Remember that expression? Horse feathers, an old euphemism for horse … well, let me just say, “horse manure.”
I vaguely recall dad using those words when he didn’t believe something that he had just heard. If anyone has the right to mouth those words today, I do. I don’t remember my exact age when it happened, but we had moved from England to the Alberta farm about two years previously. So that would likely make it early summer of 1938.
Dad didn’t possess many domestic skills so he looked for a place to park me one day during a time mother was spending a week in the hospital. Aunt Emily and Jess offered to help out, so I landed at their place about a mile across the fields.
Emily wanted to go shopping that day. When Jess came in from the fields, following lunch and a half-hour nap, he hitched his best horse, Beauty, to a buggy and we set off for town. Beauty had needed the lunch-hour break as much as Jess; she had spent the morning with her teammate pulling a binder, cutting green oats for use as animal feed. Because Jess believed that the ox (or the horse) is worthy of its hire, he had let Beauty pig out on the fresh “green feed.”
While mom and pop would have squeezed me between them on the seat, Emily and Jess, being newlyweds, didn’t want anyone coming between them. They placed me on a low stool between their feet and the dashboard, with my head just high enough to get a good view of Beauty’s backside.
We swung out of the yard and onto the dirt road on a glorious day with the smell of newly-mown hay and green oats permeating the air.
I actually saw it coming, but couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the way. Indeed, I had no place to go in any case. Beauty raised her tail and let loose a stream of green manure that poured over the dashboard and engulfed me from head to toe.
While Emily wiped my face with a handkerchief, Jess swung the buggy back homeward. Emily didn’t wait to heat water; so she dunked me, protesting and screaming, into a washtub-full drawn straight from the well. Jess cleaned up the buggy, collected Emily’s shopping list and headed for town.
Oh, but the embarrassment didn’t stop there. Emily heated water and washed the green manure from my shirt, pants, socks, underwear and, yes, even my shoes. I had no change of clothing, so she dressed me in her bathing suit.
Thanks to Aunt Emily’s tiny stature, it almost fit.
In fear that someone might see me dressed, or half dressed in a woman’s clothing, I spent the rest of the day hiding under the dining room table, emerging every half hour to ask of my clothes flapping on the line, “Are they dry yet?”
A Sunday or two back, Hugh told me he enjoyed reading my columns, especially those about my days on the prairie farm. So there you have one, Hugh. I hope you enjoyed it. I didn’t at the time.
Believe me, it really happened, but when I think of it I just shake my head and say, “horse feathers.”