Frontier Follies Page 2

  There’s one thing, however, that still happens no matter what, when, where, or how the snake prank occurs. Ladd and I somehow always wind up in a hug—even if the hug was preceded by my punching him (and not a fake little punch anymore) in the arm. We’re still raising our kids, we’re swamped with ranching, work, and sports, and our to-do lists are unrelenting. But the weird snake thing has always been a touchstone for us—a way for us to connect and remind each other that while we’re getting a little long in the tooth, the monkey business of our younger marriage is still very much alive.

  I can’t wait for the next stage of our snake dysfunction. Anyone have a rubber anaconda I can borrow?

  Places to Hide Rubber Snakes (for Your Favorite Sweetheart to Find)

  A simple way to add a little spark to your marriage!

  Freezer

  Produce drawer

  Mailbox

  Behind the cereal

  Sock drawer

  Top rack of the dishwasher

  Purse

  Briefcase

  Washing machine

  Inside a pot (with the lid on!)

  Under the garden hose

  In a flowerpot

  Hanging from a doorknob

  Inside a packed suitcase

  Under a pillow

  In the shower

  Inside a boot

  Under the covers near the end of the bed (feet!)

  Have fun! ☺

  I Do Dishes When We Argue

  Like most couples who’ve been married nearly half their lives, Ladd and I have occasional arguments. Now, I definitely wouldn’t characterize us as a quarrelsome couple; I don’t thrive on fighting in relationships, I don’t enjoy drama, and I tend to be a peacemaker . . . most of the time. Ladd is a little more confrontational in the sense that if he feels we need to talk about something, work something out, or come to an understanding, he wants to do it right then and there, when the issue comes up and the feelings are fresh. He doesn’t believe in ruminating and festering, which is really annoying considering I do. Or better yet: I would rather just ignore the conflict and let it float away into the ether and disappear. Which one of us is healthier? Never mind, don’t answer that.

  Early in our marriage, whenever a disagreement or argument would happen, I started noticing the most bizarre thing: I would mindlessly migrate into the kitchen and start doing dishes right in the middle of it. It didn’t matter if we were in the garage—or heck, outside in a pasture—when the tiff began. Just a few terse sentences in, and I would suddenly find myself standing at the sink, suds up to my elbows, pouring every ounce of my passion into getting the last bit of grime off each dish. If I ran out of dishes before the “discussion” was over, I’d grab a clean dish and wash it again. Only when we resolved the issue or otherwise stopped the conversation did I turn off the water and declare that the dishes finally, at long last, were clean.

  The thing is, I don’t even like washing dishes. It isn’t anything I’ve ever remotely enjoyed. I despise it, actually, and Ladd knows this. It’s a tedious and repetitive task, I have to stand still in one spot, and my fingers get pruny. But for some reason, during those marital arguments, washing dishes very quickly becomes my favorite pastime, my most cherished hobby—my life’s work, really. (It’s important to note that I have two perfectly functioning automatic dishwashers.)

  So here’s the thing: I noticed this washing-dishes during-arguments anomaly a good five years before Ladd did. It was my own little secret with myself. I’d look at the rack of brilliantly clean dishes and marvel at how quickly I’d knocked them out, during just a brief dispute with my husband. It both amazed and amused me. Sometimes I’d even laugh about it, putting my hand over my mouth lest Ladd inquire about what was so funny. But then one day, out of the blue, just around the time of our seven-year itch, my husband recognized the pattern. And the reason I knew he’d figured it out is because (in true Ladd tell-it-like-it-is form) he told me he’d figured it out. He actually confronted me about it during a confrontation! “How come,” he inquired that evening, mid-disagreement, “you always start doing dishes whenever we have a fight?”

  I played dumb, of course. “Well, I don’t really think we’re fighting, are we?” (I’m so bad at playing dumb.)

  “Fighting, arguing, talking, debating—whatever,” he said. “You always come in here and start doing dishes.”

  “I do dishes every day,” I began . . . but quickly gave up. “Okay, yes. You’re right. I do dishes when we fight.”

  “I know. I just said that,” my beloved responded.

  “I know you just said that,” I replied. “But I said I know because I already knew that I did that. Y’know?”

  “Wait . . . what?” Ladd asked, confused. Arguing with me is very weird. I’m like a moving target, except I don’t really move. I just kind of stand there, do dishes, and say confusing things. And by then we’re so mixed up, we can’t even remember what we were arguing about, so my unintentionally wicked plan usually works!

  Except, of course, for the time the sink had piled up with dishes beyond what is normal or acceptable in civilized society. It had just been one of those months—I’m kidding! It had just been one of those days where I was so busy and my momentum took me in a different direction. So by 7:00 p.m., with the care of four children tugging at my energy level, I was about to turn off the kitchen light and just ignore the dishes until morning. But then Ladd, back from the barn, walked into the kitchen to get some water and glanced at the kitchen sink. Admittedly, it was an aberration. It was shocking. It was packed with dishes to the ceiling. It looked like something I’d seen on TLC shows or Jerry Springer. Too tired to be bothered, I was fine to leave it and go get some beauty sleep.

  But Ladd saw an opportunity. He laughed and made light of it by suggesting that maybe he should pick a fight, because then the dishes would surely get done. I divorced him on the spot. Not really, but I did murder him on the spot. Not really, but it briefly crossed my mind. Then I laughed, because . . . to tell you the truth, it was actually pretty funny. We wound up doing the dishes together that night, which was a nice little end to that marital moment. And fortunately, so far in our relationship, that’s how our problems usually wind up getting resolved: with a laugh or a chuckle over the inherent humor of the situation, or just the inherent humor of life. Add in a little exhaustion and the perspective that comes with being together for twenty-five years, and we’re generally too tired or chill to argue these days. Fatigue: the secret to a happy marriage!

  Still, over the years I’ve tried to analyze this dishwashing strangeness of mine, which continues to this day whenever issues come up between my beloved and me. Why do I do dishes when we argue? I can’t decide whether I think of the fine soapy suds as a barrier between me and the (albeit temporary) moment of marital strife, or as some kind of disinfectant that will wash away all the unpleasantness of the moment. Or do I just not like sitting down, making eye contact, and hashing things out? As much as I hate doing dishes, maybe I hate that more? Or maybe, given the fact that I hate doing dishes so much, I consider it some kind of sacrifice or penance—an offering up of myself for the greater good of my marriage?

  Whatever the reason, conscious or unconscious, my dishwashing idiosyncrasy is at least a handy one to possess. If I could just short-circuit it from time to time and move our arguments to the laundry room . . .

  All I Wanted Was a Doughnut

  A couple of days before Christmas many years ago, Ladd and I decided to run to the big city to shop for his mom and grandma, to grab a couple of last-minute gifts for the kids, and to be alone together and have one-on-one conversations without our four precious children or our demanding cattle herd needing something from us. Or was it our four demanding children or our precious cattle herd needing something from us? The lines are blurred sometimes. And we didn’t “run” to the big city, we drove, which brings me to the point of this story. Part of the conversation in Ladd’s pickup on our trip to the city
that day was our just-formed wintertime plan of getting me back into shape. It was to start the following morning and involved getting out of bed at 5:00 a.m. so that we could spend an hour working out together before the kids had to get up and before Ladd had to go feed cattle. This entire conversation had begun twenty minutes earlier, when I started lamenting how tight my jeans had become after a summer and fall of cooking constantly for a cookbook I was working on, filming my new cooking show, and discovering how much I loved semisoft, unripe cheese.

  “I’m to the point,” I whined, “that I need to either buy bigger jeans or make smarter choices about what I eat! And I need to exercise, for gosh sake.” And then I really let Ladd have it: “I have back fat!” I sat back in the passenger seat, relieved to have gotten the rant out.

  Ladd, calmly and without agreeing with my back fat lamentation, began to lay out his prescription for me: early morning exercise to boost my metabolism and start the day off right. To sweeten the pot, he committed to joining me in my new fitness regimen so I wouldn’t have to go it alone. This was nice of him, but I could tell he didn’t empathize with me at all. He is, after all, chiseled out of granite and weighs the same as he did when he was seventeen. I would be really annoyed with him if I wasn’t so attracted to him.

  Two-thirds of the way to the big city, I asked Ladd to pull off the highway and stop at a very busy convenience store called Quik Trip, so I could get some coffee. I was getting over a cold and had been feeling a little draggy, plus the conversation about my getting up at five to exercise for an hour had really worn me out. He pulled into the parking lot and we both went inside; Ladd headed straight to the refrigerated section to get a can of Dr Pepper while I headed to the coffee section to fill a large cup of joe for myself.

  It took me a while to fill my cup, because this particular convenience store has an especially beautiful run of coffee options. You can get French roast, Colombian roast, breakfast blend, Kona blend . . . not to mention all sorts of little squirts of flavor and shots of different incarnations of creamer. I want this coffee area in my house, is what I’m saying. So anyway, I stood there and decanted, squirted, and decanted some more until I had a great big cup of luscious convenience store coffee that was likely extremely caloric, but I had only one more day before my new exercise program was to begin, so I figured I’d go out with a bang.

  I headed toward the register. I could see Ladd standing there waiting for me so he could pay for his pop and my coffee together, because he’s chivalrous like that, and also because he has never known me to have a single dollar of cash on my person. The store was packed with other patrons, and along my journey to the front, I passed Quik Trip’s very large, very impressive, very alluring glass doughnut case and made the mistake of glancing in its direction. I immediately locked eyes with an apple fritter on the top shelf. It hypnotized me instantly, then reached out its long, evil fingers and said, “Come . . . come to me.” Quik Trip’s apple fritters are so freaking good. I’m powerless in their presence. Those crisp, craggy edges . . . oh my!

  Without thinking, I removed an individual square of paper from the dispenser on the service shelf below, then reached for the knob of the glass door that was separating me from my apple fritter boyfriend. I say “without thinking” because I somehow had completely pushed out of my consciousness the entire back fat conversation I’d just had with Ladd minutes earlier. Or maybe I just rationalized it by reminding myself that I only had the rest of the day to party before my 5:00 a.m. boot camp began . . . or maybe I temporarily convinced myself that apple fritters are actually a healthy doughnut option? They have fruit in them, after all.

  For whatever reason, I pulled the knob to the right, thinking the door would slide to open, but instead it met with resistance. I had Christmas shopping on my mind—what size top I should get Ladd’s grandma, Edna Mae, and how I couldn’t wait to sniff all the men’s cologne at the perfume counter—and I inexplicably pulled backward on the knob, possibly thinking that the door opened by flipping up rather than sliding to the side. Then, with zero warning, a terrifying sound crashed through the heavily trafficked convenience store and I realized that the entire tempered glass façade of the big, impressive doughnut case had shattered into four hundred million tiny, sparkly pieces. The sound was deafening and seemed to happen in slow motion, as if a house of glass sitting on a frozen lake had fallen down wall by wall. I stood there in shock, not knowing what to do. Glass was everywhere: all over the doughnuts, littering the floor, in the adjacent sandwich case, and in my boots, into which I’d tucked my pant legs that morning. The small stainless steel knob was still in my hand. I stood there, completely stunned.

  Customers ran over to see what had happened, my husband among them. And when Ladd saw me standing there in the middle of a sea of tempered glass, a small knob in my hand, the now-unprotected array of doughnuts right in front of me, not to mention the look of horror and confusion on my face, he had but two questions:

  “Are you okay?

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wanted a doughnut.”

  By now the manager, assistant manager, cashier, assistant cashier, and probably all their friends and relatives had rushed to the scene. The manager wanted first to make sure I was okay.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” the nice gentleman said. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  Still holding the knob, I answered, “Yes. My pride is hurt. It is badly, badly injured.”

  But other than that, I told him, I was totally fine, and might I please borrow a broom and shop vac so I could whisk all this away and pretend it never happened? I noticed another female customer out of the corner of my eye. She had her hand over her mouth.

  “Oh, we’ll take care of it,” the manager said. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m absolutely fine,” I insisted. “I am so, so sorry. I don’t know what happened. One minute I was reaching for an apple fritter . . . the next minute . . .” I shook my head in disbelief.

  “It’s perfectly okay, ma’am,” he reassured me. “This has actually happened once before.”

  I immediately felt better. I wasn’t the only person who’d shattered the doughnut case at this convenience store. What a relief! All was suddenly better now.

  But then I did something I can’t explain. I instinctively began reaching for the apple fritter, still in the shattered case. I don’t think I actually had any control over this action. I didn’t logically believe I should get the apple fritter; I think it was a desperate attempt just to carry on and pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened. Well, and I guess I really just wanted a doughnut.

  That’s when the assistant manager stepped in. “Oh, ma’am . . .,” she said, “you can’t have a doughnut now.”

  I know she was just trying to protect my gastrointestinal tract from glass shards, but at the time she said it I felt like a little girl who had just been grounded from eating doughnuts. My face felt hot.

  After several minutes of offering to help clean up and insisting on paying for the broken glass and trying to figure out what country I was going to move to once I left the store, I made my way to the front counter so that Ladd could finally pay for my coffee. But when we got there, the cashier held up his hand and said, “Don’t worry about it—no charge.” I think he wanted me to leave the store as soon as humanly possible.

  When we got into Ladd’s pickup and continued on our trip to the big city, I glanced over at him. He had a look on his face that I’ll never be able to describe. It was the look of a husband who is married to a complete klutz who complains about her tight jeans then stops at a convenience store to buy sugary coffee and shatters a doughnut case while trying to retrieve an eight-hundred-calorie apple fritter. It was the look of a husband who has seen his wife fall down, run into doors, use the wrong remote control to change channels on the TV, and wear her black leggings inside out for an entire day without knowing. It was the look of a husband who had j
ust filed another incident into his vault of similar moments . . . and who couldn’t wait to remind me of it the next time we’re driving together and I say I want to pull over and get coffee.

  “You’re . . . funny,” he said, reaching over and squeezing my knee.

  Poor guy can’t take me anywhere.

  My Top Five Favorite Forms of Exercise

  Pilates. It relaxes me and makes me feel strong. (When I do it.)

  Rowing machine. I love sitting down when I exercise! I pretend I’m in Rob Lowe’s boat in Oxford Blues.

  Walking with the dogs. I listen to murder podcasts and scare myself, then have to call Ladd to come down the road and pick me up.

  Jane Fonda’s Workout. The 1982 original. I’d kill for that pink-and-purple striped leotard.

  Ballet. My first fitness love. I pretend I’m onstage in The Nutcracker and all my ex-boyfriends are in the audience!

  My Top Five Favorite Kinds of Doughnuts

  Apple Fritter. But only from Quik Trip. Preferably with no glass shards.

  Old-Fashioned. I break off the four sides and eat them one by one.

  Maple Long John. Preferably with really thick maple icing that gets all over my fingers.

  Chocolate-Glazed Old-Fashioned. With rainbow sprinkles, please.

  Apple Fritter. They deserve a second mention!

  Ladd and the Gala

  A few things about Ladd and food:

  He likes beef.

  He likes potatoes.

  He likes to eat, not dine. Prolonged multicourse meal experiences are his worst nightmare.

  Another thing about Ladd: He suffers from a troubling (for me) condition called Low Blood Sugar Cranky Butt Disorder, or LBSCBD for short. I identified this affliction early in our marriage, and I believe it is a very real condition that should be named in the New England Journal of Medicine so that a cure can soon be found. If Ladd does not eat when he (or any human) typically should eat, his mood plummets and he becomes a shorter, terser, more temperamental version of his cute, charming, Wrangler-wearing self.