"My Choice"

I've never had much choice in what I wear. According to the family dress code,

"ladies dress modestly." That means long skirts and high necklines, and that was that. I

never really minded being unable to wear a miniskirt or a tube top--it's probably for the

best--but I always wanted to wear pants.

Don't get me wrong--I like skirts. In summer a skirt is cool and comfortable,

swishing around my legs. I can flap my skirt at recalcitrant sheep or carry the morning's

eggs in it. A good skirt is comfortable, useful, and pretty.

However, trousers have their own advantages. Pants are warmer in winter; I like "My Choice"

I've never had much choice in what I wear. According to the family dress code,

"ladies dress modestly." That means long skirts and high necklines, and that was that. I

never really minded being unable to wear a miniskirt or a tube top--it's probably for the

best--but I always wanted to wear pants.

Don't get me wrong--I like skirts. In summer a skirt is cool and comfortable,

swishing around my legs. I can flap my skirt at recalcitrant sheep or carry the morning's

eggs in it. A good skirt is comfortable, useful, and pretty.

However, trousers have their own advantages. Pants are warmer in winter; I like

to layer knit pants under my garage-sale Army pants, and if Dad's not around I don't have

to wear a skirt over them. Pants don't get in the way when I want to climb a fence or

chaschoice of clothes will be entirely up to me

"My Choice"

I've never had much choice in what I wear. According to the family dress code, "ladies dress modestly." That means long skirts and high necklines, and that was that. I never really minded being unable to wear a miniskirt or a tube top--it's probably for the best--but I always wanted to wear pants. 

Don't get me wrong--I like skirts. In summer a skirt is cool and comfortable, swishing around my legs. I can flap my skirt at recalcitrant sheep or carry the morning's eggs in it. A good skirt is comfortable, useful, and pretty.

However, trousers have their own advantages. Pants are warmer in winter; I like to layer knit pants under my garage-sale Army pants, and if Dad's not around I don't have to wear a skirt over them. Pants don't get in the way when I want to climb a fence or chase a sheep, and I like the big pockets on my Army pants--though they snag on things like a skirt, sometimes.

I want to be able to choose which I wear. Skirts and pants each have disadvantages, and I'd hate to be limited to one or the other. Skirts are cold in winter; pants are hot in summer. Skirts snag on things and get in the way, but pants don't give the extra fabric for holding kittens, hiding a puppy, or tenting over my feet when mosquitoes come around. Skirts rarely have pockets, but things slide out of pants pockets if I sit the wrong way. I feel pretty, feminine, and respectable in a skirt, but in trousers I am an adventurer, prepared to climb a tree, battle a berserk billy-goat, or forge a trail through the wilderness--or at least the south pasture.

The dress code has gradually relaxed in the past year or two. My family still doesn't like it when I wear pants, but it's been awhile since anyone really harassed me about them. My choices are still somewhat restricted, but I'm on my way to freedom. Someday, my choice of clothes will be entirely up to me.

(Printed in 2012 edition of Illuminations)

Sometimes I think about this little essay, and about the fact that I now identify as genderqueer, after years of thinking I liked stories about girls disguised as boys because it was an excuse for girls in traditional historical settings to take the freedom of dress and behavior that boys had. Would I have figured it out faster if I had been allowed to cut my hair and choose my clothes? I've spent the last six, seven years experimenting with my own style, gradually pushing those childhood boundaries, figuring out what I really liked. I didn't know I could be truly happy with my hair until last spring, when I finally went full Anne Hathaway pixie, although the previous haircut (my first ever) was a fun exploration. It's been a process of figuring out what felt right, and still is--except now the level of right I've reached is tattoos and ey/em pronouns and dancing with girls on the weekend, while I try to explain the difference between sex and gender to my husband over Christmas vacation.

Catching Corbie

When I was prompted to write about Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure,” I had trouble thinking of examples in my life. Grace, let alone grace “under pressure," is not an everyday quality. Then I remembered Corbie's great escape. Just this April, I was home alone on the three acres at Cortland's eastern edge I share with my parents and two of my brothers. I was trying to get my homework done before making dinner when our chest-high black Angus heifer, Corbie, got loose and headed for Highway 77, three blocks from our house. I snatched up a bucket of corn and my mud-boots and ran. I was the youngest of the dozen people--everyone on the east side of Cortland not at work or school--trying to catch her, but Corbie is our cow: I was responsible. 

Corbie trotted mischievously across lawns, through gardens, over a sand volleyball court, and finally a waste field just before the highway at a pace just quick enough to stay ahead of everyone. I could hear the traffic on 77 as I jogged along behind, weighed down by my heavy boots. Diane, the aging trucker's tiny wife, followed at a distance, carrying a white gallon bucket of cracked corn - futilely, as Corbie turned up her nose at the bribe and trotted off again. The village handy-man, Norv - recently recovered from a heart attack - did his best to herd her using his big white pickup, and the middle-aged woman in the velvet lounge pants who'd told me Corbie was loose walked behind, barefoot. 

For six blocks we worked frantically to keep her away from the highway, but when she made a break for it she got ahead of us. I scrambled to head her off. No luck. I could only watch when she stepped onto the shoulder, contemplating the Other Side. A car whizzed past her nose - I could feel the draft - on her blind side, startling her, enough so that she backed away from the highway. That was the worst moment--imagining how Corbie might look after being hit by a car, imagining telling Dad what had happened--but not the only bad one.

The moment after I tried to loop a dog's leash around her neck, she confirmed my doubts by taking off again. I hit the ground with a jarring thud, and she dragged me on my back along the gravel bike path - Corbie, while small for her age, weighs four times what I do - until I lost my grip on the leash and had to let go. The moment we had her almost past the last house on the south edge of town and headed safely for home, she eluded me once again and turned into a back lot full of farm junk. She was tired and thirsty by then, though, and we surrounded her in the front yard. The handyman drove off to his handyman's lair for a good sturdy rope. I began worrying about getting water for her. 

Corbie was now hot, tired, thirsty, and beginning to limp, and she wanted to know what I was going to do about it. My neighbors kept her in while I began to hunt through the back for a water spigot. A cobbled-together coop contained some well-kept chickens; was there a hose to them, or did their keeper carry water in a bucket? The faucet, when I found it, ran dry. Norv returned with his rope, a good, sturdy noose, and I abandoned the question of water to begin stalking my heifer, assisted by the barefoot woman, whose name turned out to be Pat. Her grown-up son had shown up in support, adding his sedan to my squad of vehicular cavalry.

In the end, the question of watering Corbie was solved simultaneously with the question of catching her. She had reached the next yard over, and lurked in the shade while I assessed the situation. This homeowner was home, but on the other hand Mr. Kohout was someone I knew; he would probably let us get away with a lot in his back yard. Diane, the tiny woman, had gone home and returned with her trucker husband and his pickup in tow, adding to my cavalry. So: Mr. Kohout sent his son out with a lovely bucket of water for Corbie. I tied Norv's rope securely to a tree and set the noose out flat on the ground. Then I coaxed Corbie with the water, allowing her just enough to sharpen her thirst until I set the bucket down inside the noose. This time when she came to drink, I slipped the rope easily over her head. She fought the rope, pulling against it, which was why I'd tied it to such a sturdy young tree--Corbie was ours!

Through all that, through terror and frustration and exhausted despair, I didn't break down. I failed, I fell, I hurt, but I stood back up and smiled and kept going, and I never cried. On the way home I took a survey on everyone’s favorite kind of cookie. Afterwards, when Corbie was home safe, and after I finished my homework, and after Dad and my brothers constructed the new maximum-security cow pen, after absolutely everything was over, I made cookies for everyone who helped. I delivered them myself, grateful for the assistance of my neighbors and for the grace I was granted in the time of my need.

(Printed in the 2012 edition of Illuminations)

Lifesaving Libraries

Lincoln has always been my escape. I don’t want to imply that 3.5 acres on the edge of a small town 20 minutes south of the city is a prison, but 24 hours six days a week there, with four brothers as company, can sure make it feel like one. Getting groceries with Mom on Fridays was crucial to my sanity, such as it was — partly for the time away from home, and partly for the time at the library. I lived for those weekly trips.

When I was 8, 9, and 10, I’d get armfuls of books, limited only by Mom’s insistence that it wouldn’t be fair to other readers if I checked out all the Boxcar Children at once. We mostly visited the Walt Branch, and I would browse the YA section for anything that looked historical or horse-related, like The Little White Horse or the “Dear America” books. While my brothers logged on to play Neopets or Adventure Quest, I’d curl up in one of the big, red, overstuffed chairs with The Blue Sword or Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, and the world would go away until Mom started rounding us all up to leave.

When I was 11 or 12, time at the library became even more precious due to the loss of our library cards, when Dad found out I was still reading “trashy fiction” despite being “too old” to waste my time on such unproductive pursuits. This was a traumatic event, partly because it was so avoidable and partly because of the ramifications. My brothers and I had rented Monsters, Inc. while Mom was out of town. This secret was major enough that when Dad asked why I hadn’t been doing a chore I hadn’t realized I was supposed to be doing, I panicked and blurted out a forbidden novel’s title, instead of the child’s biography of Geronimo that sat at my bedside in the alibi role. Monsters, Inc. remained undiscovered, but I got spanked, my brothers were disgusted that I couldn’t keep a secret, and Dad was extra suspicious for a few months.

Having demonstrated that I was too much of a security risk to know that Mom still had one secret library card, I was no longer allowed to check out books, but I spent those precious hours every week devouring Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tamora Pierce, and the X-men comics. The back room at Bennett Martin Library with the view onto the little brick-paved garden became my weekly haven, and I tore through The Lioness Quartet on its low chairs, only slightly fazed by skipping the second book and going back to it when someone returned it after I’d read the other three.

This is probably about the same time I started rereading Lord of the Rings obsessively, as my oldest brother had hidden our battered ‘60s paperback editions instead of destroying when Dad first began purging the family library. While Frodo and Sam’s adventures challenged the paternal paradigm only insofar as they were purely fantasy, not even attaining C.S. Lewis’ allegorical heresy, I learned habits of defiance that later led to more radical reading material, as Mom slipped me Lois McMaster Bujold’s space operas, a showcase of conflicting worldviews in 16 books (so far). While Dad successfully instilled an aversion to Harry Potter so deep that I didn’t read the series until after graduating college, and still haven’t seen the movies, he was too late to nip my taste for fantasy and science fiction in the bud.

Charles de Lint and Mercedes Lackey primed me with tolerance and acceptance so that actual regular exposure to people outside my immediate family group could, once I started college, nudge me the rest of the way away from the claustrophobic fundamentalism of home.

My taste for the forbidden fruits of Lincoln City Libraries was the cause of my initial conviction that I was going to hell. If I was doomed already for defying my father’s commands to read theology and learn to make my own clothes instead of reading about women disguised as men becoming knights, then what difference did it make whether I lied about things like where I’d been until 4 a.m., as well as what I’d been reading lately? When I finally started openly wearing pants around Dad, it seemed like a natural progression from secretly reading Georgette Heyer’s Shakespearean romps about girls who chop off their hair and “borrow” their cousins’ trousers. And my chivalrous instincts around other girls finally made sense as more than just identifying with Ivanhoe and Aragorn when I realized, several years into my relationship with my now-husband that I was bisexual.

Without Lincoln City Libraries, I still might not have ever been the woman my father raised me to be: modest, obedient, housewifely, and married to one of the nice Christian boys who, somehow, all loved Lord of the Rings. But I don’t know if I would have turned into the woman my mother was slyly raising me to be: liberal, feminist, atheist, and hopefully of value to my community, not just my family.

(Printed in the Lincoln Journal Star, Neighborhood Extra, December 23, 2017.)