Julie Fry
Blog Posts
Client Blog for
Norton Sign&Design
The Norton Post
Essays
from personal
blog 1
Avila Barn
Recently I visited the Avila Barn with a friend after lunch nearby. Our thought was skip the fruit stand, gift shop, candy shop and spend 10 minutes with the animals.
We were good. Avoided all competing attractions. But the 10 minute plan failed and it happened at the first pen. A Nigerian Dwarf goat baby pressed bristly hair against the palm of my hand, through fence wire. My friend engaged another a few feet away. White goats. Speckled goats. Neapolitan goats. We fell in love.
At the next pen larger goats greeted us. A Snow White doe wanted me. A bi-color Boer closed in on my friend. When the rest of the herd noticed our reverie, we were mobbed, even though we had no lettuce treats.
The Southdown sheep ignored us, but a mini horse (smaller than a pony) gazed at us from the shortest distance between two points -- she regarded us from the furthest corner of her pen 10 feet away. Gently she pawed the fence. I scavenged toddler-discarded lettuce scraps from the gravel. Tiny whiskery-pincushion lips reverently removed lettuce from my fingers through the fence wire.
Bliss mainlined my veins. Joy washed into every gulley. We had a moment. But the moment ended when a posse of toddlers, chubby fists full of lettuce, pushed us toward the donkeys. More lips, larger lips, massaged our fingers for lettuce. "Who lip-trains these guys" I asked my friend.
The emus ignored us, the alpaca and her baby likewise, but a doe-eyed cow regarded us welcomingly. And she let me touch her.
At age two I escaped my parents' grad-student housing and crossed train tracks to visit a cow a mile away. And I once lived on a cattle ranch where dozens of steers stood along the fence surrounding my house, intrigued by me. I was the human exhibit at their bovine zoo. They stayed as long as I stayed, watching me, jostling each other for a good view, scratching my SUV with their horns. In four years never did one let me pet it. (Steers have good reasons.)
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But this brown-eyed Brown Jersey Girl not only allowed me to pet her, she stretched her neck to show me where to scratch. Beneath the chin. Behind the ears. Across the forehead. My friend joined in. Elegantly, slowly, the cow fluttered lacey eyelashes, dissolving into our touch as though she'd waited all her life.
Understand I had nine animals (dogs, cats, horses, goat) back at the Ponderosa. Yet somehow this cow caused me to feel uninitiated. Innocent wonder. Like a toddler.
I floated back to the car, intoxicated, by reflex wanting to reach up for the hand once attached to my 25-year-old mother. I contemplated a book in my future. "I Bought A Zoo Too." It's ridiculously unoriginal and unimaginative as titles go, but perhaps could sell enough copies to help pay some large feed bills.
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Essays
from personal
blog 2
Mary Frances
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I've held off crying into this blog about my little sister Mary Frances and her death by cervical cancer last December.
I penned tributes for her online prayer support pages and a memorial service eulogy, but not much transparent expression about my personal loss.
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How do you write about your right arm when it goes missing? When there are just five fingers to type with? How do you wrap words around the black hole left by a girl you bathed with, slept next to, played and fought with, shared matching pajamas and a horse with and with whom you got into a LOT of trouble?
She knew more about me than I wanted; like outrageous lies I told her when I was seven, about a fictitious romance I was supposedly having at school and later the truth about less glamorous real ones.
Mary showed me how to sneak out of the house to visit our best friends a block away while our mother napped. She followed me into dalliances with cigarettes and worse, hitch hiking, an after- curfew ride in a police cruiser, joyrides in our parents' cars before we had licenses and other things wild kids do. How does one commit such scandalous, coveted remembrances to a keyboard when missing an arm?
I expect words to show up on command as they do for other ventures (but they just don't). My sister Mary was wonderful and extraordinary, stubborn and exasperating, tough, fearless and deeply sensitive.
She figured out how to win any physical altercation with me by the time she was 13 (good on her for that one). I was not a good sister in childhood. I did better as an adult once I realized how special she was. We navigated her pregnancies and deliveries and our dad's crisis hospitalizations together.
She drove me nuts. I annoyed her. It was a tempestuous dance yet we loved each other fiercely and were part of each other more than either of us could have gauged. I am blessed in certainty as to her whereabouts and our imminent reunion. I don't "hope," I know, but dang it this hurts.
I had all these ideas about what we would do together in old age but she just up and skipped 20 grades; leaving me in her dust the same way she did every time we raced across the backyard. But this time, instead of looking back with barely detectible smugness in her smile, she looks back encouraging me with eyes that say "You won't believe this place. And this time I am waiting for you."
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Essays
from personal
blog 3
Snow
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I didn't want another cat.
My big gulp, venti, super-size cup of animal love was full. Quite. But I heard about a cat. An all white cat. Abandoned twice at the same address.
The first owners left her behind when they moved. The new occupant was a young bachelor who fed her, let her inside, and even had her spayed. But he wasn't really an animal-person (odd term, yes). White cat hair on new black leather sofas wasn't his thing. So he left her outside again. And after a while he stopped providing food.
A green belt runs through the neighborhood and behind the yard of this house. Regular walkers passing by noticed she began to appear frantic. Thin. Someone offered her a dog biscuit and she devoured it. Another walker started feeding her daily.
I visited the green belt trail to meet this left-behind, left-outside all-white kitty. She was sweet, defensive, hungry and needy. In that order. The consensus among her community of walkers was she had lived outside at least a year. No one knows for sure when her food was cut off.
We brought her to my place. I named her Snow. And like all of my pets, she now has multiple nicknames: Snowy River, Snow White, Snow Day, Snow Angel. Snow Field.
I admire her courage, trying to open herself to love again after two heartbreaks, hunger and surviving alone in very hot and very cold weather. Her adjustment here has been daunting (for me and for the other cats too). She wants love but is conflicted. If the dogs inadvertently get too close, she hisses and swipes. They don't take it graciously and she runs off. She approaches me for affection but if it lasts too long or isn't done "right," she growls and lunges with warning swipes or bites with barely enough time to stop purring.
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Just when I wonder why I adopted her, like a ballerina she curls her back into a comma and looks up with question-mark-eyes, rubbing cushioned ribs against my leg. I shrug. I run my hand across the silky, fresh snow powder fur and tell her she's a good girl. Because deep down she is. Because the more I tell her this the more I believe it.
And the more she believes it. And she's coming along.
