - it was hard to fathom why we should let certain urban dwellers live. What made it especially difficult to keep our fingers off the trigger is that tourist season corresponded closely with hunting season. So very, very tempting. And no limit on tourists!

“Officer, I was aiming for a six-point buck, but at the last moment, that old lady with the walker leaped in my way. It was just an unfortunate accident. Coulda happened to anybody.”

“Understood. Just don’t let it happen again.”

First, let me backtrack and explain my distaste. It would seem that if you were going to take up a sport as deadly as hunting, and seeing how death is somewhat final and appears to hurt a lot, it would behoove you to learn a few things about the sport first. There were basic rules concerning firearms and common sense that city folk consistently broke. For example:

• Never hunt near a road. You could spook a deer into traffic, and if a car hit it, the driver could get badly hurt. This happened to my mom – her car was totaled, and so was the soul of whatever stupid hunter sent that deer into the road, because my mother put an Irish banshee curse on him. If he’s still alive, he’s in pain, and lots of it.


• Keep your safety on, especially crossing fences. I can’t tell you how many ‘he-tourists’ shot themselves in the foot going over fences. What really surprised me is that they didn’t demand we put in ‘handicap access’ for our fences. “I shot my foot off going over your fence –put in a concrete ramp for my wheelchair, or I’ll sue.” Go ahead and laugh. Just you wait.


• Identify what it is you’re shooting before you shoot at it. Nothing like hearing a gunshot and seeing a chunk of bark fly off the tree next to you. Yes, that happened to me. Yes, he, too, received a banshee curse. Then there was the city hunter who was found ‘gutting’ a brown cow. Really. No, sir, that’s not a two-point buck – that’s a Jersey cow. Yes, you’re quite the warrior, sir. I'm sure it put up quite the fight. How now, big dummy?

The rules were there for survival’s sake. If you ignored those rules, perhaps you shouldn’t be permitted to survive. Most of the year Darwin seemed to go easy on the city-dwellers, letting them grow fat and lazy until the first frost sent them into the woods. Come hunting season, we’d avoid the forest as much as possible, bringing the horses and cows up in the pasture closest to the house. Then we’d sit back and let the city-idiots shoot at each other. We had ourselves a whole new kind of turkey shoot.

New York City couples carpooled. The he-tourist, aka hunter, would put on his shiny, bright, orange hunting gear, kiss his wife good-bye, and trespass through the nearest field, where he would promptly climb over a fence and, on a good day, shoot himself in the foot. Then he’d limp back to the road to wait for his wife, who was in town drinking lattes and staring at trees. While he was waiting, he contemplated who he could sue for his misfortune, and where he wanted his wheelchair ramp to go.

In the meantime, his wife, the typical she-tourist aka leafer/antiquer, would peruse all the over-priced detritus for sale at the antique boutiques. She’d then drive out to the countryside, park in front of our house, and brazenly steal a pair of cast iron wagon wheels off our front lawn, stuffing them into the trunk of her Cadillac. At least that’s what the she-tourist I bagged did. Poor thing – she was much too old to be hefting something that weighty into her trunk. I could see her suing us if she were injured during her theft, and I was torn between helping the spinster lift her heavy load, or twisting her arms behind her, cop style, and putting my knee into her kidneys, slamming her against the car while I handcuffed her for stealing our property.

I settled for yelling, “HEY!” She dropped her five-finger discount and scuttled back into her Cadillac, spitting gravel down our country road. I hoped she hit a he-tourist hunter on the way back into town. Or that a he-tourist shot at her car. Come on, Darwin – rise and shine, dammit!

Our hay field bordered Route 9G, a major thoroughfare. In other words, it was paved and had two real lanes. Many wayward city dwellers cruised it, pretending to gawk at the leaves changing color, but we knew they were really trolling for old crappy stuff antiques to steal.

At this time of year we’d be in a hurry to get the last hay cutting into the barn, dodging raindrops, stray bullets, and spinsters dragging stolen wagon wheels.

The leafers would park on the side road, blocking our access to the field, jabbering about lattes, and generally making pests of themselves. They were probably waiting for us to turn our backs so they could swipe our hay rake and resell it on Crazy Larry’s Staten Island Farm Equipment Black Market. Or turn it into some sort of country art artifact. Maybe it would resurface as a decorative wrought iron hanging pot holder for some bored, overpriced kitchen on Long Island. These people were downright soul-less.

Sometimes tourists would pull over to the side of the road to take pictures of us. This used to irritate the hell out of me. What were we, a freakin’ Amish zoo exhibit? I wanted to give them something special for their photo album, maybe drop my jeans and show them a real harvest moon.

My youngest brother, Bob, was in that field raking hay. He, too, had had it with the looky-loos, and decided, while still driving the tractor, to drop drawers and give them a Kodak moment. (How he came upon that idea, I'm sure I don't know, or at least I will never admit to suggesting.) Anyway, as he aimed his motoring moonpie at the startled tourists, he failed to notice a fast-approaching gopher hole. As the front left tire fell into the hole, the tractor lurched sideways, and Bob was launched into the air. Luckily, his wayward pants caught on the shift lever of the tractor or he would have rolled, half naked, under the big rear tires. As it was, he accidentally shifted gears with his belt loop, and had to pull himself back up by the steering wheel of the now speeding tractor. Grabbing the wheel like that made the tractor veer sharply, running over and crushing our brand-new handicap access wheelchair ramp for hunters.

Please don’t tell our Dad.