Stuart had been the youngest until my birth, and had been often praised for the same features: white-blonde locks, round and rosy cheeks, and the big and bright-eyed nature of the babies born to our family.  My brother’s ire for me, and the attention I received, was more or less permanent.  But then again, so was the nickname.

Thus, the Rosebud Lore began, and I was granted the name forevermore.  I learned swiftly that I was Rosebud at home and in public with family friends, Erin at school functions and church services, and Erin Rose when I was really in trouble.  In my late adolescence, it was often shortened to “Bud,” much to the dismay of curious strangers in public places.

“Why would you call such a beautiful little blonde girl a name like Bud?” a woman remarked to my mother in the cereal aisle of the Carrs grocery store in Wasilla, one afternoon.  When my mother explained that it was shortened from the more appropriate nickname, the stranger looked down her nose in my direction, and with a brief nod of approval brushed past us down the aisle and went on about her life, satisfied that this little blonde girl didn’t suffer the terrible fate of mis-naming.

There seemed to be a cycle to the interaction. Each remarkable experience in my life starts with the same general pattern: curiosity, followed by active interest, interaction, and then response.  With my brother, that usually meant petulant jealousy through cutting remarks; a pattern I learned to reciprocate quickly, to his dismay.

In other interactions, however, chaos became a theme. 

The curiosity, at first, seem to stem from my hair; a long and often tangled mess of high-and-low-lighted blonde and carmel tones.  For most of my childhood, it fell wild with full, bushy bangs, and a bleached-gold sheen that gleamed when the sun was just right. 

I was a feral child (as, undoubtedly, the bulk of my family will fully admit) and I absolutely abhorred any attempts at taming my wild hair.  My sister, a decade my senior, would later often recount to friends and family how she was practically forced to duct-tape me to a kitchen chair as I howled in total protest, in order to wrench my fine-but-profuse mane into perfectly paired Dutch braids. It was not an uncommon occurrence, either, for our mother to have to help me wash the gravel from my scalp after any given summer’s day in the 1990’s (my favorite way to use the local playground swing was upside down, so I could watch my hair drag beneath me.)

There was also the three-act comedy of errors that occurred when a bus full of enthusiastic Asian tourists debarked at the Motherlode Lodge parking lot one gorgeous day in Hatcher Pass, and thought my gold hair was part of the tour.  My mother intervened once this six-year-old’s whimpers turned to cries of confusion from the center of this giant group of well-meaning but curious visitors.  Like the gold flakes that shimmer at the banks of the Little Susitna, so too the glisten of my hair seemed to call out to strangers of all types.

My favorite story, however, occurred much earlier, during a spring day when I was about four years old. 

When we first arrived in Alaska, my mother found a niche for us by house-sitting, in an unfinished and wood-heated house east of Houston, in a remote area off Pittman Road.  The driveway itself was rugged, hedged on either side by a thick forest of sparse-looking Sitka spruce and skinny cottonwoods. Our family vehicle often got stuck during the beloved annual event Alaskans refer to as Spring Breakup (as did the that of anyone who was unlucky enough to choose to visit us during that season.) 

We were remote enough to have neighbors in several Iditarod mushers, a couple who bred and sold pure-bred wolves, and a grizzled and extremely private man with a horridly gruff voice that haunted my childhood nightmares, and who was only ever referred to by the locals as “Bear.”

Remote enough, also, that emergency service response time pushed an hour, if at all.

On this particular day, I was soaking up the sun in my sandbox not far from the house.  Engrossed in play, and with my back turned towards the dense forest wall that surrounded our home, I was completely oblivious to the Stranger that had been watching from the protected forest screen, who was now slowly making her way towards me.  I was vaguely aware, shortly, of the fall of a tall, dark shadow blocking out the sun, and a distinctive and perplexing sensation of a pulling on the crown of my head. Then, increasingly aware of the force, first gentle and timid, now progressively insistent and somewhat painful, tugging at the top of my scalp.  Confused and filled with sudden fear, I dared not move.

My mother rounded the door, a sturdy oak with a deadbolt lock that she was proud to have purchased and installed herself, her gaze frozen about two feet above my head.  Our loyal and adventurous blue heeler-Australian shepherd family cattle dog, Sam, who made the journey from Montana with us, trotted out between my mother and the doorjamb and promptly froze in his tracks, his eyes also transfixed above me.  With an odd sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I slowly tipped my head back and raised my eyes to meet the focus of their gaze, and the source of the confusing head-tugging.

I found myself face-to-nose with the gigantic snorting nostrils of a six-foot-tall, razor-hooved, Alaskan cow moose.

I dropped my shocked eyes to my mother’s face, looking for direction.  As if in slow motion, and with the inherent predatorial instinct of a hundred years of cattle dog DNA surging within him, Sam’s ears and hackles raised, and his eyes laser focused on the giant cow perched over His Child, and his mouth widened to bear the full glimmer of his canines. In a heartbeat, he took off for us.

Distracted by this new threat, the cow dropped her grip on my hair, tucked her ears back, and snorted.  I stood slack-jawed and dumbfounded, frozen in the shock of the moment, before I heard my mother shout, and felt my legs start to move.  I paddled across the yard just as fast as my tiny little legs could carry me, my eyes fixed on my mother’s open arms, while Sam tore circles around the ass of the cow, nipping at her tail and narrowly dodging the brutal power of this pissed-off, half-ton relic of the Ice Age. 

Collapsing just beyond the door’s threshold, I watched as mom turned her efforts to vocally corralling the diehard family dog, now engaged in mortal battle with the enemy in the yard.  Shouting and slapping her knees from the safety of our pallet-style front step, she knew well-enough the risk in venturing out any farther than just beyond the threshold and didn’t dare attempt to come between that cow and her target.  As I peeked around the threshold, it seemed that Sam knew, too, that his luck was running short.  As swiftly as he had begun the fight, he had now turned tail and bolted for the safety of the house.  The cow was immediate on his heels, her giant head just inches behind his rump, her ears tucked full-back, eyes laser-focused and hackles raised, her hooves pounding the ground with earth-shaking power.  The vision was extraordinary, and terrifying.

As Sam slipped past Mom’s legs, she reeled with all her weight against the door and held tight, bracing for impact. 

SLAM!

Glasses in the kitchen shattered across the linoleum floor, shaken from the open cabinets by the force of a thousand-pound Cervidae at full speed against the exterior of the house.  Mom and I looked at each other, surprised the cow wasn’t in the living room with us, and scrambled to our feet to peer through the window overlooking the front step.  The cow stood staring at our front door, also seemingly confused that she was not able to bust it down.  She shook her head, stomped across our pallet patio, and trotted loftily back into the shadows of the forest wall, into a ghost forever etched into our family lore.

Alaskan moose are known for their preference for devouring the thoughtfully-planted begonias, tulips, and flowering shrubs of residential subdivision landscaping, much to the chagrin of their hosts.  It would track that, given the choice, one might nibble a Little Irish Rosebud.