I drove to Great Lakes, Illinois, with Weston and Morgan for Ross’s boot camp graduation. The navy puts on an amazing show in an enormous hall with music and the graduating divisions marching in formation. I could hardly wait to pick Ross out from the sea of white uniforms. He could hardly wait to ask for his contact lenses, which he had not been allowed to wear during boot camp.
He had a weekend of liberty, and I had a whole list of potential entertainment, but he didn’t want to do much besides hang out in the hotel room with his family. I had to tell him about his grandmother. As difficult as that was, I could see how much he had grown up during boot camp.
I was a little bit sad that boot camp was over, because I knew that would be the end of the wonderful letters.
On the last evening, he cried when I drove him back to the base. He was heading to Charleston, South Carolina, for nearly two years of nuclear power school training before being assigned to a submarine, and we were heading home to prepare for another school year and another hard winter. The annual Party on the Farm was coming up, too, and I went into cleaning mode. Every fall, I had a big party and invited any readers who could attend. But the farm was a mess. 52 was a hoarder, and I had a hard time convincing him to ever get rid of anything—but I could throw away my own things at will and did.
I’d started throwing things out the year before when I’d made room for my grandmother’s dishes, but I wasn’t done. I tackled my closet that fall, which was packed with clothes I hadn’t worn in years. I lived on a farm. I wore jeans and T-shirts or sweatshirts every day. A closetful of dresses from a former life was doing me no good and taking up space I needed for more functional storage.
I made the first pass through my closet and came up with a mountainous pile. Only the closet looked almost the same. (How was that possible?) I took a break, reflected on the meaning of life and all this excess clothing that I never wore. I had fancy dresses from when I used to go to writing conferences and the accompanying dinners and parties. I didn’t do that anymore. I took a second pass at the closet. And a third.
Then I let Morgan pick out whatever she wanted for herself from the piles. She took four or five items. I found her pickiness very inspiring. I thought about Ross, carrying everything he owned away in a seabag.
I made another pass at the closet, and another. Weston’s girlfriend came over, and she took a couple of pretty dresses that she liked.
Morgan was a real helper. She made fun of almost every piece of clothing. (“That looks like something an American Girl doll would wear!”) She helped bag up the clothes and said “No!” when I backpedaled and considered keeping something.
In the end, I threw out almost every single item of clothing in the closet. I didn’t want to live that way anymore—surrounded by purposeless excess. I had almost no clothes left, and I couldn’t have been happier about it.
I encouraged 52 to tackle his own purposeless excess, but I got nowhere. I got the kids to help me clean up outside, making piles of crap in the driveway and the yard for 52 to examine. Most of the junk outside belonged to him, or at least was claimed as under his control. I could understand stacks of extra building supplies—leftover supplies from one project often found use in the next—but there were used furniture pieces (often in disrepair) that no one wanted in the house, broken tools, rotted construction materials, and various other odds and ends and items that were truly junk. Remains of hay and chicken poop complemented the scene as it was impossible to clean around all that crap, and most of it was piled up around the foundation of the house, making our house look like the centerpiece to a junkyard.
52 came home and pulled most of the junk out of the piles and put it back in keeper stacks around the house, but at least I got the chicken poop and old straw raked out while it was moved.
I had this vision of a storybook farm, where everything would be cute and tidy, and walking around the house and farm would be like turning a page to see the next colorful, enchanting picture. But 52 liked junk, and he was possessive of it.
We were at odds on our ideals of simple, minimalist living. My concept involved keeping what was functional and cherished. Everything should have a purpose. I organized all my crafting supplies, soap making, candle making, and so on. I had pots and pans and supplies for cheese making, and I could barely pass up a cooking gadget. I loved to cook! If it was decorative or sentimental, it was chosen carefully for meaning, and the excess was tossed, even when it was difficult. I didn’t need every birthday card my grandmother ever sent me, for example. I kept one, the sweetest one, to remember my grandmother’s handwriting and got rid of the rest. I was ruthless.
52’s concept of simple, minimalist living entailed keeping everything, because you never knew what you might need that might save you a dollar ten years from now. I was all for spending a dollar later if necessary rather than keeping twenty piles of junk all over the farm (and mostly around the house). I tried to talk him into paring down to a few piles of good, solid materials and neatly tucking them somewhere out of sight on our forty acres. You’d think there was room. I got nowhere, and his excess wasn’t just limited to materials.
He did much of the grocery shopping since he was in the city every day. If he brought home a package of chicken, he’d bring home twenty, just because it was on sale. Sometimes this was great, and I understood the concept of buying on sale, but even with four freezers by this point, we were squeezed for space, and I was running out of room to keep home-canned goods, too. I asked him for canning jars one year and for the next three years, he brought home jars from ads in the paper—some free, some cheap, some with old food still inside them out of people’s attics they’d inherited from their grandmas. I had use for pint jars and jam-size jars since I often gave away jellies and jams and needed to regularly replace those jars, but he mostly brought home used quart jars. By the time I had over three hundred quart jars, I was ready to take quart jars and throw them over the hill—and he wouldn’t stop bringing home more jars. We had boxes and boxes of quart jars stacked in the house.
One year, a church in Charleston handed out over forty thousand pounds of sweet potatoes they got from a farm in South Carolina where they were going to be plowed under if someone didn’t haul them off. They shipped them back to West Virginia and gave them away free to anyone who’d take them. 52 brought home a couple hundred pounds of sweet potatoes. Of course.
I made mashed sweet potato pie, sweet potato fries, sweet potato casserole, sweet potato bread, and sweet potato muffins. Then I was in the mood to throw sweet potatoes at 52’s head, so I called Georgia.
She said, “Oh my, that’s a lot of sweet potatoes.” Luckily, though, she wanted some, so I happily took the excess to her house. She went on a mission to pass them out to her church ladies and friends and shut-ins. She had Weston and Morgan unload them right into the trunk of her car for easy delivery.
That evening, we were planning to head out to a visitation for my first cousin once removed who had passed away at ninety-one. Georgia said, “Do you think we can bring sweet potatoes to the visitation?”
I said, “I think we’re supposed to bring flowers.”
Georgia said, “We don’t have flowers. We have sweet potatoes.”
And sure enough, when we pulled in to pick her up (Georgia would never miss a visitation outing), there she was with a bag of sweet potatoes in each hand. Morgan, who insisted on coming along (she would never miss a social event), ran around asking everyone at the visitation if they wanted sweet potatoes while Georgia handed them out at the door like funeral wake party favors. Morgan wore her darkest blue T-shirt in honor of the somber occasion and put it on inside out because she didn’t think it was appropriate to have any print on her shirt at a funeral visitation.
I said, “But it’s appropriate to ask everyone if they would like a sweet potato?”
I should have brought quart jars.
I filled as many of the excess jars with home-canned green beans as I could stand. The kids didn’t like green beans any more than they liked sweet potatoes, and they were harder to disguise. I loved green beans, but I couldn’t eat them all by myself and, for some reason, 52 barely ate, at least not at home. I finally came to the conclusion that he barely picked at the meals I prepared because I loved to cook—which was a pretty good commentary on the contrary state of our relationship, and yet we just kept truckin’.
I stayed close to home as much as possible, waiting for Beulah Petunia to calve. I didn’t want to miss it.
But it was pear time, and Georgia had pears. She’d gotten them from a friend who had a pear tree. She couldn’t see well enough to read directions anymore, and she couldn’t bear up to all the cutting and stirring involved in the preparation for canning something either.
She called me to tell me about her pear bounty.
“What should we do with the pears?” she asked.
This was Georgia’s way of telling me she wanted me to help her. I told her I’d check my recipes and find something. A few days later I gave her the choice between pear jam and pear butter.
Another day or two later she decided on pear butter. Every time I talked to her, I said, “How are the pears looking?”
“They aren’t ready yet.” Of course, Georgia couldn’t see very well, so by the time I got there on the day she told me it was time, half the pears were rotten and unusable, but we got enough out of them to make one batch of pear butter.
The kitchen at the Slanted Little House was, as usual, filled to the rafters with all sorts of things, except what you might be looking for. When I moved in there, the shelves and drawers were packed with old dishes and odd implements, and things literally fell out of the cabinets when you opened them. I spent the first few months there packing up a lot of things, adding organizational shelving and drawer inserts, and bringing in my own things in order to make the kitchen functional, semiconvenient, and pseudomodern. I moved it all out when I left, and I moved the old things back in.
Georgia and I scrambled around and came up with the things we needed. We cut the pears and weighed them.
I said, “We need a big pot.”
Georgia said, “I suppose there’s one in the cellar.”
Yeah, along with the spiders, bats, and trolls. I went to the cellar and came back with what looked like a witch’s cauldron in which to cook the pears. I scrubbed the dead bugs off the bottom.
Cooking at the Slanted Little House—to think I’d missed it!
With the pears cooked and softened enough to mash, I measured in the ingredients for the pear butter recipe and set the pot to simmering. The fragrance of orange peel, nutmeg, and sweet fruit filled the old house. Dead bugs and all, I loved that house.
We canned the pear butter in the big canning pot on the gas stove in the cellar porch, the stove I would light on those freezing cold winter nights when I lived there.
Sometimes I wondered what my life would have been like if I’d never left the Slanted Little House. My cousin wasn’t set up for livestock, and he didn’t particularly want to have them. I knew I’d made a big mistake partnering in the farm with 52, but I couldn’t ever regret the farm itself. It had become my life, and I loved it. Waiting for a calf felt like the biggest event ever.
It wasn’t long before Beulah Petunia calved, though as much as I’d tried to keep an eye on her, I still missed the big moment. We had checked on her a couple times the morning she calved, then we’d each gone out for the day. I was worried about leaving, but I had an appointment. Her udder had blown up to a point that it looked as if it might explode, so I knew her calving time had to be near. She’d been standing at the gate by the road when I drove out that day. She was still standing near the gate by the road when I came back. About an hour later, I checked on her again, and she had moved to the back of the pasture. We’d closed off the far field so she couldn’t hide out. Next check she’d moved across the creek. An hour later, she was standing there with a calf.
We brought her water with molasses to refortify her system after the birth. Molasses—for the sugar and iron—mixed with water is a standby cure-all for animals any time they are dehydrated, sick, just had a baby, or just about anything else. She drank two bucketfuls, then we stood there watching her lick the calf. The baby was already trying to stand, rooting for its food source. It was dark, and I was never good at sexing baby animals, but I thought it was a girl.
Next morning, I looked again and was sure it was a boy. Which brought to mind baby calf names like Darn It, Auction Block, and Hamburger Helper. I had no idea how old Beulah Petunia was, but she was no spring chicken. I’d been hoping for a girl to raise up as a future milker.
I called Skip. Skip lived across the river and a mile down the road in the old house where my father grew up.
I said, “Skip! I have a calf and I’m a dingbat. Could you come over and tell me if it’s a boy or a girl?”
Skip said, sure, he’d be down after a while.
I went to the meadow bottom to wait for him. Skip came across the river in his beat-up truck. He was a small, wiry man, full of energy and country know-how. He’d come from the Northeast years ago, looking for cheap land and freedom. He’d been working with cows all his life.
He looked at the calf from behind, then he flipped it over and said, “What you were looking at was its umbilical cord. It’s a girl. You can even see the little udder.”
He pointed out the tiny pink teats. Well, duh.
I had my little Jersey–Brown Swiss future milker.
One day a few months earlier, the Ornery Angel’s two little girls had ridden by on their bicycles on the road in front of our farm. They asked what our cow’s name was. I said, “Beulah Petunia.” They giggled and giggled. Every cow needs a name that makes people smile. I decided this baby needed two, just like her mama.
I named her Glory Bee, and as winter approached, I was back to milking my cow.
Winters were never easy at Stringtown Rising. The winter before, we’d had a foot of snow three separate times and lost power for a week—over Christmas. It was record snowfall. The third winter wasn’t much better. I wasn’t a courageous driver in snow and ice. I still depended on 52 for nearly everything, which was why I couldn’t see my life on the farm without him even as my life with him became more and more intolerable.
In the winter, he was the one who picked up the mail and took out the mail, took away the trash, drove the kids out of the holler and brought the kids home, and brought groceries and feed for the animals. I kept the woodstove burning so we could save money on electricity and propane, but he chopped down the trees and split the wood.
I continued to be close to my cousin and his wife, Sheryl, and Georgia. Sheryl, in particular, became a sounding board to my private troubles with 52 and helped keep me sane, along with my friend, Cindy, who had also started helping me with my ever-expanding website. She had all the technical skills I lacked, and she became a confidante, too. She lived in Michigan, but with the Internet, it was almost as good as if she were next door.
Weston was a senior in high school. He spent a great deal of that winter staying at his girlfriend’s house in town. She was an adorable girl, a year behind him in school, and she was a vegan. In my kitchen of fresh milk and butter and cheese, she was yet another challenge when she visited. Weston was a finalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition and was planning to attend West Virginia University in Morgantown. My new part-time job was scouring the Earth for more scholarship opportunities and making sure everything got filled out and sent in on time.
He’d had a more difficult time transitioning to West Virginia socially than my other kids. He was more introspective and loved spending time on the computer when he wasn’t playing football. He’d gradually developed a small circle of very close friends, so close that they all planned to go together to WVU.
Morgan spent a lot of time in the winter at Mark and Sheryl’s house unless 52 brought her home—or she walked. Sometimes if the kids were at my cousin’s and got impatient to come home, they’d walk the three miles over the hill, in the snow. They’d walk out sometimes, too. They enjoyed telling people it was uphill both ways, and it was true. Our dirt-rock road never saw plow service or salt, and the icy narrow route over the hill with steep drop-offs and no guardrails terrified me more every winter, not less. Luckily, Mark and Sheryl loved having the kids anytime, but I was afraid they’d have to adopt them if I separated from 52.
I thought constantly about separating from 52.
I was still holding on to my doomed idea that if I made enough money to take the financial pressure off him, his behavior toward me would change. I realized all along that money couldn’t buy happiness, of course, but it could certainly relieve stress. By then, I was making enough money from my website to start taking over the household bills. One at a time, I took over each bill, no longer splitting them as we had in the past, until the only bills he was participating in with me were the mortgage and the second mortgage. The mortgages were so high, there was no way I could pay them alone. I took as much pressure off him as I could.
Nothing changed. I still saw occasional glimpses of that man who had told me the story of the feral cat he’d tamed with kindness, but he never came back for good—and I gradually accepted that he probably never would.
We still worked well on activities involving the farm. I never got over the incident with Mr. Cotswold, but most of the time, it was doing things together on the farm that drew us together, at least for brief periods of time. There were always new plans we were making for the farm, projects to be tackled, animals to move up, animals to move down, the birth of a lamb or a goat, or the death of one. We had terrible luck with lambs. One day, 52 was down in the meadow bottom to do some work, and one of the latest crop of lambs was eating on a bale of hay.
The lamb walked away from the hay and dropped to the ground. 52 tried to stand it up. The lamb was dead, that sudden, for no apparent cause. 52 came back up to the house, stunned.
If you want to get in touch with life and death, get a farm. It’s beautiful and brutal all at once. Like the hen that I found dead one morning, fallen between the slats on a pallet gate. Or the half-grown chicken that somehow got mashed between the side of the feeder box and the wall of the chicken house. One time I was taking a nice little break in the evening sitting in front of the chicken yard watching the ducks and chickens and guineas, and a guinea killed a chicken. Right in front of me. In the blink of an eye. No notice.
There’s a saying in farming: if you’re going to have livestock, you’re going to have deadstock.
It’s true. Animals are sturdy but fragile creatures at the same time. Sheep could be particularly difficult. A saying about sheep is: as soon as sheep are born, they start looking for a way to die.
The animals were also always looking for a way to escape. I had Jack, our donkey, running down the road to the river one day when he got away from me. I had sheep running down the road to the river. I had goats running down the road to the river. Even Beulah Petunia got out one day. You can’t build a fence or gate that animals can’t figure out how to outwit every once in a while.
Not everything that happens on a farm is fun and sweet. Some of it is difficult or sad. And if you care about your animals, it’s hard. Mean Rooster was so mean, I was afraid every day he’d peck out my eyeballs or rip out my jugular, and yet I cried when I found him dead after one of the other roosters killed him.
But no matter what happens, you get up the next day and do the best you can with what you have all over again. I loved farm life even with all its hardships, and I loved my job writing about the farm, too. It was limitless and filled with new challenges of its own every day.
I wrote “children’s stories” with talking animals. I wrote sentimental essays about life in rural Appalachia or memoir-type pieces about my family history in West Virginia. I created recipes and wrote about food. I designed craft ideas or tried out old-time skills. I was working if I was making bread. I was working if I was putting hats on Clover or giving Poky a licorice treat or trying to find where my hens were hiding their eggs. I was working if I was taking a drive, looking for a new old outhouse to see if it had two seats or three. I was working if I was learning to knit or dye wool. I was working if I was cutting wildflowers on the creek bank. When I was finished, I would write about it all.
And I enjoyed it so much, it never felt like work. I was following my passion, for writing, and for life on a farm, and there was a deep sense of rightness to it. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
Readers responded. Traffic doubled and tripled, then doubled and tripled again. People left comments, sent e-mails and letters, letting me know how I was changing their lives, inspiring them to follow their dreams, try new things, or at least bake a loaf of bread. They told me that my daily posts were the highlight of their day and that my writing made them happy.
In the darkest days at Stringtown Rising, it was my readers who inspired me and kept me going. Making up recipes and stories for them took me away from my own life, at least in my mind. Hidden behind all the funny or informative or poetic posts I wrote on my website about life on the farm, I was hiding the terrible secret of my deepening unhappiness. I was afraid that 52 and I were not going to make it, and if I didn’t figure out how to make it without him, I was going to lose not just my farm and my dream but my business, because it was directly tied to the land.
I was trapped in a web of my own design, and I couldn’t see any way out.