Posted by Holly at July 23rd, 2007

Farm Days

         We couldn’t have chosen a better time for my son and his fiancé’s wedding week to occur! It started out sunny and hot – hotter than it gets in Oregon and with record breaking temperatures – and ended up with the wedding day being sunny and around 85* which, in this climate, is perfect. Really the week started the weekend before when Jim’s brother Jerry arrived to help Jim with the overwhelming farm work. Jim, who works too hard, was managing the pruning of the grapes – 7 ½ acres; the haying, a several step process in which the alfafa is cut and conditioned by a machine that actually breaks off a piece of each stem so liquid can drain out, the grass can stand up and dry – but not dry out; later be raked into place for the baling machine to form these lovely rectangles of yellow/gold hay; baling itself, in which another machine gathers the raked material and poops it out as a completed object replete with red strings; and, finally, the picking up of the bales on a big hay stacker that holds 16 bales at a time to unload into tall stacks that stand in the barn shed. I have helped Jim do this. When we were dating it was cute – he’d ask me if I would like to ride on the tractor with him and I’d hang on for dear life while he worked, looking like Richard Gere, and he’d say funny things (or, rather, shout them over the tractor motor) and I’d smile down from my perch on the hub of the big wheel, whether I heard him or not, and then we’d be done and go inside and have a glass of wine. Now, he asks me to help when the machinery is acting up and I do things like line up the hay bales in neat rows or roll them down the hill because the brakes on the stacker won’t hold up as he goes up the incline to get the bales. This involves kicking the bales. I actually like it because it’s like stretching exercises and maybe I burn a few calories. Anyway, this last time, which was in the weeks pre-wedding, my husband wanted me to straighten out a particular bale and told me to turn it up on end. I did what I thought he meant and he shouted over he meant not that but up on end. Okay. So I turned it on the other end. Not that, he shouted, on end. On end. This went on until he was really shouting although I tried various things and just couldn’t get it right. Finally, in furious frustration, he jumped off the tractor and turned the bale on one of its sides; a side I swear I had had it on at one point even though he was saying end but, really, after all the turning and yelling, who knew what I’d done. Later, when the dust had literally and figuratively settled, I told him that I was taught a rectangle had four sides and two ends and if he shouted at me to stand something on end when he meant a side….Well, anyway, the first round of haying concluded with the stacking of several hundred bales of about 70 pounds each in the barn and there were still two rounds of haying to go. That all went on plus all the normal activities that keep the 12 horses, 7 cats, one dog and two of us getting from day to day. Once we added the frenzy of all that we wanted to get done before the wedding…we needed troops. So Jerry cheerfully gave up his laid back Las Vegas retired life (in which he teaches and manages his own home and family) to jump up here for a week, climb on and start doing things like making the cranky stacker happier (both the machine and my farmer husband) just so the job could get done. We were beyond grateful to him. There was a morning of overlap after the bridal couple arrived and that was when I started crying, at that breakfast together, a forecast of the many tears that flowed throughout the week. That is also when everyone laughed at me for the first time; that gentle laughter that is the kindly recognition of the depth of my helpless sentiment.

          To ready our home for the wedding itself and for the guests who would be staying here from Thursday through Monday, some of them, we started in the same atmosphere where life probably began: the oozy pond down beyond the berry fields. To say this was an unusual and personally crafted wedding is truly an understatement. Maybe it’s the Northwest influence, maybe it’s the generation of the environment, maybe it’s both of those things and more but we had about 15 people who set up six or so camp sites down at the pond and that is where a lot of the unplanned, informal wedding festivities occurred. In order for people to use the pond, we had to reattach the dock to the shore. Now that’s a picture. Charlie and Jim in the water drilling and hammering through the old wood, replacing the screws in the hinges while Alexis, then I were at the other end of the dock swimming it into place and holding it there while we treaded water. I lost one of my watermelon patterned crocs in the mud. Never mind. It was a good reason to go buy the pink swim shoes I had been coveting because I’m not going back in that water without something on my feet. God knows what’s in the mud on the bottom besides my croc. Anyway, we all swam including the dog who did have to be coaxed off the dock for the first time with a gentle swat to his rear. Then he swam in protective circles around anyone in the water. Once the campers arrived, Gemini was down at the pond with his new friends – one of them another dog – playing for hours while keeping his protective dog’s eye out for possible danger.

       Local teenage boys had been working with us for weeks, dead-heading about two-thirds of the 500 Rhododendron plants and weeding the entire swath from the long driveway up and around the wedding site on the back patio. I swear I alone pulled one weed five times in a week. It was like a cartoon: I would pull it, toss it and walk away. The replacement weed would wait until I was out of sight, stick its head up enough to be sure and then, pop into place, fully formed. How do they do that? Most of what I know about plants has to do with indoor things I studied and grew back in the Upper East Side of Manhattan apartment where we lived when Charlie was born. In fact, the photos from those first days of his life have more of me admiring my double-blooming Amaryllis than my baby. I grew miniature cunifolia, some orchids; and, oh yes, a crop of cotton and peas on my window sill. One year I doubled the pea pod crop from one to two….and a handful of cotton boles flourished for a short time. Outdoor stuff still bewilders me, however, so I mostly follow Jim’s direction. In the midst of the wedding landscape attention, we had put in our vegetable garden which now requires quite a lot of loving care to protect our precious seedlings and plants. We have 75 tomato plants sitting out there, along with gorgeous peas with their delicious pods as well as shelled green pearls. There are beans in three colors. Beans you buy in a store or even a farmer’s market just can’t have that soft, nutty, tender taste of a bean picked, clipped and gently steamed. The little purple ones are the best and feel like velvet on the tongue. Honestly. My cranberry beans add beauty to the garden although, I must admit, our garden looks nothing like Martha Stewart’s where she has a TV crew of I don’t know how many to prune, weed and design. Ours is a woodsy mass and tangle of tendrils, stalks and leaves and it’s a glorious hunt for the treasure.

     But, I digress from the wedding….

     We spent the five days leading up to the wedding accomplishing a zillion tasks. The carpet cleaner came on Monday. The teenage boys continued their weekly weeding on Tuesday. Charlie and Alexis set about polishing all the silver, cleaning and filling the salt and pepper shakers. We drove over to the neighbor whose tables and chairs we were borrowing, hauled them out of the shed and loaded them on the truck. Ditto six pots, beautifully planted with flowers to round out the twelve rose bushes we had bought months earlier when Charlie and Alexis announced their engagement and wedding plans. China got moved from cabinets to tabletops, the caterer began dropping off her serving pieces. Jim moved the big barrel of our Pinot Noir 2006 into place for serving at the wedding. The window washers came on Thursday, clearing out just minutes before the first of the guests started showing up for dinner. But that’s what it’s all about … a little chaos and breath holding.

Animal Farm – But In A Good Way

     Life, of course, goes on even during preoccupation with life changing moments like marriage. Now, it happens there are three of the twelve horses in training at two different locations. One, Sugar, is at the track and will, with any luck, learn to run all the way to the end of the race and even win a few bucks. We had heard via the grapevine (a cliché that has new meaning for me), that he was doing well and we know he’s a darn good looking colt. On his first timed outing he ran a 1/16th of a mile in 13 seconds. Twelve seconds is the goal so, for not just a first time but any time, this was good and he’s since run it in 12 seconds. We knew we wanted to see him run and, wouldn’t you know it, that chance came up on the Thursday and Friday before the Saturday wedding. If we went in to see him on Thursday, we’d see him gallop but not be timed. Friday was the day for that. We thought we should go on Thursday, just in case Friday rolled around and we couldn’t do it. Portland Meadows is, surprise, in Portland and the trip in takes 45 minutes to an hour depending on rush hour traffic. This worked nicely as someone had to go in and pick up the keg at the brewery anyway. The horse would be working at 7:30 AM. In we went and it was worth the trip. He’s a beautiful animal who doesn’t so much run as float, as Jim puts it. It seems effortless for him and he is fast. While we were there on Thursday and talking to the woman who is riding him in his training, I raised the idea of going back on Friday to see him run timed. He’d be running a quarter mile. I could see Jim wanted to do that, so we did. It was, again, worth the trip as the horse was just as pretty and ran the ¼ mile in just over 25 seconds. Everybody was pleased and the vet Jim uses who is also the trainer declared this little horse would win a few races. Let’s hope. Someone I know in Seattle, whose family owned Seattle Slew (out of who we have one of his many grandchildren), once told me that when you go into the horse racing business you make a balance sheet that has very many lines of expenses and a big zero at the bottom of the income side. Nevertheless, it’s exciting. So two days before the wedding, we rose at five-ish each day to get to the track on time. After that, we were working on fumes.

     It’s not hard to tell what the animals think of all the activity around them. The horses take it in stride, so to speak, and seem generally attentive when people wander out to the barn to ooh, aah and squeal over them. A couple of them are head nodders and do look as if they are giving approval when they are bobbing up and down. It’s very effective and gives encounters with them an air of real communication. I believe they can communicate, at least with each other and especially on Christmas Eve when they talk to each other in language we can understand. Anyway, that’s what I learned while watching “I Remember Mama” on Friday nights in our Brooklyn apartment when I was growing up. It is a Norwegian legend and, now that I live with horses, I have wanted to go out to the barn every Christmas eve I’ve spent here, at midnight, to hear the horses talk. Jim says they won’t do it if they know we are there and that we can’t even hide because they will sense our presence. So, instead, we have baby monitors in the dresser drawer of our bedroom and in the barn. Haven’t heard ‘em yet but it was how we knew Tess was giving birth in April when DeDe was born when loud and unusual whinnying began. That was an exciting experience, to see that delicate filly ten minutes after her birth struggle to stand up and look all sleepy-eyed but bright-eyed and awkward but strutting around. Our guests just loved meeting her.

     The dog LOVES company and gets very busy making sure everyone is well supervised. I think he would pass hors d’oeuvres if he had the thumb capacity to hold things. The cats are another story. The two older ones are extremely social but the three indoor babies are very shy around people. They are the most personable and responsive of all the pets with us but they flee when other people are around. If someone is here long enough – for a day or two – they do begin to emerge, but this many people was too much for them. We had planned to keep all the cats sequestered anyway during the wedding day since an open door is an invitation to escape; but, we probably didn’t need to as they fled under the bed at the first sight of major company. They mostly stayed in our room with the exception of a couple of escapes accomplished when they pushed out the bathroom screen and one when they pushed out the screen in the office, the room where most of them spend the night. Oddball, the striper who looks like a Maine Coon but isn’t, was gone overnight for the first time. No amount of calling, searching, setting out of food or sending the dog to round him up made any difference. Almost on cue, the Monday after, when the folks with both the baby and the big dog took off, Oddball showed up at the kitchen door.

     Things are pretty much back to normal, now, and four of the cats give us their nightly parade each evening to their room when we call them, by name, to come to bed. We’ve got the screen hammered shut but don’t open the window wide enough for them to squeeze through anymore.

     Waldo, the oldest at 18 ½ years old, hugely surprised us by jumping down from the deck outside our bedroom, only 8 feet or so above the ground. He’s the cat with arthritis and bow legs. Jim had the idea to give him a daily dose of aspirin for the arthritis. Let this be a testimony for its effectiveness, in cats anyway. He did finally show up at the front door, in mercifully far less time than the two weeks he was gone after the dog arrived a year ago. The two baby kitties in the barn obliged by running up and down the length of the hayloft looking adorable, sometimes jumping straight up and down with all fours off the ground.

     But I digress from the wedding…..

Finally, The Big Day

     Well, actually, the big night before. Charlie’s group of Seattle friends formed mostly in a house they all rented in his early days in Seattle. They call themselves the Bubble. Alexis’ group is called the Team. The Team and the Bubble – with additional friends from college – decided to have a slumber party the night before the wedding in the downstairs of our house. Jim is a man who does not give over control easily. I think this comes from working against deadline and budget in the TV industry all those years. It was the most expedient method to have the vision, know how it should be accomplished and tell people exactly what they needed to do. There was still plenty of room for creativity – at TeleTape, where we met, creativity poured out of everybody’s fingers and he could no more corral us than cats (and we’ve seen how often they escape!). But, he was the master leader for whom everyone wanted to perform well. After TeleTape, Jim couldn’t possibly have been surrounded by quite the same quality creative crew – no one could touch us! – AND he probably had a lot of loss of control issues to work out anyway, thanks to all of us, so my guess is he set the pace and dominion was his over the next twenty years. He still knows exactly how he wants things to look and I sometimes have to brook more than a little resistance to changes I propose. Right now we’re negotiating over changing the flooring from the 20 plus year old carpeting to something that reflects new taste and not that of the woman who built this house over 20 years ago who doesn’t happen to be anyone Jim knew until he bought the house. Some of her touches I love like the gold and white Peacock wallpaper. The carpeting I can live without; just as I was able to live without the pink and green neon butterfly wallpaper in the master bedroom now replaced with lovely textured gold and an accent wall of rich red with a grape pattern.

     Anyway, Jim pays a lot of attention to his home, rightfully so, and was a little bit anxious that the Bubble/Team slumber party was really a group of marauding toxic substance abusers whose actions couldn’t be trusted. I ran interference and Charlie and Alexis assured Jim it would be okay. They offered to get us a hotel room for the night. Although we declined that offer, it worked out that all of my family was assembled by Friday so we went into Portland for dinner and got home about 11:30 PM. The marauders were pretty tired by then and were sitting around the fire pit on the patio. They invited us to join them for a drink, which we did for about 15 minutes. They all wandered off down to the pond and we went to bed. Everybody knew the caterer would be arriving the next AM about 10 and there were tables to set up, places to lay, flowers to gather and food to be cooked.

     The next day was filled with activity with Charlie and Alexis’ friends putting together pretty little flower bouquets in jelly jars, hanging ribbons and tulle on the posts of the Tea House where they would be married – which Jim had had built in time for our wedding – and the bride and groom heading out to hang signs all along the route from the hotel to our house. Around 3 PM, the bride and her attendants left here for the hotel where non-campers were staying so they could all get dressed and return as the bridal party. Charlie announced that, even though he was not going anywhere, he was now preparing to be the groom so details of set up were now up to everyone else. I think he took off for the pond to swim and further maraud.

     Things go fast in the last couple of hours and by 4 PM Jim and I figured we had better stop fussing so he could bring in the horses and we could get dressed for the 4:30 PM arrival of guests. I think some were already here but, hey, we live on a farm and this was a pretty casual lead-up to the wedding! After that, it was just wonderful fun to welcome people and see their delight in where and how we live – especially the people who are astounded that I still or at all live on a farm!

     The moment of marriage itself was thrilling and scary and unstoppable, even just long enough to observe all the folds and creases. The officiant, Charlie’s friend Bitsy whose marriage ceremony he had performed a few years ago, gave us minor instructions about entering the soon to be sacred space, gave us a two-minute warning and she moved forward into her position. I counted us down and, on the stroke of the two minutes, Charlie and I walked together, I holding his hand, just as I had when I was teaching him to cross the street in New York City when he was little: always look both ways. I intended it then and now as the specific safety lesson and the more visceral watchfulness life takes.

     And suddenly we were under the Tea House and my son and I were hugging as I handed him to this next phase of his life. Alexis and Charlie’s attendants followed us, took their places and then there were Alexis and her father, entering the sphere we had created for them. He looked dazed, she looked dazzling. Bitsy led us off and then invited me to speak. I had been given two minutes – not counting the time it would take me to compose myself. I did think I was going to cry because I had every single time I had thought about what I wanted to say over the weeks leading up to the wedding. But, to my own surprise, I was composed. I rose from my front row seat next to my husband and near my bonus daughter, Charlie’s half-sister, Nina. I looked at everyone, so happy to witness this lovely beginning and I spoke for six minutes although no one seemed to mind. I welcomed everyone and talked about the special experience of raising Charlie as an only parent, his father having died when Charlie was just three weeks short of seven. I said it was almost a selfish experience, having to share it with no one – although, I acknowledged, I didn’t do it alone and could only have done it with the presence of so many with us at the wedding and not there, as well. I meant my family, of course, and our many good friends who cared so much for Charlie’s father and for Charlie. And I said how I had tried to hard to keep Charlie his father’s child, successfully I think; so successfully that it is an honor for me that Charlie is wearing his father’s wedding band; and, that it was extraordinary to me to be married to a man who had been a friend to Charlie’s father – what a gift to each of them, Charlie and Jim, I hope, to have the continuation of that time in the form of this relationship. Then I told the two stories I kept thinking of each time I planned my words: when Charlie was little – maybe 3 – we gave him a box of crayons as a holiday present and he told me “I so cited Mommy, I so cited.” It pleased me that something as simple as crayons could make him happy and I said that he had kept that sweet simplicity. Everyone laughed, including Charlie who said, “Oh, so now I’m simple….” so I assured him I meant it as a compliment. My real message to this young man I know so well but who also can surprise me and this young woman I am looking forward to getting to know was in another story from Charlie’s toddlerhood. One day I found him with his chin on his hand, elbow on knees, sitting on steps. “Charlie, what are you doing?” “I’m watching time being speedy,” he told me. Time is very speedy and I wanted this couple to remember that and savor every moment. I quoted the end of Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction: “Go now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.”

     Then I wept while they said their vows to one another, while each broke a glass – a new version of the traditional moment in a Jewish wedding ceremony – and we shouted Mazel Tov, while their friend Josh said a Hebrew blessing, while Bitsy declared them married, when they kissed and when we all cheered.

     And then their lifetime began.

 And All The Days To Come

     The idea of my son actually being married began to shape itself on Sunday night at dinner, the night after the wedding. Six of us were at the local Japanese restaurant – the best I’ve ever been to, in fact – and I looked across the table and over at my son, sitting opposite his wife of 24 hours. Charlie and Alexis were silly, giddy, relaxed and teasingly happy. We all were. My son suddenly seemed very tall and very young. I thought of the time in his life when he had just gotten his driver’s license and had his first car, a Pontiac station wagon my sister had driven for years and had given him as a gift. In those early days of being an officially licensed driver with a vehicle, Charlie didn’t get gas without lifting the hood and checking his oil with a special rag he kept folded in the car for that purpose. It was a way for him to show he had knowledge of how a car should work and be treated to keep it strumming along on the road. It was the kind of gesture one makes when one has to rely on learned information because, well, because one has no real experience. We feel a sense of mastery over something when we have, at least, the rules and a framework to help us do something new and, in that case and this, especially important. It gives us a sense of security and some power over the place in our minds whose formlessness, airlessness and blankness could be terrifying if its owner didn’t begin to take charge. By using our heads, we can begin to quell that tremulous shaking somewhere around our solar plexus. That night at the restaurant I saw Charlie begin to take charge of his married life with the same attention I had seen years before and I saw that this is a new dimension for me to get to know.

     Of course Alexis did this, too; it’s just that I don’t know her well enough to understand how she pulls together. I am so looking forward to observing and watching these two people strike the balance that will unify them as two lovely people inside one couple.

     And that, as I heard it, was what they said to each other in their vows.

     It was a very good wedding.