CHAPTER 2

The Farm on Coldwater Road

Family portrait, San Francisco, 1961

Milt,” my uncle Bob began. “It’s Hazel.”

In 1964, a five-minute long-distance phone call from Michigan to California cost the equivalent of twenty-five dollars. People didn’t call for a casual chat. Hazel was my dad’s older sister and they were close. Hazel had taken care of Dad as a kid when he was diagnosed with rickets, a painful bone disorder. It was Hazel who shimmied up an apple tree to get them something to eat one afternoon when they were hungry kids fishing together. They lost their hard-found worms and, too poor to buy any more, she put the apple cores on their hooks. In her nine-year-old logic, she argued, “We like apples, maybe the fish will, too.”

Some people find the silver linings in the darkest of clouds. Hazel was one of those. When she was diagnosed with lung cancer, everyone was sure she would beat it.

“She’s dying,” my uncle said. “It could be a day, a week, or a month. She’s in bad shape. She keeps talking about you . . . and . . .” He couldn’t go on.

Hazel was just thirty-six years old.

Dad turned ashen. “No one told me it was that bad,” he said, stunned. He stared blankly at my mother across the room. Without a word, he handed her the phone. He sat on the couch, his head in his hands, still in his police uniform.

Bob pulled himself together to talk to Mom. “It’s just a matter of time now. She’s been talking about Milt and she wants to see him. It’s”—his voice broke—“her dying wish.”

Mom’s heart dropped. “We’ll get him there one way or another just as soon as we can.” Then she quickly hung up to avoid costing Bob any more money on the call.

Practical people, they talked about the options. Bob had mentioned flying back to Michigan. A flight would cost about $600, equal to $4,670 today, or about ten times the monthly rent on their house. Plus, they agreed, if he went back for a week, would that be enough?

“Maybe we should consider moving back to Michigan,” she said gently. “It won’t cost any more for all of us to move than it would for you to fly back one time.” Dad kept a hard gaze on the floor. “We’ve got enough money for the trip and some to hold us over until you find work. It’s been a great adventure but maybe it’s time we went home.”

With that, my parents left California just as quickly as they got there. Dad gave notice the next day. His Irish co-worker Brendan Maguire bought some of their furniture and agreed to sell off the rest and send them the proceeds. Two weeks later, they were on the road.

The morning they left, my mother walked through their empty house and into the sunny backyard bedecked in all shades of pink and yellow roses. She went to a climbing bush with fuchsia blooms, took a deep inhale, and stared up at the clear, cloudless March sky. Then she fished into her pocket for a small pair of scissors and snipped off one of the larger roses.

After they hooked up with Route 66, this time heading east, they stopped less often now that the kids were older. To avoid their experience with the “Route 66” song on their way out, Mom brought a stack of songbooks with her in the front seat. When the kids got tired and started to fight, she taught them another song. “Kids can’t fight when they’re singing,” she says. One from The Boy Scout Songbook became a family favorite:

Oh, Mr. Johnny Verbeck, how could you be so mean

We told you you’d be sorry for inventin’ that machine

Now all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen

For they’ll all be ground to sausages in Johnny Verbeck’s machine.

Days later, they hit a blizzard in Ohio. Mom reached into the glove compartment, where she’d stashed the fuchsia rose. She cradled the limp flower in her hand for a last smell of California. As they crossed into Michigan, the petals fell apart, scattering in her lap.

It’s hard to visualize a person you’ve never met but everyone loved. When I hear stories of Aunt Hazel, I think of the character Elizabeth Montgomery played in the television show Bewitched. People describe her as a lovely blonde with deep green eyes and a mischievous yet sweet presence. Just before her cancer diagnosis, she wore a fetching green satin dress with a stylish hat to a family wedding. Men clamored to dance with her. For fun, my aunt Mary Jo, her youngest sister, asked one of the men how old he thought she was. “Gosh, I didn’t think of that,” said a handsome soldier. “I hope she’s at least eighteen.”

Hazel started smoking at age thirteen. She got a job at fourteen, and then married at sixteen. She didn’t marry well. Her husband turned to booze, and by her twenty-fourth birthday, she was a divorced woman with three kids, a minor scandal in the early 1950s. But Hazel was as tough as she was kind, and, like her seven siblings, she’d been brought up to work hard. She hadn’t told anyone when she was first diagnosed with lung cancer. Hazel believed she could fight anything.

Back in Michigan, my parents were unprepared for the sight of her. Hazel’s thick blond hair had turned to wisps, her skin stretched taut across her cheekbones to expose the outline of her skull. Her green eyes had dulled with pain to a tired gray. At just seventy-five pounds, the skin on her arms barely seemed to cover her bones.

After a teary reunion, the pragmatic Hazel asked weakly where they were looking to move. “There’s a farm for rent, not far away from our family’s old little house over in Davison. It’s on Coldwater Road. You should go look.” Dad nodded that they would.

After their first visit, my parents went to the car, hugged each other, and cried.

“We can’t possibly live here—this place is a wreck,” my mother declared. “The pipes are all frozen up. There’s not even any heat.”

Although March, it was a classically unpleasant late winter day, frigid, damp, and gray. Mom stamped her feet on the floor of the living room to keep them from freezing.

The front door to the small farmhouse had been left open by the previous tenants. Who knew how long it’d been open? Snow banked into a pile in the front of the entry hallway. Beat-up carpet lined the floors and the wallpaper was peeling off in the living room.

Dad listened as he looked around. When they saw the FOR RENT sign out front, he’d had a good feeling about the place. Settled on ten acres with an orchard backing up to an expansive wood, it would be big enough for energetic kids. Plus it was cheap, just forty-two dollars a month. “It’s in a great school district,” Dad said, trying to sell her on it. “The little schoolhouse where I went as a kid is just down the street.”

Mom said nothing and pulled her coat around her to step outside to call the children in from the car. The kids rushed in with gusto. “Which room will be mine?” my brother Milt asked, bouncing around the living room.

Mom remained neutral. “Let’s look around a bit.”

My sister, Sandy, then one month shy of five years old, clapped her hands together in new pink mittens and twirled around the room. “I like it. It made the sun shine.”

Mom peered out the bay window. The weak winter sun had indeed come out and the house seemed transformed by it. The rooms suddenly felt a bit bigger and less forlorn.

Dad guessed the farmhouse had been built around 1895. They headed to the cellar, where squared-off hardwood logs made up the floor joints in the basement. The walls were made from piled granite rocks. “Looks really well built, solid,” my dad said cheerfully, banging against one of the logs.

“Feels kind of creepy,” replied my mom, still hugging her wool coat to her.

Nestled into a deep set of shelves in the basement sat seemingly hundreds of dusty canning jars. Under a muslin drop cloth, they found an incubator for baby chickens. A pair of slanting double doors and stairs led to the outside. “Good for tornadoes,” my dad said. “If you can’t get up the stairs, you can still get out.”

Didn’t help Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, my mom thought, but said nothing.

They went back upstairs to inspect the bedrooms, two on the first floor and one big room up on the upper floor. The ceiling of the upstairs room had the lines of the pitched roof and took up the width of the house with a window on each side, the top of a large tree visible from each one. At seven and eight years old, my oldest brothers weren’t worldly kids. This was the first time they’d been in a two-story house. To them, it felt as if they’d stumbled into a mansion and now had the chance to live among the trees.

Just then, they heard a voice downstairs. The owner’s wife, Molly, had shown up. She was a sturdy woman in a musty men’s winter coat and heavy farm boots and wearing a touch of frosted lipstick. She told them not to worry about the toilets—frozen solid with the water still in them—or the furnace, which appeared not to be working. Her husband was coming to sort it out.

“We had some people here and they got behind in the rent,” she explained in a husky voice. “We didn’t really get after them about it. They just left one night and didn’t tell us. Can’t figure someone doin’ somethin’ like that.” She shook her head. She handed my mom a basket piled with eggs. “We got us more eggs than we need. Just got these this mornin’.”

Farm fresh eggs! This was something they didn’t get in California. Mom was touched by the thoughtful gift. Maybe she could keep an open mind.

In the kitchen, a large window over the sink afforded a view of the massive backyard, layered with a thick coat of pristine snow. Mom noticed a massive bare oak. Good for a tire swing, probably has a lot of shade in summer, she mused.

Molly took them outside and pointed out the naked limbs of dozens of fruit trees, seven varieties of apples, yellow cherries, plums, pears, and a massive mulberry tree. She led them past a whitewashed chicken coop beyond the ample barn to show off an aging tractor under a haphazard tarp. “You can use it all you want. Come in handy if you plow a garden.” She nodded to the woods. “In summer, you can find all kinds of mushrooms and lotsa wildflowers.”

Dad looked at Mom. The kids were running around happily in the snow, throwing themselves down to make snow angels, something they had learned just a day earlier. My sister flapped her arms, beaming as she singsonged, “We’re going to live here!”

Mom bit her lip. Born in the Great Depression, she had been raised on a series of farms. So what if the wallpaper was peeling? Or the living room seemed to have a bit of a slope? She had four small children, her husband was unemployed, and they spent half their savings moving from California. Who knew what the future held? But if they had fruit trees and a garden, at least they wouldn’t starve, not once summer came along.

“Okay. Let’s do it,” my mom said. “Until we find something else, anyway.”

The next day they left my uncle Bob’s house and moved in. Molly’s husband fired up the furnace. The pipes thawed admirably. My folks bought beds at a secondhand shop and wrestled them into the back of my uncle’s truck during a break in the snowfall. Mom made each bed with linens brought from California.

The rest of the house remained empty as they settled in the first night. Mom sorted through boxes of kitchenware to unearth a heavy-bottomed stockpot. Her parents had come to greet them within hours of their arrival back in Michigan. “You’re back!” her mother, Inez, had said, throwing her arms around her in a suffocating bear hug. Her father, Charles, a hulk of man standing at six feet four inches, threw his arms around them both. On the long drive, Mom had had second thoughts about moving back to Michigan. In the long double embrace of her parents, she wished she’d moved back earlier.

Then Grandpa Charles stood back and took a look at her. “Look at you, such a skinny thing,” he said, shaking his head.

Grandma Inez nodded, wiping tears from her eyes. “You ain’t been eatin’ enough,” she agreed before blowing her nose loudly into a Kleenex.

Charles reached to the ground and picked up a hefty burlap bag and set it on the table. Inside the bag were smaller bags holding twenty pounds of mixed beans that he grew and dried on his farm in central Michigan. Along with the beans, he’d packed onions and carrots from his cold house and a thick slab of cured pork belly from his most recent hog. “Welcome home, sweetie.”

So Mom dug into the bag and pulled out a pound of dried beans to make a pot of soup for their first meal in the old farmhouse. As it began to gurgle, the warmth from the stove crept through the lower rooms. Her fourth move in five years, she began to systematically empty each of the worn boxes marked “KITCHEN” and figure out where to put things away—no easy task, given that the small room had only one drawer and few cabinets.

As she started on the third box, the walls creaked slightly at a strong gust of wind. She stopped to look out the steamy windows at the long, barren stretch of land outside her new home. Hard to imagine that only three weeks earlier, they’d been happily living in the warmth of California. What would the place look like when it thawed, she wondered.

I can always plant some roses, she thought.