SOB. POS. MF'er. Need I go on?

This boy seriously needs a job. 

It's upper 30's, too warm for the uber heavyweight blankets so Mom's feeling compassionate and toodles out into a brisk breeze, not exactly blanketed myself for conditions. Winnie's good, she comes over for a cuddle, whacks me upside the head (love tap) and stands quietly while I disrobe her.

The Bobster doesn't have a halter on (Czar destroyed all three of them & they're at the Amish tack shop getting repaired). Mom's no fool. I wrapped a lead line around his neck. He takes off anyway, with me hanging onto the line and simultaneously removing the straps and struggling with the GD (cussword #4) bullsnaps. OK, I drag the blanket off, creating small lightning bolts from the friction (serves you right you ....). 

Czar's now a challenge, the last horse standing, fully clothed. I'm got my iPod, tunes are blaring in my cold ears but I have ALL DAY if I need it. I communicate that little thing to young Master Czar. He makes his point, I make mine. He stops, I hook the leadline to the halter. His blanket is on the complex, WTF were they thinking, design with hard-to-get-to snaps and hooks, velcro that really grabs, and so on and so forth. 

I've just unlatched the rear hook and the GD (#5) bullsnap hitches onto his tail and TUGS ever so gently. F**k (#6) I know what's coming. He yanks, I yank back, desperately trying to pull the blanket away. 

And here comes BOB, at full out gallop, screeching around the corner and headed straight for us.

I am now officially road kill. 

Czar sees Bob out of the corner of his eye and spins into ME, the blanket stretched impossibly between us. Then he bolts, Bob skids past and keeps on going. The GD MF'er (#7 & 8) is wearing a grin, I swear it. I've got a lead line in one hand and the blanket in the other, both attached to a horse working up to 10 mph and accelerating.

I do the only thing I can, I drop the blanket. Said item is now trailing Czar's legs, then the material becomes tangled quite impressively around legs moving like pistons on an Indy 500 race car. GDSOBMF'er (working up to n+1 now). 

Do I drop the line? What, do I look stupid to you? Don't answer that...

No, I continue to hang on and actually manage to turn his head onto a circle until the brat's doing 5 meter circles at a hand gallop. Mercifully the blanket's now resting on a pile of quite fresh manure. Do I need to say it (n+2)?

Where's Bob you ask? BOB's doing RODEO BOB maneuvers, bucking, rearing, spinning. Bob fails flat on his side because he hit a soft spot. Ask me if I cared at that point.

What I'm doing is screaming bloody murder and waving my headphones at everything with four legs - and strangely enough, on the playlist? 'Drive Me Insane' by Billy Boy on Poison.

Karma. Oh hell, yeah. (Does that count?)

It's 3 o'clock, is it too early for a Bloody Mary, 1:1 vodka-to-mix?

THE CONFERENCE by Diane Nelson

“No, I really don’t give a flying f—,” I went eyes-on-stalks, bit my tongue, and dug my right hand into Sam’s fleshy thigh, “… what your friends are doing, you are not getting a tattoo, young lady.”

My voice took on that hated strident tone, the one I swore I’d never use after a lifetime with my own mother but unfortunately genetics had won out.

Sam seemed to be doing some deep-breathing exercises next to me. I made my final mom-threats and clicked the phone closed, then looked over at him, curious. His eyes squeezed shut in a rictus of … oh shit. While I’d been giving Jess her daily dose of long-distance parenting, in my agitation, I’d been more or less massaging Sam’s inner thigh—to use a baseball metaphor—high and inside.

FREE through Valentine's Day for your KINDLE

_Dragon Academy by Diane Nelson


"Well, do you want me to call the fire department?"

"Nah, the Frenchtown fire chief was having a coffee in the diner and saw what happened so he put in the alarm. We got a couple trucks here already, but nobody wants to step foot on that bridge."

"So how many ya want?"

"Oh geez, Marge, send everybody! The fire truck just let loose with the water cannon and blew some fat guy walking on the roof of the trailer right into the river!"

Mom’s on cafeteria duty with Firstborn and young Master Czar at the Mustang Memorial for their 50 mile endurance race this weekend.

25 degrees, frost so thick it could have snowed during the night except for the brittle clarity of a diamond studded sky and a moon casting shadows.

Stretching, I debated: go out now and get it over with or have a cup of coffee, check emails and wait until I can see better. Yes, sunrise it is.

PervBird’s morning screeching reminded me to get my butt in gear. I could hear the tin cups on the cage bars as Mr Bob got testy about the crappy service. Rinsing out my cup, I glanced out the kitchen window and saw…

Holy CRAP!

Reynard! Running the girls’ enclosure, around and around, hurling his body against the chain links, digging the frozen ground … totally apeshit determined to get into the pen. The girls were frantic, charging about, trying to get high by jumping on the lid of one of the nesting boxes.

NO!!! Those f**kers can climb!

Jr Rooster was on the top of the fence—at 6’6” relatively high enough but I couldn’t be sure it was enough to keep Reynard out. Jr’s cluckin’ ‘n struttin’, all ‘Ooo, I’ve got this one, ladies.’

I set a record getting dressed and out the garage door. Demon Cat and Mr Tom were waiting for me, just outside the door, tails poofed. I ran to the fence screeching like a banshee. Reynard halted in his tracks and glared, GLARED, at me. Then he trotted off nice as you please, and with a flick of his gorgeous tail he said, “I’ll be back.”

Oh, you sumbitch, you are going down…

Demon Cat and Tom followed me to the barn. DC set up sentry duty at the barn door while Tom settled by the tack shed. The boys had my back while I checked on the Hens from Hell. I flipped Jr Rooster off the top of the fence, back into the pen. Two of the red hens had taken shelter in one of the boxes, the rest were bug-eyed and insane with fear.

One of the hens is doing poorly so we keep her in a separate enclosure. Reynard had yanked at the wire mesh trying to pull it away from the wood frame. HennyPenny was in the back, curled into a tight ball.

Not sure she’s gonna make it. Damn.

I needed to settle them fast so I raked up loose hay from the mow and gave them a pile to scratch through – and fresh water since their bucket frozen overnight.

Crisis averted.

Time to go shopping.

It’s the sounds you remember—the relentless pounding on the roof, the sluicing rush of a waterfall on the windows. And then there’s the smell. But that came later. Much later.

June 15, 1972. A time of hope and excitement. I’d scored a faculty position at the Scranton Penn State University Campus, my husband Mike took a position as counselor in Hazleton. We split the difference and moved to Kingston, on and across the river from Wilkes Barre, PA.  Kevin was four. Our foster daughter, Miriam, was 15.

The apartment was a modest sized three bedroom, facing south, perhaps 20 yards from the levee looming 40+ feet, sheltering us from the placid Susquehanna River. We were on the second floor.  Miriam and I took our time unpacking, hanging curtains, arguing over where to put the plates, how to position the bookcases. We didn’t have much back then so each thing was precious and required careful thought and placement. The pictures and books and records took center stage. I still hear the melodies that Miriam played incessantly—Carly Simon was her latest obsession. Kevin had his books and the cat and seemed content in his world.

Agnes began off the Yucatan Peninsula on June 14. By the 19th it was a hurricane. On the 21st it made its run up the coast, landing in New York, then looping west and becoming nearly stationary over central PA.  From June 20-25 the Susquehanna Basin saw up to 18” of rain. It started in New York, the crest moving through Painted Post and Elmira, then barreling down the narrow corridor, pushing at the levees. The Wyoming Valley was no stranger to floods so they built walls to protect the cities. The walls held until the crest topped 41.5 feet, busting through and over with the raging river spilling its guts. They called it the 100 year flood. We called it Armageddon.

Mike was sent home from work on the 20th, everyone was sent home. The waters lapped at the base of the bridges, choked with trees and whole houses that had been ripped from their foundations further upstream. Wavelets lapped at the tops of the levees. We walked those levees, taking turns, on watch. The neighbors downstairs moved all their belongings up to our apartment. Like us, they’d just moved in and everything was still in boxes. We thought we were safe on the second floor.

We were wrong.

The pounding on the door came at 5:45 a.m. Fire police screaming ‘Get out. Get out. Get out.’ We had a couple of bags packed. Cat food and a litter box. A cooler with some food. A couple stuffed animals for Kevin. We jammed ourselves into the VW Beetle, 2 kids, a cat—and made a run to the west, uphill through Kingston. We got shuffled to a school auditorium to wait and see. It didn’t take long.

Twenty minutes. That’s all we had, twenty minutes. The levee breached right next to our building and released a wall of water, mud and debris. Within minutes it was covered, gone. The gasoline storage depot just south of us went next, the monster tanks floating on their sides, spilling their contents, leaving the surface iridescent and stinking. A tractor trailer was driven through the K-Mart just up the block. We never saw the bodies but we heard about them, the cemetery close to our complex. Small relief that.

The rain finally tapered off but the worst was yet to come, the river bleeding out, her lifeblood easing up the steep hill and we worried we weren’t high enough but there was nowhere else to go. The entire half of the state was going under water, washing out roads, bridges. You could see the smoke over on the Wilkes Barre side as the city floated in a bizarre hellfire as gas lines erupted. They were the lucky ones. Insurance covered their losses. Fire wasn’t an Act of God. The flood was.

We looked at each other and as one packed our few belongings, gathered the cat and piled into the VW. We needed to get somewhere, anywhere. We headed west and south, making our way over the mountain, then dropping down along country roads, washed out and leaving only a narrow width for the VW. It was insane but our world had gone mad until all seemed normal. We made it first to Mike’s family, then mine in NJ.

It took days, a week, then more and we still couldn’t get back into the area to assess the damage. I don’t recall exactly when the tears came. My father was ill, too ill to bear the stress of all of us descending on him but he was the one who comforted and we kept it between the two of us. We never mentioned it again.

Squads of workmen hired by the apartment complex had already been there. Everything we owned was in a mountain of debris in the quad. There was nothing to recover other than a few dishes they’d missed. The water ran in the fawcett in the kitchen. But there was nothing to clean.

Mud. Slimy, oily, slick, horrendous mud. Ankle deep or worse. Some people pawed through the debris trying to find a precious bit of furniture or a memento of a life now vanished.

The smell accosted the senses—the rank odor of despair, anger, fear, hopelessness. You never forget that smell. It is worse than death.

The Red Cross was there and I will forever be grateful for their helping hand. The government was overwhelmed but the Small Business Bureau did what they could. Renters without assets fared poorly in the equation. We found a used mobile home miles away.

Our lives were never the same.

We still, Kevin and I, feel unsettled when heaven’s floodgates release. We live on a hill now.

We will always live on a hill.