Jackie Shannon Hollis

When I was a kid, Mom made every birthday special. She had parties. She decorated cakes. Well, this is a cake from before she taught herself how to decorate them. I’m sure it tasted good. And it was also the birthday when my (very young) aunt decided to cut my bangs. You see how that turned out.

Mom made beautiful cakes and I can’t believe how few pictures I have of them. I had a horse head cake one year, a cake wth little horses on it another year, a cinderella cake (with horses pulling an actual carriage). Yes, horses were the theme of my cakes.

Then, somewhere along the way, I started to pout at birthday parties that weren’t my own. I’m not putting the pictures of me at parties showing the various ways I could pout. But trust me, I did. I think Mom made birthday SO special that I wanted them to all be for me and all about ME.

I don’t do that anymore. Over the years I’ve had a fine time celebrating my birthday and others’ birthdays. I”m glad I’m here and I’m glad all the people in my life are here too. I feel pretty damn lucky.  Today I celebrate my younger sister’s birthday, which is the day before mine. That’s us in this picture. Continuing the horse theme.

Dad would be 77 years old today. That’s him there in the picture, getting a kiss from Mom on their 50th wedding anniversary. Around him are his five kids and our spouses. He was happy when we were together, he liked having his chicks come home.

Dad was a storyteller and he had a rich terrain of history that he carried with him. That history came out in stories that took you there to the place he was telling about. Dad’s grandfather homesteaded the house that Dad grew up in, lived in all his life, and where he took his last breath. Visitors to his home got to hear stories and see the pictures and antiques, and rooms where some of those stories happened. And even though I grew up there too, knew that place and those things, when Dad told a story I listened, even if I’d heard it before, because he loved the telling and that made me love to listen. 

Dad’s been gone six years, but all his chicks and grandchicks and the people of Condon remember him and smile. He was that kind of guy.

My sister Cris and her husband Joe have a beautiful piece of property, called Paradise. They run their cattle on the land there and, every April, they round them up for branding. Friends and family come from all over, they bring their horses, they ride and rope and brand and cut and vaccinate. It’s the real deal with men and women who come to help and to share an experience. Cris and Joe are generous hosts. Joe stays on the ground doing the work, rather than getting on the horse to rope. I learned a few years ago that that’s the etiquette – if they’re your cattle, you let other people do the fun stuff. Cris counts the number of calves, bulls from heifers, and helps get everyone fed and supplied with the things that are needed at such an event.

Bill and I go each year and sit fence — Bill never having been a horse guy and I’m a long time from it. I feel like a city girl even though I grew up around this kind of thing. I’ve grown awkward around horses and try to stay out of the way and admire my nieces, Joely and Alyson, how confidently they ride. It’s at Paradise that I see how much time has gone by from the summers when I was on a horse most days. We were never a big horse family, but dad kept horse for us kids to ride – lazy, easy horses named Freckles and Lucky Bob. Like lots of girls, I was horse crazy and, even though we had live horses, I collected horse figurines back then and at one time had around 75 of them scattered around my bedroom.  I still get a thrill at the beauty of a horse or the pure joy of a colt.

My sister leads us up to the small cemetery that sits on a bluff above Paradise. The graves there are from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Mostly children. It’s easy to imagine the funeral processions, leading from the little cabin down by the creek and up the trail to the cemetery, men and women dressed in black, wildflowers blooming, the wind, the loss of a child maybe more expected in those days but still unbearable.

We talk about my niece Devin. The last time I saw her was here at Paradise three years ago. She died in May, 2007. We miss her so.