The Reindeer Keeper

When recently walking down a certain aisle of a discount store, I found myself drawn to all the school supplies filling the shelves. Signs shouting special pricing-great deals-hurry while supplies last-were everywhere as were children with parents obviously immersed in Back to School shopping. And there I was-still infatuated by all those products just as I used to be when I was the one taken to the store to shop for Back to School. When it was me, it was never the clothes or shoes that interested me. It was always the pencils-the erasers and glue and paper and scissors and notepads and folders. All those aromas of all those things coming together was exciting to me. Besides going back to school, it meant spending even more time at my desk in my bedroom-writing-drawing-creating whenever I could. Back then there were no official discount stores. We had a Newberry's and a Woolworths. They sat side by side in our downtown. Everyone would go from one to the other when doing Back to

I never knew about the left side or the right side of the brain when growing up and despising arithmetic. I just knew I could not stand columns of numbers with plus or minus signs or some marked with an X or others with another sign. I never had enough fingers to use when counting. There was no wiggle room when getting the right answer. It had to be exact. Two and two always equaled four. This thing called exactness was why I preferred English-preferably writing. There's lots more freedom. You aren't tied to a formula. Your answers-your essays-whatever it is you write-is all yours. No one else will have the exact same story or essay as yours. I liked that. Life is not exact. Why should what you do be exact? My distain for arithmetic-for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing-took a nasty turn once I had to take Algebra. My disdain for exactness had met its match. I was horrified by formulas and rules that made no sense and questions I did not understand. My mother as

When I was twelve, my mother gave birth to my younger brother in the month of May. Shortly after that she was stricken with a blood clot in her leg and hospitalized for a good part of that summer. Thankfully we were surrounded by family. I pitched in the best I could. Once school got out, that summer was all about pitching in. That's when I started to do the ironing. I'd watched my mother iron. It was more of an art form to her and to her mother and sisters. Whatever it was that my mother was ironing, she'd spread it out on her ironing board as if getting a game plan together in her head as to how to approach the item. Then she'd pat it down-wet her finger and then touch that finger to the iron. If it made a sizzling noise it meant the iron was hot enough for her to proceed. Back then, the ironing board was either up all the time or close at hand because everything was ironed. Bed sheets-pillowcases-towels-everything or anything was ironed. I'd learned the basic