Published: May 10, 2008 12:20 pm            

Staying hooked

If you saw my mother in a crowd, you’d know. I look just like her. Well, I’m the blonde, blue-eyed

version. I am proof that one Irishman can ruin Indian coloring for two kids.

Mother likes dishes - old dishes. She likes estate sales, rummage sales, auction sales and sales at the Dollar Store. She doesn’t care for clothes but she likes old furniture. She likes to read.

She is not a horseman or cattle tender. She doesn’t like to sleep in a canvas bed roll on the ground. But, you couldn’t tell any of those things by the life she’s had with her family.

She married a man consumed by horses who still had the dairy heifers from his FFA project. She moved into a drafty old house with wood heat and a cistern - which meant most of the year it had precious little water. She didn’t have a washing machine until I was 13 years old.

She bundled up her baby (me) to be carried horseback on a fractious gray mare, with my diaper bag, for Granny to babysit.

She put jeans stiff with starch on stretchers to dry, then dampened the whole mess and ironed them - even the toddler sized ones.

She went on trail rides and camped in a homemade sleeper, the floor of which was the truck bed. She hit the ground more than once because Daddy put her on a horse she had no business trying to ride.

She has spent a million hours sitting in the bleachers at rodeos large and small from Wyoming to Missouri. She is probably the only member of our family who has ever sat in the grandstand and watched an entire rodeo. She kept up with points in every kind of rodeo association and when we were at a finals she could tell us exactly what score or time we needed to stay in the lead, beat the person ahead or behind us, or stay in the hunt.

When my barn blew upside down, she worked beside Daddy and me to dismantle and stack the whole thing so it could be put right side up again. We did this with no tractor. We began by putting a

barrel between one corner and the ground so I could scoot under on my back with the zip gun to loosen the roofing. Mother is small but if she wants to move something she manages to lift it.

When the ice storm descimated most of the trees on my place she carried wood to the pile as fast as Daddy cut it up and dragged brush to the burn piles until I begged her to rest - because I was spent.

We didn’t have any money when I was growing up, but I didn’t know it. Mother spent everything she could scrape on my clothes and I was voted best dressed in the yearbook. We had horses, tack, a rig and entry fee money and I never wondered where it all came from because it had been there since I could remember.

She has helped me move several times. She has paid my taxes when I had no money. She has aligned my wheels and told me the truth when I didn’t want to hear it.

She has not held it against me that I turned out to be made of horses and cows and love to sleep in a bed roll on the ground. She understands the bond I have with my Daddy because she had one with hers.

I don’t say ‘thank you’ enough. I don’t say ‘I love you’ enough. Sometimes I say things I shouldn’t.

But she’s a keeper, my Mom. She took us all on and stayed hooked. She’s still there. She has always been there.

Ok, enough of that sappy stuff.

        

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