Frontier Follies Read online

  Once inside the waiting room of the ER, I nabbed an ice pack for Todd’s hand, and it helped his pain immensely. As I held it on his injured palm and stroked his sandy brown hair to comfort him, I was able to allow myself to be temporarily distracted from the shocking state of my own appearance. It also helped when I realized how positively filthy Todd was. He’d been in the cattle pen just long enough that morning to have been covered in all manner of dust, dirt, mud, and manure. And it wasn’t just on his clothes; it was on every surface and in every crevice of his body, from his earlobes to his fingernails. His plentiful tears over the previous hour had served only to create a swirly mud painting on his otherwise cherubic face. Todd and I were quite a scary-looking pair.

  I understand this might be coming across as false humility: “Oh, I looked, like, sooooo bad!” I mean, who really looks that bad in her thirties? But I beg you to trust me on this one. Imagine the worst day you’ve ever had in your life, attractiveness-wise. Now double that. Now triple that, and add a pair of crotchless floral pajama pants, a coffee-stained shirt, greasy bangs, a zit, and a manure-caked toddler. Then go ahead and triple that again, and that’s the sacrilege that was sitting in the waiting room of the emergency room in the town where I’d grown up—the same town where I’d always valued wearing lipstick to match my outfits.

  My physician father, already at the hospital seeing some of his own orthopedic patients, dropped by to see us in the waiting room. He did a cursory examination of Todd’s hand and affirmed that we’d done the right thing by coming in. Then I caught my dad looking at my clothes and I sensed very clearly that he was quietly wondering where it had all gone wrong with me. My dad would deny this, of course, but you should have seen the way he glanced at my greasy bangs. He couldn’t hide his true feelings at all! “I can take it from here, Dad,” I insisted. “You have your own patients to see.” He was immaculate, and the blue of his creased pants matched the subtle stripe on his perfectly pressed golf shirt. It didn’t matter that Todd was clearly comforted by his grandpa being there; I couldn’t bear for him to have to hang with us any longer. No, really, Dad. . . please go.

  The medical treatment Todd received was relatively routine: an application of some kind of super special cream, a great big gauze wrap, and Tylenol with codeine. I kind of wanted to ask for a dose for myself, but since I had to drive all the way back to the ranch, I decided against it. We were discharged, and in a hilarious (sad-hilarious, not funny-hilarious) icing-on-the-cake moment, as Todd and I were walking to the car, I saw the mother of an old boyfriend walking toward the hospital. You seriously can’t make any of this up.

  She was a good thirty yards away from me, but my red hair tipped her off. “Ree?” the stylish lady said. “Is that you?” That she was looking straight at me and was still not able to discern for sure if it was me is an indication of just how far I’d fallen since my premarital glory days. So I did the only thing I could possibly do in that situation: I feigned a coughing fit, hacking and gagging into my elbow as I walked faster with Todd toward my car. His codeine was kicking in by now and he started giggling at the silly sounds his mama was making, and before I knew it, the old boyfriend’s mom had scurried away and darted through the doors of the ER. Anything to get away from me and whatever plague I was infected with.

  The ride back to the ranch was uneventful. Todd’s pain was under control; he clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth about a hundred times and said things like, “Mama bom boom beebee” and “Conchy conchy,” which made me laugh. Finally, a laugh! I got home, handed Todd to Ladd as I briefly updated him on his baby’s medical status, and took an hour-long shower to wash off that whole godforsaken day. When I emerged from the bathroom in clean, non-holey pajamas (I’d sure learned my lesson), I saw that Todd was sound asleep on Ladd’s lap . . . with a plastic sword in his hand.

  “Funny” Family Injuries on Drummond Ranch

  (We’re all okay now!)

  Todd ran into a barbed-wire fence at full speed. (It was dark outside and he was playing with the dogs. He still has scars!)

  I accidentally injected myself with bovine blackleg vaccine. (That’s one microbe I don’t have to worry about anymore.)

  Ladd dislocated his pinkie finger riding his horse. (L.B. bucked and he grabbed the saddle horn too hard.)

  Alex stepped on a toothpick and didn’t tell me. (It broke off in her heel and turned into an abscess.)

  Bryce got a mild concussion. (He fell off his horse!)

  I sprained my ankle stepping in a hole. (There used to be a tree there. A tornado had taken it the week before.)

  Paige cut her hand on a beer bottle when she was seven. (It wasn’t hers. Seven stitches.)

  Ladd dropped a two-hundred-pound pipe on my ankle. (He says I dropped it, but it sounds better to say he dropped it. Ouch.)

  Todd accidentally injected himself with cattle wormer. (It happens more than you’d think!)

  Todd ran past a door and sliced his arm open on a tiny nail sticking out of a board. (Nine stitches.)

  Todd singed his face with a flamethrower. (His eyebrows eventually grew back.)

  (Todd wins the medal for most mishaps!)

  Our Great Homeschooling Experiment

  Our first child, Alex, happily attended kindergarten in our small town of Pawhuska, and her first school year was nothing but lovely. Her teacher, Mrs. Reed, taught her about Native American art, language, and culture (not to mention the three Rs), and I had zero complaints . . . except when it came to transportation. Alex had two younger siblings at the time, and in order for me to get her to school in the morning, I’d have to drag all three kids out of bed early, load them all in the car, and haul them to town for the hour-long round trip. Then we’d turn around and make the exact same trip in the afternoon, when it was time to pick her up. After a couple of months of this back-and-forth schlepping, I was already tired of the car and was even more tired of not being able to get much done at home during the day. I’d think about having to feel that way for the next eighteen years (Bryce was just a baby, not to mention the fourth kid, who wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye yet), and I felt overwhelmed.

  So I decided to give the ol’ school bus a try; I was surprised to learn that it actually did pick up country kids! The only problem was that our ranch was the farthest away from town, so we had to be the first stop on the morning route. This meant the driver would pick up little five-year-old Alex at 6:45 a.m., and she’d ride along on the rest of the rural stops, finally making it to school by 8:15—an hour and a half on the bus for my little pookie head. In the afternoon, the reverse was true: She was last to be dropped off, usually as late as 4:30 p.m. I always felt sorry for Alex when I went outside to meet the bus; she was usually passed out, her soft cheek smudged against the window of the bus. The school bus obviously wasn’t turning out to be ideal, so that whole year we toggled between the two ride options, with Ladd jumping in and helping when he wasn’t on his horse. (Though honestly, the horse might have taken less time.)

  Summer came, and we so enjoyed not having to fight the whole transportation thing. Around that time, my best friend, Hyacinth, and I had dinner with some couples from Tulsa. We were picking their brains about ideas for an art camp we were thinking of organizing, and we’d never met them before that night. They were all exceedingly hip, very intelligent, really funny, and they were spiffy to boot. During the course of our art camp conversation, one person in the group casually mentioned that they all happened to be . . . homeschoolers. I did a double take. I asked the person to repeat himself. I was shocked and confused. I couldn’t square it! Homeschoolers? It didn’t seem possible.

  Hyacinth and I prodded, and as the parents described their reasons for homeschooling and their approach to education, I studied each of them. These people did not fit the stereotype of “homeschooler” I had somehow formed in my head. For example, I didn’t know homeschoolers drank wine! How cool was this? Hyacinth, whose daughter, Meg, had also just finished kindergarten,
looked at me after our discussion and we whispered to each other, almost in unison, “Should we do that?” Not once had I even remotely considered homeschooling before, but that night I lay awake in bed and mulled over the new world of possibilities.

  I mentioned it to Ladd in passing the next day, imagining he’d laugh and tell me I was crazy for considering it. Instead, he said immediately, “I think it sounds great—let’s do it!” He’d seen firsthand the difficulty of Alex’s transportation to and from school the whole previous school year, and with (then) three kids, he saw how untenable it could become. And if you think he wasn’t also calculating how much more ranch help he could get out of this . . . well, ha ha. Ranchers are always thinking about ways they can find more help.

  After a couple of weeks of intensive research, I was 100 percent on board the homeschooling train, and we dove in that fall. I bought a globe, a chalkboard, and an abacus. I followed the classical education approach of studying one era of history for an entire school year, and we started with the ancients. We got together with Hyacinth and her kids for a co-op day once a week. One day we had a Roman lunch and put our baby boys in matching togas. That Halloween, the girls and I dressed up as a Cleopatra trio, because by golly, we were home educators now, and every single experience, no matter how ordinary, was a chance to learn about the world. We sang songs about Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire, and Alex memorized a new Greek and Latin root every day. It was a time of exciting new discovery, and I marveled on a daily basis at the comprehensive first-grade education I was receiving! (Oh, and Alex, too.)

  This period of time was also what I now refer to as the “acquiring phase” of homeschooling: If there was a workbook, reference book, set of math manipulatives, life-size skeleton, or wall-sized mural, I bought it. I went toe to toe with a fellow homeschooler on eBay over an out-of-print visual reference of the ancient world. (I lost, and I don’t think I’ve ever quite gotten over it.) A storage closet in our home that my mother-in-law had once used for sporting equipment and out-of-season clothes was soon overrun with maps, markers, file folders, and other supplies. I decided I wouldn’t be content until our house was its own Staples location.

  That first two or three months of homeschooling, I followed an extremely rigid schedule—and I completely set myself up for failure. I thought if I meticulously scheduled every thirty-minute time slot during the day, Alex and I would stick with a game plan and we’d get everything done. But then Paige would need something. And then Bryce would cry. Then Ladd would come home. Then the cows would knock down the fence and get in the yard. Then the dogs would get sprayed by a skunk. And the domino effect would cause our homeschooling schedule to come crumbling to the ground, day after day after day.

  Then one dark and stormy afternoon, I found out I was pregnant again. How could this have happened?!? That item wasn’t in one of the preplanned time slots! (Also, nausea and science experiments are not a good combination.)

  At some point during that first year, Hyacinth and I decided, for the sake of our long-term friendship, that we did not have compatible homeschooling styles at all, and we needed to suspend our co-op days for the time being. She was very much a type A homeschooler in all the positive ways, with a start and end time for each day (and each subject). She had worksheets printed the night before, and put bookmarks in place so they’d know what they had to get done. Hyacinth had so much discipline and sense of purpose, she’d never dream of throwing up her hands and calling it a day before the work was done; I did it a minimum of once a week. She’d been so kind and generous to bring her kids out to my house every Thursday to do some “shared learning” together, but sometimes she’d arrive and we’d still be looking for underwear, and I think she realized she was better off blazing forward at her own house.

  So it was then that I decided not to fight, but to embrace, my haphazard, irresponsible nature and not try to be something I wasn’t. Where Hyacinth was a type A home educator, I was more of a type L. I assigned myself the title of “relaxed homeschooler,” and there was no looking back. I’d wake up with a rough sense of what our educational objectives looked like that day and I’d shoot for a general start time . . . but sometimes we’d start an hour later. Sometimes two. We’d have spelling tests in the bathtub and drill on math problems while I folded laundry. Some days we’d forget to do math altogether. (Sorry, Alex.) We sang memory songs and made a lot of jam. I hardly ever used the chalkboard, except to leave Ladd little love notes for him to see on his way out the door in the morning. If I felt a subject was above my pay grade, I’d buy a DVD series and park Alex in front of it while I made Paige a snack or gave Bryce a bath. It worked for us! For a while.

  When it came time for Paige to start school, it was a little bumpy trying to navigate two different grade levels, but I somehow managed to hold it together most days. Unfortunately, Paige liked to do crafts, and I’d never owned a glue gun before (see Wrong Mother). She liked to wear an old Richard Nixon mask while practicing cursive; it was a costume I’d worn in college years earlier, and this really confused Ladd. As a check and balance, I’d take the girls for standardized tests every couple of years to make sure I wasn’t messing them up too badly. I never got to the bottom of whether their less-than-impressive math scores were due to nature (math isn’t my strong suit) or nurture (therefore, I was never enthusiastic about teaching it), but by and large they were doing fine from an educational standpoint.

  An unexpected benefit started showing itself, too. The girls got to take part in life on the ranch a lot more than if they were away at school during the day. If Ladd needed help sorting cattle at the pens, he’d borrow Alex for thirty minutes here or there. If he was shorthanded, he’d take Paige to gather cows. It was then that I realized my “relaxed homeschooler” approach had to have been divinely inspired, as it would have been a tough game of tug-of-war if I felt Ladd was interrupting my schedule to take the kids to work with him. As it so happened, I had no schedule! So marital harmony could continue on—and besides that, the kids were receiving a lot of agricultural education as a bonus course.

  My mind would sometimes wander during those long school days. I once conceived of a T-shirt line I would market only to homeschoolers (talk about a sound retirement plan!) with sayings that were plays on old slogans:

  “Homeschooling . . . because they’re worth it” hinted at the old L’Oréal ads.

  “My homeschooler can beat up your honors student.” I must have been under stress that week.

  My favorite idea of all time was a nod to Porsche in the eighties: “Homeschooling: There is no substitute.” (Get it?)

  But then I’d veer off course and occasionally come up with more inappropriate ideas: “Homeschooling parents do it on the kitchen table” was one. I guess I was slowly losing my good sense.

  It’s worth mentioning that I never actually manufactured any of these T-shirts. They were just passing ideas swirling around in my scattered brain along with Latin roots, fractions, and eBay curricula auctions. My days were packed and busy. And once the boys hit their schooling years, all bets were off. It was too much for me to keep track of, and there was an unfortunate incident with Bryce wherein he asked me at age nine what a nickel looked like. (Seems I’d forgotten to cover the currency lesson in our early math program. Oops.) Also, I noticed that sometimes the confines of homeschooling would wear on my nerves. Toward the end of summer, a Staples commercial would come on TV and show a dad happily dancing through the aisles buying school supplies while “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” played in the background. I remember actually telling the nice dad to “shut up” before turning off the television. I never got to experience that same glee every fall.

  Over the next several years, I would adapt our homeschooling approach to what our family (and the kids) needed. The girls started attending a classical co-op in Tulsa, which really took their schooling to another level. I kept homeschooling the boys for a time, then tried the co-op, but it wasn’t a fit for their wi
ld, unruly, pee-outside natures. Besides, as I was driving them to Tulsa the first few times, it occurred to me that this whole driving and living-in-the-car thing was the whole reason we’d tried homeschooling to begin with, and here I was again. Bryce and Todd ultimately wound up at public school in Pawhuska so they could play football—and it’s been a great decision for them. Go, Huskies!

  Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely choose to homeschool the kids again. They got to spend a lot of their earlier years together most of the time, and they got to be more a part of ranch life than if they’d gone to public school from day one. I got to enjoy them at home for more of their childhoods, and while I haven’t done a scientific poll, I’d guess that most of the kids are glad for their homeschooling experiences. At least that’s what they say when I ask them to their face . . . with a twenty-dollar bill in my hand. (Just kidding.)

  I have to say that I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to go back and teach Bryce that currency lesson. It still comes back to bite him sometimes! (Nickels can be very confusing.)

  Adventures in Children’s Time

  I could write an entire book about the myriad times Ladd has pushed, pulled, encouraged, nudged, or prodded me to do something that I otherwise would never have chosen to do if left to my own devices. I am very comfortable right where I am, thank you very much, and he knows that if he doesn’t occasionally light a fire under me, I’ll just stay in my delicious comfort zone forever, happy not to have to mess with or factor in anything new. Ladd is my husband, but he’s also a human match in that regard. (Blowtorch is more like it.)

  Ladd and I tried our hand at an evangelical church for the first two years of our marriage, but we would eventually put down our roots at First Presbyterian Church and have been worshippin’ and tithin’ and fellowshippin’ there ever since. The congregation is comprised mostly of ridiculously sweet retired people who’ve lived in Pawhuska their whole lives, and we were the youngest family there (by far) for quite a few years. Like most small churches, ours relies on the support and participation of congregants when it comes to the various aspects of carrying out a Sunday service, and our pastors through the years have always encouraged members to volunteer to be lay readers, greeters, and the like. I never sign up for anything, because I just want to go to church, be blessed, have a cookie and a mug of punch, then go straight home, where my comfort zone is waiting to welcome me with open arms and a soft pillow. But I’m always grateful for the kind souls who throw their hat in the ring and help out.