A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at December 28th, 2006

About this blog ….I can only post when I have a signal.  Until a few months ago we were still on dial-up out here so far in the country, I mean, agricultural region.  That was hell with, sometimes, as many as 20 interruptions an hour, if I got on at all.  After a lot of research I found a satellite company that said we could get a strong enough signal out here and I signed us up, just like that.  For thirty glorious minutes I was on the internet and things were moving at the speed of shadow.  Then the signal dropped out of existence.  Flummoxed, I finally called the satellite folks and they walk-talked me through the whole process of unplugging, uncabling, plugging, waiting, watching the blinking lights, hoping they would go solid…with no good result.  They finally told us we would have to have an installer come back because they weren’t reading any signal on their end; and, it would be about a week.  Awful news.  About two days into the waiting, my husband happened to be out on the deck at the site of the installation and came in to report that he knew the problem.  The dog ate the cable.  Sheepishly, I did tell the satellite people and the guy is probably still laughing about it.  Anyway, they came sooner than a week was up and put the cables way up high, through the attic and into the office where the dog, presumably, can’t get at them.

          So now I have a problem only when the weather is bad; which, in Cornelius, is November through April.  The signal is always there but I can get on only sporadically and usually at the end of the day because, as I have often noted, if the weather is going to clear up in the Pacific Northwest, it does it at the end of the day.  In spring and summer, that is terrific as you get the equivalent of an extra day.

          It would be especially nice to have that extra day every day because maybe then I would have the time I crave to write.  As it is, I am trying to adjust to new tasks that involve skills I’ve never found it terribly key to cultivate – mucking our horse stalls, for instance – and fulfilling what I think I’ve figured out is the one raspy edge of my husband’s that most needs attention.  That is: not having to do it all alone.  I know why he feels that way; he spent so many years responsible for major TV productions and, at the same time, for all of the household chores as the worsening chronic sickness of his late wife caused her withdrawal from the partnership.  Ultimately, he worked, ran the household and cared for her.  Now, he’s got a pretty full plate in retirement with a vineyard, blackberry field that, last summer, yielded 18 tons of berries, eleven horses and all that goes along with managing such activities.  Not that he complains; he wants to be doing those things; that is what his dream was all along.  It’s just that it is overwhelming and when he starts to feel the pressure, he feels like he can’t do it all and that it’s too much for one person to have to shoulder.  His response to me, in those moments, is really his response to the past.  He expects a certain set of circumstances that don’t really exist anymore.  He expects that he’s still doing it alone.  But I’m here, now, capable and willing to help even if I feel a little silly and embarrassed and worry that I won’t perform adequately some job he can do so well himself; and, at that, jobs that don’t require a lot of experience:  cleaning out the horse stalls, for instance; something that, in and of itself has no glamour (despite the Green Acres myth) but, as part of the whole, is dream fulfillment; my husband’s dream to be a farmer and have someone by his side with whom he would live that dream. 

Old fashioned?  Maybe; but, what is this all about but dreams, anyway?  A week or so ago I had a dream I told Jim about in which I was wearing a lettuce leaf bracelet.  On Christmas morning, in addition to the new desk chair I lobbied for, a big box under our tree held unexpected treasures – two wonderful thesauri and a book of one-liners and a plastic bag that held a head of lettuce with a hole cut out of the center so I could wear it as a bracelet.  Jim said he wanted to make my dreams come true.  We are too old to dream a future together and create something new. Our job now, and what we do have together, is the ability to help each other with our existing dreams. I think it’s possible that we know this deeply and that the moments of friction that do occur are over not a threat to our individual dream but over a threat of failure in not being up to the job of waving a magic wand over the other person’s dreams.  

I said in our wedding vows that I began to consider the possibility of marriage once I saw that we each had a ragged and jumpy heart and that we each had the desire and ability to soothe that ragged edge in the other.  We’re not always on the same wave length, and we don’t always have the signal at the same time, but it is always thrumming in the air, the veritable energy of connecting our dreams. 

How sweet is that? 

Posted by Holly at December 21st, 2006

I live on a farm. It is preposterous that I should live on a farm. I live here because I married the farmer who is sweet and rugged and, when he wears his glasses, looks like Richard Gere. He was born to this work and, in fact, spent 40 years as an independent television producer waiting to get to the land. But, I digress; this is about the farm, not exactly about my new husband, except maybe a little bit. It’s not the kind of farm with chickens and cows but rather horses, grapes, blackberries, apples and vegetables. The vegetable garden is easily as big as the condo in Seattle I sold when I got married to the farm. If you were to walk in where, on a grid, the front door of the condo would be, you’d be standing at the end of a row of peas. To the left, the master bedroom and bath, there are artichokes and asparagus. Jim, the husband-farmer, moved the asparagus this year (he says transplanted is more accurate) and we picked a couple of early stalks that tasted great but were like lanky teenagers who don’t have their full growth yet so he decided we should let the plants grip their new earth home this year and have a grown-up crop next. I’ve been watching them put up a lacy veil and develop little red berries. Right next to them, still in the MBR, is the artichoke plant. About a dozen of these elegant finials graced our summer meals with their nutty flavors released through gentle steaming. Elsewhere, outside of the vegetable condo, is another artichoke plant, the ornamental variety. I am in love with this plant. It resembles its edible relative and puts up strong stalks on top of which grow something that looks like an artichoke but, instead of closing over and growing those beautiful leaves shaped like the card suit of spades, heads of spiky purple develop. They look for all the world like punk teens. Bees love them, which means you have to be prepared to move fast if you want to cut some to stick in a vase and leave on your kitchen table. Mine are in an old King Tut liquor bottle dated 1978 – right around the time I saw the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of art. I found it in the local Goodwill and the exotic artichokes look fabulous against the shining and glamorous gold and black of the bottle. Back in the veggies, and moving quickly through the condo, beans and peas, beets, chard and lettuces fill up the guest room before reaching the living room and deck, my favorite parts. Here is where grow more cucumbers, zucchinis and acorn squash than I have ever seen in one place at one time that wasn’t a big grocery store; excuse me, urban market. And that is to say nothing of the tomatoes, skillions of tomatoes, each one a precious jewel of satisfaction. Biting into a tomato that has just come off the vine in your hand on a warm and sunny day with, maybe, a fluffy cloud or two and definitely a bunch of horses grazing in the nearby pasture, is something. It’s like reading a description of something you’ve never done but almost feel as if you had by the time you finish the paragraph. If you’re lucky, the tomato kind of explodes and the juice and seeds squirt into your mouth, startling your tongue – and dribble onto your chin making you lean forward fast. It’s all a rush of taste, thrill and motion. I can’t quite believe I live here and don’t yet feel as if it is anything I can lay claim to. Living on a farm is as far away from my Brooklyn apartment growing up and subsequent big city life as I can fathom. Leaving Brooklyn and moving to Manhattan was about as far afield as I ever thought about. And that was quite a leap. Living in New York City is like nothing else in the world. In fact, when I finally did move west to Washington State, I wanted to write a book called Living In America For The First Time: New York Is A Foreign Country. And I was nearly terminally homesick in Seattle in the beginning. True, I would have moments of being so involved in my work that I could have been anywhere and would have no sense of being away from New York or in Seattle or anywhere else. Coming to, leaving the work trance, I would see those moments as hopeful that I was still myself no matter how far removed I was from my familiar surroundings. It is also true, though, that what saved me from the homesickness, as much as I have been saved, was taking a soulful walk in a nearby park only to begin to recognize its contours and begin to believe I might be in an Olmsted landscape, just like those of Prospect Park or Central Park in New York. I was. It was a little scary that my joy derived from the balm of a familiar landscape, that I was so attached to the familiar I could only be truly happy in its embrace. I know I never said the word Seattle growing up; why would I, the capitol of the state is Olympia and that’s all we had to memorize. It was an odd transition, one I made for a man with whom I had a long involvement – not the new husband – and I used to worry that I had trucked all the way across the country with stuff that started in the east like the china and silver that were my grandfather’s and that I adore, wondering about their New York sensibility in this outdoorsy atmosphere. I prided myself on the remarks I always got from friends who visited me in the Seattle condo sans vegetables, that it was so much like a New York apartment. This was always high praise as New Yorkers are not so particularly beloved out here; at least, not on the surface. We’re too quick and sharp-tongued. We say what we think without the benefit of the Northwest Nice phenomenon. Articles appear in local newspapers about this from time to time. Then there’s the intimacy evaluation. People out here are friendly and smile at you, but hardly ever with their eyes. It’s hard to get to any intimacy and, if you do, it takes a long time. It’s quite unlike standing on a New York City street corner, waiting for a break in the traffic through which to dart and striking up a conversation with the person next to you, literally sharing thoughts and quick anecdotes that cut through the early stages of a relationship to get to the heart of the matter. You know where you stand there. You don’t always here. I always congratulated myself that I had picked friends who understood, aspired even, to the east coast rhythm and found those parts of my personality engaging. In other words, I didn’t want to lose my New Yorkness. So it astonishes me daily that I have come to love and live on a farm with acreage expressed in multiples of ten and skyscrapers replaced by mountains. Three of them within sight on a clear day. On other days, they are there but behind a mist that must be just what it was like when Ronald Colman crossed into Shangri-la in Lost Horizon. If I never said Seattle growing up, there wasn’t even the opportunity to say Cornelius, a small town of mostly Hispanic residents, migrant farm workers. Cornelius may, someday, grow a little as it is close enough to Hillsboro and Intel – and Portland – to absorb the urban spread these centers of commerce will surely spawn. Right now, however, it is a small town place where most store signs are in Spanish first. I have only flashes of feeling that I truly live here and have some stake in this beautiful place instead of being an invited and welcome guest in my husband’s home; a place he earned and I just had the good fortune to marry. And although I am in no way comparing my life to that of a migrant farm worker, there is a lot ahead of us. The first few months I thought only of how I could bring some sense of me into this place until my husband reminded me that when people asked me if I had made the changes to make it my home, I should rightly have been answering, you mean our home. That, of course, is at the heart of this. All of my life I’ve had a vision of my own, even as a child. I never saw myself in a marriage, as a mother, doing anything as a couple. I didn’t resist it when it happened and had a perfectly wonderful, if too short, marriage whose disseverment by death was life’s greatest misfortune for me and for our little son. But my image of my own life was undisturbed and, for the next twenty-five years and despite a long relationship – with separate abodes – I lived on my own. I used to say it was the only silver lining of losing my husband when our son was only seven that I didn’t have to share his upbringing with anyone who might not always agree with me. How have I gotten here? How did my mind, without my knowledge, decide that it was time and safe to risk living so far outside of my comfort zone and with someone else who, oh lord, has opinions and visions and who knows how to do so much of what I never even considered before? It is a question I may not bother trying to answer. There really is no time to try to answer it as there are tomatoes to pluck off the vine, apples to turn into pies, fires to watch in the big brick fireplace, wine to drink, sunrises to watch from the bedroom window beneath the limbs of a protective pine tree and in the arms of a man I love.