We’ve been getting a ton of comments and feedback and questions from Earpers out there. One of the things that people have been most curious about is who exactly we are, here at Earp Division Expo. So I decided that, for this week’s clue, I would kill two birds with one stone. I would bury it in a short autobiography. It’s your job to try to figure out just how in the hell my life relates, in any way shape, or form to either Wynonna Earp or the real life people involved in the show.
Here we go…
I was born, quite a while ago on the less well known side of New York State known as Western New York. To give you guys a little perspective, if I were feeling ambitious, I could walk to Niagara Falls from where I was born in Buffalo. It’s not quite marathon distance, but it’s not exactly a Sunday stroll.
My mother found out pretty early that I was more a brainaic than super model and she skipped me right over kindergarten and into first grade…where I spent most of the first day bawling my brains out. Most of the kids were horrified, but one little girl, Emily, came over, took me by the hand and didn’t leave my side. That was great…right up until another crying child was brought in by their overwrought parent and deposited in the room. Then I’D start crying all over again. I’ve always been a bit of an empathic kinda gal.
Things that still make me cry? Animal cruelty, frustration and anger (that's really helpful when I'm trying to be tough), bugs in my house. Though I'm grateful I don't live in Australia...have you seen the size of the spiders they have there?! That's just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Anyway...
Fast forward thigh school and Em and I were best friends right up until she moved to somewhere in Michigan with her family. Then, we fell away. I still think about her often and wonder how she’s doing.
I have a brother who’s a year and 10 days younger than I am….Irish Twins, but we couldn’t be any less an Irish family if we worked at it. There was all the usual fighting that any family gets with more than one child in a household. Siblings, amiright? At any rate, he and I have mostly grown out of it. Though we did have a screaming match in the car on my mother’s birthday because he took a wrong turn getting to the restaurant and blamed me for it. It’s a long story, but you don’t need to know much more. Suffice to say, some “F” words flew and my mother was not real happy with us. Aside from those moments, however, my brother is my biggest defender and most vocal champion and I fuckin’ dig him.
Moving on.
For the past (big) bunch of years, I have been working in the inner city of Buffalo as an English teacher. Yes, it’s EXACTLY as bad as movies make it out to be and there aren’t an abundance of inspirational stories at the end of the year, but it hasn’t been all bad either. Don’t get me wrong…It’s been rough at times…I actually got socked in the eye breaking up a fight last year, but for every crap incident or experience, there’s at least a dozen times I have burst out laughing with (and at) the kids. Just the names alone are something to write home about. Once of my first years, I had a girl in my class name “Spontaneous” and since then I’ve taught a Cleopatra, a “Mister”, and his brother “Master”, a “Female,” several “Cash”s, a set of twins named “Mike” and “Michael”…geez, I could go on and on. I remember a girl, who was one of five girls and they were all named after “things my momma said she’d never be able to afford.” Diamond, Lexus, Tiffany, etc……...
I just…..
Anyway, I could go on for days with stories from the classroom, but I do want to keep this moving.
In my life now, I’m an avid reader, tv watcher, walker; I love to cook, work on FILM photography, travel, deal antiques…a lot of solitary pursuits, I guess. I’ve been to Sicily a bunch of times and hope, someday, to be able to retire there. I tried to replicate a little piece of it on my own turf, but…well…things didn’t exactly go as I’d planned.
I’d picked up a bunch of different kinds of tomato seeds and was so excited to get them home and planted. I grew up helping my grandmother can sauce and was all kinds of ready to do it myself. I’d done it before with store bought tomatoes, but this time, it was going to be from scratch, with real, honest-to-god Sicilian tomatoes.
I started the seeds in the house in March…these little pots covered the downstairs of my house from one end to the other. I fed them I watered them, hell, when it got chilly, I rotated them into and away from the fireplace just so they could feel all safe and snuggly. I can’t tell you how excited I was when they started emerging from the soil. I talked to them; I told them stories of my day (thank god my dog was born deaf, as I couldn’t have handled her knowing what I was doing), fed them, watered them, warmed them.
When the weather got nice and they were a little bigger, I transferred them to bigger pots and started bringing them outside and inside to get them ready to go in the ground.
After giving some of them away – I may have gone a little overboard with the planting – I picked about a dozen of the strongest and brought them to the back yard for planting. I prepared the beds with soil and fertilizer, pulled the weeds and gently put the plants in the ground….where I continued to watch over them obsessively as they grew tall and strong.
And then….it happened…I walked out to the back, ready to smile and check for tomatoes, to take in the smell of the leaves…and noticed something didn’t look quite right. As I got closer, I thought to myself, “did they fall over?”
No. They did not. What HAD happened, however was that some large animal—I suspect deer—had come during the late night, early morning hours and eaten the top two feet off of every single plant out there.
That was the end for me. I haven’t been back out there since. It’s fine. I never wanted to go into agriculture or horticulture or whatever the hell else it’s called…weeding bores me, the idea of planting flowers year after year because they just die frustrates me; I kinda have a black thumb anyway, so fine. Deer: 1, me: 0.
Anyway, that’s a bit about me. I could go on and on, but it seems that I’ve gone on long enough.
Oh…and good luck using all that information to figure out who our next guest announcement is going to feature. There are AT least three or four good clues in there that should point you in the right direction.