"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.)

Rambling

I don't really have anything to say. I just felt like typing. People complain when I make a bunch of Facebook posts all at once after work, and anyway that isn't what I feel like doing. This seems like the place.

One of the houses I drive past on the way home from work has a backyard full of stars. They're just Christmas lights, of course--plastic frames supporting tiny bulbs, contributing to the light pollution that makes the real stars so hard to see--but they're beautiful. It's a big backyard, with lots of shrubs and trees in which to places the dozens of lights. The golden glow is gorgeous.

The nurses are trying to cut my time on med pass at work. I'm only supposed to take two hours, and I generally run half an hour over that, because of the last three people, two need a lot of stuff and one doesn't want his pill until after nine anyway, so I HAVE to give it after the two-hour mark. I really don't think I'm going to worry about it that much, because there will always be something that keeps me from cutting my time down. It used to be a lady with a ton of eye drops, which have to be given at five-minute intervals. Now I have someone who needs the bandage over the ulcer on her leg changed, and someone else who wants lotion on her (admittedly very dry and flaky) legs. I'd rather do a good job for each of these people than cut them all short to make the nurses happy.

Tonight I finished ten minutes early, apart from waiting until after nine to give that one pill, and then waiting until another lady came home from an outing with her daughter around ten o'clock. So no, I wasn't actually done. Even without those two to wait on, I wouldn't have finished early if it weren't for the fact that a quarter of my patients were missing: one out, one moved to another facility after a stint in hospital, two currently in hospital, and one dead. I don't feel it's a victory, or even a relief. I miss them all.

Lark has been extra neurotic lately. She's been guarding my shirts in the corner, and licking obsessively anything I leave in her reach. Of course, she's also wanting lots of attention when I'm home, for which I can't blame her. She's finally calmed down after lots of petting tonight, and now she's lying alongside my legs. I rather regret the extra blanket, now--she's producing a lot of heat.

I took three books back to the library today, having finished none of them. I've been writing more than reading, lately--and that all journal, really. It's good practice, as I think about how to structure my sentences, my paragraphs, what to say first, what to leave out....trying to keep rhythm to my sentences....and it carries over to my school assignments, my outlines and speeches. Which reminds me that I need to do the textbook reading for next week, as well as figuring out what to talk about in the how-to speech. Doug talked about how to throw a punch. I helped with the visual aid....Visual aids tend to be my weak point--I tend to focus on the speech itself, and the aid is rather an afterthought. Thanks to Fogell, my first speech's aid was rather good, but the one for my second speech was a few lines of text, which I hoped would emphasize what I hoped people to take away from my presentation. I have no idea how effective that was.

It's late enough that I should start getting ready for bed, but of course I'm comfortable and don't want to move. Lark just got up to go roll on the carpet, which needs to be vacuumed soon. The last load of my laundry needs to come out of the dryer. I should probably wash some dishes, but they aren't mine so there's no pressure. The house will probably be cleaned pretty well while I'm at work tomorrow afternoon, anyhow. I'll be main med aide before supper, the busiest time--of course. This happens enough that I've gotten tolerably good at it, enough to get by, but it's still a bit stressful. I'd rather be heading home to visit the clan after church.

I've been hoping to take Patrick along for one of these afternoons, but he works every weekend, Friday through Sunday, and one of his fellow drivers is out of commission. His odds of getting a day off are slim to nonexistent, even two weeks in advance. Oh, well. I don't want to push, because he's probably trying to save up money before the Christmas trip--as am I. I have no idea how much I'm likely to spend, now that I've bought my tickets. The "three hundred into savings every time checking passes a thousand" rule is temporarily in abeyance, while my paychecks accumulate to help pay for Christmas presents and whatever the heck else I might need in Arizona. I have no idea, really. It's not like I'll be paying for a hotel, since we're staying with Patrick's mother and her sister. He never lets me pay for anything when we go out together, so I doubt my eating expenses will be high. Christmas presents seem likely to be my greatest cost....and I still have no idea what to get for Patrick's mum. Nor is she optional--she sent me a lovely birthday present, in addition to shaping Patrick into a civilized (mostly) human being who is also a darn good boyfriend. I was also having some trouble with his present--I asked him, and he said his present was me taking his place helping his mom in the kitchen with the Christmas candies while he hauls her boxes of books out of storage. Sigh. I guess I'm going halves with one of his buddies on a wet-shaving set, but I'd still like to give him something that's just me. I don't know....

Well, such worries aside, I'm looking forward to the trip. It'll be my first trip anywhere that doesn't involve my family, and I haven't been back to Arizona since I was two or three, so it should be interesting! It will also be my first Christmas since I was about five....and my first trip with Patrick....and my first time meeting his mother....as well as all his friends, since in Nebraska he seems to have classmates and coworkers instead. Them I have met.

Lark is at my elbow now, a convenient little furry armrest. I'm still not particularly enthusiastic about heading for bed, but I can't afford a bad night's sleep tonight. Even if I don't stay for choir practice, I would like to be able to focus on the sermon, and I can't take knitting to keep me awake.

Bad weather

Yesterday was icky snow, so I had my first experience driving in slippery conditions. I took Marcos home first, so I got some good advice (Marcos is from California, but he lived in Minnesota for awhile--I'll trust him) before I was on my own. Christine had already said I could stay with her if the roads got bad, but directions to her house from SCC don't have much in common with directions to her house from Marcos's house, especially after I made an unplanned turn onto Leighton in order to avoid rear-ending the giant black pickup in front of me at a stoplight. I had to navigate one of those insanely labyrinthine neighborhoods common to Lincoln before I could find 81st, and then I had to ask a lady shoveling her driveway in the early dark where I was in relation to Vine, Christine being a block north thereof. Fortunately I was still a little way north, and once I crossed Holdrege Christine called and directed me the rest of the way.

So then I had my first experience of an impromptu sleepover. Christine was a little hyper-hostessy, but we sat on the couch and watched movies until bedtime. I was thinking rom-com, but "A Walk to Remember" and "P.S. I Love You" are, it turns out, dramas. Hardcore dramas. Someone-special-dies dramas. Sigh. There were fun moments, I guess. And they're both based on books. Is that good?

I had a clean t-shirt and my Krav pants in the car, which made tolerable pajamas. I have a toothbrush in my backpack, I had leftover food in my backpack, Christine happened to have a charger compatible with my cellphone......and I slept like a rock until my phone and the alarm clock went off at seven.

And it's such a short drive to school that even leaving later than planned, I still made it to the parking lot before Conan got out of his truck. Nice.

Yaaaay!

Wednesday is my day for volunteering at St. Elizabeth's. I like St. E's--the atmosphere, the location, the Christian worldview (even if they are Catholic) but I'm a little frustrated. I'm volunteering up in the postnatal ward, and the nurses aren't busy enough to delegate much to volunteers. Finding enough to do is a bit difficult, because I can't take my supervisor's advice and knock on doors, asking patients if they need anything. This is, apparently, the nurses' territory. They have a point--a new mother probably isn't interested in doing much beyond sleeping and cooing at her baby, and who am I to interrupt? But that leaves such activites as making tea-pads and badgering Mallory at the desk for chores to do.

Well, today I did very little badgering. The tea-pad supply was actually low, and I spent an hour and a half making tea-pads. While no task can be entirely mindless, one does eventually hit the limit on refinements to technique. I think I am approaching this point, making tea-pads. I mean, I've got my work setup down. Now I'm trying to order my operations to maximize cooling of the tea before I have to hold a thin plastic bottle full of it. Divide and Conquer sounds fun, but the fun is limited. Anyway. The supply of tea-soaked maxipad icepacks is now Topped Up.

After that I did go and ask Mallory, just in case, because while the supply of care packs is low, I can't make up more without more photocopies of the booklet, which always runs out before I come. Mallory told me that the lady at the Labor and Delivery desk had mentioned a project for a volunteer. That was interesting! I mean, it was filing, and I probably committed a dozen HIPAA violations today, just trying to find a clear version of a patient's name in order to look for her file, but admissions and things were going on in the background, and medical eavesdropping can be educational--especially if one asks questions afterwards. Medical questions, not gossipy ones, of course.

To summarize--today I felt both competent and useful. Best of all, I felt as though I was learning.

Literary devices

Sometimes, after an epic, life-changing adventure, a character forgets everything at the end. Patricia McKillip used this in Ombria in Shadow; the city shifted, and nobody could remember that things had ever been different. Robin McKinley explains in a blog post why this is a horrible thing to do to one's characters: adventures are for learning about oneself, and how can the changes in a character remain when the character has forgotten what she can do? I thought it just bothered me because I hate forgetting, but okay. Erasure of character development.

However, even though this device is Not Okay, writers still use it. I understand why, of course. Sometimes the author wants to release a character back into the wild after a long and disturbing period in situations that ought not to exist, and the only clear way for the character to return to normal life as if nothing had happened is for him to forget all about those adventures. Artemis Fowl was mindwiped by the fairies because, if I recall correctly, they didn't want him complicating things anymore, and I think he went along with it. Of course, since he'd become Chaotic Good only through the long process of Adventures, as soon as they erased his memories he went back to being evil, though perhaps with a nagging feeling that he shouldn't be doing this stuff.

My question is not, "But why would anyone ever want to do that?" My question is, "Does anyone actually like this device?" Is there a single reader out there who reads something like Artemis Fowl and says, "Oh, yeah, they erased all his fun memories of adventures and making friends and becoming a decent person! I love it when they do that! I hope he never remembers!" I would understand some enjoyment if the reader was looking forward to the process by which, in spite of everything, the character remembers after all. I would understand some pleasant anticipation of Artemis's sneaky recording of a video to himself, explaining everything he's forgotten. Sometimes shoujo mangaka like to use temporary amnesia as a device for demonstrating that circumstances don't matter, and the hero will fall in love with the heroine all over again even without the help of whatever weird situation the writer used to bring them together in the first place. These tend to irritate me a bit, but I could understand someone enjoying them. But--at the end of the story--no sequel in sight--for everyone to forget? Completely? It's so unfair to the characters! Readers remember their adventures, but characters aren't allowed to read the book themselves......