Our Truck Is Ringing

Posted by Holly at May 31st, 2007

Our truck is ringing.  It is the latest in a series of my foibles leaving me feeling like a complete idiot and then trying to remember that my master’s degree in communications was not meant to prepare me for living on a farm.

          I usually feel as if I know nothing, trailing after my husband the accomplished green grocer of the land and maintainer of small and large equipment and animals.  I know he feels as if he is still learning about the grapes every day and how best to grow them, crush them and turn them into wine but it’s not the same as my innocence and lack of framework in which to think through such questions.  And, I might add, a total absence of my ever having thought about them or of having spent one second considering they might be part of my life. The extent of my ability and experience to garden, before I married my farmer husband, began with elementary school window boxes in which we carefully propagated seeds we bought as Arbor Day school projects.  Things like marigolds.  They never grew for long.  My grandmother had more success with her miniature forest of grapefruit seedlings.  These she nurtured in pots on our Brooklyn kitchen windowsill.  They were all always about 5” tall.  My outdoor gardening experience concluded at the last real house I lived in some 25 or more years ago in a tiny enclave called Snedens Landing that you had to know about to find.   I have a picture of me wearing a yellow sundress, holding a hoe – or maybe a rake – in one hand and a scotch and soda in the other.  I didn’t so much as garden as portray a person who gardened.  And only from time to time.  Not that I don’t have tremendous respect for people with this desire and talent; it just isn’t one of my skill sets.  And so I frequently walk around the farm tripping on myself, figuratively and literally.

          When I first started volunteering to help clean out the horse stalls I waited while Jim drove the tractor into place and then I could shovel the stuff out of the stalls into the attached spreader.  Then I would wait for him to come and drive it into position in between the next two stalls.  The few times I tried to do it myself, I just couldn’t get the thing to start and would have to call Jim away from whatever farm task he was doing.  Finally, I waited until he wasn’t home for an hour or so one day and went out to practice starting the tractor.  Now I can move it the five or ten feet from stall to stall.  I have only barely tackled backing it up and, frankly, don’t be behind me when I do.  But the other day, in a fit of zeal to prove to my husband that I am interested in making his life easier, I agreed to drive it up into the vineyard and spread its load of poop in the appointed rows.  Jim explained how one of the wheels – I think it’s the right one if you’re looking at it – makes the poop drop out, set it for me, gave me a little encouraging lesson about making the wide turns, told me he had confidence in me and off I went.  It went well and I was feeling pretty darned pleased with myself as I reached the bottom of the row, made the wide turn and headed to where he was pruning.  This last part of the trip was downhill in two directions, forward and sideways, and we’re talking about driving on dirt, here, not pavement so the way is rocky.  I was sure the tractor was going to end up on its side.  But I made it and brought it to a stop to talk to Jim.  Well, I almost brought it to a stop.  It started rolling backwards and, as if in a dream, and a slow dream at that, I realized I had to do something.  Jim was shouting something at me I couldn’t understand; I was debating whether to jump out or not and also trying to brake.  In my mind, I saw it crashing into the row of grape vines for which it was headed and, as if in a cartoon, taking down the whole vineyard row by row.

          As it happened, I did hit the post and the tractor did crash into and run over two plants but it stopped, thank God.  Turns out Jim had been yelling brake, brake and I thought I had been braking but the brake is not to the left of the gas pedal the way it is in a car, it’s to the right.  On the left and on the other side of the steering column, is the clutch, which is what I had been lead-foot smashing to the floor as hard as I could.  Jim was kind about my stupidity.

          Later that day he needed to load two of the horses to take them over to the vet.  These are Tess, the new mama, and her baby DeDe born on April 25th.  Tess is going to be bred again and the foal is too young to be separated from her so both needed to get into the trailer.  Jim didn’t foresee any problems as Tess always loads well.  My job was to hold the baby on her lead, close enough so Tess would know where she was and far enough away to give mama room to load.  Tess had other ideas that day.  Nothing Jim tried seemed to work, not even putting the baby in first with me holding her against the side of the trailer.  We call her a baby but she does weigh about 110 pounds and she is a horse, making her strong just because she’s centered with those front and back legs giving her stability and mobility.  Finally, after about an hour of trying, Jim got the mare on and tethered and took the baby’s lead so I could go and shut the door.  He had cleverly backed the trailer pretty far into the arena to form a barricade with the two gates so the horses couldn’t escape around the sides of the trailer and now I had to move the trailer door away from the gate door.  The metal door banged into the metal gate, Tess leaped out of the trailer whinnying her displeasure followed by Jim on his knees, followed by DeDe who jumped over Jim who rolled under her little belly to avoid being kicked and who landed on his back, knees up.  “It might have been better if you hadn’t banged the doors”, he said from that position.  He called a nearby horse trainer to help him after that.

          Still smarting from my ineptitude, I am gamely trying to be helpful.  Today our neighbor Beth called asking if we had a jack because they had a flat on their truck.  Realizing I’d never seen one, I called Jim who was up in the pasture cutting hay.  He told me there was a hydraulic jack hanging on the east wall of the shop and there might be one in the wheelbase of our truck.  He did say that Ted should come up and look for it himself but I said I was sure I could find a jack.  I think I found the one in the shop because I think I correctly determined which way is east by remembering where the sun sets and looking opposite that.  It looked heavy and complicated so I decided to look in the truck.

          After I finally got the hatch open I looked for the spot where you would lift the floor of the car interior to reveal the spare tire, jack and jumper cables.  There was no trap door, every part of the floor was fused and it couldn’t possibly have been there.  I did spy, however, the spare tire suspended from the underside of the bottom of the truck as I was looking underneath for the outdentation of any compartments.  I got out the owner’s manual and discovered that the jack would be underneath the back bench behind the cab of the truck on the passenger’s side and, sure enough, I located it.

          Feeling pretty proud of myself, I went to close the back of the truck, no small feat since the panel is kind of heavy and awkward.  As I was lifting the drop-down door, the phone – land not cell – I had put in the pocket of my shirt fell out and slipped between the bed of the truck and the inside lip of the door and landed inside the spare tire, still hanging attached from the underbelly of the truck.  And that is how the truck came to be ringing when the man from the parts department at New Holland called me back to discuss the bearing I needed to order to put in the haybine where the zerk goes so Jim can rake the hay or whatever it is haybines actually do.

          And that is why I am not answering the phone today.                

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Petals and Wings

Posted by Holly at May 24th, 2007

I had this piece in my mind as I was writing Nostalgic For My Marriage, really our wedding day.  It is something i wrote for the Washington State Arboretum Journal and was then reprinted in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden newsletter about a year ago.  It describes the attachment to place I feel with such vigor.

 Petals and Wings
         

In the beginning we lived in the back of a six-story apartment building and sometimes, in the summer, through the windows of the apartment opposite, I would glimpse the trees in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden across the street.  Later we would move up one floor and to the front of the building into a larger apartment with windows facing the panorama of the beaux arts Brooklyn Museum, the magnificent art deco structure of the main branch of the Library and the lushness of the Garden.            What an amazing place to grow up.  The experience of the place itself surrounds me now and immediately takes me out of wherever I am.  I long for a way for slip back there so I can walk the treasure-embedded sidewalks where pieces of glass or coins somehow got stuck or walk through the Garden when Cherry Blossom Lane is in full bloom, drunk with pink, anointed with fluttering silk petals that free-dance down to earth.

            Growing up in a city implies a dependence on public landscapes and the foresight of urban planners.  Growing up in America’s great landscapes where farming is the industry, one views the land in a different way, of course.   While I have seen the magnificence of landscapes that roll on hill after Winslow Homer hill, field after field, their vastness doesn’t have the same hold on me as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s every planned pathway, little rookery, gardens of tender herbs, Daffodil Hill or reflecting ponds full of orange and spotted poi.  

            At the entry to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden stands a boulder deposited there during the ice age.  The boulder, like the camels in front of the Asian Art Museum in Seattle, holds an almost visible aura of generations of children climbing and sliding, hiding behind or trying to move it with pudgy little arms.   Not that I always noticed that boulder …. after awhile, it was just there until a day I walked through the gates and was struck by how different it looked.  Standing there, trying to puzzle out the difference, I was astonished when a sudden, quiet fluttering sound led to what looked like a patchwork blanket lifting above the rock.  Hundreds of Monarch butterflies rose as one, hovered in air for moments until, as dancers in a live ballet tableau might, each creature flew off separately.

            There is something about time that plays just out of reach around the corners of my mind.  Swirling time, drifting time, all time at the same time leading me to think that we are on a permanent timeline and, sometimes, we simply slip back and forth.  How else to explain that every bone moment of the past seems to have eternal residency in my soul.

            Generations of butterfly wings and flower petals later, those creatures fly and the cherry blossoms bud, puff and fall gently on earth I know.  Do they know they can do it without me but that I cannot do it without them?  

 

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Nostalgic Attachment

Posted by Holly at May 18th, 2007

            I have so much nostalgia for this first year of my marriage and for the day of the wedding that I find I am feeling something like regret that the first year is coming to a close.  Of all the gifts, gains, losses, styles and epochs of my life, I have this clutching feeling only for this one year and for just about my entire childhood.  It’s powerful.  Once, when I was telling my mother how I longed for my growing up on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn and that I felt as if I went back there and sat on the bench on the broad street in front of our apartment building, I thought I could slip back in time, she made me promise I would only do it with her there so she could pull me back into real time.  She could sense the grip the past has on me and, whether she thought I was losing my mind and it would slip off completely or that I might actually physically slide off this dimension into another, she took it seriously.  I have sat on that bench since but I haven’t actually concentrated on slipping back, a little afraid for myself.

 

          The experience of the place itself has this hold on my soul.  Place has  power – past place, current place, but not every place.  I’ve lived in the country and in cities, mostly cities but enough different places to realize that, while I may have loved where I lived and what I was doing there, I don’t long for most of those times and places the way I do for my childhood and for this past year in this place I would never have chosen on my own.   How could I?  I never knew such a place existed….

 

         Growing up in New York in the magical 50s set the standard for me.  My orientation is skyscrapers.  The sight of the Chrysler Building, it’s steely grace and majesty set into the bluest of skies or mirroring the flinty color of days without visible sun is almost more than I can bear.  And for all the years I lived on the Upper West Side, every spring, as soon as the equinox passed, I had to go stand at the corner of Broadway and 73rd Street and watch the sun as it hit the side of the Apple Bank building, the light almost tragically beautiful.  I never felt overwhelmed by New York’s buildings – from its tender, crowded four and five story apartment buildings with all their teeming life to its tallest structures.  There was, and still is, a sense of knowledge and as if I had a special entitlement or endowment just by growing up in their midst.  And yet, I loved the greenspace of my childhood as much; so much that it features in much of what I have written and some of how I spent my career – raising money to protect precious greenspace, but always within urban confines.  It is my city nature that nurtures my soul more than anything else.  I want to be back in that place at that time.

So, why should it be that this place in which I was married and that doesn’t have a tall building in sight anywhere has the same tug on whatever inside of me evokes nostalgia?   Now, standing at the kitchen window in particular – although the view exists from many other places in this house – I look out at the spot where Jim and I were married and, with only the smallest flick of a time chip, I am back there in that moment – or I want to be so much I can almost feel the thrumming of that moment.  It hangs in the universe, forever happening.  That kitchen window is right above the sink and so I am usually washing dishes or shelling shrimp or setting up the coffee pot for the next morning so all Jim has to do is push a button and caffeine drips into the pot, like life-giving fluids through an IV.  I marvel that I can be in two places at once:  stacking up the ordinary day-to-day moments of our life on the farm and also still feeling it is just beginning and that I am witnessing its start over and over.  I look out at the scene – slightly changed now that we’ve got a pile of firewood on one side of the Tea House and a table and chairs under its perfectly angled Asian roof – and I see us standing there and talking to each other, telling each other thoughts and promises that could only come after a lifetime.  We spoke the words of people who know, not people who hope.  When we talked and listened to each other that day, the words were sifted through our lives with others.  Our moment was so full and so elegantly spare at the same time.  I knew we were standing on the tip of a vortex and that all the spinning wasn’t pulling us in and down, it had lifted us to its point, to safety.  Not that the first year has been free of churlishness.  We’ve had those moments, too, and they were not easy to live through.  In the midst of them, though, I sensed that the expectations of how it was in our previous lives were producing reactions in this one that weren’t of our moment.  As we have figured out that little byway, incidents that might become big roadblocks are just little door sills we step over gently.  This leaves me to be so in love with this marriage in this time and place that I want it to always be at the beginning and, therefore, never end.   I think that’s what the longing for my childhood place is also.   I think I’ve been holding on all along to that distilled concentrate of that magical time when I was most me growing up in the most amazing city in the world, a place that has everything – good and bad; where I could experience just about anything and where I learned to wrap myself in cotton batting against anything that might happen in life.

         

               This recognition helps to understand the feeling of wanting to hold this place to ourselves.  When my son and Alexis decided to accept our offer to be married in our space, in a pinging second I knew I would be giving up something as well as gaining something.  Jim put it best.  He said he wanted to keep the experience ours, too, and his way of doing that is to say we should have a hundred weddings here so we can always be the first.  We will always have its magic to give away.

         

             This new marriage gave me the same sense of being safe and protected and loved and free.   I won’t lose that space sense when my son and Alexis speak their marriage secrets to each other.  In fact, I hope it is our gift to them.

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Does What I Do Make A Difference…Or Is It Horse Poop?

Posted by Holly at May 12th, 2007

I am SUPPOSED to be cleaning my office, a desperately needed activity as anyone who has ever worked with me will tell you.  But, I’ve just had the nicest conversation and it speaks so well to questions I have about my current life that I’ve stopped annoying tasks to write about it.  We had a call on our answering machine from the Democratic Committee in our area asking if Jim wanted to stay on the volunteer rolls.  The outgoing message on our machine announces a contest – not the first time I’ve run contests on my voicemail -calling for a favorite fictional character and with a vague promise of a winner and a prize.  Nobody takes the latter seriously but a lot of people enter the contest.  The woman phoning from the Democratic Committee said she loved the contest and entered with the Count of Monte Cristo.  When I phoned back, I got that same volunteer.  We updated the records, adding my name, and then laughed over my message.  She told me it made her chuckle during a long shift of volunteer phone calling and that she realized we can do little things to brighten someone’s day.  That made me feel great.
          I worry whether I am still contributing, making a difference, now that my life is so far away from the productive workforce.  My first visit of significance to Jim at the beginning of our courtship included his taking me on the tractor while he spread manure.  Not your usual first date, to be sure and, when I went back to the office the following Monday and told my staff what I’d done, they all said a version of the same thing…spreading manure was a great job for a fundraising professional. 
Well, I spend a fair amount of my time now literally shoveling horse poop from the stalls of ten of the horses.  It’s mindless enough work while taking some coordination.  Good weather is best because the horses spend more time in the pasture, do most of their digestive work there and it doesn’t have to be cleaned up.  Still, there’s a lot of poop in the stalls.  We use big plastic scoops with prongs – mine is purple.  You have to actually get under the pile of poop and get it to the back basket part of the scoop, lift it and then hurl it into the trailer attached to the little tractor (yes, there’s a big tractor, too).  The tractor and trailer, by the way, are parked in the aisle outside the stalls, strategically positioned between two stalls so it only has to be moved five times, not ten.  I almost get the tractor to start each time if I remember the position for the gears and how to turn the key once, release, count to five, turn it again so the motor kicks in.  So far I haven’t hit a gate but I’ve had to learn how the thing maneuvers, which is not like a car.  Don’t be near me when I’m backing up.  
The amount of horse poop in each stall varies.  Also in the size of each individual poop.  Generally, they are, maybe, 2” by 2”.  Danny Boy, however, has enormous poops, almost double in size.  And the baby, DeDe, born on April 25th and who you would expect to have teeny squares of poops, has decidedly big ones.  Her stall, shared with her mama, Tess, is doubly hard to do because the whole space is covered with hay to give her a soft spot for her lie downs so the poop kind of hides in the hay. 
The difficulty comes in balancing the purple basket tool.  The first few times I did this, I couldn’t control the angle of the thing and kept losing my grip on the long handle so poop would spill.  When it spills, it’s never in a pile, the way it is when the horses deposit it in the first place.  It scatters and then you have to scoop almost individually.  Jim has this almost choreographed motion of bend, scoop, tilt, raise and release into the trailer.  He releases underhand so the scooper doesn’t even have to be flipped.  I’m lucky if I can hold it still enough to turn it over into the trailer and dump my load in with none spilling on the aisle floor – ones that will have to be accounted for later.  Sometimes I think of my father who was once recording a recipe for gefilte fish my grandmother was dictating to me over the phone.  She never wrote down her recipes, of course, and my dad was on their extension phone trying to get it down for posterity.  When he mailed me his handwritten transmission, he put a note on the bottom that read:  “You think it’s easy?”.  Same with horse poop.
So while I’m out there I often think about the newness of this life and how I seem to be living it out of order, having become a housewife at the end stage, learning and doing things in a way only a brand new wife might – with a lot of disasters and a huge growth curve.  And I think and wonder how important can it be to do so much laundry and fold my husband’s underwear (I draw the line at ironing it), or experimenting with mops to keep the kitchen floor reasonably free of the never ending farm dirt that gets tracked in; or, about weeding gardens, driving pick-up trucks and planning for three meals a day.  I wonder what I am possibly contributing to the world.  It’s true I still volunteer and get involved in community issues but in a different way than I ever did because, now, I put the tasks of marriage first.  For the last many years starting when my son got to high school and didn’t need for me to be as available as I had been, I’ve concentrated most of my energy outside of my home.  How much did I need to do as a single person living alone?  Not that much.  I spent long hours at the office, many hours volunteering, leftover hours entertaining myself and few hours tending to a household. Now, sometimes, I feel so silly saying I have to leave a volunteer meeting at a certain time because I’ve got sauce on the stove and Jim will be in for dinner at 5 PM.  I know my job is to make my husband feel loved and cherished and soothed and cheered on.  Just as it is his job to do the same for me.  And we are having so much fun doing exactly that.  That early dinner hour – 5 PM to start cooking a meal we’ll eat around 6 when I used to be just picking up my head from my work and starting to think about leaving the office, and then dining around 9 – is one of the best times of our day.  We do this little dance around each other in the kitchen.  Sometimes I prep for him, sometimes he for me.  Whatever the meal, we’ve got these really good instincts going about how to share the role.
Is this enough to change the world?  I know I do little things during the day that make him laugh, even unintentionally (my hair in little blobs on the sides of my head is one), as he does for me.  Can our giggles and chortles start a succession of colliding atoms in the universe and add a lighter moment to a world so filled with misery? Can what we are building, our little new family, with this love be important to anyone other than those who care about us?  I have no idea.  I only hope so and hope nameless people who call me – volunteers I like from the Democratic Party or even pesky telemarketers – continue to get even just a tiny moment’s respite from whatever plagues them during their day so they stop and smile and think, maybe, even the smallest things can make a difference. 

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