A Body of Work

Yesterday I backed into the long handle of a golf club that we use to prop open the door to the chicken coop and fell backwards, landing on arthritic left thumb. I watched it all in slow motion on the way down to the cold ground, and don’t remember if I did the classic arm wind-milling in an attempt to right myself. Flat on my back and looking up at the blue above me, I smiled and chuckled to myself, rolled onto my knees and stood up.

I used to be so graceful and surefooted.

I also had fewer lines on my face, more energy and could even sprint when I wanted to. Whatever happened to that ageless thirty-two year old who could work sun up to past sundown and not reach for the Advil on her way to bed? She was the one who chuckled while considering the chicken run from a different vantage point yesterday. I expect I’ll be giving her a few more laughs before I pack up and head to the Other Side.

Before we took up the mantle of caretaker here among the trees and the furrowed fields, our bodies lent themselves to less rigorous activities of the outdoor sort. Cutting the grass, maybe trimming a hedge or two, but that was about it. Oh, and dragging a couple of trash cans to the curb once a week. Hoo-boy, talk about mopping one’s brow, eh? At our last official suburban home, we got ambitious one summer and put in a concrete path off the back steps using one of those molded heavy plastic forms that Quikcrete called a Walkmaker. You’d fill the randomly-spaced sections with a stiff crack-resistant concrete blend, lift off the form carefully and set it down again to refill until the stepping stone path of your dreams reached the garden. We were so young and in love, we drew a heart in the wet cement and put our initials inside it, using a stick to make the point and the fletching ends of an arrow on either side of the heart’s edges. It was easier back then to go through the stooping, shoveling, smoothing and tugging motions necessary for such a project; we could carry on that way for hours without a break and still have energy to safely make dinner while the cement dried. We didn’t quite get that path to its intended destination, and became distracted by some other outdoor event until we sold the house and left the molded concrete stones behind to tell an unfinished story for the new owners. If nothing else, they knew we were smitten.

There’s no marker on the timeline of my accumulated years where I can pinpoint that moment when I could no longer lift eighty pounds of Quikcrete like I used to. Or the exact day when my left thumb grew more stiff and in need of coddling at the end of a long stretch of handwriting my memoirs. It’s never that precise, the aging process. It’s far more subtle and gradual when one’s muscles don’t quite lengthen the way they did during the Big Barn Cleaning of 2002 or the trimming of goat hooves when we kept a herd of forty-two (do the math on that one: four hooves per goat x forty-two and that’s a mighty lot of chasing after four-leggeds to wrassle them into the pedicure position). It’s easier to run through a list of the surgeries I’ve had and remember to send a Christmas card to each of my anesthesiologists. Let’s see…I’ve come through a tonsillectomy, wisdom teeth extraction, two stapedectomies to replace the stapes bones in both ears (with a platinum filament, no less. Ain’t I all fancy now?), brain surgery to remove a benign tumor on my skull, a total hysterectomy and treatment for Graves disease (not surgery, but I did get to drink radioactive iodine from a tiny brown bottle while sitting upright in a chair with a heavy lead apron that covered my torso. The nurses who administered the medicine made sure they were safely on the other side of the glass door to the treatment room before I raised the bottle to my lips and said a silent “bottoms up!”). Thyroid now shrunk into oblivion some twenty years later, I dutifully take my levothyroxine every morning as the sun rises through the bathroom window.

Living where we do is a daily physical commitment that needs our regular attention, and our bodies must show up in working condition. The projects themselves are enough to get our blood moving and our lungs expanding. Who needs a gym membership when you’ve got 41 acres of squats, overhead presses and ab crunches during the planting and harvesting ends of the season? Our mortgage payments ensure that we’re motivated to get the most of what this natural weight training program has to offer, and I stop just shy of saying we’re now sculpted in our 50’s. We’re not couch potatoes, but neither are we ripped. I’m grateful to make it around the paths by the woods and in the fields every morning no matter what precipitation falls on me and around me during those seventeen acre treks. I feel sturdy and alive. And that’s worth a tick mark in the achievements column of my life’s ledger.

We know that at some point, it’ll be the day’s big event to walk down to the barn to fire up the riding mower and cut the meadow’s two and a half acres of grass down to size. There will still be another eight acres to go but we’ll save that for the next day and hope it doesn’t rain before we get to it. We’ll be less fussy about keeping the weeds down around the house; as long as they don’t climb up the siding and obscure our view from the second floor window to the west, that’ll be fine. Of course, by then we may have moved the master bedroom to the first floor and will only venture upstairs to see what that snuffling sound is in the attic that’s almost empty now.

In some sort of cosmic paradox, this rural tenure of ours has both invigorated and aged us in equal measure. We’ve more lines and spots on our skin, that’s true. But we also take in every molecule of oxygen the trees put forth; it hits our bloodstreams like the tonic it’s meant to be. I feel more renewed than fatigued more days than not, and I relish those evenings when I’m exhausted from the days’ physical work rather than the “wired-tired” of too much mental stress. The difference as I drift off to sleep is decidedly distinct and I don’t even remember my dreams. Delicious.

Today began like most other days, with a walk around the land and a good bit of taking stock of the projects that await us when the winter melts into spring. This morning, though, I was determined to get a head start. When the trees are bare and the fields’ contents a transparent brown, it’s clear which thickets need cutting, which trees need to be freed of the grapevines that cling to their nubby bark and weigh down their upper canopies. I set my sights on a small group of black walnut saplings just on the other side of the meadow, draped in straps of grapevines swaying in the cold winter winds. My technique is fairly simple: cut the thicker section of vines that lie closer to the ground, then pull on the thinner dangling end of the vine above until it comes loose and cascades down past my ear-muffed head to the ground. All was going according to plan until I grabbed hold of a rather stubborn vine and gave it a mighty tug. I toppled backwards as the vine slipped out of my grasp and held fast to the sapling’s uppermost main branch, laughing my way to the ground in a soft tuck-and-roll maneuver. I could almost hear the nearby thorny blackberry stalks snickering as I lay there for a long minute, wondering if two falls in as many days was cause for concern. I sat up, fixed my gaze at the end of the grapevine still swaying above me and pushed myself off the ground to full standing position.

One of us was coming down, and it wasn’t going to be me.

In Our Dreams

In the luscious quiet of a new morning, I tiptoe past the garden on my way through the field to the woods. She’s asleep beneath her blankets of compost, mulch, and flattened cardboard boxes I repurposed from the recycle bin at work. The 6 x 6 planks that frame the raised beds are stoic and patient as the space above them flutters with the ghosts of last year’s harvest. We’ve already mapped out the area where we’ll plant potatoes and onions this spring, garlic is in and out of sight, doing whatever garlic does in mid-January, and a pile of woodchips from the grandmotherly silver maple we trimmed last November is looking forward to covering the paths between the rows of future strawberry spinach and amaranth. In the middle of it all, a young volunteer mulberry sapling pauses its stretch toward the sky, saving its strength for a spring growth spurt. Tucked into the morning’s latest winter scene—bare trees dusted with a confectioner’s sprinkling of snow—the garden looks peaceful and trusting, willing to hold on carefully to the tender roots of whatever starts we truck out on planting day in the two-wheeled garden cart that still holds the top spot on our “Best Purchases for Outdoor Projects” list. She’s counting on our careful planning and discretion and we’re determined not to let her down.

And…the seed catalogues have started to arrive, in nonstop glorious full-color succession.

Some of them are just too indulgent to be allowed, with their vibrant and precisely staged layouts of rich purple cabbage and pole beans, twelve varieties of basil (I want them all), melons with neon orange or red insides wrapped in dark green striped or speckled outsides, and those Atomic Grape tomatoes that almost change colors as you watch them ripen (we have a couple of strategically-placed lawn chairs in the garden’s paths so we can do just that). As much as I love winter’s muted palette of greys and whites interrupted by tawny browns and deep evergreen, I freely admit to leafing through the pages of the catalogue du jour on the top of the stack to soak in the electric colors of this year’s zinnias and cosmos. My eyes drenched in such ocular delights, even for a few moments, helps me push on through some of the rougher days. I encourage you to try it.

Today, under a moth-eaten blanket of clouds and slow-motion snowfall, the warm breath and cheerful technicolor displays of spring aren’t even visible on the mind’s horizon. I’m fine with that—you know, live in the present—but at night I can set my dreams to a different station, and so I do. In the dark behind my eyelids after midnight, I imagine those raised beds bursting with kale and corn mache, tender French Breakfast radishes and Bull’s Blood beets (the dark blackish-purple leaves an excellent shot of color for any mixed salad). Butterflies and bees flit about pollinating anything they can get their little feet on, and the row of cattle panels bent into curved trellises anchored with t-posts are dripping with Lemon cucumbers and three different kinds of plum tomatoes. I walk through this tunnel of lush green in a flowing cotton sundress and eat the warm fruit right from the vines (this girl knows how to dream).

I can hear Patrick’s garden dreams as he slumbers by my side, though his imaginings lean heavily toward soldier-straight rows of everything we’ve planted, each seedling in its place and perfectly spaced per seed packet directions. He built all those raised beds so he’s entitled to a vision of precision and orderliness (I’m quite fine with a more higgledy-piggledy layout, letting our green children run wild and barefoot in their formative days until my inner adult tries to tame them after its far too late. One of the many reasons I don’t have human offspring). When we both wake up after a long and delicious night of such meanderings, it’s a harder task to transfer these images to paper, drafting a Garden Plan that each year, we swear we’ll abide by no matter what. We write down what goes where and in which raised bed, who’s in charge of what garden sections, and a daily maintenance schedule that resembles arriving and departing flights at O’Hare. Being mere mortals, however, our ambitions can easily dissolve in the weariness at the end of our day jobs (which help fund this whole botanical enterprise) and we make a less-impassioned promise to get out there tomorrow and dig the rows for those Ruby Crescent fingerlings we’ve been eager to grow. Thinking of those potatoes on our plates, roasted and drizzled in just the right amount of olive oil and pink Himalayan salt, is enough motivation to follow through.

Given the current state of affairs, these garden dreams have sometimes been hijacked by others, manifesting our worst fears (more violence and riots, a virus that has no “off” switch) and creating nightmares that don’t end when we open our eyes. We keep falling asleep anyway, night after winter night, tucked trustingly in the arms of hope, holding fistfuls of seed packets and tiptoeing past the promise of spring asleep in the humble field behind the house.

A Tired Soul Still Knows

Somewhere deep within me, underneath the motions of a daily routine committed to muscle memory, the what’s for dinner and did you get the mail and how was your day churns a sob so thick and wide, a storm of tears that will have its time above ground and soon. I’ve been sitting on it since Wednesday, January 6 at 3:11p.m. or so, but when doesn’t really matter. All I know is I’d best let it loose, get out of its way. I heard it somewhere (don’t recall when or from whom) that one can either walk with the Creator or get dragged. Well, you know how much I like to walk. And while I appreciate the surface sentiment, I thoroughly reject as abhorrent the theological notion of any higher power that would drag its oft-times reluctant and frightened creations around. The One I understand is much more patient than that.

So I wring from that bit of limited wisdom the importance, indeed—the necessity—of giving way to the surge of emotions that carries healing with it on its rocky tides. No, it won’t feel comfortable at first, or at all, but I’ll be better for it, less burdened and afraid. Any first-year psychology student knows that what we ignore between our ears, behind our rib cages and in our guts simply bides its time until it becomes bigger than what our skin can contain. I love my friends and family and co-workers too much to let unattended rage or sorrow come splashing madly at them sideways. And I love myself enough to forego that interior damage. So there it is—a grief manifesto and playbook, all wrapped into one small paragraph. Writing it was easy; implementation will be less so. We’ve got enough Kleenex. I checked.

Maybe this is similar to how you’ve taken in the events of the past four days (as of this writing): shock, repulsion, deep deep sorrow, disbelief, anger, perhaps even rage, roiling fear, relentless anxiety and a small glinting sliver of hope that we can push through this, our arms entwined and heads up, gaze planted firmly on a horizon that wobbles but stays within sight. I’ve not slept well, have you? The couple of hot baths I’ve taken didn’t wash away anything except the day’s sweat and dust. Apples still bring comfort in their simplicity and nourishment, but my appetite is shot otherwise. I must learn to put down my phone, to strap on my hiking boots more than once a day and get out there where whatever’s stirring within me has room to spread out and maybe even dissolve in the tolerant space around me. But that rumble of a sob is still waiting for its right and proper moment. I listen and wait. Listen…and wait. What else can I do?

Well, for one, I can let you know that I’m not in that “got it all sorted” place. That I’m frightened, even when I take those recommended deep breaths for a count of four on the inhale, eight on the exhale. I felt flat and bland when I closed off my work day for the week last Friday. No relieved anticipation of the weekend like I’d usually feel. For now, I blame Wednesday and a weary spirit that has held up its hand, saying give me a minute. Give us all a minute.

But I am tired.

Tired of waiting for something to be over.

Tired of waiting for something to begin, for people to come to their better logic and senses, to choose wholeness instead of fractioned factions.

Tired of evil mislabeled as mental illness, or worse, patriotism.

Tired of the hate…the hate…the hate.

I’ll keep wearing a mask until it’s no longer necessary, but I’m tired of what it now represents.

And tired as I am, I still can’t sleep. Isn’t that odd and wrong? Just…wrong.

And yet, somehow and in almost tender defiance of my fatigue, one of my feet keeps moving forward, followed by its trusting companion. I cover ground and find myself in a different place after moments or hours or days; the view is different enough to feed my hungry curiosity and pull me forward. A blue heron, out of place and way too early for its usual spring arrival, glides gracefully past the upstairs home office window this morning as I’m hanging laundry on a retractable clothesline, and I stop to admire its beauty. Wish I could fly. Half an hour later as I’m suiting up for the morning walk and glancing out the kitchen window, I see it slowly stepping its way past a bend in the creek. I don’t think the fish have returned yet, but what do I know? Not as much as a blue heron, apparently. I let the chickens out and place my trembling ungloved hand on the rough grooved bark of a black walnut sapling along the path to the woods. Maybe the weather-guessers will be right, and the sun will come out today.

Until then, I carry that sob with me and reassure myself I’ll survive its tsunami. The creek has told me on more than one occasion that she can handle some excess water, so I’ll be ok. We will be ok. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do.

Truckless in Homer

Thirteen miles from our doorstep, wrapped in the cold steel arms of an auto body shop parking lot fence, the blue Tundra sat minus its front grillwork and sporting a random-looking collection of florescent green circles that marked dents and dings in need of repair and new paint. We arrived on the first day of our shared holiday vacation, Patrick and I, to transfer the truck’s contents into two much smaller cars—one a white four-door rental, the other a small pre-owned SUV we’d purchased two days prior. Out of our vehicular element by a mile and nearly two decades, we worked with few words between us and a mutually tender understanding of our shared sadness over this particular loss filling the episodic silence.

In late October, we’d managed to total both of our trucks after two deer strikes one week apart. Patrick went first, driving the red Tacoma to work one dark and rainy morning, and I returned the favor as I drove to a friend’s farm to pick up a small batch of laying hens on a Sunday morning in broad daylight. The buck was a majestic 22-pointer, as long as the Tundra’s grill was wide, his rack visible well-above the hood (remember—Tundra. Toyota’s largest. 5200 lbs that can tow up to twice that. BIG.). I stayed center, didn’t swerve, practically stood on the brakes seconds before impact—that sickening crunch still echoes—and watched as this beautiful relative stumbled over to the guardrail to thrash out the final moments of its life under blue autumn skies in a wooded roadside gulley. I called 9-1-1 to ask if someone could come out to end his misery, then drove back home in my own to let Patrick inspect the damage. Both trucks were drivable in the short term, so we went on to pick up the chickens that Sunday morning and Patrick drove the Tacoma to work a few more days before the insurance claim came through with the rental (a white Toyota Corolla, four-door and way too low to the ground for our pockmarked gravel driveway). We worked one claim at a time, dropping the red truck off for assessment and repairs while I drove the blue truck to the office on Mondays. For ease of reference in the rest of this story, we’ll call them Red and Ol’ Blue.

Red was my truck at first and for a long time before Patrick laid reasonable claim to it. I’d had a gold Tacoma for years until the company recalled it for unfixable defects and we got to turn it in to be shredded (I still want to see the machine that can shred a truck). The payout was generous enough to allow for the purchase of Red when she was brandy-new, maybe sixteen miles on her when we drove her off the lot. I bought vanity plates that read GRYFNDR (an homage to Harry Potter’s house) and a vinyl decal for the tailgate, “My other ride is a Firebolt”. Hey—when your nieces turn you onto a franchise, you go with it and earn your “Coolest Aunt” title with every mile. Someday, if I ever come into money, I’ll own one of those Hello Kitty-wrapped Volkswagen bugs, you just watch.

We hauled everything in Red, from the weekly trash to rocks and tree limbs and auction finds, and I think one of our nieces had a go at learning to drive in it, taking the hairpin curves in our agri-hood with her elbows locked, corkscrewing her arms until Uncle Pat showed her the hand-over-hand steering method. On balmy summer evenings, we’d toss sleeping bags and pillows in the back for an easy overnight camp-out in the flat part of the meadow beneath the Old Man sycamore tree by the creek and look for falling stars until morning found our heads asleep on our dew-dampened pillows (inevitably, one of the cats would join us somewhere in the night, and what a jolt awakening that would be, as we own tuxedo kitties and at first glance in a groggy state, they faintly resemble skunks). Once I chased a poacher’s hunting dog off the land in such a fury I didn’t pay attention to the thicket on the driver’s side and scratched the length of Red’s flank. Patrick would not let me forget that; we never touched them up with any matching paint. Some scars are best and most helpful left in the rough.

Then Ol' Blue came along after an unexpected windfall (we don’t play the lottery, honest. These things just seem to happen to us at the most perfect opportune moments). Patrick wanted a truck that fit him in the seat and shoulders and would be sturdy enough to cover the miles it took to deliver him and two weeks’ worth of supplies to Sundance grounds in South Dakota every June for ceremony (while I stayed home most years with Red). The Tundra fit the bill; I’d help Patrick load up the night before and wave goodbye before heading back to the house to dress for a day of early summer gardening work. I accompanied him out west in 2018 and 2019—Ol’ Blue’s last trips to that sacred place. It was cool for this 5’2” gal to ride shotgun and way high above the little sedans and sportscars to our right and left on the freeway. We could each rest an elbow on the console between us, and I think last time I counted, there were a total of fourteen cup holders in the cab. No one needs more than two at a time of course, but the other twelve never went unemployed; we packed them with a first aid kit, lint roller, tape measures, road maps of Indiana and Iowa, bottles of hand sanitizer and Armor-all, nail clippers and handmade cloth drawstring bags of loose tobacco. Fast food napkins still had their place in the glovebox on top of the envelope that held our registration and proof of insurance. Patrick bought a matching cap for the bed after the first year, making our eventual trips to the farmers’ market to sell granola an easier haul—folding tables, canopy and storage totes of inventory fit neatly back there and were well out of the weather.

Red was totaled first. I didn’t cry, but I was hard to cheer up for a few days after we got the call from the insurance agent. We took bets on what the payout would be and made cautious plans to purchase a new vehicle, knowing that even a used truck would be out of our financial reach. Patrick is a negotiating genius so I left that to him, tossing in a few bits of logic now and then about the finer points of our mobile lifestyle needs. We landed on an SUV that would have just enough driveway clearance when the snow fell in drifts and be economical enough to handle Patrick’s longer work commute (I’m working from home most days, so my gas footprint is smaller for the time being). We were just about to close the deal when we got the call about Ol’ Blue. The cost of repairs was more than the insurance wanted to pay, so another total loss. Patrick isn’t often speechless, nor am I for that matter, but this one made us go still for a couple of hours. While we’re not one paycheck away from being homeless or in over our heads with the most basic of daily living expenses, we certainly can’t replace two trucks in as many months. Hard decisions lay before us, modifying our options and calling to task our preferences for travel, taken for granted up until now.

We are looking down the road of being a one-car household for the indefinite future. Borrowing time from the pandemic’s strange gift of working from home for one of us, and banking on a smooth handing over of the keys in the late spring when Patrick no longer reports to work to drive his students when the school year ends, we think we can make this work. But on the day we unloaded Ol’ Blue of his burden as he sat between two equally-pitiful banged up and dismembered cars in that auto body parking lot (the market supplies and equipment still in tow in the capped bed), it was the end of an era for us. We reached back in our collective memory and confirmed that we were truck owners for at least eighteen of our twenty years here, and made unintelligible sounds at the prospect of not having at least one on the land to haul the trash to the end of the driveway. Even with a reasonable payout, we’re still miles and months away from being able to add a second vehicle of any sort to complete the fleet we need. The word “need” has changed now, and we’re learning to be ok with that. We consoled ourselves with carryout pizza before heading home, the two cars packed to bursting with stuff we had to repatriate in the barns. Ol’ Blue was also a storage container on wheels. We’d forgotten that.

We do realize—immediately and continually and deeply—how lucky we are not to have added personal injuries to our respective deer strike claims, that we’re still employed and all family members are COVID-free, there’s food in the fridge and the sump pump is working as it should during a rainy week. The list of “thank goodness” is still longer than our temporary woes and will always be that way, based on how we choose to look at things. But as we both prepare to end our holiday vacations and return to a familiar work schedule, we occasionally glance out the front door to see if Red and Ol’ Blue have reappeared in their former shiny glories. They haven’t, and we wince a little, grateful for the memories of road trips and summer camp-outs and nieces taking hairpin curves…

There are some stories only trucks can tell.