studies in cultural juxtapositions

We got up and had a leisurely breakfast and went to pick blueberries but it was closed for ripening but being who we are (that is, always leery of rules for rules sakes although respectful of those with sound reasoning behind them) we stopped anyway and husband went to see if there were enough berries ripe to pick or not. Being as there were eight people milling around, we attracted the attention of a person who was working cutting the briars out of the berry field. He came out to see what we were doing and to run us off. When he came out, I asked him if there were any berries. He said no. Behind him was husband, fresh from walking around the field. “What about you?” I said, “Do you think there are any blueberries ready to pick?”

“Oh, there are plenty of blueberries ripe for the picking,” he said.

And you could see that fellow’s face grimace. He was irritated. If he'd a had hackles, they would have been raised. We weren’t going to be easy to run off. How dare we? Dead, awkward silence. I looked at him again. “What do you think? Would she kill us if we picked anyway?” I asked.

He looked up at me, his eyes flashed electric brown, and he said, “That’s my mama!”

“Oh,” I said, “so she would kill us then?” Pause. “We think the world of Mrs. Grullo.” Smile.

And everyone relaxed and we started to take our leave. I don’t know quite what started the next part of it. Some offhand remark, no doubt. I think he mentioned that he’d like to have a cow to milk and I of course said that I’ve milked a cow every day now for six years, and goats before that, and my daughters (who were talking to his daughter who had brought with her a ring neck snake) milk the goat now and that’s when things really loosened up! And it turned into this free flowing conversation telling tales and jokes and stories and family history and now he’s keeping his eyes open for a milk cow for me, and mine can run with his bull after I dry her off (instead of become a beef). We must have stood there for over an hour, with name introductions coming only at our departure along with hearty shaking of hands and an agreement to meet up later in the week.

Then we decided to go catch part of the Virginia Highlands Festival in Abingdon. Now, this thing is big and popular and old -- shoot, I remember coming to it with my mother when I was a child and everything was held on the Barter Green and Martha Washington Inn lawn. Now I usually avoid it, trying not to go to or through Abingdon at all for anything during the three weekends and two weeks that it runs because it totally and entirely gears itself to being a more-money-than-you-have-sense, come-in-from-out-of-town-and-immediately-be-an-expert-on-the-local-arts sort of crowd. Except I do like to catch the photo and art exhibits, and sometimes the arts and crafts booths.

Walking around the arts and crafts area, I admired one painter in particular, and one raku stoneware person who had this copper glaze she’d developed, and there was a leather dress for $500 and some wooden bowls that I told my husband I wanted some wooden bowls and utensils myself, except actually had done, not like those at the fair and done by machine. Then there was this turned wooden bowl booth. That’s all the guy had; perfectly round, perfectly turned wooden bowls and pepper grinders. And, as we’d done with the other wood booths, husband started talking to him about the wood and how they keep it from checking as it dries and the like. The wood turner immediately starts in on how this is all local wood “from right here in Abingdon” but it is obvious that he himself is not. Finally he admits he’s grew up in Pennsylvania. Which is fine. But he has this edge to him. It is like he is trying to be nice but he just doesn’t know how. When he starts telling us how he gets his wood, husband reciprocates by telling him about some trees we have here that were downed by those huge winds in April. I realize that husband is offering this guy to come and get some of this wood. It is the very type and condition that he has just told us he uses. And there I am, watching this interaction, and when we left his booth I said to husband, “That guy didn’t even know you were offering him that wood.”

That’s cultural -- those two men, the one of the blueberries and the one of the wood turning -- being so different. It is like one speaks the language and one does not. And the thing that gets me is that it is not a language that cannot be learned -- it is just that most people who come to live here don’t believe it is a language worthy to be learned.

We both shook our heads and took our leave of the wood turner without introductions or shaking hands or arrangements to meet up later. We moved on to the photography exhibit which was manned by old hometown folks I’d known all my life, who remember being young children themselves and going to see my grandfather preach. Roots are not grown in one generation and the truth is that without real roots, there are no wings either. There were only two ridiculously pretentious entries into the photography contest; most of the entries were actually quite good. One pictorial piece in particular called “Ma done sold the farm” was excellent. And a portrait called “Kenny” I particularly liked. What the judges had awarded “best in show” probably really was and that is nice.

But it was already time for the exhibit to be locked up and so we voted for our favorites and walked back across the viaduct . . . under which a train was passing at just exactly that moment. It was switching some cars out on a side rail and we stood there and watched the whole thing, including getting to see the brakeman switch the tracks and getting to see the tracks actually move, and we talked about the guy who invented the coupling system that saved so many lives and what it might be like to work on the railroad and how big those cars really are and how scary and not like Polar Express it is like when you can’t see the engine or the caboose and the cars start moving right beside you.

And then we came back home.

Our Finest Hour

My truck broke down. Twice. Twice mind you. In one day. The first time I was on my way to work, and getting later every minute, with 18 hungry horses waiting to be fed. The second time we thought it was fixed, with my family on their way home and me on my way back to work, when it was dead dead dead. Again. So I walked those three miles back to work. On that very hot (ninety degree) day.

My family had their own trials. Husband hates, and I do mean hates, mechanical work of that sort. He cusses the entire time. My kids were all still asleep when the call came to get up, do chores, eat, get dressed, and not know what the day would hold from one minute to the next. And new starters don’t come free.

But here is what happened. No one panicked and no one whined. Everyone met the challenge. Even the youngest sucked it up and went with the it. When it was over, he told us how much he hadn’t wanted to do it, but he had done it anyway. While the kids were at the barn with me, they helped work. A lot. Later when they were at home, when husband had to come back to fix the truck the second time, they looked around and they did not just do whatever. They knew how much stress we were under and they not only did their chores but asked themselves what else needed to be done and did it. In fact, they undertook a major project that had been waiting in the wings and they finished it. Themselves.

In the movie Apollo 13, Ed Harris who is playing Gene Kranz confronts the potential scale of that disaster and says: "With all due respect, sir, I believe this will be our finest hour.” That day was definitely one of our finest hours, an hour that showed the absolutely magnificently right stuff our family is made of. I am awed by every one of them. And all of us together, well!

And not only my family. A friend came and got me to work the first time, and my boss was totally great about all the irregularities of the day, and I had help that day which I usually don’t or I never would have finished up. A stranger with nothing to gain tried to help me the first time I was broken down. Kindness after kindness was shown to me.

Of course at the end of it, husband looked at me and said, “Who is going to stop and get the beer, me or you?”

Me.

Silent Summer

Chickens through the Gate
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

I always say that I can't draw a straight line. Husband says I can't draw flies. And the paint program is, I think, particularly difficult to draw in anyway. And yet it is so easy, so there, so I can share it if I've a mind.

And when I saw the scene that I drew, I was of a mind to share it.

My family used to have a big huge family reunion third Sunday in August. After they built the church, I didn't stay for the preaching anymore. Too loud. I did sit on the tombstones and under the apple tree and eat apples and listen to the singing though. I loved Noad's singing the best because, really, he couldn't sing at all, it was terrible, and I loved it so because I loved him so. And he would always wonder if he was going to sing at JJ's funeral, or would JJ preach at his.

Eventually my wanderings around during the interminable preaching and waiting for the singing and dinner on the ground took me down the road behind the outhouses, further, further. There was a gate to climb over, and it was not much used but definitely a road. I knew it led to the old cemetery, where my great-grandparents and others, were buried; to the ruins of the old cabin where my grandfather was born at the turn of the last century. There were still a few cows in the fields, and a few hewn stones that had been doorsteps, and a sty to climb across to get into the graveyard.

But mostly here there was silence. A deep kind of silence that I don't think many people these days know. You could see no one, you could hear nothing. Except cows and birds and wind on leaves and sometimes grass growing.

One would think we live way out now but when I think of way out I always hear that silence of my ancestor's home. I always wonder if it would have been even quieter then, when they lived there, with no cars anywhere in the county, and no planes -- or would the trains and horses have traveled the way they sometimes do here. I live at least 20 miles from any train tracks and yet sometimes we can hear the train. I can't see anyone's house from mine, but I can hear when the neighbor toward the back is hammering on his barn, or when the neighbor to front is feeding his dogs.

But the thing that I have most noticed that this land is never without is plane traffic. There are always contrails, usually at least three. There are most little planes that fly over here than anywhere I've ever been. I think this is an area that several local instructor's use for students learning to fly, because they go round and round in giant triangles. There are helicopters, the black unmarked kind, the business kind, the forest service kind, even, occasionally, the armed services kind.

I had decided that I would not do much today. I went outside and sat in the sun. A cat joined me. I saw the push me pull you rooster and hen through the gate. And when I listened I heard the chickens talking, and a cat stalking, and the chicks with their adolescent voices, and even some geese flying. I could hear, barely, the back creek. And some air in the leaves. Regular calm children sounds. The large animals were somewhere far away and I could not even hear a bell from them (they were probably asleep at the back creek). There were a few other birds, small birds, but the noisy jays have fledged thankfully.

And then I realized I was not hearing even a single plane. Not a small one, not a large one. I searched the sky and there was not a contrail, not even one. Not event a whoop whoop whoop from a helicopter.

Powerlessness

Scythed
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

I’ve been doing a lot of scything lately. Mostly late at night, almost in the dark, after milking. Although if we decided to, say, scythe a hayfield we’d of necessity get up early and work as long as possible until the heat got too bad. But that’s not what I’m doing, at least not right now.

I guess I’m sort of testing out the scything thing. Oh, we’ve always HAD a scythe, and I’ve used it quite a bit, but I sold my mower early in the spring with the idea of scything instead. The possibility of scything. Because the mowing thing just wasn’t working well anyway, and because the ideal would be to not use those infernal combustion engines anyway.

I’m scything at a time that I’m seriously investigating what it would take for me to be able to rotate my pastures more. I know all about how you can graze insanely small areas with insanely large numbers of stock by frequent rotation. This works primarily for a more industrial food model than I subscribe to. So because it all seemed insanely over-managed to me, and because I frankly had other things to do (have babies, raise them, get a garden in good order, build a house, you know, priorities), I was supremely happy with my large back pasture and using the front pastures primarily as organic material resources for the garden.

But now I’m itchy about fences again. More of them. And also wondering about hay. I’ve been content to buy it from a neighbor. We don’t use much, it is cheap, it brings even more organic material onto the farm. But we’ve toyed with the idea of making hay, how it could be done. Husband remembers haystacks but I’ve never seen them. I have a horse drawn mowing machine but it would need rehabilitation, and probably two horses to draw it. And more acreage than my front pastures (my likely hayfields) offer to be efficient.

Ah, but what about scything? And hay stacking? I don’t know at this point. It is a thought.

It is a thought that actually seems possible. That you could actually manage to have animals and feed yourself and have some small excess on just biological power. Which seems in itself revolutionary. People buy can openers that require power for goodness sake! Imagine a whole life wherein “power” was optional.

I’ve never been an off-the-grid worshiper. I figure using radically less (not a token little bit less) is plenty. But this “power-less-ness” is intriguing. It seems a spiritual matter, the same sort of idea as my favorite J.D. Salinger quote, “[Have] the courage to be an absolute nobody.” Open heart. No fear. Power-less.

And besides, scything always reminds me of my father. His very first job was scything old man somebody’s field. He was about 13. The two of them would start at the top of the hill and scythe down, walk back up, repeat. Forever. He said when they finished that first pass, he looked at that field and didn’t think they’d ever get done.

And isn’t that just the way it is -- if you aren’t using other-than-muscle power, nothing ever gets done, as in finished. As in, there are always dishes to wash. There is always some dirt on the floor. There are always a few more weeds that could get pulled in the garden. There is always the next milking, the next meal. One doesn’t dance in order to get done dancing. Why should one live one’s life trying to get to the end of it?

Sufficiency of a Different Sort

I was hoeing the corn. I couldn’t help but remember the story of my paternal grandmother hoeing an entire field of corn with her four small children under age seven. She and my grandfather had decided that it would get them ahead to raise an extra hog that year, and an extra hog required an extra field of corn and the only field they had access to was a mile’s walk from their home. Since Dadaw worked 12 hours a day in the mines, that meant Mamaw had to do it.

And so, as my aunt, her eldest child, told it, Mamaw did her regular work that morning, then packed up a lunch and a bottle of milk, three hoes and four children and walked a mile. The two elder children were small enough that they hoed together in the same row while Mamaw took the next row. My dad was one of the two younger children who played on a blanket in the shade. They hoed, stopped, had lunch, hoed some more, walked back home and had supper on the table for Dadaw.

I was hoeing corn today and wondering if she was ever afraid like I am. Afraid that everything is going to come crashing down on my head. Again. Afraid that I won’t be able to live up to my own standards. Again. Afraid of the things I can’t possibly anticipate, that I won’t be ready for. Again. I look very much like her: the only thing she ever told me she was afraid of was the “sting of death”.

When my grandfather wanted a better paying job running a newfangled machine in the mines and they wouldn’t give him the job because he was too “little” and he left his family and went to West Virginia and got a job on that machine -- was he afraid? It worked -- he came back with experience and know-how and got that job. But to leave your family and not have a job lined up, it seems scary to me, for him and for her.

I do not believe my husband is ever scared. He scares me because he sees as clearly as I do how things could go wrong, but it scares me and it doesn’t him. I do not know how he does that. He says I am like Arthur Dent telling the psychiatrist that I just don’t think the universe likes me, and he is the psychiatrist telling me that everyone feels like that.

In my heart I experience life in that way wherein we are all the same. Not the same but one. One but without number. That we all have “light” within us and that light always recognizes itself.

In my head I experience that people are weak and cowardly and turn their back on you and hurt you if at all possible. Even when it doesn’t help them they’ll hurt you. Like it is a sport and they get points for inflicting pain.

I hoe corn and know again why I choose this life. Because life does not roll off my back, and hoeing corn only gives me blisters, not heartache. Because I can hoe corn, and trim the horse’s hooves, and milk the cow, and make the bread, even treat a snake-bitten dog -- and not once feel like I am not enough.

Killing the Bride's Brother

I was 28 and my college roommate and I were both getting married that summer. Her wedding was first. She and her three attendants spent the night before the wedding in a cabin on a lake. We were just about to hit the sack when there was this horrid noise. And again. We turned off the lights so we could see out the windows. I remember the bride's sister jumping up and down screaming, her lit cigarette bobbing, the only light in the room. Noise again. Rocks being rolled off the roof. We looked outside and saw a person amongst the trees, then two people, then someone in a truck. We were scared. Very scared. Whatever these people were doing, whoever they were, whatever they wanted, it couldn't be good.

I went into action. "Shut up!" I screamed at the screaming girl. "Don't panic," I said a bit more evenly. "Don't panic. What do we have? What can we do?" I armed us. I had a frying pan. Someone else had a broom. I don't remember what our other implements of destruction were. We wondered if two of us could get to the car in order to drive to the ranger station to get help.

And then we heard someone on the porch. "This is our chance!" I said. I told them my plan. We were all armed, so to speak. The porch was small and enclosed. The person was trying to unscrew the porch light. I said that we would open the door and then hit the person on the porch hard and over and over again. I emphasized that we had to hit him until he didn't move anymore. Then two of us would run for the car to go get the ranger and the other two would go back inside and lock the door.

It turned out that we weren't fast enough. This no doubt because I was real sure two of these girls were going to be cowards. The person on the porch got the porch light off. But to our surprise, he then left. Shortly after that, two people got in the truck we'd seen waiting and it left. As soon as that happened we went for the car to go get the ranger.

Except before we could get the ranger the truck circled back around. And that's when my former roommate recognized the truck as her uncle's. The person who had been unscrewing our light had been her brother. They thought they were playing a prank. I told them they would really have ruined her wedding if we had killed her brother.

I am so sorry for the recent tragedy just up the road from us at Tech. But I sure would like to take the above lesson in attitude and balls and self-defense and give it to those kids before they died. Pacifism magnifies violence.

Fraternal Relations

I was somewhere around thirteen years old, in that just budding coltish-legged stage of female pre-puberty. Sleepily I walked into the kitchen. My elder brother, a good bit older than me, seemed alarmed. “CG!” he said, “Take that shirt off right now!”

I looked down at my pajamas. It was just a red cotton shirt with a little appliqué of a frog on it.

“Take that shirt off, CG! I’m not kidding! Right now!”

“What in the heck is wrong?” I yelled back, pulling at my shirt and thinking of running out of the room.

“Why, that frog, it’s peed on you and made two little warts on your chest!”

My brothers and any cousins (all male) who happened to be around erupted into laughter as I turned red, slapped the back of his head, and went for the toast.

Jerk, right? Typical brotherhood if you ask me. That’s how I knew they loved me -- that’s what my mother told me and what I came to believe.

And now it has come to my attention that perhaps I relate to the whole world as a sibling. Specifically as though everyone in it were an older brother. Or I treat them as if I were their older brother. Something like that.

There were some great differences in the maternal and paternal sides of my family, although both of my parents were, yes, hillbillies, and were, yes, exceedingly close to all their siblings. But those sibling relations looked very different to me as a child. My mother and her sibs (she was the youngest child of a youngest child) joked, gave each other a hard time, kidded, told stories both true and lies, and were always a pack of fun just to be around. My dad and his sibs were, to my childhood perceptions anyway, no fun at all. Boring. Disapproving, even. Of everything, it seemed. Especially of me.

And I had two older brothers. And fun uncles. And I learned that to have fun, to show love, you give a hard time to, kid, joke, see what you can pull over and off, count coup, and take absolutely no guff from. It is like an extended verbal, mental, sometimes physical wrestling match. There is lots of contact, lots of intimacy, lots of fun.

Not that it makes relationships easy. But it is what I know.

The only problem with it is that not everybody I’d like to have a relationship with relates that way. And nobody wants to be friends with somebody they think is mean. But that meanus ™ is a huge part of who I am. And I think it is a huge part of the brotherly love that the world would be better off with lots more of.

Picking the Fat

“Well, now, I’ll just be honest and tell you how it really was miss,” the patriarch says to me. I’d called him to see what if the asking price on a supposed milk cow and calf wasn’t more than a bit high but being who we are where we are, that wasn’t the first conversation. First I asked how he’d been feeling, and when had he hooked his team, and how was his “boy” (who is older than me), stuff like that.

Eventually I got around to asking about cattle prices. Sure enough, the starting asking price was a good $200 more than what a high first asking price would legitimately be, especially taking into consideration the specifics on this cow. She is just barely 2 ½ years old and yet has just born her second calf -- that is too young. She was bought as a milk cow and would not stand to milk, no matter what. Allowed to gestate while being babied and accustomed to the routine, she still wouldn’t stand to be milked by machine when she freshened . . . but they say she will stand quietly while being hand milked. But she is not actually being milked, and she never has actually been milked so she can hardly be called a milk cow. Her bull calf is less than a week old, and yearling beef calves are bringing very little this year, what with the price of corn having doubled. It is February (no grass), not April. My starting offer, if I were to make it (which I eventually did), would be less than half their beginning asking price.

Of course, he didn’t say anything that directly. He told me how much yearling calves had averaged per head year before last, last year, and this year, told me he’d missed the last two cow sales, told me those Jersey cows didn’t bring the prices like those “good” cows do. When I told him I thought they were asking a bit much for the pair, he said, “What? Are they asking $800?” and by this I knew what he considered a high beginning asking price.

And then we went on to pigs. Yep, they’ve killed theirs but he wasn’t feeling well enough to help much. He told me to be sure I stopped by his place and he’d give me a mess of meat, and sausage since we don‘t usually make any sausage.

Then he said, “Well, now, I’ll just be honest and tell you how it really was miss.” He always calls me miss and never can remember my first name at all. “When we used to kill pigs, people would come and pick the fat out of the intestines, that’s how hard times were. People would walk, I’m talking they’d walk five miles, just for a head. To make that souse meat. My momma didn’t make it but Mrs. Dust made souse meat with the liver and meat from the head and all those spices and it was good stuff. That’s how hard them times was, people picking fat out of the intestines.”

He isn’t talking about the depression because he isn’t old enough. He’s just talking about a way of life. How it was. Not about any particularly hard time as we would look back and think of it.

Let him with ears hear.

Helpful hint of the day: instead of ordering overly expensive fingerling potatoes (and having to pay exhorbitant shipping), check your local stores for them at affordable prices, then save your own seed. We've found them at the health food store and we've found them at Wal-Mart. They work fine.

Of Corns and Calluses

Twenty-six year ago I had a corn on my little toe from wearing rubber riding boots. I got a terrific pair of Dehner’s (one of the things in life that truly were worth the money) and treated the corn with Dr. Scholls and never had another problem.

Until, that is, I fell in love with another pair of non-breathable shoes. This time my downfall was a pair of garden clogs that I’ve worn so much I have worn out three pairs in three years. I noticed a couple of years ago a thickening on part of each foot and started pumicing them when I bathed. They never hurt but kept getting thicker. Finally there were definite centers and I though, ah-ha, they are corns. In a strange place. I put some salicylic acid on them and sure enough, in about three days the centers fell out. A very small thing, leaving a little hole.

It made me remember my grandparents. I grew up in the house beside of theirs and was freely in their home and knew their every routine: how they got up in the morning and while Mamaw did her toilet Dadaw would make breakfast for each of them of a single fried egg, a piece of toast, some runny oatmeal, and a single piece of bacon, and how this would sit and get cold until they were both ready to eat together; how Mamaw would then do the downstairs cleaning while Dadaw went back upstairs to dust and vacuum; how they each had their things -- Dadaw the furnace, Mamaw the sewing; how other things they did together -- like processing the apples for freezing. I remember how Mamaw always called Dadaw slower than Christmas (he was) and how Dadaw complained that now that he was old he couldn‘t work but 5 or six hours before he had to sit down and take a rest.

I remember this stool they had. We called it the saddle I think, or the saddle stool, something. It is surprisingly hard to remember sometimes these things that otherwise I remember so clearly. It has curved legs and its top and cushion were hourglass shaped and it was small and light and I’m sure one of the cousins has it. I have Mamaw’s Bible. Everyone got something priceless like that when our grandparents died.

I remember some afternoons going in their back door and into their family room and Mamaw sitting on the couch with one foot in the dishpan of hot water, Dadaw sitting on the saddle stool with her other foot propped on his lap, him with his sharp pocket knife out scraping the calluses off her feet, scraping the toenails to length -- they said as they aged their nails had gotten too thick to clip. And then she would do the same for him. This is what fifty years of marriage looks like.

We haven’t been married fifty years yet, and I don’t have to have husband scrap my toenails yet, but when the callus around the corn came off three days after the corn did, I had to have him cut a piece of it off from another piece that hadn’t quite released yet. It was an amazing thing, the layers of skin over a huge wide area that my body had laid down to cushion those little tiny corns. First pieces about the size of a dime and about an eighth of an inch thick peeled off. Then a thinner piece reaching out to about the size of a quarter. All off the outside ball of my foot, just under my little toe.

And that too made me think about how we ourselves get all callused up. Life as often as not doesn’t actually make any sense to me. I try to hold on to the deep belief that the universe in general is a good place, but I have to admit that mostly, I don’t like people. I like my animals and find peace there. I like the earth. And the sky. And the trees. And the lichens. And the carrots. But even these things lived with naturally require a hard spot. I try to not grow calluses about people but I probably do. I try to use the psychic pumice stone on those calluses. I try to figure out what the corn might be, and how I might treat it.

But when those calluses fell off my feet, my feet were sore. That’s how people feel to me, always. This is probably one of those things I’m not supposed to admit out loud. But they all feel like that. The people I really don’t like, well, the callus is fine for them, but the ones I really do like, love, depend on, need (though I will almost never admit it), try to take care of -- where they are in my heart always feels like my feet did just after those calluses came off. Tender. Sore. Like Janice Joplin’s voice. So obvious that the toughness is only a façade. So tender that even just the sheets on the bed cause them to hurt.

Sometimes I stand in heart chakra opening yoga asanas and cry.

And that makes me think of my grandparents’ again. As Freewill Baptists they participated regularly in the sacrament of foot washing. Symbolic ritual service. Unto the least of these. And what we are here for really is so much about what we are here to give. And there is much of that that comes out in my cooking for my family. How little care is in a happy meal, a Boston Market supper. How much loving care and service in a scratch cake. When a person dies, what do we do? We take food. Why? To be of some small service. To make things a tiny bit easier. And then I wonder why we don’t do more of this when someone is born. And do it for each other just because. I think a lot of it is because we don’t know what would be of service anymore. Another casualty of modern convenience.

I hope it is a real service, at least sometimes, to say what no one else is willing to say, even to the people I care the most about.

Life Is A Party

I want to ride it all life long. (sing that to the Rascal Flats tune)

Our eldest was just a week old as we walked in the warm spring sunshine to see our part-time neighbor in the log cabin. We met our other neighbor along the way. He was something, wanting so badly to be a good ole boy but just not having a clue and always pissing someone off with his cultural ignorance. He had two little girls.

So he saw us with our little bundle, and they are so little at first, and he came over, and I’m sure he meant to be nice but what he said that I remember was, “Well, all your fun is over now.” We looked at him, confused, and said in that confident new parent way, “We think he’s pretty fun actually.” He said, “Well, you do at first, but then you can’t go out to dinner or the movies or do anything really.”

It wasn’t long until he and his family and his debt followed his job out of here.

And ever since then we’ve regularly laughed that it is “too bad our fun is over now.” You see, we actually like being around our kids. We didn’t decide to have kids so that someone else could raise them, or because of some genetic predisposition to reproduce ourselves. We decided to have kids because we really wanted to have kids, to get to know and fully appreciate these other beings who came to share this time on earth with us, to create a family, whole.

And frankly, holy.


Hauling the Tree In
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

I’m really glad that we are together, and our children are here, with us, in our house & on our farm, today and all days. I’m really glad we picked out our Christmas tree and decorated it all together. I’m really glad to have dinner together, and breakfast. To carry wood together and do chores. To rely on each other, to celebrate each the other. Alone and together.

Ok, ok, and irritate each other too. Sometimes that is even the best part.

On Living On

My friend, Laura, her mother-in-law is dying. Recently Laura made a comment on Ren's blog that made me want to tell her this story. The blogosphere has been blessed lately to have several terrific articles about death posted -- Ren's heartfelt sharing referred us to a wonderful outpouring at 37 days, and Jim at earthhomegarden was just as eloquent. It is unlikely I will be eloquent, and very likely I will ramble.

I have said before that I think death is not so removed to those of us on the farm. In the fall and winter, it seems something or the other is always dying. Just as in the spring something or the other is being born. Birth and death. Different sides of the same coin. I didn't use drugs in childbirth and I do my best to not interfere with something's death but to honor it in its transition as it has honored me in sharing its life.

But death, and human death, was no stranger to me even as a child. My grandmother died before I was born. Her sister, my sort of substitute grandmother, died when I was quite young, too young to go to the hospital to see her, or to her funeral, or so the adults thought.

Next was my uncle Virgil. Now, Virgil was a case, you'd have to understand that. Small, thin, wirey -- he was the one who got in the fights that his younger but much bigger brothers got him out of. He had a nickname for everybody. He always scrubbed my head when he first saw me.

He didn't have a good family life. He was married twice and both women abused him. He drank, evidently a lot. I wasn't much if at all aware of those things then. He smoked. A lot. That I was aware of. And he took Alka-Seltzer by the bucketful.

He got stomach cancer first, but that was actually fairly easily treated. Then he got lung cancer, I'm sure it was less than a year later. His wife was crazy, said he got cancer to spite her, stuff like that. Again, I was a kid but these things I was marginally aware of.

And then one day Mother and I came home to find Virgil sitting in our back yard. Oh, he was so sick. He'd driven six hours just to get to his sister's house because he knew she'd take care of him. When he got there he was too weak to walk into the house. He settled into a bedroom, consulted local doctors, we got an oxygen canister in our house, and life went on. Not so different, but with Virgil in the house.

He still smoked, and darn near burnt the house down a few times. And I remember a few dramatic things, like coughing fits he'd have when I think everyone in the house thought he was dying right then. That's when the oxygen came out. I remember my mom and dad looking at each other, that silent communication that exists between husbands and wives -- but neither called for help. What help was there?

I don't remember much else specifically to be honest. He lived with us three weeks. He died three days after he left us, and he only left us to have a doctor check-up and the doc put him in the hospital then. And the funeral, with my mother having banned his wife, was interesting to say the least.

But what I remember most is sort of what I don't remember at all -- all the normal time in those last three weeks. I learned that it didn't matter how sick he was, he was still onery and funny Virgil. He was still himself. That is probably where I started to get a sense of reincarnation because his beingness was not diminished at all. I learned that death is not a bad thing. I learned how precious just the watching tv together was. I was somewhere around 12.

I'm not finding the right words, of that I'm sure, but I treasured, even then, that time I had gotten to spend with him, and with my family because of his dying.

His father, my grandfather, was already sick when Virgil died and died himself not that long after. He also had a somewhat lingering death in a series of strokes. There were several times he was in the hospital. The hospital then was a 17 bed hospital, if you can imagine that, where we could walk in any time and everyone knew everyone else, and it was run by a convent of Irish nuns. I still remember which room he was in when I got to watch a World Series with my other uncle, my hero. Did I mention that I really don't like baseball -- but I loved being with my uncle T. I remember what room Papaw was in when he died, that he had his next to last stroke on New Year's Eve, that the glycerin for his throat smelled of lemons.

I remember, for both of them, that caring for them was never, ever a burden but a joy. Stressful, certainly, and hard, but also a gift to us, the people who could give the care. Not that I did anything myself really, but I just always felt that those times were gifts the dying had given to me.

I have written of my father dying before. There are people in my life, now, who I am not able to be with as they are dying. I do not regret any time I have spent but I do mourn the time lost. While I remember their dying, that is not all I remember -- I very much remember their lives. And they do, in fact, live on in me. Patti quoted Jack Lemmon: "Death ends a life, not a relationship."

Neither death nor pain are bad things. Like birth.

"Do whatever it is you have to do to have no regrets." Debbie of SOFH told me that when my dad first got sick. I pass it on.


Day's End
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

PS A link you must visit -- Funeral Consumers Alliance. I really ought to put that on my sidebar. The book Caring for the Dead is simply fascinating.

We Have Tales to Tell

I mean, really, it is such a good party, this whole Thanksgiving idea.

And I didn't need the sake or even the sushi. After about noon yesterday everything went swimmingly. And what didn't was ok, like I didn't end up having any bulgar after all, so I just cooked some soft white wheat and we've decided we like it even better in tabouli. I mean, after all, whole usually is better. And the pies, to die for. I love making holiday pies almost as much as I love eating them. And the bird, wonderful. Husband is the bird roaster, and the dressing and gravy maker. We had so much food we couldn't even put it on the table. A grand feast is a great thing.

With so many preparations, it was after dinner before the pig got his breakfast. All the women at the shindig came with me. They grinned at the cats vying with the giant pig at the trough, but when I dumped in the muck tubs full of leaves for his dry bedding, and he did his whirling dance as they fell on his back, well, I thought Aunt was going to bust something laughing. Then we hypnotized a chicken. Then we found acorns and hand fed them to the pig just past and below his giant big oinker nose.

And they told pig tales from their childhoods. Then back inside the children sat on their laps and showed them their scars and their grands told tales of scars they had had as children. And I mean, I only wish the crowd were bigger. I love the tales. It is really the tales that tell what life is, what family is, what is valuable and worthy and what is not, and in the end, that let us know we are who we are.

And telling the tale is probably exactly why I blog. Thanks to all of you for your reading and your writing, for your tales and your amens and your 'now wait just a minute's. So have another virtual piece of pie and we'll figure out where in the heck all these leftovers are going to go.

Flying

This is for me, this is for anyone else still who remembers him or someone else special, and this is for the Scheherazade Project even if it only very barely fits the theme if you look at it sideways. Also, sorry I've been a delinquent blogger but I've written several in my HEAD I just haven't had time to post.


Sometimes I have a need to remember everything, to pull it up, turn it around, examine it from all angles. Sometimes I have no choice and it comes, unbidden, full force, visceral and I don’t just remember, I live it again. Sometimes it is like a shadow, or seeing through a glass darkly, when I don’t quite have it all and it teases me with what I don’t remember.

It had to be a Monday in late summer. Summer because I was out of school, Monday because otherwise I would have been at the pool. Unless I was young enough that the municipal pool hadn’t yet been built. Warren was still in high school but I don’t know for sure how much older than Kevin he is, but that means it was before 1976. I’m reasonably sure I was at least 12 so that would put it 1973.

This is what trying to figure out what it is you actually remember is like.

The phone rang. Mother answered. And when she hung up she said out of the blue, “Do you want to go to your Uncle Tam’s for a week?” I didn’t have to think about it at all. “Yes!” There was some quick clothes gathering which she took charge of. And we went to the airport. Not a big one, the local one, on top of the mountain, Lonesome Pine. And me and my suitcase got in a little single engine something or the other, Cessna or Piper. My brothers would likely know but I was never good at that.

So I got in the plane with him and we flew about an hour, maybe two, to the DC area. Maryland Airport. This is all true you see, and you can look all these places up. I can’t figure out how to change the names of the innocent here, or what to protect them from.

I got in the plane and we flew up there and after we got there, everything I remember or don’t remember is fuzzy. I think it was a week before my mother showed up, she may have had a brother or two with her, but I don’t really remember. I do remember that it seemed a lot longer than a week. I don’t believe I’ve ever been so bored in all my life, hours and hours of time without the only reason you are there, him. Mostly he was at the airport. I remember fragments of those days -- going to her antique store, Anna’s ‘Tiques and sitting there all day; getting cigarette butts out of ashtrays and going to the windowless side of the house where I’d hidden matches to smoke them -- knowing now how I must have reeked but she never said a word; playing pool by myself in the too small to play pool garage; the exact lay of the creek at the back of their yard, and the enticing but never explored path that went beyond it; the 8 track tapes of America, “this is for all the lonely people, don’t give up until you try.”

I remember scenes with him in them a little more intensely: the night the Pentagon buddies came over and smoked cigars in the dining room and I just listened to the timbre of their voices rising and falling all night, and wondered that they called him Bill; going upstairs quietly and catching him sleeping in his cubby hole home office, and him waking up and saying, “Ah, you caught me working;” the way he’d go upstairs and put pants on over his boxers in the mornings after I got up, seemingly slightly embarrassed that he’d only had boxers on again. Mostly there I remember being taken out to dinner one night, just the three of us, and having this great Maryland seafood meal, and him being a little sloshed and flirting shamelessly with the waitress and his wife being mortified, and me just loving the whole thing somehow. I love to dine, I loved him. Of course, the whole world would flirt with this man, it couldn’t have been more natural.
I do not remember at all going home.

But the ride up there, in that plane, that I do remember.

We got in that plane and took off and I probably didn’t even look back. He flew me over my house and other landmarks, then we took off to make time. I remember flying over some bowl in the mountains, probably Burke’s Garden. I remember that he would point out different things about the instruments, like the level one, and how if you couldn’t see the horizon you couldn’t tell, if it weren’t for that, if you were level or not. I remember looking at cotton candy clouds. And at some point he said, “We’ve got a thunderstorm. We’ll have to see if we can get there before it does.” He tightened my seatbelt for me.

I was clueless. I know that now. I’m aware of wind shear in storms, and just how small of a plane that was, and just how easily they can fall out of the sky, how few people survive when they do.

The plane started what I can only describe as bucking. I’m a horseman and it was bucking. Now, a bucking horse when I was young and not afraid of broken bones didn’t bother me a bit, and neither did that bucking plane. I was strapped in and Tam was at the controls. We’d hit something hard and I’d grin. He’d look over at me. We’d hit something worse, and I’d laugh. He’d look over at me and grin. We used to do this together in the car around the mountain roads too -- the faster he’d go the bigger I’d grin until I laughed out loud. I was never scared with him. Ever. It seemed to go on for a fairly long time, maybe 15 minutes, and got worse. I of course had no idea where we were in relation to anything. I’d stare at the controls but could not decipher them. He mostly concentrated hard, except when we hit those spots and he’d check to see if I was ok or not and I’d be laughing.

Then suddenly we were there, landing. I don’t remember clearly anymore after that but I think his little crippled mechanic came out and helped tie down and get me inside. And probably wonder that he’d fly in in that kind of weather.

That mechanic held Tam the time he didn’t make it in, the time he crashed and died.

I don’t know what it all means, or why it never ceases to bring tears. Like I’m missing something. Looking right at it and missing it. Should I hold on to it? Try to remember more, more clearly? Or let it go?

I had a piece of his furniture. It was the only thing I had of him. And it got lost in storage. And when that happened, I was able to let it go, realizing that the furniture was not him, that he’d not even had much to do with that piece and even if he had, it wasn’t him. And I still had my memories of him, just not a piece of furniture. My mantra, things are not important, came to me then.

But are my memories like that Murphy bed too? Are they something that isn’t him, a graven image instead of the real thing?

He died 28 years ago today. It was a perfect September Saturday then too. I don’t believe I miss him a bit less. I do believe he loved me

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