Posted by Holly at August 6th, 2007

     On a recent Sunday, we took the day off; meaning, the only real work we did was to clean the barn. Oh, and check the water lines in the vineyard, pulling a few leaves and cutting a few straggler shoots at the bottoms of the plants.  Actually, we never really leave Jim’s world because it was he who suggested – declared – that all he wanted to do on Sunday, after church, was go home and get a big glass of orange juice, the Sunday papers and go sit on the chaise’s on the patio. 

He didn’t have to suggest that twice to me.  I think we work too hard and loved the day of semi-rest.  I got up from reading the papers only once when we decided we needed snacks and assembled a plate of leftover stuffed cabbage from the wedding (rice, apricots, maybe, nuts – really good), hummus, goat cheese, some kind of semi-hard cheese, wheat thins and a big glass of newly processed plum juice with club soda and vodka.  The plums are from the tree off to the right of the house.  It was heaven.  Later we made French fries, grilled salmon and tomatoes and onions for dinner and pork chops for Jim’s lunch during the week while we watched “60 Minutes” as we went in and out to the barbecue.  And drank some of the just bottled 2006 Pinot.  It was a good day.  The only two things that would have made it better would have been getting up a little later and having some part in the decision.

The waking up hour is a continuing dialogue as Jim is ready to be up and at ‘em by 5 AM, sometimes lingers in bed until 5:30 but is too anxious about all there is to do and gets going by 6 ish.  This is way too early for me.  We play argue about it now.  Jim brings in my coffee more or less when he thinks I should be drinking it, announces it’s there, sometimes brings the cup close to my still buried head and moves it back and forth beneath my nose.  Then he might get into bed and report on the major stories in the New York Times, which is mercifully delivered daily and to the front door so I don’t have trudge down the driveway to pick it up at the mailbox a quarter of a mile away.  Anyway, I do struggle up to drink the usually tepid-by-then coffee at something after 7 AM.  Until then, Jim has a definite advantage and takes it.  He says it’s the only time of day he can talk to me and expect to top me.  One morning, not too long ago, he went out to move the irrigation pipes with the two girls who are working here this summer and I slept in until 8:08 AM.  It wasn’t even the hour so much as waking up naturally that made the difference in my demeanor.  It’s not good to have your sleep interrupted before your mind and body come awake.

          It was the changing of the irrigation pipes today that put us firmly back on Jim time.  The worker girls are on vacation for the next two weeks and it just happens that the alfalfa needs three more days of irrigating to push it up to cutting height.  My strong husband could do this chore himself but it is decidedly easier with help.  Last year we did it before breakfast so I consider myself lucky and I’m grateful that we waited until 8 AM to head up the hill today.  By then, Jim had the juicer going and was extracting juice from the plums.  He had a pot of juice simmering on the stove to become plum jelly; he had a dishwasher load of empty wine bottles going through; he had fed the one cat who eats ahead of everyone else so the others don’t steal his food; and, he’d fed the horses.  I had managed to drink the tepid coffee.  It was enough fortification to get the lesson Jim was offering in jelly sheeting which needs to occur before you pour the jewel colored liquid into the jelly jars.  It needs to pour off a metal spoon so that there is one drip off the edge.  And when I think it starts to look like jelly.  Uh oh.  This is an instruction I don’t feel I have the competence to follow.  I mean, I know what jelly looks like from the jars you buy but, will I be able to tell when it comes off a spoon?  I’ve had some miserable failures in that department including the scorching of the bottom of big pot full of simmering tomatoes to be canned.  Jim had been tending them because what did I know about canning and he’s been doing this all his life, practically.  He went to the downstairs kitchen and did something, came back and told me they’d be done in about three hours.  Okay.  When I returned from errands, hours later, he was on his tractor and didn’t exactly warm up to my chatter.  What the trouble was was that he was “disappointed” because I had not turned off the tomatoes.  I thought he was taking care of them and simply telling me they’d be ready in 3 hours.  I didn’t know that was a directive to be there for the tomatoes.  Oops, miscommunication.  This delivery of expectations has been a continuing challenge and I’ve been clear in saying, since the tomato incident, that he needs to tell me exactly what he wants me to do.

Anyway, this day Jim ran downstairs for the jars, lids and screw tops, put them in a boiling water bath and began filling jars.  His first jars filled, we turned to the subject of breakfast:  Light, sweet and easy with sliced fruit from our trees or bushes of people we know and toast for Jim to use the little bit of first-batch jelly that didn’t fit into a jar.  (It turns out it looks like jelly in a jar when it’s on a spoon:  a little sticky, a little drippy.  But not too sticky or drippy.  It’s a judgment call.) 

          Then we were ready to face the pipes.  I went to get dressed and actually, logically, chose to wear my bib overalls because I needed a place for my tool, the one I use to unhinge one pipe from another by pulling up the hook catch.  I got these overalls as a pre-wedding day surprise for Jim.  He had been teasing me about needing bibs, which were obviously not a part of my city wardrobe.  Nearby neighbors gave a party for us the night before our wedding for all of our family and out-of-town friends.  It was a barbecue in their wonderful, 100-year old barn and I knew the bibs would be perfect.  As we dressed, I told Jim I had this surprise and put them on for him.  I had to hike up the hardware for the over the shoulder part because the smallest ones I could find were plenty roomy.  I wore them on with 4-inch heels; pink and black plaid ones; a nice touch, I thought, for a barn party.  Jim took one look and decided he would give me my wedding present right then – diamond earrings!  I think I looked fabulous!  This day, I wanted those bibs to hold a tool the name of which I don’t even know…

          I am pondering what it means in my life that I have begun to think about my black sweat pants as my good pants.

* * *

          I have three pair of work boots.  The work boot work boots are pink Timberlands.  They are probably the most expensive shoe in my current daily wardrobe.   The ones I wear to clean the barn are brown with big loopy blue shapes on them and their companion pair are black with multi-colored polka dots.  People who come to buy hay or Christmas trees or drop off things and see me in my boots love them.  I love them and love wearing them in the horse’s stalls.  I would have worn the barn ones up into the muddy pastures but there is a slit on the left side of the left one and I knew my foot would be soaked in minutes so I put on the polka-dot ones although I try to save those for actual dress wear in the rain. 

          We drive up to the pasture to do this although it’s a nice walk.  The work is arduous enough when we get there that the ride up and back isn’t luxury as much as R & R.  The dog pretty much always jumps in the car with us.  He loves the car.  Sometimes we can’t even get him out when we come home from a trip together.  He’ll sit there for hours.  He does like running through the pastures, however, and seems to like it when Jim and I are out together so he jumped right out today.   On the way to the first part of the job, I ruminated that I was wearing the bibs for a practical reason but began to rue my decision, a little worried that if I had to go to the bathroom – and I surely would because I always surely do after the coffee in the morning – there was a lot to accommodate to make that possible with the overalls.  Jim made some joke about filling up my boots and proceeded to show off his advantage by peeing right there in the field. 

* * *

The first part of the job is to go down the end of the long line of pipes and pull off the end cap so the residual water flows out.  Then the latches all get pulled and the pipes separated up the hill.  There are two sets on each side of a square.  There are 10 pipes in my first row, each about 40 feet long.  They’re aluminum so not that heavy (hah!), weighing 30-40 pounds each.  Next, Jim builds the new square to move the irrigating about 90 feet downhill.  To do this, three of the way bigger pipes that lead from the water source up to the lateral lines of pipe have to be disconnected and removed.  This shortens the distance and that’s how you get them 90 feet downhill.  So, Jim grabs the top end of the first big pipe and dispatches me to pull it apart at the first downhill juncture.  In the same split second I both marveled and admired the beautiful, fan-shaped wave the water made as it poured out and screamed as it poured right into my left boot.  Jim said, “Oh, and get your foot out of the way when the pipes come apart.”  Thanks, Jim.  The boot squished the whole rest of the time we were in the pasture, two hours.  Later I told Jim I wondered if Diane Keaton was going to carry the pipes or have a stunt double when she plays me in the movie.  Jim said she wasn’t pretty enough to play me (sorry, Diane).  Sweet, I told him, but Julia Roberts is too young to play me.  Yes, he said, but her mouth is big enough.  Whatever he means by that.  

Walking up to the first line of pipes, I was watching the dog sprint from gopher hole to gopher hole.  Sometimes he stands there in the on point position, cocks his head and moves it back and forth as he hears something we don’t.  Now and again he’ll begin to dig, dig, and dig into one of the gopher tunnel openings.  Usually he comes up with only a dirty face. Once – and I didn’t see this, thank goodness – he came up with a gopher.  The work gophers do is truly amazing.  They must be the envy of other, furrowing animals while they are the bane of farmers.  The networks are extensive and, if you’re not careful, you can put your foot right down into the sloped opening of one.  I have done this many times.  I once met a man on a plane who is the engineer project manager on the tunnel that’s being built under the Bosphorus River to link the European and Asian sides.  It’s a couple of kilometers long.  Pretty ambitious.  I wish I had known more about gopher holes then to ask him if tunnel people study them.

 Our pipe/tunnels are above ground.   I’m not exactly sure why there isn’t an underground irrigation system although I can imagine that it costs a lot of money to install and probably doesn’t give the same flexibility moving around the pipes and putting them exactly where the water is needed when it is needed.  We only do this a few weeks out of the year, depending on Pacific Northwest weather to do the rest.  Line unhinged, square built, I begin moving my pipes, one by one.  There is technique involved; although, admittedly, this is my own divined technique.  The pipes act like wings and most of the 40 feet is evenly distributed on either side of me.  Actually, it’s better to pick up the pipe not in the middle but closer to the heavier end, the one with the sprinkler attached, to act as ballast.  The idea is to get both ends up in the air so they don’t drag and fill up with dirt.  I’ve discovered that it is actually easier to carry them with my arms hanging and holding the pipes in my hands, rather than cradled and resting on my forearms.  However, on my forearms, my ribcage acts as a rudder and that function is taken on by my hips and pelvic bone in the other position.  I need the rudder action since those wing-like ends pull me right around in a circle unless I control them.  It’s not so easy…it’s very easy, in fact, to over-correct and feel yourself floating to the right or left when you’re trying to go forward.  So it’s a constant choice between easier-to-carry-down-stretched-arms-but-poor-hip-rudder-action…or, the good rib-cage rudder with bent arms.  Either way, frankly, I’m ready to stop when it’s over.  The comfort is that maybe I’m burning up a few hundred calories because I certainly don’t restrict them going in anymore!  God, this work makes you hungry.

Anyway, I spend my time out there thinking, phrasing, counting the steps between pipes, setting up little markers of completion and rewards.  One of those is the wild blackberries coming into full sun-plumped ripeness.  With luck, a set of pipes will be finished right near a ripe patch.  Another thing I think about is why I am doing this.  Obviously I’m doing it because I live here and this is the job but, I’m still so struck with how it’s possible to live inside someone else’s dream and be able to do the work not because there’s any direct personal motivation to do this work.  The motivation is to do it with my husband, to feed his dream.  I am still drawing the distinction between starting out early in life with someone with either a blank dream palette to be filled in or with one started that the other takes to.  This is so different; this is two people coming together out of a need to be close to someone, out of wanting to experience that intimacy that had been missing from their lives for so very many years.  I sometimes get stopped in the cycle of my thoughts on the part about this not being my dream and that’s when I start puzzling over whether we’re in Jim’s world or mine and wonder why he decided to marry me.  And then I remember we’re in our world with all the history we bring to it.  We don’t really talk much about our feelings about our past lives, although we’ve certainly shared some of the experiences.  Sometimes I think it’s too bad that we don’t share the feelings and how what’s happened to us has affected us because I think marriage means you are the safest and most protected and comforted you can be and this is where you should trust that you can talk about the things that make your tentative and scared and this is where you will get the comfort you need – for past and current wounds.  But maybe these late in life marriages are different. I don’t know yet, for sure.  It is for sure that there are whole subjects about which we each know the outline and we understand the enormity of the impact on the other but we don’t share the details.  It may be because the details are still too painful.  Is there a little guilt involved that we are happy with each other?  Would we feel disloyal to our late spouses if we admitted that?  Would we be disloyal to this marriage if we admitted that neither of us would have wanted the tragedies that occurred to have happened?  Both of those thoughts are a little bit true for me.  Without talking about it in depth, I don’t know if they are true for Jim.  And I don’t know if it is important to explore.

I do know that standing out there in the pasture when the pipes are all set out and the water is spurting in wide circles from each one of the 30 or so sprinklers, I get a girlish, giggly thrill watching my husband, hands on hips, a ways away from me, watching his water ballet.  I can already smell the sun in his cork-colored tee shirt when he is satisfied and walks down and we hug on the way to whatever comes next.