Greener Pastures--A City Girl Goes Country

Yee-haw! We Closed!

2011-11-30T22:45:00.002-05:00

Making Hay Instead of Making Loans

2011-11-23T21:33:00.003-05:00

I know you’re sick of it, but this is what’s happening:

We have a new date for the closing. At least I think we do. It’s November 30. That’s a week away. Since past experience has shown me that Slow Bob’s bank says they are going to close but then they don’t, I thought I better double-check. And since Ellen, the loan officer at Bob’s bank doesn’t return my phone calls, even though it’s in our contract that his bank should keep me informed and apprised just as if I were a real estate agent brokering the deal, I decided to shoot her an e-mail. I thought why get aggravated when I get her voice mail and she doesn’t call me back? So I e-mailed. I said I just wanted to confirm that the closing is set for Wednesday. She said, “As far as I know it’s scheduled.”

As far as I know?!

Tell me I’m not asking for anything crazy! Tell me I’m not expecting too much! Is it too much to expect the loan officer to know whether it’s on or not? Is it too much to expect her to get up off her ass and find out?! Is it too much to expect the buyer to actually abide by the contract, a contract the loan officer helped him write?!

Not that it’s Bob’s fault. That I know of. Forget Slow Bob. It’s Slow Banks in Virginia. I’ve realized it’s a Virginia bank thing. Because of all the transactions I’ve had buying and selling houses, buying and selling the Keansburg house, buying and selling the Jackson house, Oklahoma, Ferrum, and now this, ten transactions in all, the only time there was a problem with a house closing on time was when a Virginia bank was involved in a mortgage. Ten closings, two involving Virginia mortgages. Eight on time. The two involving Virginia mortgages not.

The last time this happened, bad, but not quite as bad as now, was when we were getting a mortgage to buy the Ferrum house. We had just traveled two days from Oklahoma and pulled up in front of the Ferrum house towing a trailer with dogs, cats, a fish, a kid, the computers, all our valuables and jewelry, with the moving trucks a half day behind us, and were told, standing on the curb thinking we had made it and the worst was over, exhausted, dirty, dehydrated, that the Virginia bank wasn’t ready to close. Two days earlier when we left our old house, the house we could have stayed in longer if we’d known we had no where to live, there was no problem. But now, suddenly, for some reason no one ever explained, they couldn’t do it. Couldn’t close. Sorry. No go. You’ll have to find a motel. I’m sure you can find a motel on such short notice that will allow all those animals. Oh, all the stuff that’s coming tomorrow morning on the moving trucks? Storage. Yeah that’s right. Storage. That’s what they have that for!

Luckily it didn’t come to that and I can actually say one nice thing about the Evils. Since they’d already moved out, they allowed us to move in before the closing. It took the bank two weeks, two weeks until they were finally able to close, and the Evils made our lives a living hell for the favor, but that’s another story. At least we weren’t homeless. The point is, the Virginia bank caused this. For no reason.

And so experience tells me not to count on the bank. Perhaps they get delayed because the loan officer has to make hay—that actually happened with Kip, Buyer Number Two—the loan officer’s voice mail said that’s where he was when no one could reach him all week to find out if Kip was getting the loan. “I’m out making hay. Please leave me a message.” I kid you not. Now it’s hunting season and everyone’s obsessed about that around here—Kurt’s helper didn’t come to work again today because he’s out hunting and the company we sub for said it’s slow, they don’t have any work, it’s hunting season—so maybe that’s the hold-up.

Whatever the reason, we feel like little kids waiting for Christmas. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And then it gets canceled. But they reschedule it! Then we get our hopes up again. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Gotcha! Canceled. But rescheduled. Ah, why don’t they just give us our coal and get it over with?

Friday Night in the Country

2011-10-28T20:58:00.004-04:00

It’s Friday night in the country and Kurt and I are back at our computers. We tried to go out. The kid is on a sleepover. Very rare. But there’s nothing to do around here. There aren’t even any lights on in the houses and I wasn’t sure when we passed them if they were abandoned or the people were all asleep. It was only 8:30. Probably half and half. It’s common around here for people to let old farmhouses fall into disrepair and then put a doublewide, or if they have money, build a brick ranch house, a few hundred feet over. It’s also common around here for people to get up when it’s still dark to feed the critters, and so naturally they go to bed early. So it could be either way.

I love the old farmhouses. It breaks my heart when I see brown clapboards with all the paint worn off, buckling porches choked with kudzu and roofs like swayback horses on old farmhouses. Maybe the next time I drive by the roof will have collapsed. It frustrates me that people have given up on these houses. Don’t they know there are people like me who would love them?! How did they get so far behind that giving up and starting fresh made more sense than trying to fix the thing? Maybe one year the heater conked out and the roof started leaking and they thought they could get through one more winter—maybe the livestock market would be better next year. Then the chimney started crumbling and noises on the metal roof as mortar fell and skidded to the gutters raised the hair on the back of the farm wife’s neck. She stopped stirring. She cocked an ear to listen. They couldn’t stay warm. They couldn’t use the bathroom sink because the pipe was broke. (If there was a bathroom sink.) They couldn’t keep up with the paint. They were tired of it. Every spring, scraping, sanding, painting. An old house will kill you.

But still! I would never abandon an old house!

We passed these old houses and the doublewides and neat brick ranch houses, all dark, not long after supper in search of a dive bar we got a tip on. Kelly’s boyfriend, fifteen-years-old, mentioned it in passing. He was over for dinner and was explaining where he lived. I was trying to maintain a look on my face that conveyed both sophistication and friendliness (he comes from a good family—the father is a lawyer). He said, “It’s past this bar. It’s a dump. You wouldn’t want to go there. Rednecks go there.” Kurt’s and my ears perked up. He’s obviously much classier than we are. There was actually a bar around here? And it had rednecks?

All these years we’ve been living here, we haven’t found one good watering hole. Not that we’re big drinkers. But you’d think that in the moonshine capital of the world, in a place where people know how to line dance and play fiddles, we would be able partake in the whole authentic experience in some backwoods honky tonk with knotty pine walls and red-and-white checked floors like you see on TV. Something like Urban Cowboy. But there are none—no honky tonks, saloons, taverns, pubs, inns, or local hangouts of any kind where you can get a beer, a line on some decent moonshine—just so you could say you’ve had it because I hear it’ll rot your insides out if you drink it on a regular basis—and maybe listen to a little bluegrass on a Friday night. At least on this side of the lake. No bars at all. There are forty-seven churches and one Dairy Queen but no bars.

There are a couple of bars on the other side of the lake. They cater to “them ones not from around these parts”—non-locals—who buy McMansions on the water and build docks with boat houses bigger than my real house, but that’s about forty-five minutes around. Plus, they are really not bars, per se. They are really restaurants with bars on the side to accommodate diners waiting for their tables and they seem to go out of their way to shed themselves of any kind of country flavor, which is what we have all come down here for but I suspect the locals are embarrassed by and don’t realize how much we, their only customers, love that stuff. If they did, they’d be making a ton of money. The places would be packed. But, in a misguided attempt to attract us, their décor is designed to be progressive and modern—industrial pipes and duct work exposed on the ceiling (these “pipes” are sometimes fake—cardboard tubes spray-painted with silver paint), plum-colored walls, shiny black tiles, brick, martini glasses with Z-shaped stems.

There is one real bar on the water but it thinks it’s in the Keys and has bamboo tables, blue drinks and plastic palm trees.
It specializes in ‘80s bands and closes at eleven o’clock—about the time I’m just perking up—even on July 4th. Very similar to the Palace across the boardwalk in Keansburg except you could barely get the people out the door at last call at two a.m. and when they had ‘80s bands, it was 1980.

Therefore Kurt and I were really itching to find a cool, authentic place. They might say around here that we had a hankering for one. This might be our only chance since we’re selling the house. Pretty soon we’ll be in New Jersey where we’ll have plenty of bars to choose from but maybe no authentic redneck place. So we decided to go find this dive bar. We couldn’t ask the boyfriend for directions because it’s bad enough that we don’t pray at dinner and we’re already wrecking Kelly’s reputation (the boy, good natured, said that’s okay, when Kelly apologized that we dug right in like two barbarians—he had said a silent prayer). Obviously a nice boy. Last thing we wanted to do was damage her reputation any further—I’d already embarrassed her when I told him that the woman in the old picture he was looking at on the wall in the kitchen was Aunt Millie and she was a hot number. Why I had to describe her, I don’t know. But that’s what we always say about Aunt Millie when her name comes up. She was a hot number. When he looked at me quizzically, I said, “You know, a floozy. Died of cirrhosis of the liver, something like that. Big drinker. But ooh, she was a hot number in her day. Had a couple of husbands, flaming red hair…” So I couldn’t ask him for precise directions and we had to wing it.

Luckily we have the Big Mama because at least if you’re going to drive all over the hillside with nothing to look at but dark houses and hulking shadows that may be cows or children of the corn, at least you can drive in style. I splurged and put my seat warmer on. This was our night on the town! Kidless, in my cowboy boots (not the riding ones, the dancing ones), and going to a backwoods, country dive bar! I imagined some Outlaws on the jukebox, perhaps a little ZZTop—“Waiting for the Bus,” would be perfect—and some oldies, got to have the oldies—“Make the World Go Away,” George Jones, George Strait, Hank. We’d dance across the dusty floor and shoot pool with boys (that’s what they’re called around here—boys—not guys, not men, even if they are grandfathers) in flannel shirts and John Deere caps, and maybe a cowboy or two. There’d be a couple of bleached blondes with too much make-up on and hairdos back from when I was still watching Three’s Company, and a guy named Eeavard with his head on the bar. I mean, how good is that? A guy named Eeavard?!

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have gotten a look at some of the farmhouses. But all I could see were shadows zooming by. We couldn’t find the bar. We went further. We turned left. We turned right. We said let’s go a few more miles. We considered calling the boyfriend but ruled it out. How desperate were we anyway? What about if we took Business 29? Maybe it was the business highway and not the regular highway? (I don’t know why they do that—it’s so confusing—two highways with the same name.) We’d get excited every time there was light on the horizon—Look! That’s got to be it! But all it ever was were the yellow lights coming from a church basement or the digital sign from out front. No bars anywhere.

So we’re back on our computers on a Friday night. Which I guess is just as well. I hear boys with names like Eeavard can get pretty rowdy.

Oz

2011-10-14T22:59:00.003-04:00

The rainbow

We didn’t close. You heard that right. Slow Bob got the new job. He started it the other day. But then his bank wanted a letter from the old job saying that they would rehire him if necessary. I know! It’s crazy! It’s unheard of! First they make him quit his job and get a new one and then they demand the old one promise to hire him back if the new one doesn’t like the way his breath smells. Slow Bob has requested a letter to this effect, but so far, the old job hasn’t coughed it up.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not Virginia, but I am dead and this is some alternate Virginia, the Virginia Hell, and I will spend eternity selling this house over and over again but no one will be able to get a mortgage for it. I’ll get this close and then boom! The deal will fall through!

I am being punished for leaving New Jersey in the first place. I feel guilty for leaving my daughter Jamie when she was in college and we went to Oklahoma to begin with. I feel guilty when my mother was sick and she cried for me to come back, I said I couldn’t. I should have at least lied! Everyone always knocks New Jersey, including the ones who live there. I thought it was going to be so great here. I’ve learned there are good things and bad things about every place. But there is no place like home.
Flying monkeys

I need my ruby slippers! Or a bank that really wants to make a loan!

A Message

2011-10-09T23:04:00.004-04:00

It is one week before closing and Slow Bob hasn’t gotten the mortgage commitment yet. Now it turns out he needs a letter of reference from a prior job before the new job will commit to hiring him and he won’t get the mortgage until the new job commits to hiring him. Which I thought was already done, since we were told he got the transfer and were even told the start date, but turns out is not completely done, like how a cake is not done when you stick a toothpick in and it comes out gooey. It’s almost done. It smells good. But you can’t eat it yet. And, in fact, it might burn. Like say if someone is honking outside and when you go to the door, they yell, “Do you have horses?!”

Also, the title work has not been started yet and though there won’t be any problems because my title is clean, it won’t be finished until Wednesday. Monday’s a holiday. Columbus Day or something. Everybody’s out of work; everyone’s clamoring for work; but people will conjure up any excuse they can to not actually go to work. Like last week the helper couldn’t work because it was opening day of hunting season. Hunting season! Here we’ve been scrambling for work and we don’t know where the next job is coming from (and this is one reason we want to go back to New Jersey—it’s not just because I’m homesick—we think we’ll have a better chance finding work up there, not unlike the husbands did during the Depression when they all went up north to work and sent money home to the wives who rented out rooms and sold eggs while waiting for them—I saw that in a movie one time) and the helper takes off for the opening day of hunting season!

So the lawyers informed me not to expect anything on Monday because it’s Columbus Day. Why didn’t they start the title work sooner? They had the order from Slow Bob’s bank since last week. I know because I called them to find out how things were progressing. I started my title work on the house up north last week and that house is supposed to close after this one. Nothing gets done until I get on the phone and ask if they did the thing yet. What am I going to have to do—wipe everyone’s rear ends next?!

Best case scenario, maybe the title work will be finished Tuesday afternoon, but most likely Wednesday. That really means Thursday. Therefore, what it boils down to is this: I’m not going to know if this deal is really going to happen until Thursday. And we’re supposed to close on Friday!

In the meantime, I couldn’t postpone any longer doing things I’d rather do if I was sure we were closing—things that cost me money and money I won’t get back if this deal doesn’t go through, things that disrupt business and will hurt my business if it turns out we are staying, things that hold people up, lead people on, or could be unavailable to me if I wait till the last minute. Like the horse hauler. If I don’t schedule him now, he might not be able to do it on the day that I need him. It’s a two day job and the guy’s got to stay in Virginia overnight. And the flatbed trailer. If we don’t buy one now, we might not find one at the price we can afford when we’re ready to go and we need one to transport the tractor. And the well, septic, and termite inspection on the house down here. If I wait too long, the results won’t come back in time. But if we do it too soon and Slow Bob doesn’t get the mortgage, we still have to pay for tests we didn’t need and are unable to use for the next buyer because the results are only good for thirty days. The termite inspection and the title work up north too. I had to get that going. I had to order boxes, bubble wrap, a moving truck, homeowner’s insurance, electrical service… I had to talk to the schools. We couldn’t wait any longer. In one week we’re supposed to be ready to hitch up the wagons, literally, on Bob’s bank’s word that everything looks good. What if they’ve got their hands behind their backs and their fingers are crossed?!

I’m freaking out. Today is my mother’s birthday and I was hoping I’d get a message from her. Some words of wisdom. Something to calm me down. I listened for her words when I was picking up manure, but nothing. I was hoping I’d see a butterfly but I didn’t. My only consolation is knowing that I will finally know the answer, one way or another, in one week. If they don’t show up in the lawyer’s office on Friday, then I think it’s safe to assume it’s not going to happen. And if they do… well, I can’t even imagine the relief I’ll feel.

Then I got a text. It was from my daughter Jamie who lives in North Carolina (temporarily) and who I visited yesterday to bring some stuff that wouldn’t fit in my new house but Jamie could use. Plus all her boxes that I’ve been carting around for the last ten years—toys, cards, books with flowers pressed between the pages, old clothes, even a set of rubber car mats with red and black zebra stripes. When she was going through her stuff, she came across this:
I don’t know how it got in there! The date on the back says “1996.” And what were the chances of Jamie finding it today? Tell me that’s not a direct message from my mother! I couldn’t have gotten a better message unless she hand-delivered it herself.

I'll Believe It When I See It

2011-09-29T21:35:00.012-04:00

Slow Bob got the transfer! But that don’t mean anything. (I’d like to stop right here and tell you that I know my English is not always correct—I should have said, “That doesn’t mean anything,”—but I am writing how I speak, just like I would if we were sitting across the table from each other having a cup of coffee. Not to say I always know what’s correct English. However sometimes I know when it’s not right and I do it anyway.)

So Bob got the transfer. We got more hay yesterday anyway.
Even though everything looks pretty good at this point, I have no faith that it will actually happen. According to Bob’s banker, the only thing we’re waiting for now is the appraisal. Since we keep lowering the price every time we lose a buyer and put it back on the market, the last appraisal is twenty thousand dollars higher than what Bob is paying. And since we never stop working on it (since the last appraisal, we’ve painted ceilings, put pea gravel in the tractor shed, installed a new ceiling light, put ferns on the porch…) the amount of the appraisal shouldn’t be a problem.

The loan officer said, “Just as long as there are good comps, we should be good to go!”

I assured her, “Oh yeah, there are plenty of good comps!”

But there aren’t. I live in a town of about a thousand people. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. And this is a place people don’t move away from. People stay here. What are the chances that, at any given time, there will be a farm exactly like mine for sale?—a four bedroom house with one bathroom and with real horse facilities including a riding arena on ten acres? There’s a house for sale down the block right now. It has two acres, three bathrooms, no horse facilities and it’s on the highway. There’s another one in the other direction that has around the same acres as mine and a similar horse barn. But no house. (Of course serious horse people don’t care about houses. Just give us a barn with water and electric and a place to plug in the coffee pot so we can make a bran mash for the old guy in the winter.) A couple of miles down the road there’s an old dairy farm on sixty acres for sale. None of them are really comparable to mine. What are they going to want? A cookie-cutter house in the middle of a development that’s the same as all the other ones except the kitchen is beige and not blue?

So it’s going to depend on how much of a stickler Bob’s bank is going to be. And that means I had to go and get more hay.

Getting Ready For Winter

2011-09-14T22:47:00.004-04:00

We had to get hay. There was no getting around it. We could be here for a while. Our latest buyer, let’s call him Bob, got turned down for a mortgage because the bank thinks his commute to work is too long. You’ve got that right. The bank is suddenly concerned about a borrower’s quality of life and butts into decision-making like a meddling mother-in-law who gives the baby a pacifier, or takes it away—whatever she deems is right—because the mother of the baby is obviously an idiot.

I warned Bob about the trouble the banks were giving people who tried to get a mortgage to buy this place. Bob told me if he got the house he planned to transfer to one of his company’s branches closer to home after he got settled in. But in the meantime he would commute. Admittedly, it wasn’t close. Almost two hours. Just like what my girlfriend’s husband does who owns a car dealership up in New Jersey and less than what my other girlfriend’s husband does who works in Manhattan. Sometimes you have to travel for good things.

I advised him not to mention his plans to the bank. If he transferred, they’d claim he got a new job and they don’t give mortgages to people with new jobs. I said don’t give them any ammunition. Don’t even mention it. Don’t tell them that I have a really nice riding arena and you could give riding lessons if you wanted to even though you don’t plan to. Don’t even say it. (They rejected my first buyer because of that. Didn’t want her to rely on paying her mortgage by giving riding lessons even though she was a registered nurse and in fact took riding lessons on her days off.) I warned him: don’t say anything.

But who knew they’d have a problem with the commute? It didn’t even occur to me and I don’t know if it occurred to Bob because he was fine with it. Why should it bother anyone else? I have no idea how the bank found out. Are they Mapquesting the distance people go to work in addition to pulling credit reports and looking at tax returns? What’s next? Will they ask for proof that you own a riding lawnmower because push mowers require too much energy? Will they ask for references from people who will vouch that you know your way around a toolbox and can fix a broken window and repair the heater if it conks out? That actually makes sense. You would think maintaining their investment would be more of a concern to them than worrying about how far the borrower has to drive.

Bob hasn’t given up. He’s trying to get the transfer. But I don’t have a lot of confidence. Last year we thought we were closing, so we didn’t cut wood. I’m too cheap to use the electric heat continuously so I got ripped off buying a dump truck full of wood that turned out to be so green it sizzled and spit like driftwood just washed up on the beach and had to be resplit because the pieces were so big and heavy I could only carry one at a time. And you know how strong I am. I don’t want that to happen again even though getting hay is the worst job in the world. I’d rather clean sheaths. I’d rather weed-whack all the monkey weed or the pig weed, whatever that crap is that grows on the bank behind the arena like it’s on steroids. Forget manure. Even though most people would lump manure in with the sheaths and the weed-whacking, I like picking it up because that’s when I do all my thinking. That’s when my mother talks to me.

At any rate, we had to go and get the hay because I have no faith Bob is going to get the transfer and I think we’re going to be stuck here for the winter, possibly forever. Kurt was kicking and screaming. He’s sick of this farm stuff. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t ridden the horses since we moved out of Jersey eight years ago. And that was the whole point. The horses. But all he’s been doing is building barns and building fences and fixing houses and then fixing houses more so we could sell the houses. We thought we were going to kick back in the country. Have a nice, slower-paced life. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and a slice of blackberry pie; maybe mosey down to the barn for a ride once in a while. But he spends more time and energy maintaining things, fixing things and trying to get rid of the things that we fixed than actually partaking in the rocking chairs on the front porch or the triple gates we installed on the riding arena so we could enter and exit on three sides or the manicured trails he keeps in tip-top condition because you never know when someone’s going to want to come and look at the house. He doesn’t even have a horse anymore since Kelly took over Bullet. So he was not happy about the hay.

The thing about hay is you have to get it while it’s available. It’s not like Jersey where you can pick up the phone once a month and say you want some and the hay guy delivers and stacks it on Thursday. Here, you’ve got to go get it yourself. And you’ve got to get it while the going’s good. Because the farmer won’t store it for you. Even if he had a place to store it, he’s not doing it. You want it, you come and get it right now before Wesley Bell comes and gets it because Wesley just picked up a couple of nice Walkers down at the sale and they need some groceries right quick. Hay, in the land of hay, is somehow a commodity that’s in short supply. At least if you want hay without mold or Johnson grass or crushed up cans and Styrofoam cups baled up with it. And it’s almost impossible to get delivered.

We got 95 bales at the crack of dawn on Sunday morning after going out for Kurt’s birthday the night before. We tried to schedule it for later so Kurt could sleep a little on his only day off. I claimed the horses were on a strict schedule regarding their meals and we would come over after they ate their breakfast but the hay lady was having none of it. She had something else to do and wasn’t waiting around for us to buy her hay. She’s one of the few around here who doesn’t go to church so I don’t know what else she had going on that was more important than getting three hundred dollars in a place where people work half a week to bring home that kind of money and where by the looks of her house—blue tarp on the roof, plywood on a window—she could use.

We’re going to need another four hundred to get through the winter. Three hundred if you go by Kurt. Five hundred if you go by me. And we’re going to have to go back before Wesley Bell gets them. I don’t even want to think about the wood.

No One Knows Me

2011-08-15T21:39:00.007-04:00

Ginger is gone. She went back to Texas. Ginger is one of my blog buddies. I follow her because she was a transplant like me and because I admired how she was trying to make a living farming. She and her family were kind of like hippies (I don’t know if she’d like that characterization but that’s how I thought of her because of the goat cheese, the books, and PBS) and they really lived off the farm. They milked their own cow, grew vegetables, heated with wood, and Ginger sold cake and bread down at the local farm market made with flour she ground herself. She ground it herself. Very hippie-like.

She didn’t know how to do all of these things at first. I imagine she knew how to bake bread, being a hippie and all. But she had to Google how to slaughter a chicken and castrate a bull. I could never slaughter a chicken myself, even if someone actually showed me and I didn’t have to resort to Google, but I appreciated that she did. Not that she killed an animal. It was her lack of hypocrisy. How she was humane and grateful, thanking the animal and taking good care of it. If you have to kill an animal, at least be humane and grateful. But I couldn’t do it even if my heart was in the right place. I think I could castrate a bull though. I’ve seen horses getting done. Afterwards you take the testicles and throw them up on the barn roof for good luck. I don’t know if Ginger threw the testicles up on the roof.

Everything was going well, as well as can be expected on a farm with goats getting out and weeds coming in and whatnot, and then Ginger’s husband Philip died. He was from New Jersey, like me. He and Ginger met in school and she also lived in Jersey for a time, until they moved here. That’s how we started talking, yakking on e-mails in between the blogging. She lived in Jersey, I lived in Jersey. She lived in Texas. I lived in Oklahoma. That was close! When you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you don’t know anybody, you’ll latch on to any little shred of something you have in common even if the link is as precarious as being from neighboring states.

But after a while, Ginger didn’t reply to e-mails. I don’t think it was me. She was busy with her church friends. (She was a hippie but she was also from Texas.) Besides castrating animals and butchering chickens, church is the other thing people do out in the country. They get religious. I’ve even seen it with my own friends who left New Jersey and moved to the country and all of a sudden they’re thanking Jesus on their Facebook and saying prayers for everyone who has anything whatsoever wrong like their car won’t start or a horse got kicked. I myself turned to it as well, even though I felt like a fraud. Then I quit when the pastor called gay people evil. But that’s a whole other story—how I found religion and lost it just as quick.

I understand why people are drawn to it. When you’re in the country and there is no neighborhood bar or crowd of mothers holding the hands of backpacked kids waiting for the school bus on every corner, when you are in a place that’s so remote (if you can count having Internet and Dish TV and everything a person could want at her fingertips down at the Minute Market as being remote), that you calculate the cost of a tank of gas and the time getting there in deciding whether it’s worth joining the book club or even going shopping, and the only sounds you hear are the birds and your own voice if you test it now and then by clearing your throat or talking to the dog, the only people you see are the mailman and Eldon on his tractor or Pearl when she brings you something—a pie, cucumbers, a flyer for vacation bible school—you need something. Church, out in the country, is the community. All activities come packaged with the church. The spaghetti dinner? It’s down at the church. The kids are going to the water park. It’s sponsored by the church. The bluegrass festival? It’s in the pastor’s field. You need to find a good plumber? Ask Ray about it in church on Sunday.
And so when Philip died, Ginger’s church friends rallied around her. I wanted to go and visit her when I heard. But I wondered if the death of one’s husband was a good time for blog buddies to meet in real life. Plus I knew she didn’t need me. Her freezer was jam-packed with enough meals the church ladies made to last for God knows how long and all the church husbands were stocking her up with wood and fixing her fences. They even helped outfit her kitchen with an industrial oven so that she could bake bread efficiently and make a living without Philip.

When my mother died, a few months later, Pearl brought me over a pie and took me to a flea market to get me out. She even helped me rescue some rusty old motel chairs discarded behind an old barn that I had my eyes on for years, which I later sanded and painted, saving them from the Dumpsters and making them look cute on my porch.
I’m grateful to her for that. But that was it. I don’t go to church so I had no other support system. Almost immediately I wanted to go home. My mother wasn’t there anymore but I was suddenly very homesick for where she’d been, for the people who knew her and would be shocked when they ran into me at the supermarket and I told them she died (she died—it still doesn’t sound real), and for all the things I took for granted that were linked to her, to my family, to me—the ocean, ticking spinning wheels at the boardwalk, taverns with diamond-shaped windows in the doors, stoops, docks, shamrocks, doo-wop, Bruce Springsteen, lobstermen, Italian bakeries, Soprano accents, Elk’s conventions, the tunnel, the garden, handball, skeeball, stickball, Hoboken, the Statue of Liberty, even the New Jersey Turnpike.

I remember when the turnpike was being built. My sister, annoying as always, called it the “turnapipe.” The pavement was brand new, bright and white and surrounded by crow-weeds and cattails like a road in a state park going to the beach. And it did in fact go to the beach; it went down-the-shore, to Keansburg, to the little town where we rented a bungalow in the summer. When we passed the real estate office that was shaped like a ship in Laurence Harbor, we knew we were almost there. And there was my mother, only 24-years-old, driving her 1968 Dodge Charger with the black stripe on the back end, Crystal Blue Persuasion playing on the radio, and three kids in the back seat kicking each other, vying for a window.

There is no one around here for me to tell this to. People smile and nod when I tell them how she loved her cars—a red Mustang, a gold Cadillac, the Charger, a two-toned Grand Prix that looked like it belonged to a pimp, to name a few—and how she was a flaming redhead until she got sick—this was no old lady who got leukemia and died! But no one around here knows her. No one really knows me.

I imagined that Ginger was having it even worse. She lost her husband, her partner on the farm. How would she manage without him? At least I didn’t have to worry about that. How would she castrate the bulls? Did she even know how to use a chainsaw? (For firewood, not the bulls.) Could she drive the tractor? What if the truck doesn’t start? She had it doubly bad. And with kids too.

But she seemed to be doing it. She got the oven. She planted seeds. They even wrote an article about her in the newspaper. They called her “the mighty widow.” Everyone was impressed by Ginger. Because, let’s face it, it would be hard to make a living on a farm with a husband, never mind without one. Yes, she was heartbroken about Philip and blogged about sitting on the deck at night all by herself, looking at the stars, listening to the whippoorwills and thinking about him. But she was getting on.

I was surprised. I thought she was going to go back to Texas as soon as the funeral was over. And jealous. I was not getting on. I suddenly hated it here. I didn’t even ride my horses anymore because all I wanted to do was go home. We put the house up for sale and I dedicated myself to selling it. Dedicated is too mild a word. I’m obsessed. Fixated. All I do is work at keeping up with it, cleaning it, improving it, marketing it.

I wished I could be like Ginger, and still like it here, still get all teary-eyed over the mountain view that is so beautiful it looks fake; I wish I was still tickled when Eldon, in his straw hat and overalls, waves to me when he drives past the house on his tractor, or I see the filly across the road sticking her head through the fence trying to get some clover that is somehow more delectable than the knee-deep grass she’s standing in. Like she’s doing right now, as I type this. But I don’t care about any of it anymore. Since my mother died.

If I went to church, I’d probably feel better because I wouldn’t feel so alone here. I’d have a community. But I’m not going to church for that reason. And so I suffer in silence, posting ad after ad for this house, thinking up creative ways to get it sold, analyzing, scrutinizing, second-guessing myself about why it’s not and what’s going to happen—am I stuck down here?—am I going to get cancer like my mother and die down here all alone?—and not living in the now, not being present and enjoying my life, because all I’m doing is dreaming of home and figuring out ways to get there.

Then, to make matters worse, Ginger up and left. First she started blogging about it. She decided to do it. She was leaving. Going home to Texas. In a way, I felt relieved. I was not crazy wanting to leave such a beautiful place after all. Even though she had all those church friends, that wonderful community who supplied her with wood and fixed her leaks, in the end, she still wanted to go home too. I warned her it was going to take time to sell her farm. I offered to send some of my prospects her way. She didn’t take me up on it. Such confidence! (She had no idea how bad the real estate market is.) Then I read about how she was planning to leave in the summer so she could get the kids settled in before school starts in September. I thought, good luck with that. I figured for sure I would be out of here before she was, but then the next thing I knew, even without selling the farm, she left. Poof. Gone.

And now I’m even more jealous. How come she can leave and I can’t? Well, technically the reason is because I have to sell my house and she didn’t. I don’t know why she didn’t have to sell her house. Maybe she got life insurance money when Philip died. Maybe she just doesn’t care and she simply abandoned it. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.

What matters is I have to stop white-knuckling it because I can’t force it to happen. I have to find peace and acceptance, like it seemed Ginger had, when she was here, and when she left, so I can live in the now. Because the now is all I have. Stop the obsessive cleaning and fixing. Stop cutting the grass with a toenail scissors like they tell you to do on Designed to Sell. Start riding my horses again. Go back to the clubs. Take a good look at that mountain behind the hay field.

And maybe get a hold of some testicles to throw up on the roof.

What a Kid Will Do

2011-07-29T19:57:00.006-04:00

When you live way out in the country, out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s too hot to ride, a kid who’s not allowed to play on the computer every waking minute will find other things to do. Kelly takes walks in the woods and plays with the dog. She catches frogs and turtles. Sometimes bugs. She also takes pictures. Whenever I look for my camera, she’s got it.

Recently, her pictures were featured on the blog Creative Influences. They said some nice things about Kelly’s work.

Here are some pictures she took of Harley. I call it her “Horse Taking a Shower” series.

The Best Summer and the Worst Summer

2011-07-20T21:22:00.003-04:00

On July 4th, I think about two things. I think about when I went up to Jersey to help take care of my mother for a month. She was so sick, I think I knew she wasn’t going to make it. I went outside on her porch for a cigarette. In the beginning of that month, she was coming out there with me and we were smoking together. But on July 4th, she was in the hospital and I was out there alone. I heard my father’s TV inside the house. I heard the fireworks in the distance and I saw a few over the horizon. People celebrating. Life going on. While I was out on the porch smoking and my mother was dying.

Then, it also makes me think of July 4th, 1976, the Bicentennial. It was the day I brought home my first pony. The family was having a barbecue in the backyard. I tied the pony to the chain-link fence on the front lawn, went into the yard and announced, “Guess what followed me home?”

My mother said, “Oh no Debi, not another dog.”

I said, “It’s not a dog. Come see.”

The family swarmed around him. A horse! It’s a horse! I think they let me keep him because of the novelty of it. My father tried to feed him a hamburger. “They’re vegetarians Dad!” I cried. That’s how much my family knew about horses. But my father got to work building a little barn, one of those 10 X 10 Dutch colonial sheds they sell outside the home improvement stores, and my mother would get Cherokee hay, one bale at a time, and transport it home in the trunk of her Dodge Dart.

Cherokee didn’t make it either. He died right before Christmas. But it was the best summer of my life.

So the best summer is intertwined with the worst summer.

Now I realize I had the worst summer, because I had the best summer. It wouldn’t have been so terrible if I had a mother who wouldn’t let me keep that pony. I wouldn’t miss her so much if she hadn’t been that great.

Stuck in Virginia

2011-07-05T22:16:00.003-04:00

Every time I get my heart set on a house, something always happens to mess it up. This time we waited until everything looked like it was a done deal with my buyer. Let’s call him Kip. Kip was pre-approved, his buyer was pre-approved, plus his buyer didn’t have a house to sell so we didn’t have to worry about that. Kip’s buyer had already done the inspections on Kip’s house and everything was good there.

I even called the loan officer myself. He said that with Kip’s 20% down, one year’s worth of mortgage payments in escrow (because of relocating and having to start his business over fresh), his good credit and loan-to-debt ratio, there would be no problem. He said Kip was “strong.” The last thing I did was wait for Kip’s buyer to get his mortgage commitment. I covered Kip. I covered Kip’s buyer. Then we went house hunting. We looked at the nuclear reactor house, we looked at the house on the highway, we looked at the house that even I would set a match to.

The Alloway house was funny. The Alloway house was the very first house we were interested in back in the winter when we sold the house the first time but we never went to look at it because it was quite a bit over our price range and the listing agent said the owner wasn’t negotiable. She called it a thorn in her side and said she’d taken dozens of people to see it but he wouldn’t budge a penny. He wanted close to three hundred thousand and our price range was low 200’s so no sense going. But now, lo and behold, it was down to $249,900, plus a new septic tank had been installed. Sometimes things are a blessing in disguise! Our new agent happily took us to see it.

I can’t even go into telling you about it. I’m too upset. By the time I posted the last story about house hunting and was getting ready to tell you about what we got, it’s over. After everything I did to micromanage the deal, all the checking and double-checking I did, after everything I did to make sure everyone was doing their job and no one was leading me on to believe that my buyer could get a mortgage when he couldn’t, the deal fell through.

I found out the day I found out my father passed out on the kitchen floor, woke up vomiting blood, and got himself to the hospital by crawling to the phone and dialing 911. He’s okay now but this is why I have to get home! This is it in a nutshell!

I’m starting to think I’m stuck in Virginia. No matter how well-priced my house is, no matter if I keep selling it over and over again, no bank is going to lend anyone any money to buy it. We gave them all that money to bail them out, and yes, I understand that they’re cautious now and they should be, they shouldn’t have been lending people money for houses they couldn’t afford in the first place. But I keep bringing them buyers who can afford my house and it’s a good house, priced under the appraisal, and if these people can’t get loans, no one’s getting loans. The bank is sitting on all the money and foreclosing on people’s property—they’re like the king—they’re keeping it all! No wonder why the economy is still at a standstill….

The banks aren’t the only bad guys. You’ve also got the henchmen. That’s the lawyers. This is how it all played out: Kip’s buyer learned ten inches of Kip’s backyard was in one of FEMA’s newly designated flood zones and would require flood insurance. Supposedly Kip wasn’t aware of this. Kip’s buyer’s lawyer advised him to ask for more money off the house to “remedy the situation.” I can just picture what he said. “It’s a buyer’s market! You can get another twenty grand off the house for that!” Everyone was happy up until that point, including Kip’s buyer, a first-time home buyer who loved Kip’s house, but was, naturally, afraid to cross his lawyer, and his parents, who were hovering during the entire process like a new mother over a preemie in a crib and were now nodding their heads vigorously because they had such a good lawyer.

Kip said no; he couldn’t afford to give any more money off the house because then he wouldn’t be able to buy mine. I offered to give him another five thousand off the price of my house and the real estate agents offered to take less of a commission to help him make the deal happen. The real estate agents even got the seller of the Alloway house to contribute five grand. Then it was a roller coaster ride. One minute Kip and his buyer came to an agreement, the next minute they didn’t. It was on, it was off, it was on, it was off.

Pretty soon I’m going to be in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer just like my father if this keeps up.

Finally it was on. But then, even though we all kicked in money, Kip still had to lower the price of his house to satisfy his buyer, and now he didn’t have enough money for the 40% down payment the bank wanted. Yeah, if you’re sharp, you caught that. First the bank told us 20%. Now it was forty. I couldn’t believe it. I specifically discussed this with the loan officer myself in the beginning of this process because I didn’t want what happened with my last buyer to happen with this one—the bank leading us all on. But now 20% wasn’t enough. By the time I thought it was safe and bought a house, 20% morphed into 40%. Kip only had 35%. Plus Kip learned that the interest rate on the loan was over 8%, double the going rate.

So the deal is off. And now we are probably going to lose the Alloway house because I was bidding against someone else who wanted it and the reason the seller accepted our offer was because we assured him it was a done deal down here, we were closing, everything had gone through and all we had to do was pack. I suppose there’s a chance the other person who wanted it found another house. Or maybe he won’t be able to get a mortgage the way the banks are holding on to the money. Maybe a miracle will happen and I’ll sell my farm to someone else who actually can close before the Alloway seller finds someone new. I have been getting action. Someone is doing a drive-by right now as I write. I even have someone who came right out and said he wants it but can’t buy it till August when his divorce becomes final.

In the meantime, I can’t even tell you about the Alloway house because I’m so upset.

House Hunting

2011-06-26T18:16:00.004-04:00

We looked at a bunch of houses before we started getting worried. There was the log cabin that had views of the nuclear reactor from the front porch. That wasn’t even the reason we rejected it. Though it was surrounded by beautiful farms with silos and fishing boats in the yards and reminded me of Misty of Chincoteague, and I love log cabins, the town itself was a ghetto. I’m talking gangland ghetto. Let’s put it this way. Even though I come from Jersey City, I was scared when we were in McDonald’s. Kelly would have to go to school with these kids. I bet all the farmers’ kids who were stuck between the ghetto and the bay where their families had crabbed or farmed for generations, were homeschooled, and the farm families were cringing at what grew up around them like weeds on the other side of a fence. I liked the house and the neighborhood so much, for a split second, I not only dismissed the nuclear reactor but I wondered if I could homeschool Kelly. Then I remembered that I don’t even know my times-tables so that was out.

There was the old stone house with the bathroom in the middle of the bedroom with a shower curtain that you pull around the toilet for privacy and all the plaster falling off the ceilings and walls in all the bedrooms upstairs, plus a kitchen that needed to be totally gutted. It had great acreage, even more than I have here, and we might have considered fixing it up if it wasn’t so overpriced.

There was the house on a busy road in a bad part of town that was too small and didn’t have enough acreage even if we didn’t care about living within walking distance of a check cashing place and a dollar store.

There was the house that the sellers refused to let anyone see.

There was the house next to the power lines. (It wouldn’t stop me. I don’t like it but power lines are a good place to ride—you can ride for miles and miles. But Kurt says no on the power lines.)

One possibility was the newer ranch house in pristine condition on twelve beautiful pasture acres that you could move right into. The house wasn’t old, like I wanted, but it was practical. My father would approve. It was a little small but it had a full basement, a den, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. It had a carport for the dually and a fenced-in backyard for the dog. It was nice. But there’s always a downside to everything in our price range. It was on a busy road. Somewhat of a highway. A country highway. But a highway nonetheless. On the good side, you could have horse shows there. That’s something I was actually looking for—a place that would be conducive to having horse shows. It would help to pay the high New Jersey property taxes. It would even be a good place to build a warehouse for our flooring business. Tractor trailers would be able to access it. But it was also overpriced. They’d have to come down. We filed this away as a back-up house—something we’d buy just to get up there and maybe sell later if we couldn’t stand the road. Maybe it wouldn’t bother us. You never know. It’s not something we wanted to do, buy a back-up house—we’re tired and are sick of moving. But we had to find a house.

There was the house in historic Smithville. Smithville! Smithville is one of the reasons I want to move back to Jersey! Smithville is a little village of shops on cobblestone streets that sell gourmet coffees, homemade pies and chocolate, candles, antiques, pottery, lavender-scented lotions, homemade goat soap, I Love Lucy collectibles, restored Schwinn bicycles, incense, beads, rocks, shells, Violets candy and Bazooka gum, vintage toasters, movie posters, and wind chimes. It’s where I got my magic wand from.

I love Smithville! When we left New Jersey, I thought the whole Virginia was going to be like Smithville. But I haven’t found anything like that here. As soon as we moved back to Jersey, I was going to go to Smithville right away and get some chocolate-covered strawberries and maybe a piece of rose quartz for my rock collection. So I was excited when I realized the next house on the list was actually in Smithville!

The listing said “dry basement,” but this one had the wettest basement of them all. We actually might have considered it just for the location alone, but like most of them, it needed way too much work for what they were asking. Overpriced with a capital O.

We ruled out handyman specials in worse shape than the winery house, houses that needed to be burned down, houses on small acreage,
a house next to a gas station, a house that used to be a truck terminal, foreclosures and short sales (they take too long), and a house that was so far down at the bottom of New Jersey that I might as well stay in Virginia, that’s how long it would take me to run up to the family’s for a cup of coffee or to take my father to a doctor’s appointment.

We were worried.

And then we found the Alloway house.

A Second Chance to Get the Winery House

2011-06-17T21:58:00.003-04:00

When we lost our buyers because they couldn’t get a mortgage and the seller of the winery house wouldn’t wait for us to find new buyers, I heard my mother’s voice when I was out in the field one morning, picking up manure. That’s when it’s peaceful. That’s when I do all my thinking. She said, “Don’t worry Debi. You’re going to find an even better house.”

Truthfully, I was mad. I didn’t want another house. I hesitated telling Kurt because, even if he didn’t think I was crazy, hearing my mother’s voice, he didn’t want another house either. Plus, I didn’t believe her. No way was I going to find a house that was better than the winery house. Yeah, it needed work but anything in our price range in Jersey was going to need work. This was something that we would never be able to afford otherwise! It was a grand old house, the kind that when you passed it on the street, you thought, “Rich people live there.” There was no way we were going to find anything that could compare.

My father thought we were crazy and insisted it was still going to be there when we found a new buyer. He said, “Nobody’s going to buy that thing!” I said, “Dad! Did you see the architectural details? Did you see the banister? It’s got pocket doors!” He rolled his eyes. Fathers care about things like heating houses without going broke and they worry about roofs, bathrooms that need toilets, and tax bills.

But he was right. Father knows best. The winery house was still available when we sold our house the second time! And my mother was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t her speaking to me after all. Maybe it was just my grief, grief over losing her, grief over losing the house—no wonder I was hearing things! It was my mind’s way of helping me cope. And now it was still for sale!

But we’re not stupid. This time we planned to look it over real good and figure out exactly what it was going to cost to fix, plus we were going to look at as many other properties as we could find so we could compare it. We didn’t have time to do this the first time because we were closing so fast in Virginia, plus a blizzard was happening. Now we’d have time. And we’d be comfortable in good weather. We thought we might even end up offering the seller of the winery house less money than we had in the winter if it needed more work than we had originally estimated. Also, we were coming out with less money this time because we sold our house for less. She had her chance to lock us in but she’d refused to take a house-selling contingency and wait for us. Now she might get less! It was her own fault.

Ironically, the people buying our farm the second time are from New Jersey. We turned them on to a local mortgage broker who knew this was a horse farm and was waiting anxiously to lend somebody some money to buy it. He didn’t care about the agricultural zoning or the “income producing nature of the property”—meaning the buyer could give horseback riding lessons if she wanted to. He gives loans out for small horse farms all over this area regularly. He said our new buyer looked good. We waited until every i was dotted and t was crossed. We waited until our buyer’s buyer got all his inspections done and got his mortgage commitment. We double- and triple-checked everything and as soon as we were sure nothing could go wrong, we got Pearl and Eldon to watch the animals and we went to Jersey to buy a house.

By the time we got there, our real estate agent told us we had to go see the winery house right away. She said if we still wanted it, we had to make an offer immediately. That day. Even though I told the seller of the winery house that we were coming and she said she’d wait for us to look at it again, she took another offer. And if we still wanted it, we had to decide now, before it was through attorney review. Tomorrow attorney review was over.

We were mad. There wouldn’t be any time to look at any other houses. There wouldn’t be time to leisurely dig into what it would take to hook up the sewer pipe to the septic system or to find out even if there was a septic system. Really. When you think about it. Maybe it was a cesspool. Maybe there was an outhouse. Technically, we didn’t know. We’d have to forget trying to get prices for replacement radiators (the radiators had exploded in the winter), and we wouldn’t be able to examine the roofs, the electrical wires that draped across the front yard and were propped up by a stick, or the garage in back which was locked up the last time we were up there. Now we were under pressure again.

The other offer was for $196,000. Our original agreement was for $200,000. Meaning don’t bother to try to get it for less. I didn’t like it. I also didn’t like it that the seller would renege on her deal with the other guy, if there really was another guy, if we offered her a better one. Business is business but they had an agreement. It didn’t seem right. Still, we went right away.

Let me put it this way. If there is another buyer who is giving the seller $196,000, then I’ll smoke my hat. It was a disaster! Being vacant, it did not weather the winter well. There was more peeling paint, the tarps had blown off the roofs of the outbuildings, and the property was so overgrown and neglected that the little clearing I was going to squeeze my horses onto wasn’t big enough for a goat. Now that the snow was gone, we saw trash and debris all over the yard, there was plywood covering mysterious holes in the ground (perhaps the septic tank), and broken glass crunched like corn chips under our feet—obviously the house had been continually vandalized over the years and broken windows was the destruction of choice. It wasn’t the picturesque property I remembered from Christmastime. It looked like a city lot.

In the back was a garbage pit. I know old houses have garbage pits. But this one was about the size of a swimming pool and though I was busting to start digging because I could see old stuff right on top—milk glass, broken blue bottles, china—there was also new stuff in it. Plastic Snapple bottles, brown beer bottles, ribbons of rubber from car tires and other new things not interesting or collectible fanned out from the pit into the yard and spread toward the house like it came with high tide. And it was black. Not from being burned. It looked like oil.

I didn’t know what Kurt was thinking. The real estate agent was with us and you can’t always talk openly plus I knew how much he loved the house and I didn’t want to be a downer but I was thinking no way am I going to buy this thing! I watched his face trying to discern if he was as shocked and disappointed as I was. He didn’t reveal anything. He was looking around, stepping over boards and brush. We went inside. Instead of being freezing and dark like it was in the winter, this time it was about a hundred-and-fifty degrees and dark and smelled like cat piss. In the cellar it was cool. Kurt noticed condensation. He poked the insulation above us. Water trickled down. Everywhere we poked, water came down. We peeled back the insulation. The rafters were drenched. Turns out someone, trying to do a good thing, put in the insulation incorrectly and it trapped all the moisture. It was a mold explosion waiting to happen.

Honestly, I was relieved. There was no better reason to reject the house. I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to persuade Kurt that we shouldn’t buy it. But it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t want it either. We didn’t even have to mull it over. The seller of the winery house wanted an answer now? Then the answer was flat out, unequivocally no. No way.

We felt like a load was lifted. Now we could go house hunting without worrying about the winery house, without wondering what-if, without mooning over the grand old house that got away. Losing our first buyer and causing that deal to fall through, was, it turns out, a blessing in disguise. And maybe my mother was right. Because anything was going to be better than the winery house.

Purple Dining Rooms Look Good To Me

2011-05-14T20:24:00.009-04:00

I’m frustrated because I have a bunch of people who’d love to buy this place but they can’t because they have to sell their place first and it’s slow-going. The only one who was not encumbered by having to sell a house couldn’t get a mortgage because of the agricultural zoning and “the income producing nature of the property.” Meaning she could give riding lessons. Oh no, can’t have that. Can’t have someone making a few bucks to help out with the mortgage.

My place is in pristine condition. It has never looked better. Those words came right out of Pearl’s mouth. That’s because we don’t stop working on it. Every time we fix or clean something, we look around for another bug on a windowsill or cobweb to sweep. Short of tearing the whole thing down and starting fresh, there’s nothing more that we can do.

My friend, the real estate agent, suggested that I repaint it in neutral colors. I know. I watch all those shows too. Designed to Sell, The Unsellables, and Get It Sold.

This was on AOL Real Estate this morning:

“It's not that unique features aren't fabulous, it's just that leaving too big a personal imprint--the koi pond filled with rescued sea turtles--can be an impediment in this buyers-rule market. It doesn't matter whether you're a celebrity or Joe Normal trying to sell your tract house: Experts say this is no time for purple dining-room walls and computerized toilet seats.”

I disagree. Unless you don’t know how to decorate.

Here is the living room in my house in Jackson.
Not quite red. More like Snooki self-tanning orange. (I call credit if Sherwin Williams comes out with that color.)

I sold that place in one month for close to the full asking price.

Here is one of the bathrooms in my house in Oklahoma.
In my defense, I didn’t have a lot to work with—unless you’re going modern, there’s not a lot you can do with grey fixtures.

I sold that place in two weeks for the full asking price to a cash buyer with no contingencies, no appraisal, no inspections, nothing, and could have had a bidding war if I didn’t already shake hands with the guy. It was the second highest priced property on the market in the county in a depressed area. Not bad for a FSBO.

Here is my purple dining room they advised against in the above article.
It’s purple. Not plum. Not lavender. True purple. Country Living magazine wanted to do a spread on that place but I sold it before they had a chance to. That one took a little longer. About two months. Granted, I didn’t get near the asking price but I had other issues going on there. It was next door to the Evils’. I couldn’t wait around. But I was happy. I bought it for $195,000 in 2004 and sold it for $365,000 in 2008.

So, no. I’m not painting the office in this house.

I admit it’s not going to appeal to the largest common denominator. (I sold the one with the purple dining room to a witch. No kidding. Serves the Evils right.)

But I think it’s fair to say my red office is not ugly. And if someone thinks it is and they don’t have the smarts to know they can pick up a couple of gallons of off-white for fifty bucks, then they don’t have the smarts to know that this house is a phenomenal deal and they’ll probably drive me crazy nit-picking uneven floor boards and dead bugs on windowsills.

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes—Rolling Stones

Update: Since writing this, I have received two offers on the house.

Practicing to Be a Cool Old Lady

2011-04-26T21:31:00.003-04:00

I don’t want anybody to be shocked when they see me when I go back to Jersey. I’ve really aged in the last year. It’s probably from the stress of losing my mother plus I turned fifty and I’m going through menopause. All of a sudden I have wrinkles all over the place and I’ve got this paunch in the middle that I see a lot of middle-aged women get. I’m not too worried about the paunch. I’ve watched all the women in my family get it when they went through menopause and then when they were done with the changes, a few years later, they got skinny again. I ride horses and take care of this whole farm myself so I’m not too worried about it. I’m very active. But the wrinkles. They’re not going away.

What bothers me about it is what other people are going to say. They will whisper, “Oh, what happened to Debi?” And “Debi looks terrible!” I know I look tired. I feel tired. I feel like I’ve been through the mill these last few years. If it wasn’t for what other people are going to think, I really wouldn’t care too much. It’s not like I’m going to let myself go. I’ll have blonde hair on my deathbed. But you can’t control everything.

The problem is, they haven’t seen me for eight years. We all age and I know they have wrinkles too. But they’ve seen each other regularly so I’m sure they don’t notice it in themselves like they’ll notice it in someone who they still think of as being forty-two years old, the age I was when I left. And then I’ll show up and I’ll be fifty. It’s like when someone dies. You always picture them the age they were when you lost them. But I’m coming back. And yeow! It’ll be a shock.

But who cares? I’m going to be a cool old lady. I knew this was going to happen sooner or later so I figured I better find a way to accept it. If I can’t look like a hot number when I’m old, at least I can be fun and make people smile. You know, like a Betty White type. So I’m practicing. One time I took a sip of water and spit it at Kelly. Got her right in the head too. I also race her up the stairs and I beat her because I cheat—the trick is I hold her until I get ahead of her. It helps if the dog’s involved because he grabs her by the ankles.

We talk with English accents. I encourage her to call me “Mum” and we stop whatever we are doing whenever Russell Brand comes on the TV so we can study him and make people chuckle. (They often chuckle in England whereas we Americans tend to laugh or giggle.) Today in Cato’s, Kelly held up a shirt and I exclaimed, “That’s quite lovely!” Kelly said, “I know Mum. It’s splendid, isn’t it?” Kurt told the clerk, “They’re not really British you know.”

I’ve also been practicing in Walmart. It’s so dreary in there—what better place to spread some joy? I always talk to everyone anyway. Now I go out of my way to do it.

I make a point of using the cashier’s name. “Thanks a lot Ruby. You have a great day.” They always look surprised that I read their name tag and used their name. Like it actually took effort. You get easy credit for this one.

I make jokes to strangers in the aisles. “Now if only I could hit the lottery I could buy some meat to go with all these snacks!” (We’re big on snacks in this house; hence the paunch mentioned earlier.)

I always stop and chat with the greeters because they get a bad rap. Like that’s an easy job. I’m fifty and I couldn’t stand on my feet all day long like they do. Most of them are senior citizens and they don’t even let them sit down. Why can’t they say hello from a stool? Why isn’t there a stool on the side so they can at least take a load off when no one comes in?

And I try to be helpful. “I get the store brand salsa,” I told a woman who looked confused, her hand hovering back and forth between the Pace and Chi-Chi’s. “The lime and garlic,” I advised. “It’s delicious and you get a lot more for the money.”

One time I had such a long conversation with a woman on line at the deli counter that I found out she’d lost a child and she was raising her grandchild, the state where she was from, the kind of work her husband did, her middle name and why she was named that, what kind of cold cuts she was buying and the theme for the party she was throwing on Saturday. She was wearing a butterfly pendant on a gold necklace. I didn’t tell her about my mother. You know, and how she loved butterflies. I didn’t have to because I felt so good making that lady feel good, that’s what I was busy doing. When she got her order, she reached out and squeezed my arm. “It was so nice talking to you!”

All day long I felt good. I noticed, when I looked in the rearview mirror driving home, that I was smiling. And there in the corner of my eyes were big crow’s feet. And somehow, they didn’t look so bad.

Signs

2011-04-09T15:52:00.003-04:00

All my flowers are blooming. The first one that came up was my mother’s. It’s a tulip. Jamie’s boyfriend Lou’s mother gave it to her when she was first in the hospital. She wasn’t allowed to have any plants or flowers in her room so she gave it to me because she knew I wouldn’t kill it. No one else in my family gardens. I carried it down to Virginia in its pot covered with crinkly pink foil. It was carefully wedged between a suitcase and a cooler filled with pork roll and cannolis from the Italian bakery. I planted it next to my back steps so I could see it all the time. It died right away. I thought that was a bad sign. And I was right. My mother died too.

The following spring I fixed up that little area by the back steps. I put mulch down and made a border out of Kelly’s collection of glass insulators. The colored glass looks really pretty when the sun is shining. I put an old tin watering can there that my neighbor from Jersey gave to me because she knew I liked old things. I put a metal sculpture of a grasshopper there that my mother bought for Kelly’s room when she was a baby. I added a couple of pretty rocks that I found, one with white streaks of quartz in the shape of a cross (I considered selling that one on eBay—“Woman sees Jesus on a stone!”), and another rock shaped just like Jersey. I put a dot on the spot where the winery house would be with black Magic Marker.

Then, when I was in Peebles, they had one of those fake rocks for sale that you hide your house key inside. I would never hide my house key in one of those because everyone knows what they’re for. Might as well hide it under the doormat if you want to be stupid. But I liked it because it had a copper plate in the middle with a picture of a butterfly on it. My mother loved butterflies. So I bought it and I put it right in the middle of the little plot of earth by my steps. Every time I go up and down, I look at it and think about my mother.

Last week I was on my hands and knees weeding when I spotted something green sticking out from underneath the fake rock. I picked it up. It was the tulip! Two springs have gone by since it died and here it was again, nosing up through the mulch, muscling its way from underneath the fake rock that was on top of it.

I took that as a sign. I really don’t know what kind of sign it is. Hope? A sign that my mother lives on even when I thought she was gone? A simple sign of spring? I don’t know. But it’s something good.

Me and Joyce Carol Oates

2011-03-31T21:21:00.003-04:00

The last time my mom was at her favorite place, her trailer at Mountain Shadows Lake in Newton, N.J.

Joyce Carol Oates lost her husband unexpectedly when she drove him to the hospital because he had pneumonia and he caught something there. A staph infection or C-diff or something, just like what was always getting my mother sick. A week later he was dead.

I hold up Raven’s Wing and think—she wrote this when she was innocent. When she didn’t know what pain was. I think about when I met her over twenty years ago at a reading she gave in a library in Princeton. I asked a question. I always ask questions even if I’m scared. She was a famous writer! Now I look back and I think about how she and I didn’t know what we were in for. Being scared is nothing compared to losing someone who means the world to you. We could have never imagined our futures back then when our paths crossed and we shook hands, she in a grey wool coat and beret, me in a twenty-nine dollar jacket from Bradlees. She was smaller than I’d imagined. Her hand was cool. I said something nice about her work. I worried that I sounded like a jerk. I worried that I smelled like cigarette smoke. It was an innocent time when all I had to worry about was what a famous writer thought of me.

Good News and Bad News

2011-03-26T22:23:00.004-04:00

View of our neighbor's farm.

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is, I’ve been getting a bunch of inquiries about the farm. The bad news is, nothing is happening with any of them. I have a couple of people from northern Virginia who have told me they are going to come down to look at the place but they haven’t yet. I have a couple from other states who have said they’re coming, but they haven’t yet either. A few—I don’t know where they’re from—ask me questions and I get excited because I have the right answers.

For example, “How much of the property is fenced?”

Yay! “All of it is fenced and cross-fenced, and a lot of it is board fencing—hard to find around here.”

And, “What are the neighbors like?”

Oh, good one! “The neighbors are gifts from god! They are one reason I don’t want to leave this place. Pearl and Eldon will bring you a pie when you move in, plus they’ll watch your animals whenever you go away. They’re friendly but they won’t bother you. You can’t ask for better neighbors.”

But it doesn’t matter how good the answers are. I never hear from them again.

Then I have one who is local. They did a drive-by and then they e-mailed me. They love the place. Love it! But they have to sell their place first. I have one from up in Maine who begged, “Don’t sell it to anyone else! I want it! But I have to settle some business first.” Whatever that means. Then I have a lady who wasn’t planning to move until she retires in four years but she stumbled upon my place and wants to know if it would be possible to lease it out? As a matter of fact I’ve gotten, four, count them, four people who’ve asked me if they could lease it. Plus Pearl and Eldon will keep an eye on it. Please see the above about our wonderful neighbors.

One of the people who inquired about the farm is now a friend of mine. She is not in the position to buy it, but we got to yakking on e-mail and then we got to yakking on the phone and I now have a new friend in Georgia.

I’ve even gotten another offer on it. The only people who came to see it since my deal fell through offered us the full asking price like the first people. They even admitted they were looking at it before I lowered the price and were prepared to pay that. Shoot. However, and this is a big however, they have to sell their place too. I understand I might have to take a house-selling contingency. I wanted the seller of the winery house to take a house-selling contingency from me. So I understand that. But I know that my house is going to sell. I’m in control—I know I priced it right (in fact, it’s now underpriced, reduced even below the appraisal), and I know how to market it. I have it advertised all over the place: Realtor.com, Land-and-Farm, FSBO, Owners.com, Virginia Equestrian, Virginia Horse Journal, Horse Talk, Horse News, Homes Now, HorseTopia, HorseClicks, Equine.com, Lands-of-America, Craig’s List, Facebook, you name it. I also put flyers everywhere. We even created its own website, www.SmithMountainLakeHorseProperty.com, with tons of pictures and information. This is not the first rodeo I’ve been in. This is the fifth place I’m selling by-owner. If there is anyone out there who needs a little horse farm in this price range and who is actually capable of buying it, I’m going to sell it.

But how do I know my buyer is going to do a good job selling his house if I take a contingency? I have no control over what they do to get their place sold. What if they don’t put their all into it like we do? What if they have a real estate agent who just collects listings, sits back and does nothing, hoping it’ll sell itself and if it doesn’t, well, no skin off his nose? So we called the agent to see if we could get a feeling for how things were going to go.

“Well,” he yawned. “It’s in the MLS and we run ads in the newspaper and we’re going to have an open house.”

Big whoop.

Next we took a ride and looked at their place ourselves. It’s a nice new ranch house but it’s on a main road plus the property is wooded and hilly. Which is exactly the reason they liked ours. You have to walk way down to get to their barn and they’d love to have a real riding arena. On top of that, they were next door to a trailer with a blue tarp, torn and shredded, dangling from the roof and flapping every time the wind blew. There were dogs on chains around the trees in the front yard and stainless steel bowls, dented and upside down, were scattered about. My heart sank. I was hoping this was going to be it and we could take their offer. We looked at the comps just to be sure but I don’t have any confidence they’re going to sell that place for a long time. They’re going to have to drop their price about fifty grand, maybe more. I had to tell them to come back when they’re under a solid contract.

So I’ve got all these bites but nothing’s happening. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Eventually I’m going to sell it and then all of a sudden they’re all going to come out of the woodwork, suddenly they’ll all be ready and they will be heartbroken that they missed it. This always happens when I’m selling my places. Only this time, due to the market we’re in, it’s just taking a little longer. I want to tell them hurry up, hurry up, you’re not going to find anything better than this in this price range… But of course I can’t. They’ll think I’m desperate. They won’t believe me.

In the meantime, I am officially out of contract on the winery house. The seller finally signed the release forms and they are sending my earnest money back. This is good news and bad news too. It’s bad because the house is freed up now and even though giving me a house-selling contingency wouldn’t have stopped her from selling it to someone else (if someone made an offer, she would have asked us if we were ready to perform and if we still couldn’t close, she could have taken the new offer), it might have prevented other people from looking at it when they found out it was under contract.

But it’s also good because we could renegotiate when we do find a buyer for this place and who knows, maybe get the winery house cheaper. I’ve learned some things about it—taxes are even higher than I was told, homeowner’s insurance is going to be practically impossible to get… Also, it’s possible we might find something that’s even better. Trying to look on the bright side. Because I am heartbroken I might miss it just like all the people who inquired about my place are going to be if they miss mine.

The Big Guns

2011-03-19T16:06:00.003-04:00

I got out the big guns. I’m not talking about my real gun. I hate that thing. I want to get rid of it. I have no idea what it is—a shotgun, a rifle… I keep getting the two of them mixed up. I keep having to say, “Kurt, what do we have again?” when I want to tell someone about it. The only reason I got the stupid thing was because of the Evils. The cops couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything, so after I got hit with the hammer, I went down to Walmart and got the gun. I filled out some paperwork. It took fifteen minutes. The next thing you knew I was wheeling it out to my car in a shopping cart next to the macaroni-and-cheese, and some kind of ammunition—buckshot, bullets, I don’t know—was in the seat up front where babies usually sit.

One of the church ladies sent her husband over to show me how to shoot it. It nearly knocked me off my feet even though I lift fifty pound bags of grain on a regular basis and push wheelbarrows full of manure, dirt, rocks, you name it, every morning. But it’s been almost five years now and the Evils are long out of the picture and the gun has been sitting in the closet making me nervous… under the bed making me nervous… in the attic making me nervous... One time I put it in the extra refrigerator out in the garage but that made me nervous too because what if we get a thief who’s hungry? Plus I had no place to store the beer and hot dog rolls when summer came. Then I read about some guy who was moving to New Jersey and he got arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike because he was transporting his gun in a locked suitcase underneath boxes of china, dish towels and the toaster oven in the trunk of his car. So I’d like to get rid of it.

Anyway, I’m not talking about the real gun. I’m talking about something even more powerful. It’s so powerful that I almost told the seller of the winery house about it when she called to see if I had sold the farm yet. It appears that someone else is interested in the winery house and they want to make an offer but it’s also contingent upon them selling their property and I think she wanted to make sure that I was still interested before she told them no. Yes I’m still interested! We’ve asked for a house-selling contingency but they never responded! I assured her that my farm should sell quickly. I told her I have people coming from other states to see it. I told her to go look at my website so she could see for herself that my farm is beautiful and it’s priced right and it should sell in a timely manner. I told her that I just put it on Realtor.com. Then I almost told her about the statue.

It’s a St. Joseph statue, about three inches high, cream-colored plastic, and would look good next to Mary in the manger if you were missing Joseph. It could even fill in for one of the Wise Men if you were in a pinch. But he’s really for burying in the yard like a dog buries a bone. Or a pirate buries treasure. They say that if you’re trying to sell a house and you bury St. Joseph in the front yard, it’ll sell fast. You would think that the only thing selling is the St. Joseph statues themselves. They are all over eBay and for sale on websites with names like Good Fortune For You. But they work. I can vouch for that! This is the third St. Joseph I’m burying. It worked when I was selling the Oklahoma house and that was a tough house to sell because it was the second highest priced property for sale in the county in an area that was very depressed. It sold for the full asking price in two weeks to a cash buyer with no contingencies—no mortgage, no appraisal, no inspection, nothing. And then we practically had a bidding war but we were already in contract. People were coming out of the woodwork begging me to buy that place!

It worked for the Ferrum house with the Evils next door. No one thought I was going to get out of there alive. But that house sold in two months. It took a little longer. That’s because I had to do it very quietly—I couldn’t let the Evils know. I didn’t even put a for-sale sign on the lawn because if they got wind that I was selling, they would have done something to sabotage the sale. Both of those sales, like this one, were for-sale-by-owner. For-sale-by-owners aren’t easy when conditions are good. They’re almost impossible when conditions are bad. In this case, it’s the economy.

So I ordered another St. Joseph. You’re supposed to dig it up and take it with you when you sell the house but it’s so windy out in Oklahoma, any tell-tale marks in the yard where I had buried it were blown away and after digging the fifth hole with a kitchen spoon because everything was packed already and finding nothing but worms and a bottle cap, I gave up and left him there. Ferrum, I was so happy to get out of there I’m lucky I didn’t leave Kurt, never mind the statue. I wonder how many St. Joseph statues excavators will find in the future? I can just picture happy homeowners on their hands and knees, digging in the garden and finding St. Joseph. “What’s this Honey?” They stand up with a hand on a hip and blow the dirt off. Squinting, they hold it up. “It appears to be a religious artifact of some sort,” one of them speculates.

The thing came with a little plastic bag and directions. You’re supposed to bury him inside the bag, upside down, facing the street. It seems kind of mean putting him in the dirt head first, but that’s what it says to do. You have your choice of prayers. I said both of them. I figured if one is good, two is better. The horses hung their heads over the fence watching me. Effie went by in her old turquoise pickup truck. She tapped the horn. She probably thought I was planting spring bulbs.

When I was finished, I decided to do some weeding. You never know when someone will want to look at the place so you have to keep it up. You have to be ready. I weeded the flower beds. I weeded the vegetable garden. Then I got some mulch.

Later, when I went in the house there was a call on the machine from someone asking about the farm. It doesn’t mean anything. But you never know.

Things I've Learned in Virginia

2011-03-05T15:49:00.005-05:00

1. If the wheelbarrow starts going down the hill really fast and you’re losing control, just drop it and hold on. You’ll skid a couple of feet and then stop. If it’s a really steep hill and you’re heading for something you’d prefer not to crash into—a tree, the pond, the manure pile—just drop it, hold on, and sit. That should do it. (Spray & Wash is not necessarily going to take all the orange out of the seat of your pants.)

2. Do not park a full wheelbarrow laterally on a path that zigzags down a hill because it will fall over the minute you take your hand off the handle to scratch your nose and all your hard work will go tumbling down to the bottom and you will say F-it and leave it there. Park straight, facing down.

3. All these years I’ve been eating rutabagas, not turnips. I’m still traumatized over that. My whole life my mother said they were turnips. When I confronted her about this deception, she acted all nonchalant, like it was no big deal. “Yeah? So? They’re really rutabagas. We just call them turnips.” She didn’t care one iota when I told her how embarrassed I was when I bragged to Pearl about my delicious family recipe for mashed turnips and she informed me, “Why Debi, them aren’t turnips at all. You’re getting your root vegetables all mixed up, bless your heart.”

4. When someone says “Bless your heart,” that means you’re a moron.

5. The mayor is not actually a crazy person who runs amok, crashing through fences all over town, trampling people’s lawns and gardens like a madman. The mayor is a mare, Wesley Bell’s sorrel broodmare who thinks the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and can’t be kept contained because the minute the electric fence goes out, she knows it.

6. Electric fences go out on a regular basis in Virginia. Or in the country, of which Virginia is mostly, agriculture being our number one industry. Of course some mortgage lenders (Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation) refuse to make loans on homes in agricultural areas even though we gave them all that money to do so--check out my story Bad News--in effect discriminating against country folks. But that is neither here nor there. The point is, the electric goes out in Virginia regularly and most people have generators. Some have them hardwired into their houses, it happens so often. We’ve been lucky; it’s only happened to us a couple of times and not for long so I’ve never had the chance to pull the generator out. And Kurt would have to be home if I did need it because I have no idea what to do. But I have it just in case. It’s next to the power washer, which we also don’t use.

7. In addition to generators, people in Virginia also have scanners. They listen to the calls that come in to the fire house or first aid in the beginning of winter when everyone is firing up their woodstoves for the first time and they didn’t get them cleaned first. Or when someone calls the ambulance for Brandy Hinkle because she took too many prescription drugs again, all those popular ones you see on TV, because she has nothing better to do than invent aches and pains because she’s bored out of her mind since she refuses to work or go to school and she got married when she was eighteen-years-old to someone else who refuses to work or go to school. It’s a vicious cycle over there and the only excitement is when the ambulance comes. As far as the cops, you rarely hear anything on the scanner about them. At least in these parts. Well, other than the occasional shooting. Because everyone has guns around here. Pearl keeps a portable scanner right in her breast pocket like a pack of cigarettes just so she can stay on top of things. If there’s anything I need to know, she calls me.

8. Bobcats mating sound suspiciously like women being murdered. That’s when I called the cops.

9. Tall grass is hay.

10. Baptist churches have white people.

11. Handy things. Like how to give shots, clean sheaths, stack hay, bake pies, and grow vegetables, all things I used to pay someone else to do in New Jersey. But I still can’t put new string in the weed-whacker. And I don’t know how to start that generator.

12. Just because there are old farmhouses all over the place doesn’t mean I am going to find anything good at garage sales. This is the hardest place for garage saling with the exception of Oklahoma. The people will not part with their old stuff or they have incredible patience and will sit around till the cows come home waiting for the right person to come along who will overpay for a jadeite sugar bowl because they’ve been looking for that exact piece for ten years. Either way, you will find Fisher Price toys, NASCAR collectibles, VCRs that don’t work, baskets, old shoes, brass fixtures and stained Tupperware at garage sales but no Roseville unless you want to pay an arm and a leg.

13. Testicles on dogs are the norm. When I first moved down here and started seeing all the testicles, it was so weird to me I might as well have been seeing dogs with antennas coming out of their heads. Some people actually think they’re going to make money breeding dogs, but the real reason is they just want to get some puppies because they’re cute. But they don’t think they’re cute enough to warrant a trip down to the local dog pound to save one, and certainly not cute enough to stop adding to the mess. Thousands and thousands of dogs get put to sleep in Virginia every year and even more cats.

14. They sell liver-and-onions at the local restaurant down here. It’s a buffet-style place called Chitwood’s Home Cooking and the last time I was in there, the whole pan was scarfed up faster than the one that contained the marshmallow salad. I couldn’t believe my eyes. People actually choose liver-and-onions? I thought liver-and-onions was something mean old aunts gave to kids in the 1950s and the kids spit it out when no one was looking. I thought liver-and-onions went out of style with kerchiefs and aprons.

15. Speaking of meat, people claim they hunt deer for the meat. To put food on the table. Trying to be open-minded, I tasted it. It tasted like crap. They say that’s because it wasn’t prepared right. It has to be cooked just right. Anything that has to be cooked just right to be edible is crap. And if it’s so good, why doesn’t Walmart sell it? Why isn’t it flying off the shelves down there? Why isn’t it in a stainless steel pan next to the liver-and-onions down at Chitwood’s? Because it’s crap.

16. Bulls are the boy cows who can mate. Steers are boy cows who are castrated like what should be happening to all the dogs around here. Heifers are the girl cows. I’m still not sure what that thingy is that’s hanging from their bellies. Is it a penis or is it something to do with the bellybutton? And you can’t go by the horns. Both boys and girls—sometimes they have them, sometimes they don’t. Hence, I can’t tell a boy cow from a girl cow.

Recalculating

2011-02-22T23:16:00.003-05:00

If I learned anything out of this nightmare, it’s that Kurt and I have no patience. We don’t have to move. We were only moving because I’m homesick. But now we’re busting to get out of here. Busting I tell you! Yes, not finding out the buyer couldn’t get her mortgage until two days before the closing caused everything to be in an upheaval. It caused financial difficulties, logistical problems, lost opportunities and at the least, it inconvenienced everyone. But that’s not the reason that we suddenly have to get out of here like the place is on fire.

It’s like being in a car crash. You’re going 60 miles per hour; suddenly, you hit a wall. Screech! Boom! The car stops but you keep going. It goes against the forces of nature to stay in your seat like nothing happened and the broker tells your buyer, “Look for another house—it was probably a blessing in disguise,” like you can just turn the station on the radio or readjust your GPS. Like it’s nothing. Like there’s something not great about your house! But you’re already in motion. So what was once going to be a leisurely exercise—we had been planning to hunker down for the winter—has turned into a lesson about patience. I’ve learned we don’t have any. Coming to a screeching halt makes me crazy to find a way around this detour.

And there’s no reason. Jersey is still going to be there when we find another buyer. The winery house might even still be there. Who is going to buy that thing? You can’t get a C.O., you can’t get a mortgage, I just found out right before all this happened that you can’t even insure it. It’s as as-is, as as-is gets, and nothing is hooked up so you can’t test or inspect anything. Who else is going to have the gonads to take a chance that when they buy that house, they don’t get in there and discover that the septic is shot or the well water is polluted? How many Debi-and-Kurts are there out there?

(The seller obviously believes she is going to sell that house because she refused to give us a house-selling contingency.)

Plus, the good part is we don’t have to move in the dead of winter. Can you imagine, moving a whole farm and a business (not to mention the kid) to another state and to a house with no heat in freezing temperatures and then trying to build some sort of horse shelter and fencing in a three-week period while there is snow on the ground? We’re crazy I tell you!

Maybe Bill is right. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. For me. Not my buyers. They won’t find a place that’s better than this, in this price range. Someday, when they look back, they will be kicking themselves that they didn’t try harder to make this deal happen. Me? I’m going to recalculate and turn left at the next sunny day. The riding arena is just waiting out there and if I am patient enough, maybe, just maybe, I’ll hear my mother’s voice again.

The End of the Trail

2011-02-14T21:08:00.004-05:00

The people who came to see the house this morning, loved it. Funny, they’re from New Jersey and that’s where we’re going. I don’t know if they’re going to buy it. They’re looking at a dozen other properties while they are down here. No property is perfect. In this price range, I know they won’t find something that has it all so it depends on what’s most important to them. The drawback to this place is we only have one bathroom. For me, even with the irritable bladder, that wasn’t as important to me as having real horse facilities. There were a lot of things that were more important to me. You can always make a bathroom. But I don’t know what they’ll decide. They did say I raised the bar.

Oh, but what a pain getting all ready again! I knew enough not to start packing just in case the deal fell through and I’d have to start showing the place again. I figured I’d pack while Kurt was up at the winery house getting the electric and heat on and all that. But I had to do some things. So I spent the last two days putting it back together—putting the cross-ties back up, stuffing things back into the attic, rehanging pictures, unrolling the sisal rug we keep under the table on the deck and unfolding the chairs… Staging. And cleaning. I’m a clean freak but when you’re selling a house and you only have one chance to make a first impression, it’s got to be flawless. Kurt went out on the trails with the tractor and manicured them. He cleaned up all the things in the garage he had prepared to take with him to New Jersey and he parked the farm truck in the back. We made phone calls to people to let them know we’re still in business and canceled people who were waiting, like the movers, homeowner’s insurance people, etc. I had to call the hay lady to see if she still had that hay she had asked if I wanted. Also, I’ve been reviewing and relisting all our house-selling ads and contacting people who inquired. Stuff like that. Now we start the process all over again.

I don’t have any hopes for my buyer coming through. Though she signed a contract agreeing to make every effort to obtain a mortgage, and though she has a down payment, high income, excellent credit and stable jobs, she says she’s not qualified when I tell her about other loan programs I’ve found out about. I don’t know how hard she has been trying. I don’t know if she has been frantically digging online, researching USDA loans and FHA rules and contacting other mortgage brokers like Kurt and I have. Heck, it seems like my online friends are doing more digging! If she’s scrambling, she’s not telling me about it. It looks like it’s over. I think it’s the end of the trail.

We’ve asked the owner of the winery house to give us a house-selling contingency but it’s been a few days now and no answer.

I know we’ll sell this place sooner or later. Spring is coming and it’s gorgeous here in the spring—flowers blooming everywhere, birds singing… We weren’t expecting to sell it so fast anyway. We’d planned to hunker down for the winter. I was surprised I was getting bites on it to begin with. It was the ugliest time of year and we were getting action! Of course I had to tell everybody that we were under contract. At least two people who were interested have already bought a house. That makes me mad. But I know that sooner or later it will go.

All my friends, all my blog buddies, have been so good. Screaming for me, feeling for me, coming up with ideas. I just wish I had my mother. I do think she spoke to me. It was when I was picking up manure in the field. That’s when I do my best thinking. It’s peaceful. It’s dead quiet except for the occasional horse snort and I put the pitchfork down, stop to look at the mountains behind Pearl and Eldon’s field…

All of a sudden I heard my mother say, “It’s all going to work out even better Debi.” It was like she was standing right next to me, whispering in my ear. Either I’m going crazy because I’ve had one bad thing after another happen since we left New Jersey and I’m so frazzled that I’m hearing things. Or my mother really is on my shoulder. Either way, a sense of peace fell over me.

Bad News

2011-02-08T23:47:00.003-05:00

Bad news. Our buyer couldn’t get her mortgage. Two days before closing. Not because of her credit. Not because of her income. Not because of the appraisal. All of that was fine. It was because of something totally ridiculous. We’re zoned agricultural. And I guess FHA doesn’t give out loans for property in rural areas.

My buyer can’t get a conventional loan—she’d need a 20% down payment and she doesn’t have it. FHA requires less money down. She’s not selling her house to buy this one, which is what most people to do to come up with that kind of money, in this case, about $52,000. Her house is a doublewide that needs some work and she was going to sell it later, at her leisure. This enabled her to give us thirty days to vacate the premises, a big plus when you’re moving a whole farm to another state and to a fixer-upper. Everyone was happy.

In the beginning of this process, what I was worried about was the house appraising for the proper price. It’s a tricky property because it’s a horse farm and comps are hard to find. I called the buyer’s banker, Bill Reynolds from Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, to make sure he was aware of this. I asked him to send an appraiser who was familiar with horse properties and who would understand the value of a real horse property and not compare it to a house with ten acres and a shed out back. I stressed this was a turnkey working horse farm. So he was aware of the nature of the property from the beginning.

But he let it go all the way to closing. And now everybody’s lives are in upheaval. I can’t tell you how this has screwed up so many people in time and money. One example is how Bill made us put in electric heaters upstairs, even though it is warmer up there than it is downstairs. That cost us five hundred dollars. It was totally unnecessary but we figured if that’s what they wanted, we would do it. How about how we had to stop work because we’re supposed to be leaving and now we don’t have jobs? What about the seller up in Jersey who is in financial hardship and is counting on us to close on Tuesday? I could give you dozens of examples how this has hurt us and other people. It’s just too long and upsetting to write.

My buyer was so upset she asked me if we could change the zoning. I said I didn’t think so but I would call the zoning department just in case. The zoning officer couldn’t believe it either. She said most of the county is zoned A1—agricultural, and single house dwellings are permitted. In fact, most of the state is zoned agricultural. Agriculture is our number one industry! FHA only gives out loans to people in cities? If that is true, Bill doesn’t know the products he is selling because he knew this was a horse property from the beginning.

And now I may lose the winery house because of all this. I have some other people interested in the farm, and I know that I’ll sell it sooner or later, in fact, I had a drive-by yesterday, and I have somebody coming over on Friday, but to go through this whole process all over again… it just might take too long and the winery house will be gone.

Of course I should have known the bank would screw it up. Just like they screwed up the whole country.

A Scary House

2011-02-02T21:59:00.006-05:00

We put our house on the market in September, for-sale-by-owner, and sold it in December. This is the fifth house we sold ourselves and I expected this one to take a little longer, due to the economy, but it went about as fast as the last one did. In fact, we were planning to hunker down for the winter because fall is not a good time to start marketing a property, but it flew off the shelf.

Now we had to find something to move to. This was going to be the hard part. We wanted something old; it had to have acreage for the horses; it had to be close to family, work, and barrel racing, which are in all different directions; it couldn’t be on a busy road or near power lines; and it had to be around $200,000. In Jersey. And we only had two days to do it. We had to get back home because of the animals. The animals is one reason why I want to move back to Jersey. It’s too hard leaving them every time we have to go up there for the holidays or a wedding, or like the last time, my mother’s funeral.

This time we went up there for Christmas. And to find a house. In a blizzard. We weren’t expecting a blizzard. We didn’t even know there was going to be snow and I didn’t bring any of my functional farm-wear because I wanted to look good; I didn’t want my family to say, “What the hell happened to Debi down there? She’s a mess!” So I brought clothes that looked good but weren’t good for trudging around in the snow. Jersey clothes. Form over function.

And I can hear my sister’s words if she’s reading this: “What do you mean you’re not a mess? You most certainly are a mess!” See, I told you. You’ll know what a northerner is thinking because she’ll tell you. And somehow I feel comforted by this, even if it’s not what I’d like to hear.

The first house that we looked at was a turn-of-the-century Victorian that had once been a winery. Our hearts started thumping as soon as we saw it. We parked in the street with our flashers on because the house was vacant so no one was there to shovel and we couldn’t see where the driveway was. If there was a driveway. We climbed through knee-deep snow in sneakers to get to the front door, surrounded by yellow clapboards with peeling paint and wires dangling from the ceiling where a porch light once hung.
The cops arrived to investigate why an out-of-state truck was parked out in the street. Someone called. They thought we were casing the joint. Hey, this is Jersey!

We loved the house but it was scary. It wasn’t because of the ghosts. Supposedly there are ghosts in the house. A woman and a girl. But it wasn’t that. It was the work. Talk about a mess. There was no electric, heat, or plumbing. It was colder inside the house than it was outside. We were so cold and it was so dark, we couldn’t really examine anything and when I had to pee, I had to go outside in the snow. My fingers were frozen, my toes were frozen and my butt was frozen. We looked at each other. Heartbroken. It was too much for us. Then we looked at other houses.

But we couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was crazy if we got that house! It was risky! It was reckless! It didn’t even have enough acres. We could squeeze those horses in. The taxes were high. We’ll be making a lot more money in Jersey. It’ll cost an arm and a leg to heat. We’ll get a woodstove. What if the septic is broke? Septic shmeptic. Oh, what we could do if we had a house like that! The possibilities were endless. And so we went back to see it again with the only pair of boots we could find since all the shelves in all the stores in New Jersey were wiped clean and luckily I have big feet because no one wanted the size eleven.

We brought my father back the second time. I could tell he loved it as much as we did. He asked, “Did you see that movie The Money Pit?” But he didn’t actually say, “Don’t buy it.”

In truth, if you really look at the situation, it’s not as bad as it appears.
The worst was over. All the demolition. All the messy and expensive stuff. The owners had gutted it down to the studs and put in all new wiring, plumbing and insulation. They put in new windows and two hundred-and-forty-something sheets of drywall, curving it where it had been originally curved, saving all the molding and salvaging all the architectural details.
They put in new heat. They stripped all the hardwood floors. Then it looked like someone just put his tools down, went out to lunch and never came back. Nothing was done. Wires were hanging out of holes in the walls and ceilings waiting to be hooked up to outlets and switches and lights; the toilets were in the bathrooms with the labels still on the bowls connected to nothing; the cabinets were in boxes on the floor in the kitchen and the sewer pipe went to nowhere.

But, when scrutinizing it and rationalizing why we should have this house, we realized that any house we bought in our price range would need new cabinets and new floors and new electric. They always do. We know that from experience. It can be the cutest house, the most adorable, well-kept thing on the block and we’ll think we lucked out and we don’t have to do anything but paint and move in. Then when we get in there we discover, even though we got an inspection (like the Ferrum house) and even though it’s brand new (like the Oklahoma house), the roof is leaking or it needs a new well or the heat doesn’t work or the septic is on its last legs, usually all of the above. The only thing is, it wouldn’t be scary. You could go in and turn on the lights and it would be deceptively warm and nice because everything would be up and running. But we’d have to fix all the same things we’d have to fix in the winery house. Sooner or later. Besides, we didn’t like any of the other houses. They were 1980’s tract houses, houses on highways, modulars with popcorn ceilings, cracker boxes and shit boxes and houses that didn’t melt my butter.

So we bought the winery house.

Going Home

2011-01-23T21:38:00.003-05:00

I haven’t been able to write about the houses because I’m afraid I’ll jinx myself. I guess I’m really superstitious. I avoid walking under ladders and I do knock on wood, using my head if there’s no available oak or pine. But now it looks like everything’s going to go through so I think I’m safe. Knock wood.

I’d been out of Jersey for seven years but it took my mother dying for me to get homesick. That’s the reason I’m going back. People assume it’s because of work. It’s not, though I expect it to be better up there. I miss my peeps.

And I don’t feel welcome here. I’m a Yankee.

At first I was in denial. I even wrote a story about it, Yankees and White Lies. But once I started analyzing my feelings about why I had this sudden urge to get out of here like the room was on fire (was this just grief?), I realized that I was not imagining being disliked and sometimes discriminated against by the people who didn’t know me and I was tired of it! I’m great! I want to be where people appreciate me and even if we are different, even if we have a difference of opinion, even if we vote differently (egad!), we can still be friends. We can still tolerate each other.

The fact is, I don’t feel safe here. Admittedly, part of it is because of what we went through with the Evils. But the other part is because I am different. And that’s a no-go in the south. I warned Kelly not to tell anyone that we go to the Unitarian church—they won’t like it down here and I didn’t want her to start getting picked on. I was afraid to put a bumper sticker for Obama on my truck—afraid the truck would get keyed the next time I was in Walmart. I hesitate to admit I think gays should be able to get married just like everyone else.

I was even told that my grandchildren will never belong here. A friend of mine informed me that if Kelly has children, they will never be considered “from here,” even if they are born here, because their grandparents are from the wrong side of the Mason Dixon Line. Even when I pointed out that her ancestors were from Europe—that was different—she made sure I knew that my future grandchildren would never belong. I’m a Yankee and all my kin, forty years from now, fifty years from now, doesn’t matter, will be Yankees. This was my friend.

So I’m going home to a place that, ironically, has a reputation for mean people but where I’ve never been assaulted, robbed, vandalized, harassed, or had my dogs poisoned like what happened in Ferrum, and where I’ve never paid a higher price than what someone else paid because of the way I speak, like what happens here all the time. When they hear my accent and figure out where I’m from, they either charge me higher prices than my neighbor because they don’t like me or because they think I’ve got money. Either way, I get ripped off left and right down here.

Sometimes I think I was meant to be here for a while so I can truly understand what black people go through when they complain they were stopped for walking down the road or couldn’t get a job simply because they were black. I used to think, “Ah, get over it. Stop being paranoid.” Now I’m rethinking the matter. Now I’ve got a taste of it and I know what they’re talking about. Only they can’t change their skin and I can go home.

To be clear, I am not saying that everyone is bad down here. Just like all Yankees are not bad, but some are, all southerners are not bad. I’ve met some wonderful people—Becky and Claudia the writers, my other writer friends and blog buddies, too many to mention, some nice horse people, my German girlfriend Tanja, the nice folks who own Blair’s store, Effie, Olivia, Dee-Dee my seamstress, George my farrier, the Johnsons—I could go on and on. But best of all my neighbors, Pearl and Eldon. They have been a bright spot in my life, teaching me how to garden, bringing me pies, bringing Kelly to Dairy Queen and choir, taking care of my animals when we had to go to New Jersey because my mother was sick—they’ve been the closest thing to family that I have here. I can’t even talk to them about moving because Pearl and I start crying. I’m really going to miss them.

But I am busting with excitement because I am going home. We sold this farm and we bought another one. You won’t believe how we did it all and what we are up against next. It is crazy with a capital C. And now that it looks like it’s all going through, knock wood, I’m going to catch you up.

My Mother's Sweaters

2010-12-20T23:32:00.003-05:00

I wear my mother’s sweaters. A nice, big, cable knit, olive green, from Land’s End. It’s the kind of sweater you wear when you’re eating soup or getting firewood. She never got wood. She thought this life on the farm was, “A hop in the ass.” Those are her words. She also said, “This is for the birds.” She shook her head and said, “You’ve really got to love this…” when she watched me going out to feed the horses, putting on the rubber boots, camouflage sweatpants and ski mask that makes me look like a burglar, twice a day. I took that as a compliment. She saw my passion.

I can’t wait to look in the mirror when I put on one of her sweaters. With a face like mine, that looks so much like hers, and then in one of her sweaters, I can trick myself. If I stare into my eyes in the mirror, and look really hard, she looks back. I get a fleeting glimpse.

Sometimes I think about dying my hair red to see how much I will look like her. She was a natural blonde like me but she dyed her hair red for so long that I don’t remember her as a blonde. I always used to joke around that I was going to do it to see what kind of trouble I could catch her in, when people mistook me for her. With a name like Cookie, and red hair, she was bound to be in trouble. But I never got around to it. Now I’d like to do it to see if I could channel her, like I do in the bathroom. But I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed when I find out it’s really not her.

When I was in the beauty parlor last week, they took my coat. It was my mother’s coat. I wanted to say, “Be careful with that coat! It’s my mother’s coat and she just died in April!” My father let me take whatever clothes of hers I wanted. I left my sister the Elk’s jacket even though I wanted it myself because it was all covered with her pins and buttons, a real piece of her. But Sharon is an Elk. That’s what they had together. I think about that jacket a lot but I’m proud of myself for giving it up. Especially since no one asked. No one would have even known, there were so many clothes and shoes and pocketbooks to sort through and I was all alone, taking what I wanted. That’s what my mother would have wanted. For me to be good. She could count on me for that.

I worry about what’s going to happen as things wear out. Should I conserve the sweaters and wear the coats only on special occasions? Some things that she gave me long before she died are already wearing out. Hand-me-down sweatpants and sweatshirts, flannel pajamas, things she knew I could always use on the farm because I’m hard on them or because they would keep me warm. The sweatshirts have dark cuffs from dirt that won’t come out, bleach splatters and paint stains, red like the barn and grey like the porch. The neckband on the sweatshirt from Wildwood is loose and hangs like a necklace. What happens when one of these is to the point of no return? Do I throw them away? How can I throw an item of my mother’s clothing in the garbage? I don’t care how messed up it is.

The silence in this house is loud when I think about the loss of her. You really notice it when you’re alone and you stop for a minute. The finality of it. I will never have another chance to tell her how I appreciate the hand-me-down pajamas with the pictures of the monkeys on them. I can’t believe it myself how much I didn’t appreciate these things enough when they were coming on a regular basis. How I took it for granted that they would always come, worn ones replaced with new ones, another kind she rustled up just because I mentioned liking the ones with elasticized ankles. She had a pair! “Here, see if these fit you,” she would say, coming out of her bedroom where she had been digging around.

I want to say to my daughters, “Appreciate me.” Not for my sake. For theirs. I want to warn them to pay attention, to slow down, to savor whatever I do to show them how much I love them. But they won’t listen. They can’t imagine. Just like I couldn’t imagine. I thought I knew what it was going to be like, losing my mother. I worried about it my whole life, in fact. Pictured screaming and crying. And I have screamed and cried. But I never imagined I would feel so powerless, that this would be so final, that I would never have another chance, no matter what I did, and all I can do to comfort myself is wear her sweaters and hope I feel a little bit better by the time they’re all worn out.

A New Low

2010-12-03T21:27:00.012-05:00

I’m a garbage picker. I get a big charge out of it when I find something good in the trash. In fact, I’m proud of it. Saving money and helping the environment at the same time by being creative and resourceful is fun. Especially in this economy and because of the mess the earth is in. But even I have to admit that I’ve sunk to a new low.

You can find all kinds of good things in the garbage. Some of my best finds have been an antique cookie jar,
a couple of metal motel chairs with original green paint,
and Jamie’s turquoise swivel-chair,
circa 1950 or so. That chair was a real coup. We found it at a garage sale. We wanted it bad but the sellers wouldn’t budge on the price. They were asking fifteen bucks for it. That was too much money for a single chair in an outdated color and style, no matter that we loved the color and style, at a garage sale.

On Monday evening, around midnight, we happened to be driving home down the road where the garage sale had been and lo and behold, what do we see sitting out on the curb waiting for the garbage pickup on Tuesday morning but the turquoise chair! I slammed on the brakes. Jamie ducked down. I made her get out and help me load it up. Had to drive all the way home with the hatch on the little Geo Storm flapping open but it was worth it. That chair looked great in her bedroom with the cool lime green walls and black carpet and is still going strong in her funky apartment twelve years later.

Here in Virginia, the garbage is a sitting duck because we don’t have garbage pickup—every few miles there is a collection of green Dumpsters for residents to dispose of their household trash and unwanted goods. These are often surrounded by a chain-link fence that is never locked, convenient for night-picking, and have identifying labels: Household Goods, Recyclables, and directions and warnings: No Commercial Dumping, No Brush, County Residents Only.

I’ve gotten some good stuff at the Dumpsters. A yellow coffee cup that matches my kitchen.

A vinyl webbed lawn chair for the poolside that adjusts to four different positions.
Plastic chairs for the horses. Well, not actually for the horses. More like for watching the horses. I keep one in my arena and one behind the barn and this way if you ever want to take a load off, just sit down. After a while they crack from being out in the elements all the time. But I don’t care because I got them for free. Last winter was hard on the plastic chairs. I had to throw one away. I kept my eyes out for a new one. It took me about a week before I found a replacement at the Dumpsters.

One time I picked up a vintage chrome breadbox.
As soon as I put it in the truck, another truck pulled in behind me. He was towing a flatbed trailer filled with junk. I couldn’t tell if he was a metal man, or he was looking for good stuff to sell on eBay or keep for himself, like I do. Either way, he would have liked the chrome breadbox. I tried to make eye contact with him because I wanted to gloat, “Na na, na, na, na, you just missed out on something good,” but he wouldn’t look my way. He strolled over to the other Dumpster and nonchalantly peeked inside, watching me out of the corner of his eye, waiting for me to go. He would have never imagined that he and I were on the same page, garbage pickers, me being in that diesel-taking dually blasting the Sirius radio. He probably thought I was one of the rich people from the lake and he wasn’t about to let me catch him digging in the trash.

It helps to live at lake where all the rich people have huge houses with round rooms and walls of glass jutting out over the water like crystals in a stone. The stuff they throw out… Sometimes you can upgrade. I finally admitted it was time to throw away my white wicker set that I kept on the front porch and that the cats favored as their own personal scratching post. I hated to get rid of it because that set looked perfect on my porch. But it was falling apart so, reluctantly, I loaded it up on the truck. A few minutes later I returned with almost the exact same set but in like-new condition, plus an extra piece for my bedroom that matches the grey-green in my Victorian carpet. It doesn’t make a lick of sense why someone would throw away something that was so good. The rich people.

They’re the ones that probably left the food. It was sitting right there in a perfectly fine Kroger bag, off to the side so someone would see it. I never like to show any interest when I see something someone doesn’t want anymore, but thinks is too good to throw away because someone else might want it, so they put it to the side. Don’t want to look like a low-life if there’s someone around who doesn’t abide by that kind of thing. You know, snooty people. Those ones who are too good for themselves. The same thing the metal man was afraid of. So I looked around. I was alone. I flung another bag into the Dumpster where it landed with a thud and casually walked over to the sack and peered inside. It was stuffed with boxes of cake mix. Poppy seed. German chocolate. Yellow. I stuck a hand inside and took a better look. They were all sealed. But what sealed the deal was when I saw the black walnuts. Two large bags of walnuts. I got excited. Walnuts are expensive.

I quickly pulled out a couple of boxes. Clean. There was a bulk-size box of Gummy Bears someone probably picked up at Sam’s Club and then found herself disappointed on Halloween when no trick-or-treaters came. There were also jars of spices with the cellophane wrappers still intact. I considered inspecting it all right then and there but thought better of it. Someone might catch me and I didn’t want to rush the job. We’re talking food here. So I picked up the whole bag and threw it in the back of the truck just in time. Someone pulled in. It was Effie in her old turquoise pickup truck.

“Hey girl,” she said, opening the gate to her truck and lifting a white plastic bag. “You git any a them tornadas last night?”

“There’s more tornados here than when I used to live in Oklahoma.”

“You musta brought ‘em with ya.”

“Either that or global warming,” I said. “The weather’s been crazy lately.”

“That there’s a conspiracy by the government,” she informed me. “They wanna put folks out of jobs is the reason they’re saying we’re having global warming.”

“Ah huh,” I said.

No use arguing. One thing I learned about country folks is they’re set in their ways. Plus Effie is as cute as a button. Crossing mean rednecks is one thing. Crossing a little old southern lady who drives an old turquoise pickup truck with a spirit catcher hanging from the rearview mirror is another. And good thing too because she invited me to the cake sale down at the church. I wouldn’t want to be excluded from that. In fact, I offered to contribute. Poppy seed, chocolate, yellow, whatever they wanted!

I helped Effie throw out the rest of her trash. Then I hurried home to go through my loot.

I opened up a couple of packages of cake mix and examined the plastic bags. Clean as a whistle. I put it all in the freezer—just in case I missed anything, a little time in the freezer would kill it.

When I made Kurt listen to this story as I was working on it like I always do (I like to read them out loud to him), he said, “So where is this free food you got at the Dumpster?”

I looked at him. “Uh… You’ve been eating it?”

I don’t know what’s lower. Getting food from the garbage or feeding it to people without their knowledge. It’s just not right! Not that I actually got the cake mix out of the garbage. But it was low nonetheless. The question is, why was it so much fun? And where should I put that breadbox?

A Cold Winter

2010-11-21T19:43:00.003-05:00

The only good thing about winter coming is, now that I’m fifty, time flies. I hope this one goes fast because they say it’s going to be another doozie. They know this because a lot of nuts are on the ground. I don’t mean nuts like that one from Delaware. Nut nuts. Acorns, hickory nuts (or as they say in the country, hicker nuts), walnuts, even pecans, are all over the place clogging gutters and getting stuck in the clefts in horses’ feet. (Not the walnuts. They are the size of small baseballs. They’ll dent a car though if you’re stupid enough to park under a walnut tree.)

I wouldn’t care if winter was going to be bad if I didn’t have to go out there. I don’t mind short dashes when we’re having a doozie, like going back and forth to my car, although in Jersey I’d been known to leave it running while I went into Fashion Bug to get some more clothes and jewelry and pocketbooks—whatever I needed to keep up with the other hot chickies up there. Of course I had to lock it in Jersey and so I had a second set of keys or else it could get stolen or someone could swipe all my CD’s like they did one time when CD’s were still cassettes. Nowadays I have Sirius Radio and so even the CD’s are going to become obsolete. The technology today... I’d really like to get one of those electronic things where you can start your car right from your warm spot at the kitchen table where you are just finishing up your coffee and getting ready to put your boots on. I don’t know if you can do that with the diesel-taking dually. I think Kurt said no.

Anyway, running out to a cold car is not the worse thing in the world. The worse thing in the world is the horses. That takes time. Feeding, watering (at least I don’t have to deal with frozen hoses and water barrels anymore since Kurt put in the hydrants and electric), standing in the same spot for hours holding horses for the farrier, cleaning stalls… It’s a nightmare! When I was a kid, we used to throw the frozen balls of manure at each other. It was a primitive game of laser tag. I also used to ride in the snow back then. I thought it was fun when the hairs in my nose felt like tiny shards of glass and I couldn’t feel my feet anymore.

Now, the wind is kicking up out there and the temperature dropped to fifty degrees. Fifty degrees is nothing but it feels like it’s thirty degrees because just a few days ago I was in a tank top. Now I’ve got the heat on! But I’ve got to ride that horse if I ever want to get him barrel racing again. I think I’ll just send Kelly out there. I’ll get her to lunge him for me. If she resists, I’ll lob at walnut at her. Or wait until winter and the manure freezes. She grew up with electronics. She won’t know what hit her.

Horse Stuff--The Rest of Them

2010-11-17T21:37:00.003-05:00

Okay, so real quick, right around the time my mother died I found myself with too many horses on my hands and I was overwhelmed. (Everything that happens is measured in time against its relation to my mother’s leukemia and death—before my mother got sick, right before she died, around the time she died, after she died, like B.D. and A.D., as if she were Jesus.)

So I leased Doc and Steel out to a therapeutic riding place called Unbridled Change. Doc, who is twenty-seven-years old, works one day a week for a couple of hours giving rides to children with special needs. He works another day a week with the kids on the ground. He looks even better than when I had him. His top-line filled out and he gained a little weight. Michelle, the owner of Unbridled Change, started feeding him three times a day; plus she has plenty of grass. And a little exercise probably helps. When we pulled into the driveway to visit him, he came cheerfully over to the fence nickering hello. He’s happy. I hope she is able to use him for a long time—at least through the winter—because I’m really enjoying the break. Whenever she feels he’s too old and needs to be retired completely, I’ll go and get him. He’ll be taken care of until he dies because that horse deserves it. He’s one of the good ones.

Steel, the little grulla, it turned out has a sore back. That is why he was crow-hopping when transitioning to the lope; not because he was being stubborn. I feel really bad that I was unaware of it and I made him lope. (Perhaps this is one of the reasons I’m getting Lowdown checked out even though there’s probably nothing wrong with him—I’m paranoid now.) But with these quiet ones it’s sometimes hard to tell because they tend to be lazy and stubborn and since they don’t speak English they can’t say it when they don’t want to do something because it hurts. I thought I ruled out pain when I Buted him up for a few days and he still acted exactly the same. There were no other symptoms. No lumps, bumps, swellings, or heat. Nothing. He had some issues transitioning to natural barefoot trimming but once his feet grew out, he was fine. When I consulted the vet about the crow-hopping, he thought, like with “the good old country pony” I had a few years ago, I was worrying over nothing. And the farrier didn’t seem to think it was anything physical either.

So I felt really bad when Michelle reported that Steel’s back was sore. There were a couple of vertebrae out in his spine and her chiropractor has been working on him and feels with a little rest, he’ll be fine. I hope so otherwise I am stuck feeding an unsound horse for another twenty years. He’s only six. I couldn’t sell him. I couldn’t euthanize a horse that’s not all broken-down lame or sick. I wouldn’t be able to ride him if he’s unsound. It’s bad enough when you’ve had a horse for a few years and had some good times on him and then he founders or something and you have to take care of this huge animal who eats you out of house and home and who you can’t do anything with. That’s bad enough. But when it happens to a horse that’s not part of what I call my “core herd”—I’ve only had him for a short period of time and the jury was out on whether or not he was a keeper—that’s really bad. But it’s still an animal with feelings and I’m responsible for him. So I hope everything turns out okay and she is able to use him for a long time too.

Minnie. There is nothing going on with Minnie. There never is. She’s just out there looking cute and waiting for grandkids.

Horse Stuff--Part Three-Lowdown

2010-11-13T23:02:00.004-05:00

Here’s the lowdown on Lowdown. I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. Lowdown. I named him that because of the Boz Skaggs song and because I thought it sounded cool. Lowdown. How lowww can you go? That’s how you say it. Lowww. Like Barry White growling in love songs low.

I wonder if there are any people around here who listen to Barry White who aren’t black? The only stations on the radio are country stations. That’s all fine and good. I can dig country, especially when I’m on my way to a barrel race. But that’s all you can get. Thank God I got the Sirius radio in the new truck and I’m tuned into Barry White again. Why just this morning I even heard the Fifth Dimension, Melissa Manchester, and Tony Orlando and Dawn. I suppose when I get out of the diesel-taking dually in my red-and-black checked jacket and camouflage sweatpants that the guys in the pickup trucks next to me think I’m one of them. Then they hear the radio. I don’t turn it down when I get out. I leave it blasting for all to hear. That’s got to throw them for a loop.

Okay, I’m done making an excuse to mention the new truck.

Lowdown. I’m afraid something’s up with him. First, I couldn’t transition him to natural, barefoot trimming like I do with all my horses. For months, he walked around like he was on broken glass. That surprised me because when I used to have him in Jersey, I pulled his shoes after every Showdeo season and then I’d go out and ride him the very next day and he never took an ouchy step. But here, I couldn’t get him to transition no matter what I did. Biotin, Easy Boots, Venice turpentine, conditioners, deep bedding—nothing worked. Finally I told the farrier to just put the shoes back on him.

Now granted, we had a couple of issues that I didn’t have in Jersey. His heels were contracted when I got him back and his angles were a little off. Also, it’s very hard and rocky here, whereas in Jersey it’s soft and sandy. However, I still didn’t expect that we wouldn’t be able to do it. I was even able to transition Doc, who had the worst feet in the world! But I couldn’t transition Lowdown. So we put the shoes back on and he walked a hundred percent better.

But that’s not the only thing. He looks funny to me when he lopes. He’s short strided and it’s kind of like he lugs his backend behind him. The people who had him these past seven years had done western pleasure with him so maybe that’s all it is—I’m not used to that slow western pleasure lope. To me, it looks crippled. I’m not sure if what I’m seeing is a western pleasure thing or he really is crippled. It’s nothing blatant. But I feel like something’s not right. I scrutinize him in the round pen and think I saw him take a funny step but maybe he didn’t take a funny step and maybe if he did take a funny step, maybe he stepped on a rock because even with the shoes back on (fronts only) he can still make contact with the rocks on the ground and the farrier did say his soles are thin. All this runs through my head.

Then I’ve got people sitting back and waiting, rubbing the hair on their chins waiting for me to reveal that Mr. Hart unloaded this horse on me because there’s something wrong with him. I know that’s silly. Mr. Hart knew I would take this horse back if he was three-legged lame and ready for the glue factory. I attached that promise right to his papers when I sold him the horse. I said, “If Lowdown ever needs a home, no matter what, if he’s old and broken-down lame, he always has a home with me.” I was thinking about the horror stories I’ve heard about famous horses who had been rescued at the sale and the rescuers couldn’t believe it when they pulled up a lip and discovered their skinny rescue who almost went to slaughter was related to a great horse like Secretariat. And those like Ferdinand, who actually ended up on somebody’s dinner plate in another country because he went from owner to owner to owner until finally no one knew who he was or what he had done, or cared, and he was slaughtered. There were many times I was sitting at the sale and I’d see what was obviously a fancy show horse in a previous life, or a wonderful kid’s pony and I wondered, how did he end up here? Do his old owners, who he had obviously served well, know what has become of him? I didn’t want that to happen to Lowdown someday. So I attached that note to his papers and I contacted Mr. Hart every time I moved to give them my new address so that they would always be able to reach me if he ever needed a home. That’s why Mr. Hart gave him to me. Because he knew I loved him that much. Not because he was trying to unload an unsound horse. But still. The skeptics keep putting thoughts in my head… Who gives away a beautiful ten thousand dollar horse to a stranger?!

Of course it’s possible, if there is anything wrong with Lowdown, Mr. Hart is unaware of it. After his daughter had lost interest the last few years, they leased him out to other kids in the stable and who knows what kind of shenanigans might have gone on? No one takes care of your horse like you do. Perhaps they didn’t condition him and they rode him too hard? Perhaps he was “off” and they were kids, they were too busy playing trick rider and event jumper and they didn’t notice so they kept riding him? It was a jumping stable. Jumping and western pleasure and dressage—all the things the rich kids do. It’s possible Lowdown has some wear-and-tear issues and Mr. Hart has no idea.

I want to find out. Does he have anything going on pain-wise or is he just being bad? He came back to me spoiled. He’s done a few things he hasn’t done since he was two-years-old. He’s done a few new things. He doesn’t like his forelock brushed. He’s cinchy. He’s nippy on the cross-ties. He won’t load. (Even though he’s been in this particular trailer a hundred times and never gave me a problem before.) And he’s bucked a couple of times. On top of that, I know nothing about this western pleasure training he’s got under his belt.

So before I push him to perform, I want to make sure it’s just him being spoiled or me not understanding what he’s been trained to do, and not pain. So I have the vet coming over next week. I told him to bring the X-ray machine. If there are any questions, I’m going to tell him to dig. I know they think I’m one of those crazy Yankees who keep horses in heated barns (I don’t know any Yankees who keep horses in heated barns) because when the receptionist asked me where he was lame, I said, “Well, he’s not actually lame.” Then she asked what actually the problem was and I had to admit I don’t even know if there is a problem. I just want to make sure. I know that threw them for a loop.

Horse Stuff--Part Two--Harley

2010-11-04T21:02:00.004-04:00

Harley is my favorite horse. Him and Lowdown. Okay, they’re all my favorite. But Harley is the one who I’ve been riding all these years and he’s my barrel horse. He’s also the one I feel sorry for and worry about. Kind of like the runt of the litter. Or the problem child. He is a little small. But he never gets into any trouble. He never resists me; never says no. But if he was in the wrong hands, he could get into trouble.

Harley used to be Kurt’s horse but Kurt hates him. Harley is afraid of men and Kurt is pretty manly—big hands, deep voice like Sam Elliott’s, rough. Don’t let him dye your hair. One time I tried to get him to touch up my roots because I kept overlapping and it was turning into a Brillo pad in the back. So I had the bright idea of getting him to do it for me because he’d be able to see better, standing behind me and all. I don’t know whether he did it on purpose because he hated doing it so much or he was just plain terrible at it, but he smushed the hair dye all over my head and it came out even worse than when I do it myself. One time I got him to cut my bangs. Let’s put it this way—you remember Nellie on Little House on the Prairie? Well, that’s what my hair looked like. Point being, he doesn’t have a girly bone in his body and is incapable of any skill normally associated with being female. Like doing hair. Or babying a horse. Therefore, even though he’s kind and gentle with animals and children, Harley was terrified of him and required major patience. Kurt didn’t have any and was unwilling to try to summon up some when he felt there was no call for it.

“I’m not doing anything to him!” he’d cry in his defense when Harley was bugging out over something.

“Talk baby talk to him,” I’d say.

“I’m not talking baby talk to him. I’m asking him very nicely.”

“You’re scaring him Kurt!”

This went on until the day we attended a team penning clinic and Harley was so nervous when we were chasing cows, when we got down to the end of the arena, Kurt went one way, Harley went the other, and Kurt fell off. Sam Elliott did not like that in front of all the other guys.

(Edited to add: Kurt is denying that he fell off that day. He says I’m lying to add color to the story.)

After he fell, he said he was leaving Harley there when we went home. They had a weekly horse auction at the place and Kurt was going to cut his losses—he was leaving that jackass for the sale. I was so mad I couldn’t get him to like this horse who I thought was perfectly fine, who I’d picked out, in fact. It was one thing after the other with them. I said, “Fine! Leave him then!”

Luckily he changed his mind at the last minute and loaded him up. But he was still going to sell him. At home, my girlfriend Monica noticed how Harley followed me around the corral like a puppy dog. She said, “He really likes you. Why don’t you ride him for thirty days and then put him up for sale?” Normally I don’t have time to ride two horses because you have to ride your horse every day if you’re barrel racing but the Showdeo season had just ended and I was done competing with Lowdown. If I started riding Harley, I could tune him up and fix whatever little issues he had. It would be better for selling. But it wasn’t the money I was thinking about. If he was well-behaved, he’d be less likely to fall into the wrong hands and end up going down the road, so to speak. That was my concern. That he have a good, permanent home. So I thought Monica had a great idea.

At first I was scared riding him. He was so fast and reactive. But I remember the moment I fell in love. It was when my neighbors came over to watch me with him in the round pen and I overheard Harry say, “Look at the way his ear is cocked back listening to her; look at the way he hangs on to her every word.” I looked down. He was right. Harley was glued to me.

That was eight years ago. I’ve been riding him and loving him ever since. Kurt still butts heads with him. Recently he came storming into the house and threw the halter on the table where it skidded into the sugar bowl. “You catch that bastard!” I knew who he meant. I didn’t even have to ask him. I went out there and called him. He came running over and slammed on the brakes right in front of me. Errrrrrr! I didn’t put a hand up or take a step back. He’d never run me over. If he could speak English, he would have said, “I’m here! I’m here! What do you want?! What can I do for you?! I love you so much!”

But that’s not the end of the story. Harley has headshaking syndrome. We discovered this a few years ago. Headshaking is a neurological disease that is incurable. They don’t know what it’s from. There’s lots of theories—over-vaccination, allergies, an injury, genetics. A headshaking horse jerks his head up and down like a bee just flew up his nose. Horses head-shake for different reasons. A lot of headshakers are photic. Harley is triggered by exercise. When he’s having episodes, he’s unrideable. It often gets worse and worse until a horse has to be euthanized.

The first time Harley did it, we were riding in the tall grass in Oklahoma and I thought bugs or seeds were popping up and tickling his nose. I was getting frustrated—com’on, com’on, cut it out. I urged him on. But it got so bad that he tried to wipe his nose with his foot while we were trotting and he fell down with me on top of him! Luckily he’s really athletic and he scrambled right back up before I even knew what happened. But right then and there I knew what it was. I remembered reading about something called headshaking syndrome many years ago when I was a kid and borrowed every single book in the library that had anything to do with horses. I read them cover to cover even if they were about riders in England who put things on their horses called rugs and cruppers; even if they were about Iranian horses and breeds from places like China, Russia, and Trinidad; even if I couldn’t understand them—I took all the horse books out. Some things stuck. I automatically knew Harley had headshaking syndrome.

I never thought I’d be able to ride him again. But this past spring I started him on Remission, which is mostly magnesium and has lysine and some other stuff in it. It’s one of the many things desperate owners of headshaking horses try. I don’t know whether the Remission worked or the headshaking gods were looking down on me or what, but I was able to ride Harley all summer and there was no headshaking. We even barrel raced a couple of times!

This is what happened at our first race. Harley and I were both scared out of our wits. It had been a long time since we competed and I didn’t feel ready. I wanted to scratch but Kurt got mad at me. He calls it tough love.

“Allllllright then… if you want me to get killed…” I said, hoping he’d say “Never mind, don’t do it.” But nooo. I thought, screw him. I’ll just jog Harley the whole way like it’s an exhibition. So what if I lose the thirty bucks entry fee? I was going to scratch anyway. But when they called my name and we headed down the alley and he saw the barrels, he wanted to go and it suddenly felt right and so I let him. Holy cow! We never went that fast or turned that tight! It was a 1D barrel if I ever saw one!

But then when we approached the second, I somehow lost both stirrups. Oh, I’ll tell you how that happened. That happened because I didn’t put my rubber bands on. Barrel racers put rubber bands around their feet and the stirrups because their feet are all over the place and it’s easy to lose a stirrup. The bands keep the stirrups with your feet. But if you fall off, it wouldn’t hang you up because it’s just a rubber band and it’ll break. I didn’t put mine on because, remember, I wasn’t going to run; I was only going to jog the pattern.

So I lost both stirrups and I almost fell off as we turned the second barrel. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we veered out into the middle of the arena and somehow I stayed on. Got back on track. But halfway to the third, he bucked (probably because I was so off-balance) and I almost fell off again. I saw the dirt going by awfully close to my face. I climbed back on by my chin. Then turning the third, somehow, by some miracle, my feet fell into both stirrups; I mean they literally just slipped right back in like someone held them out for me and said, “Here, right here.”

I was able to stay with him and race home, laughing with delight. It was a mess. It was one of those runs that people put on the YouTube videos with titles like “Barrel Racing Mishaps.” But I was thrilled because all I kept thinking about was that first barrel. The potential! All that potential!

And I didn’t fall off.

That’s the story about Harley. I recently stopped riding him because I started riding Lowdown. I was dying to see what was under the hood after not having him for seven years. That story is next.

Horse Stuff--Bullet

2010-10-28T21:07:00.004-04:00

Here’s an update on the horses:

We’ll start with Bullet first. Last you heard, the Bad Boy fell at the first barrel. When he scrambled up, Kelly’s foot got stuck in the stirrup and she got dragged. I immediately went out and got her the Breakaway Stirrups. If a rider falls and gets her foot caught, they come apart and the rider can get free. So now she’s in a helmet and the emergency stirrups. I was thinking about bubble wrap next. Actually, someone tried to sell me some kind of newfangled vest-thing, not unlike bubble wrap, that inflates when the rider inadvertently disengages from the saddle. He zeroed right in on me when he saw the worried look on my face as I gave Kelly directions at a show and how I hovered and wrung my hands. He looked from me, to her helmet, to the Breakaway Stirrups, and then back to me again. He knows who his target customer is and so he came right over and demonstrated, pulling the cord on the vest, throwing himself in the dirt, and rolling like he just jumped out of a helicopter and was trying not to get shot in enemy territory. The vest popped and blew up. But I didn’t buy it. It was time for Kelly’s class so we left him there in the dirt, struggling like a turtle trying to right itself.

Even though the vest didn’t make the Bad Boy blink an eye when it exploded right in front of him, sometimes he forgets he’s twelve-years-old and still acts like he’s a colt, nearly jumping out of his skin at the mere mention of a Walmart bag. Kelly is planning to take him to a cowboy competition. So she’s been sacking him out—trying to get him desensitized to things. I think I’ve got a good little trainer on my hands.

Last week we went to a gymkhana where Kelly hit a barrel in the barrels class and also in Texas barrels. Bullet is good for this. It’s because he does a rollback. Kelly’s got to work on that. But she got a fourth place in Speed barrels and won the poles! I think it’s because of me. I’m good luck. As soon as I got there, she started kicking butt. I missed her first three classes because I had to stay home to wait for someone who was coming to look at the farm. I knew they were looky-lous when their real estate agent called and asked if she could bring them over. (We’re selling the place ourselves like we always do but we are willing to give an agent a small commission if she brings us a buyer.) I’d asked if the buyers had horses. Their agent said no. I asked if they were planning to get horses and she stammered, “Uh, uh, no, I don’t think so…” Somebody did not do their homework… hence the reason we always sell ourselves.

So I knew this was probably not a serious buyer but someone out for a weekend drive wanting to go and see the farms and look at the pretty horsies. A large part of the value of this place is the fact that it’s a turnkey horse farm. If you don’t need the horse farm part, the barns, the riding arena, the round pen, all of that, you could get a better house on a half acre lot for the same money. So I knew. But you never know. When you’re selling by-owner, you have to be on call whenever a potential buyer wants to come. Therefore, I missed Kelly’s first three classes. But that’s okay. I made her a nervous wreck anyway. “Here, let me check those stirrups… Is that strap adjusted correctly? Did you tighten your girth?” And the mother of all mothers, “Go slow. I don’t like the footing here.”

“It’s a race Mama!”

Kurt—“Leave her alone.”

Hey, at least I didn’t make her get the exploding vest.

Next week an update on the others.

Bad Bugs and a Bug That Brings You Joy

2010-10-16T19:47:00.007-04:00

I've grown to hate bugs. In Jersey, it was only the cockroach I had to worry about. And the occasional mosquito bite. But here... I've got bees the size of a man's big toe; I've got spiders you remove with pooper scoopers (well, that was actually Oklahoma); I've got ladybug infestations and stinkbugs; wood bees that are drilling my barn down; moths that are running amok; mud daubers, chiggers, superhuman ticks and don’t get me started on the flies. Anywhere you see cows, there are flies. Big flies, little flies, in-between flies, flies that give you the middle finger…

One time there was a praying mantis on the top of Kurt’s head like a jaunty hat. He looked this way and that way (the mantis, not Kurt) and was kind of cute until you remembered praying mantises cannibalize their mates after sex. What was he doing on Kurt’s head?

Kelly found a beautiful dragonfly the other day. Neon green. He was as big as my pinky. He was injured, so she brought him in the house. I said, “Very nice but this ain’t a baby bunny we can try to nurse back to health. It’s a bug!” and I made her take him back outside again. The next day when I was sweeping the front porch, I found his carcass behind the geraniums. I felt guilty. When the bugs are so big you feel bad about their deaths, it’s a problem.

I still kill them though. In Jersey, I’d scoop them up in a napkin and carry them outside where I set them free. Except the cockroaches. Here, I’ve learned that as soon as I see two of something right in a row, I’m in for an infestation. It is going to be holy hell. There is nothing cute about thousands of ladybugs crawling up the walls and across the ceiling and dropping into the mayonnaise when you’re trying to make a sandwich. This is what happened when we lived in the Amityville Horror House. Not here thank God. Here I’ve got what’s considered normal bugs for the area. Which is bad enough. A few dozen of this, a couple of that. Just enough to annoy me, sting me now and then, and make me scratch.

I like some of the bugs. Lightning bugs. Cicadas. When they make that clicking noise, it reminds me of a hot summer day. Crickets. They’re good luck. And butterflies. Butterflies remind me of my mother. She loved butterflies. She had butterfly decorations in her house and a sweatshirt with a butterfly appliqué on it. She even had a tattoo of a butterfly on her ankle. I don’t even have any tattoos and she had one. I was very proud of her for that.

The morning of her funeral, everyone was waiting in their cars to proceed to the cemetery. The funeral home guys were going back and forth carrying all the flowers out to the hearse, and the family, Kurt and I, my dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, were standing outside the door watching them, smoking cigarettes and crying. The limos were waiting for us to get in, the doors opened.

All of a sudden a big yellow butterfly flew out of the funeral home door and fluttered in and out of us. It flew all around. We all started screaming. “Look! Look! It’s Mommy!” Then it flew up, up, up over the roof and disappeared into the sky. We all watched it go.

This was in April. It was cold up in Jersey. Butterflies weren’t even out yet. And butterflies don’t live inside funeral homes. It was a sign from my mother telling us it was okay, she was still with us, maybe not in the way we were used to, but she was here. And we really needed that. None of us is religious. Some of us don’t even believe in God. How do you get comfort if you can’t tell yourself, “She is in Heaven now?” I’ve come to realize that’s one reason why religion is good. Comfort. Or else you need a good, old fashioned butterfly.

A Perfect Sunday

2010-10-12T20:38:00.003-04:00

Yesterday Pearl dragged me down to the local church (local meaning pick one on any corner), where the church ladies stuffed me with fried chicken, ham, meatloaf, biscuits, macaroni-and-cheese, scalloped potatoes, corn casserole, green beans (from Effie’s garden), banana pudding, pecan pie, something with marshmallows—you know, all the typical southern fare—and the preacher’s son and Kelly looked at each other. Then I went home and went to sleep. It was a perfect Sunday.

Moving Back to Jersey

2010-10-03T21:33:00.001-04:00

Pearl brought me over a chocolate cream pie the other day. Pearl’s pies are completely homemade, including the crust she rolls out with, I imagine, a rolling pin. You see them on TV, the rolling pins—animals clonk each other on the heads with them in cartoons and women in aprons on black-and-white sitcoms wave them. You will also see them in antique shops. For a while there, rolling pins were all the rage, especially the ones with the colored handles—Depression-green or black like my own, or red. There were also marble rolling pins and glass rolling pins which, as you can imagine, were hard to find, glass being very breakable. Especially if you’re going to clonk someone on the head.

But I know Pearl’s got one that she actually uses to make that homemade pie crust of hers. Unless I’m getting it mixed up and the rolling pin is for making bread. I don’t know because a homemade pie in my house growing up meant my mother put a Mrs. Smith’s in the oven. Normally we’d go to the bakery. There was one on every corner. Normandy. Catanio’s. Westside Italian Bakery. And even though there were no pies better than one from the bakery, on special occasions, we got the Mrs. Smith’s because you had to turn the oven on.

I, myself, thought I was making homemade pies until I got down here and started getting Pearl’s. I actually mix things up to put into the pie crust. A can of pumpkin. Or cherries. When I got brave, I cut up apples or even stirred pecans into a mixture of melted butter, corn syrup and sugar. Now tell me that’s not homemade. But my crusts came out of a plastic package I picked up in the freezer case. And my rolling pins with the green handle and the black handle stayed on top of the kitchen cabinet strategically displayed in a wire egg basket as if I actually used these things and they weren’t just decoration.

Kurt always rates Pearl’s pies. “Good.” “Yummy.” “She outdid herself.” He said this one was exceptional. When I called her up to thank her, because you’re supposed to say thank you again after you actually eat it, not just when you get it, I told her she outdid herself. But I was suspicious.

“You’re trying to get us to stay, aren’t you?” I asked.

“You’re onto me Debi,” she laughed.

Then she said something that, perhaps if I would have known sooner, I might not have decided to go back. She said, “I thought that you and Kurt were going to stay forever and you’d take care of me and Eldon in our old age.” Like her heart was broken. I had no idea they liked us that much.

I didn’t want to tell her I was thinking the same thing. I’m motherless now. But even before that, we’re down here all alone, with no family, and Pearl and Eldon have no kids. I always had the idea of adopting them. Pearl and Eldon. Not kids. Though I wouldn’t be against adopting a child. Actually, I often think about taking in a foster child. But that’s another story. Pearl and Eldon—we have a lot in common. Eldon’s a horseman. Pearl’s a clean freak just like me and worries about everything just like I do. And then there’s those pies…

But the homesickness already set in like pitting on a brass fixture or mold on the underside of a stirrup leather. There is no stopping it. Now that I’ve made the decision, I’m like a dog who gets loose at the airport and trots all the way home, determined, obsessed, a thousand miles back to his old backyard where there’s a bone buried next to the porch and other dogs who jump up and down and practically break their necks on the ends of their leashes when they see him.

So I’m going home. That’s right. We’re selling the farm. It’s been 7 years since we left New Jersey and Kurt says we’re done playing around. We tried it, we had fun, we learned a few things (though I still can’t make a pie crust) but when I lost my mother, I really started thinking about things. What if my father gets sick? Maybe even more importantly, do I want to lose sharing whatever years he has left too? And maybe I want to get close to my sister. Maybe all of a sudden I think she’s pretty cool.

And what about Jamie? That was nagging at me anyway. What happens when she gets married? How will I go dress shopping with her? What about when she has a baby? Who will babysit? How can I get close to this kid like my mother was close to Jamie when she was little and my nana was close to me? I have memories of things just as important as knowing my nana loved me, memories of sitting with her on the front porch in the rocking chairs drinking cans of Shop-Rite soda—cream, root beer, grape, orange—on a hot summer day; and at the end of winter, standing on her tip-toes looking out the kitchen window over the sink and exclaiming to my grandfather, “Harry! Look! My crocuses are coming up!” I remember watching her dance in her hula skirt while Pop-Pop played the banjo and taking my hand, “Com’on Debi!”; trying to teach me how to crochet; studying her dream book to find out what numbers she should play and showing me her system—basically, take a guess. All of that is just as important as knowing someone loves you. It is feeling it. It is living it. You can’t have that unless you are sitting in the rocking chairs together.

Not only did I start riding shopping carts after my mother died, but I learned I didn’t really appreciate the people in my life like I should have. It is stunningly gorgeous here. I always say it’s so pretty it looks fake. But I can’t enjoy it if I’m mooning over my family. If only I could have my mother again, I would live in a roach-infested tenement with views of the brick building next door and a naked light bulb in a chicken-wire cage.

It doesn’t have to come to that. We’re going to have a farm again. But I want to go home.

My Big Truck That Takes Diesel

2010-09-15T15:04:00.003-04:00

I get a lot of attention in the new truck. People appreciate trucks around here. Especially big ones. They really love big ones with double wheels in the back (Kurt keeps calling it a dually) that take diesel. That’s truck gas. You see that on Ice Road Truckers—the big rigs getting diesel.

I’m like that girl on Ice Road Truckers. If she can drive one of those big rigs, I can drive our dually. It’s not easy though. You have to watch those double wheels every minute. I never know where to watch! In the big mirror, or the little mirrors that are attached to the big mirrors, or the rearview mirror, or the TV screen thing that comes on when you’re backing up. Usually I like to turn around and see for myself because you can’t trust new technology. Sometimes the thing starts beeping and you’ve got plenty of room! The truck is more nervous than I am. That’s pretty bad.

I like to put on my sunglasses when I drive it because then I look really cool. Long blonde hair and sunglasses driving a dually that takes diesel. Even though I can’t see very well with the sunglasses on. Sometimes I need my trifocals. There are plenty of places to put things in that truck so I put the trifocals in one of the little cup holders in the middle and when I need to change the channel on the Sirius radio, I take the sunglasses off, put them in another cup holder, and switch to the trifocals. After I find what I’m looking for, I put the sunglasses back on.

I love that Sirius radio! I think I could quit smoking using it if I stayed out in that truck all the time because every song is good and I sing at the top of my lungs. I sing till I’m blue in the face. Which doesn’t take very long because of the smoking. But I rebound real quick. Half a song and I’m going again. I can’t help myself. There are so many good songs on. I keep going back and forth between 6 on Sixties, 7 on Seventies, and Soul Train—Motown! Glorious Motown! I haven’t heard good stuff like Sly and the Family Stone and Marvin Gaye since I left New Jersey!

I feel like hot stuff when I’m passing guys working on the side of the road. I might give my hair a little flip but I do not put on the trifocals. They stop and lean on their shovels and nod their heads like they can hear Sly too. I act like it’s no big deal—me driving this big truck that takes diesel.

Parking it is another story. I don’t know what I’m going to do when we go back to Jersey where there are no parking spots. Here, I park way out on the other end of the parking lot when I’m going to Walmart and even so, I am always partly in the spot next to me. I act like I do it on purpose. Like I was trying to take up two spots. It is a brand new truck. There’s metallic flake in the black paint. It looks like little specks of 14 carat gold for God’s sake! There’s a new BMW that I suspect belongs to the eyeglass guy in Walmart that is parked way out no-man’s land too. I don’t blame him. Who wants to get sideswiped by someone’s old beat up farm truck or have the door of someone’s mini van that has a sticker of a soccer ball in the back window inadvertently hit your BMW or your truck that takes the diesel?

Yesterday when I came out of Walmart, I saw a scratch on the wheel well. I started pushing the cart faster. What?! A scratch?! How did that get there?! I hurried up the little hill, huffing and puffing because whoever designed this Walmart did it backwards. The store is downhill and the parking lot is uphill. It doesn’t make sense. When your cart is empty, you’re going downhill, but when it’s full, you’re going uphill. So when I arrive, I give the empty cart a push and hop on and if I don’t hit a stone to throw me off course I can make it all the way down to the entrance. Weeeee! I used to do this only when Kelly was with me so whoever was looking would think I was just being a good mommy and playing around with the kid. But the last couple of times I was there I got brave and did it by myself. If there is anything I learned after losing my mother it’s that you better treat every day like it could be your last. And if that means a grown woman is going to ride around the Walmart parking lot on a shopping cart, so be it.

At any rate, leaving the store with a full cart is another story. It’s bad enough if you only needed a few things but if you came to get dog food and litter and cases of Mountain Dew, all the heavy stuff, it’s literally an uphill battle. But when I saw that scratch on my dually diesel, I was like one of those old ladies who lifts a car off a person who got run over—I suddenly had super human strength and I ran up that hill with the overloaded cart and held it with one hand while I bent down and inspected the damage.

But it was nothing. Just a little dirt. I licked my finger and wiped it off. Someone said, “Nice truck.” I stood up and looked around. It was the landscapers doing those little islands in the parking lot. They had big trucks too. One of them even had the double wheels. But no gold-flecked paint and I’m not sure about the Sirius radio. I put on my sunglasses the minute I got in and pretended like I could see when I waved goodbye.

Getting Dragged at a Barrel Race

2010-08-23T21:38:00.004-04:00

Kelly got dragged at our first barrel race. It was my biggest fear—falling and getting caught up in the stirrup and being dragged. I was on the bleachers inside the indoor arena when it happened. I can’t stay with her by the gate. I’m a nervous mommy. I’m going to make the kid a nervous wreck:

“Okay, let’s review. What do you do if a horse bucks?”

She recites what I told her to do in a bored tone.

“What do you do if a horse rears?” (I think by saying “a horse” and not using Bullet’s actual name, I won’t put it into her head that this could potentially happen but I want her to know what to do if it does.)

More monotone repeating.

“What do you do if a horse bolts?”

She rolls her eyes.

“Stop rolling your eyes! These are emergency procedures that every rider should know!”

I continue. “Now shut up. What if you fall and your foot gets caught in the stirrup and he drags you?”

Once she gives me the proper answers, I slap said horse (Bullet) on the rump and say, “Okay then! You’re good to go!”

Doesn’t mean I stop worrying. One time we were at a race and I confided in the mother sitting next to me that I was nervous. She leaned over conspiratorially and asked, “Would you like a tranquilizer?” I was flabbergasted. Truth be told, nowadays I have gotten worse and I’d probably take one. Either that or some good old fashioned pot if I smoked it.

That’s why Kurt was out in the warm-up area with her. Let him do the dirty work. He thinks I’m overboard anyway. I felt my blood get hot like I was getting ready to run. When they called her name, I stood up and turned on the camera. The thing I was worrying about was Bullet acting up at the gate. He has a history of that with me. Trying to whirl around. Getting a little light on the front end. But he hasn’t done it with Kelly. They’re a good team. He knows she’s his herd leader and he has confidence in her. Me, he knows I’m scared. As in I’m 50-years-old now and I haven’t ridden regularly for a long time so I’m very weak and all I keep thinking is, if my horse throws out a little buck or jumps sideways, I’m a goner. Therefore Bullet has no confidence in me and when I try to calm him down, he says no way.

He entered the gate with no problem. Whew. They raced to the first barrel and I thought, “This is good.” He went a little past it but she stopped him and turned. All of a sudden, he disappeared from the camera lens. It looked like he’d dropped right into a hole. Boom! Gone! I looked up. He’d fallen down! Right on Kelly’s leg! When he scrambled back up, her foot was caught in the stirrup and he dragged her! I ran down the bleachers and hopped over the vinyl fence or through it, I don’t know. Kurt said I broke the fence. All you see on the video are big halogen lights on the ceiling jerking around and dirt flying by. And me crying, “Oh! Oh!” That’s when he was dragging her. She bounced like a rag doll being pulled in the dirt by a little girl with a thumb in her mouth.

Luckily, after a few strides, she somehow fell free. I think I was kneeling in the dirt helping her up and saying, “Are you okay? You’re okay! Are you okay?” before Bullet, the racehorse, even reached Kurt at the gate. That’s how fast I ran. Kelly jumped up and the audience applauded. She wasn’t hurt; just shook up. She was bawling out of shock but she was okay. Bullet was also okay. We walked back to the trailer, giggling now, giddy with relief, reviewing what happened.

“Did he trip? Was he on the right lead?” And “Did you turn over on your belly like I told you to?”

“No.”

“Kelly! What about the emergency maneuvers?!”

I brushed the dirt off her back and she readjusted her helmet. Then she wanted to get on. I didn’t know if she was going to be scared to get back on him or not but she didn’t blink an eye. In fact, she was mad she couldn’t make another run. And she was a little high. I think she felt proud that she escaped unscathed and was enjoying the attention from everyone asking if she was okay, kind of like a war hero back from battle.

My father, when I told him the story that night, threatened me with my life. Said if anything ever happened to Kelly he was going to kill me and berated me for getting her involved in such a dangerous sport. I said, “Where were you when I was a kid?” He said, “Horses were slower back then…” I suspect he had tranquilizers.

Candy Panties and Pies

2010-06-13T22:41:00.002-04:00

Pearl brought me a strawberry pie the other day. I think she wants to comfort me. Right after I got home from Jersey, she brought me a chocolate-cream pie. And now the strawberry. I don’t know if she’d still like me so much if she knew what I was listening to in the truck. Donna Summer. Kelly hates it. She said, “Mama, can’t we put something else on?”

I think I raised a little prude. I don’t know how that happened considering I have a rather saucy background. For one thing I used to make a living by selling lingerie and adult toys at “F-a-ware parties.” Sorry, I know it’s silly to block that word since we all know what I’m talking about but I don’t want to offend the church ladies. A little curse here and there is one thing. The F word is quite another. I don’t want them to think I’m trashy. It’s bad enough I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with the word “ain’t.” Or “gonna.” And I smoke. Of course this is the south where you’re likely to hear things in the Minute Market like, “Ain’t you gonna put any a them fancy Marlboro Special Blend cigarettes on sale anymore Brenda Jean?”

“I told you Frank, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. That’s on the tobacca company.”

Still, I don’t need to be saying F too. Well, unless I’m really mad. Like say if the horse stepped on my foot and I was wearing flip-flops because I didn’t feel like changing into my boots when I went out to feed. Or Brenda Jean forgot to put my Snickers in the bag.

Anyway, the poor older daughter endured more than most embarrassed pre-teens during the lingerie-selling period in my life when I was a single mother who also cleaned houses, tended bar, and sold Barcaloungers and curio cabinets to pay the rent. First, Jamie had to share a bedroom. Not with a sibling. That’s bad enough. I didn’t have any other kids at the time. No. She shared a room with me. Her mother. But it was even worse than that. She also shared it with my stock. Industrial-style steel shelves lined the wall on one side of the room to the other, across from the My Little Ponies and Rainbow Brites, and depending upon whether you were raised Catholic or not, it housed either medical necessities or X-rated novelties.

Either way, these items flew off the shelf. Literally. Especially to bored housewives. There were edible panties (in three different flavors), the Santa and the Bear Vibrator, Ben Wah Balls, penis erasers and the ever popular Joy Jell. I figured with all this stuff around, the kid was going to turn out to be either the biggest slut going or become a nun, one or the other. Turns out she turned out pretty normal. I don’t believe she ever slept around but I think she likes sex.

The little one, on the other hand, has swung in the direction of the nuns. This morning she was mad at me. She claimed she heard Kurt and I having sex. That was impossible since we didn’t make a peep and I told her so.

“Well, I heard your door shut,” she said.

“So?”

“And there was whispering.”

“You know, maybe we closed the door because we didn’t want you to hear.”

She rolled her eyes.

The toaster oven dinged.

“You know,” I continued, “maybe you ought to be glad your mother and father still love each other so much.”

Jeez, it’s not like she has to worry about finding a pair of strawberry-flavored panties under the couch or something! Strawberry pie crumbs, maybe. But no edible underwear.

Lucidity

2010-05-14T20:46:00.002-04:00

The one who asks, will always receive; the one who is searching will always find, and the door is opened to the person who knocks.—Luke 11:10

Alright, alright, I can see I have to get this show on the road and tell you what happened.

Mr. Hart gave me the horse. That’s right. Gave him to me. For nothing. A ten thousand dollar horse. Who does that? Yeah, people give horses away. I have given horses away. But it’s usually because they have a problem or the owner has a problem. Not for no reason. Old horses. Rescue horses. Rogue horses. Not valuable horses who would incite a bidding war if put up for auction. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like God was giving me this horse because of everything I’d been through and now this, the worst of all, with my mother. Not that any horse could take the place of my mother. I would go out there and shoot them all in the heads myself if it would bring my mother back for just one hour.

But the joy I felt… How can you feel such joy and sadness at the same time? The joy doesn’t take the sadness away, but it lessens the load a little. It gives you a rest from the sadness. And not just because I got the horse and could have fun with him. Yes, there is great joy in that. But also because someone, some stranger, could be this kind. The idea of it! How could a stranger be this kind? Every time I thought about what this man was doing for me, my heart welled up.

The timing couldn’t have been better. When Mr. Hart told me to come and get the horse, I happened to be planning to go and visit my mother but was considering postponing it because I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to drive that far by myself. No biggie. I’d been back and forth to Jersey a number of times since she got sick. I could wait another week or two to go up there. But I was afraid Mr. Hart was going to change his mind and not give me the horse. People at the stable, his friends, people who knew Lowdown, were up-in-arms that he refused to sell him to them and I was scared they would work on him and get him to change his mind before I got there. So I went right away, driving ten hours by myself pulling the horse trailer, sick as a dog, with irritable bladder and an inability to back up and therefore terrible anxiety about getting myself into a predicament where I would need to. It wasn’t pretty.

Oh! If I would have waited one more week to go up there it would have been too late! All these years trying to find the horse, crying over him, and his owner tells me to come and get him during the last week my mother had any lucidity. If I would have waited one week longer, just one week, she would have never known I was there. But she knew. I stared into the bluest, saddest eyes I had ever seen, took her beautiful face in my hands and she said my name.

“Debi, Debi, I love you so much.”

“I love you too Ma. I’m here.”

I sang to her. I sang a song she used to sing to my daughters. “You Are My Sunshine.” I sang it softly and didn’t care if the nurses could hear and didn’t know if she could hear, even though her eyes were open. She was in such agony… When I stopped, there was silence. And then she said, amazed, “You hear that?” Like she couldn’t believe it. Like it was an apparition.

And she cried to me. Oh, the suffering! If only we knew what she was going to go through… It is barbaric. It is unbearable when I think about it. You know what, I can’t even talk about it now. I am too sad. I often have to distract myself or else I can’t take it.

So let me get on to something good.

I was surprised when Mr. Hart didn’t ask me to sign anything when I took the horse. No contract to return him if I didn’t want him anymore, no agreement to keep him forever, no promise to send money if I ever hit the lottery. Nothing. Nada. He gave him to me free and clear. I didn’t expect to get the registration papers. But he gave me those too. I recognized Lowdown’s baby picture stapled to the top of the document a little dog-eared around the corners now but just as cute as ever. I figured, well, he won’t include the transfer report. If he includes the transfer report, I can reregister Lowdown in my name and if I was a bad person, I could turn right around and sell him.

When I got home and was going through all the paperwork, I saw that I was right. No transfer report. But that was because I didn’t need one. The registration papers were still in my name! There it was—Owner: Debra Van Cleave! Mr. Hart never changed him over! All these years he was still mine in my heart—I had no idea he was still mine on the papers too.

What amazes me is that Mr. Hart completely trusts me. He doesn’t even know me and yet somehow he can tell what kind of person I am. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because when I sold him Lowdown seven years ago, I attached a note to his papers saying that if he was ever three-legged lame or old and broken-down and unwanted, please don’t send him to the sale—he would always have a home with me. Maybe it is because I tried to keep in touch with them from the beginning. Or maybe God whispered in his ear. I don’t know.

What I do know is when I look at that horse out there now, I think of my mother. And I feel good.

It has become clear.

A Gift from God

2010-05-08T16:46:00.004-04:00

Here’s the thing. A few weeks after we bought Steel, just long enough to get attached to him, I got an e-mail. (The time it takes me to get attached has shrunk proportionately in relation to how aware I’ve become to all the abuse and neglect in the horse world.)

The e-mail was from Lowdown’s owner!—the palomino Paint I’d been crying over!

When I’d tried to find Lowdown a couple of months earlier, I called the person, the broker, whose name was on the old advertisement we’d dug up on him. It was probably a disconnected number by now. At the least, he’d be long sold. But maybe she knew where he was. It was worth a try.

A woman picked up. It was her. She told me that Mr. Hart didn’t sell Lowdown after all and he was still being boarded at the same place I’d left him seven years ago! I cried to her as well. She was a little cold. She didn’t say, “There, there now.” I sniffed and asked her to tell Mr. Hart I was trying to reach him. But he never called. I figured he didn’t care. Or she didn’t give him the message. Just in case, because you never know, I tried one more thing. I sent a letter by regular mail in care of the stable. I figured if it came by the U.S. Postal Service, they’d have to deliver it to him or break the law. But I still didn’t hear anything. So I resigned myself to the fact that Lowdown was lost to me. Then I went out and got Steel and tried to put it out of my mind.

Now there was an e-mail from Mr. Hart. I was shocked. I was scared to open it. I said, “Kurt, I’m not opening it…”

Many scenarios swirled through my mind. OhmyGod, was Lowdown okay? OhmyGod, was it possible he was for sale? And maybe even more importantly, was it possible that I could afford to buy him if he was? He’d have to be missing a leg or at least an eye for that to happen. I sold him for more money than I could ever imagine paying for a horse. That was one of the reasons that, when we had to sell one horse back then because we had no room, I choose Lowdown. Even though he was my own personal riding horse, I knew I could get the most money for him and truth be told, we could really use it. Plus, he was the only one without any issues and so would least likely be at risk. Harley could easily fall into the wrong hands. One false move and he’d have a heart attack and jump sideways ten-feet, perhaps buck or even fall down in sheer terror if his rider’s voice was any deeper than, say, a fifteen-year-old boy’s who had just begun to shave.

Anyone could do anything with Lowdown. He was born old. As a two-year-old, (a two-year-old!) he actually helped me get my confidence back after I had the bucker. I rode him all over the place—we went trail riding in the back of Great Adventure’s safari park where the lions and bears were caged and he practically waved as we moseyed by. We went team-penning every Friday night. We learned how to barrel race together. We were in parades, strategically placed right in front of the fire engines because of someone’s sick idea of a joke but Lowdown couldn’t care less. All the other riders on unruly, nervous horses were incredulous—“How old did you say he was?” The chances of someone messing him up and creating a problem horse who would switch hands many times on his way to the sale (i.e., slaughter) were pretty slim.

And so he was the one to go and I regretted it every day for the last seven years.

Was it possible I could get him back? Now I was in Virginia and had acreage. And though I was on what I call “full-horse-overload” with the stupid retired horses, and the new horse Steel, I didn’t care. Additionally, don’t forget, we got laid off last year with no warning and had to scramble to start our own flooring company— www.ShopAtHomeFloors.net. Considering the economy, we’ve been doing great. But it hasn’t been easy. Then, with my mother being sick, we‘d been going back and forth to Jersey every time you turned around, and every time we did, it was a big project, and expensive, because someone had to take care of all the animals. The last thing I needed was two new horses in the mix. But if there was any way I could get Lowdown back, I would. My heart was beating hard in my chest when I opened the e-mail.

Mr. Hart told me he was thrilled when he got my letter and thought it was a gift from God. He actually said that. He had been worrying about what to do with Lowdown because his daughter had lost interest some years ago but Mr. Hart loved him as much as I did and didn’t want to just sell him to anyone. Though people offered him even more than what he paid for him, including a friend of his, he didn’t feel their reasons for wanting him were good enough. He said he was so happy to find out that I was still interested in him. He asked me to call him.

I started jumping up and down. “Kurt! Kurt! I might be able to get him!”

But how? This was crazy! I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

Kurt said, “Don’t worry; we’ll get him somehow.”

This is one reason I love this man.

You may want to sit down for this. I sold Lowdown for ten thousand dollars. I’m sorry but I think that’s an insane amount of money, certainly way out of my price range. Unless he had something physical going on now, Mr. Hart would probably want at least what he paid. Though Lowdown was older now, he was surely even better than when I sold him. He had been in training with an Olympic trainer and doing some jumping. They did English equitation with him and western pleasure. At this point, he had pretty much done it all. What I didn’t do, they did. So he was not only gorgeous, but he had a variety of disciplines under his belt. The perfect all-around horse.

I e-mailed back and assured Mr. Hart that, yes, I was definitely interested! But I warned him that the money situation was “modest,” for lack of a better word. I fantasized that maybe he’d have mercy on me and let me have him for five grand and even though that was also a lot of money in our world, we would manage somehow. Kurt said we’ll charge it. Or we could make payments. Maybe, if I started playing real quick, I could hit the lottery or at least sell one of the children. They’re awful cute. And the little one is quite neat. The big one is messy but she can cook like no tomorrow.

Anyway, Mr. Hart e-mailed me back. “Call me,” he said. “Money is not an issue.”

That is when I felt God on my shoulder...

A New Horse Didn't Help

2010-04-30T22:14:00.001-04:00

My mother has passed away since writing this but I’m posting it so you can catch up. Lots of strange things have been happening and though I’ve never been very religious, and this might be pulling at straws, I feel that something mysterious has been at work here. I call it God on one shoulder and my mother on the other.

There are two things going on in my life right now that are so completely unlike each other, so yin and yang, so dark and light, so heaven and hell, that I think I’m going to hit the lottery. Or be in an earthquake. Something’s going to happen. One is so sad, I can hardly take it. That is my mother. The other one has to do with a horse.

In the midst of what I shall refer to as my own great depression, which has since dissipated in response to my cigarette smoking (sad but true), I bought a horse.
The reason why I did it was two-fold. First, we needed one. Who doesn’t? No, we really did need one. Since retiring the old guy, Doc, Kelly swiped Kurt’s horse like most children swipe a cookie. The brainwashing, which I have inflicted upon her since birth (Look at the horsey! The horsey’s nice…) took. My horse, Harley, has headshaking syndrome and is retired for all intents and purposes. Basically, he’s shot. And Minnie, who looks like a My Little Pony come to life, is a little too small for either Kurt or me, about as high as the top of my thigh where I was thinking of getting Kurt’s name tattooed in pretty black script. Maybe in another language just to be trendy. Not Chinese though—that’s getting old. (He thinks it’s hot. Tattoos. Not foreign languages. I don’t. He does. But it’s the least I can do for him since he’s been building me barns and run-in sheds practically non-stop since we first laid eyes on each eighteen years ago in the Halfway Bar.)

So we actually needed two horses. One for Kurt and one for me. And since sooner rather than later is the best time in my book to get anything equine, I jumped right on the idea of rewarding myself for not smoking. That was the second reason. I thought it would help me stay off the cigarettes. Even though reward didn’t work as a motivating factor to keep me off them when I bought the horse trailer.

But an excuse is an excuse. If it works, I go with it. Therefore we went to the Great American Trail Horse Sale where I found exactly what I wanted: a young, small, green-broke Quarter Horse gelding with color. The fact that this guy has tons of racing blood was icing on the cake. I never imagined I’d find a Quarter Horse with running blood at the trail horse sale, or my favorite color, grulla, but there you have it.

However, it didn’t cheer me up. I tried to talk myself into being happy, told myself I should go out there and ride him so we’d be ready to run barrels in the summer, but something always came up. I can’t ride today; it’s too windy. I can’t ride now; I have to bake a cake. Truth be told, I could care less. I had a new horse out there, a beautiful horse, and I might as well have had a suitcase in the yard, that’s how much motivation I had to go and do something with him. Which made me feel even worse.

In addition to my malaise, I worried that I made a mistake and he was a little too small. I like a small horse. That’s what I was looking for—a small horse. But once I got him home, this one looked really small. Almost pony size. Which normally would not be a problem. Some of my favorite mounts were large ponies, 14 hands or so. Great to just hop on and tool around the property. But I needed a barrel horse. In barrel racing, as in Thoroughbred racing, every pound counts. We consider the weight of the saddle, and the stirrups; even the weight of the shoes. I knew he’d be fine for regular riding, but how fast was he going to be able to go hauling my fat ass around the barrels? It would definitely be a handicap.

Then I had an idea. The new one, who we named Steel, could be Kelly’s horse. Kelly is sixty pounds lighter than me so they’d be a better fit. Kurt could repossess his horse from the kid, and the second new one we got would be mine. But not now. I wasn’t ready for the additional expense and work of two new horses at once. Plus, I just wasn’t into it. I was too worried about my mother. So I’d keep riding Steel, make sure he was solid for Kelly, and if all went well, we’d make the switch in the summer and buy another one for me then.

But, as my mother always says, God works in mysterious ways…

Frances (Cookie) Kelly

2010-04-28T22:15:00.003-04:00

My father Bob Kelly, mother Cookie Kelly, and family friend Johnny See

I lost my mother on April 19. I thought I knew what sad was. Turns out I never really felt sadness. Not quality sadness. I’ve felt depressed, down, anxious, worried, horrified, sorry, and bad. But now I know I’ve never really felt sad. Until now.

A Bad Time

2010-03-22T22:26:00.003-04:00

My pretty mother, Cookie Kelly.

This happened in the middle of March:

I haven’t had the wherewithal to do much lately. That’s another one of my new words, wherewithal; like melancholy. Not new like I haven’t heard of them before. Of course I’ve heard of them before. I’ve just never used them before. Not until I quit smoking and became melancholy and have recently lost my wherewithal like I lost a receipt or a nickel. It’s just gone. Poof.

I’ve been depressed. That’s why I lost my wherewithal and have become melancholy. They say there is no right time to quit smoking, but I’ll tell you, I think this is a really bad no-right-time. My mother is dying of leukemia. Let’s face it—it doesn’t look good. This is my mother. This is the woman who was the prettiest mother in the whole school, who caused kids to say, “That’s your mother?” and me to look forward to parent/teacher night so they could see her. This is the woman who wrote “yummy” on the top of recipes she gave me, who scraped the paint off the windows with a razor blade in my new home, and who helped me give birth to my children. She was so excited over my daughters. Jamie, her first grandchild. And Kelly. When Kelly was born, still attached to the umbilical cord, she was so excited she screamed, at the top of her lungs, “She looks just like you Kurt! She looks just like you!”

I love her more than anything in the whole world and I’ve worried about her dying, in fact, my whole life. That’s how attached I am to her. That’s how much I love her. No one wants to lose their parents. But you expect it to happen when they get old. You brace yourself. You’ll be sad and you will miss them, but you expect it to happen to old people. Fathers in slippers and mothers in housecoats. Not someone young and red-headed and who still screams with excitement. How will I go on without her? That’s what I want to know.

The worst part of all is I know she is suffering.

On top of that, I’ve gone into menopause. I think it was triggered by the trauma of my mother because when I went up to Jersey to take care of her for a month last summer, that’s when I missed my first period. I missed my period and I thought, “Oh, this’ll be hot shit if Kurt’s vasectomy fails after thirteen years when I’m away for a month and my ex-husband has suddenly reappeared and is conveniently around all the time, wooing my parents with offers to fix the furnace and bringing them flowers and candy. That’ll look real good…” But it wasn’t a failed vasectomy. It was the beginning of menopause.

Oh, there’s all kinds of things. Kurt was laid off last year and yes, we went back into our own business and it’s going okay, but it’s still a struggle. It would be hard to make a living out in the middle of nowhere in good times, never mind when the country is practically in a Depression. Factor in that we started this on a shoestring and you will agree that we are magicians if we pull this off.

We moved three times in six years. They say moving is on the top ten list of most stressful things. Right up there with death and divorce. We moved a whole farm across country, to places we knew no one, with no jobs and no real plan except… this place looks good.

I’m not even going to get into the Evils.

Then I’ve got the regular stresses. These are the things people normally say is the reason for it being not the right time, like the roof leaking or getting a speeding ticket. Suffice it to say that I’ve got my share of those. Not speeding tickets though. Knock wood. I’m not a speeder. I got a ticket one time for having studded snow tires on my first car, a 1965 Ford Galaxie 500. Convertible. Powder blue. 427 engine. I had no idea what studded snow tires were, so really, it was not my fault. Actually, I still don’t know what studded snow tires are. (I don’t know what a 427 engine is either but the boys told me that’s what I had and they were very impressed so I go with that.)

Anyway, all of this together is knocking me for a loop but I’m not supposed to complain and whine because there is no right time to quit smoking. I’m sorry but I think I have a bigger no-right-time.

Still. I did everything you’re supposed to do to succeed. I’m not going to go into it all; it’s too long and boring. In the end, I felt so bad, I couldn’t stop crying. I also wished I was dead. That’s not me. My girlfriend, a psychiatric nurse, warned me not to take that lightly. So I went and got an antidepressant. I’ve never taken an antidepressant before in my life. I was mad I had to resort to that to stay off the cigarettes. But it was too late. I also went and got some cigarettes. I’m sorry. I know it’s wrong. But I immediately felt better. And I haven’t shed a tear since.

Except happy tears. And that story is coming up next. It has something to do with a horse…

I'm Okay, You're Okay

2010-02-25T21:09:00.003-05:00

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while. It’s been hectic. Since I quit smoking, I can’t think and I’m not doing anything efficiently. That’s right. You heard me. I’m still not smoking. I didn’t relapse. I’m okay. Everything is just taking longer. Hence, I have like, three times the work.

All this snow hasn’t helped. We have gotten non-stop precipitation. Snow, hail, icy rain. If it’s bad, we’ve gotten it. Today we’re getting wind. Might as well be living on the tundra. Is the tundra like this? I’ll have to ask Kelly what the tundra actually is. I think she learned that in science class. It’s very hard to take care of the horses in weather that’s like the tundra. Truth be told, I hate their guts when I see snow out there. When Kurt told me it was snowing again this morning, I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Is this a sick joke?” like he put a Gummy worm in my salad. Or I just found out Sarah Palin was running for President. Sick.

Anyway, I heard you guys were looking for me and that’s really nice. So I’m just checking in and letting you know that I am okay and you’re okay for being such good friends.

Day Thirty--Crying Over the Horse

2010-01-31T17:19:00.005-05:00

Okay, so what happened to that beautiful palomino Paint, Lowdown, who got me over my fears and helped me get my courage back? I sold him. I know, I know. It was one of the stupidest things I ever did. I’m crying about it now, just writing this. Of course, lately, since I’ve quit smoking, I’ve been very emotional and I’ve been crying about everything. They say that smoking masks emotions. I always thought that was ridiculous. It’s not like drinking where someone gets loaded to hide the pain. But now that I’ve been off them, I think they do mask feelings. Because along with the anger and the rage, and even this newfound sense of humor I’ve acquired where everything is funny, I’ve been sad. And it’s all coming out. I told Kurt I was feeling melancholy. He pointed out that I never even used that word before. Melancholy.

Anyway, I’ve been crying my eyes out. I’ve been crying about long lost relatives who I haven’t seen in years. I’ve been crying about long dead relatives. And dead TV stars like I Love Lucy. That got me thinking about Ricky Ricardo who died of lung cancer and I started crying about him and it reinforced my quit. Music guys like Eddie Arnold who sang one of my favorite songs, “Make the World Go Away.” He recently died and so I’ve been playing that song and crying. Les Paul. (Because I want to sound like I’m sophisticated musically.) John Denver. Which made me think of Sonny Bono out there in Colorado and I know Cher’s heart is broken even though they were divorced for years. Is James Taylor dead? I hope he’s not dead too.

Then I cried about my old customers at the Cambridge Inn because “Make the World Go Away” was on the jukebox. I cried about those who died, those who might have died since I’ve been there last, and those who are still drinking, their noses dropping lower and lower into their mugs until someone shakes them and says “Last call.” They might as well be dead.

Yeah, I wonder about those guys. Scottie, Old Man Charlie, Dave the Lobsterman, Mitch-I’ve-Fallen-Down-And-Can’t-Get-Up, Jimbo, Rich who brought me a pack of gum every time he came in, Don who’s ex-wife was born with only one nipple (or was it three?), and all the guys from IFF who brought me perfume in unmarked bottles. George Ross. Rossie. That’s what we called him. He I know is dead because I went to his funeral. He was the best. Why am I crying about all these people?

I’ve been crying about friends I didn’t appreciate, friends I didn’t know I had till I moved away, and friendly neighbors who taught me how to use draw reins and still send Christmas cards. Coworkers and bosses who I thought I would see again but have lost touch with and can’t find no matter how much I Google like Bob and Arlene. Ricky and Amy. Joy. Debbie. Diana Nova. I’ve been crying about Haiti and the little boy whose stepfather killed him, and Morgan Harrington who disappeared at the Metallica concert and now they found her body and her mother said that even her bones were pretty.

I’ve been crying about my mother who has leukemia but that’s a given. I’ve been crying about her for months, long before I quit smoking. And my father.

I’ve been crying over the death of the dream I had of having a close relationship with my brother and sister. I have given up on that. For some reason, they don’t like me. At best, they are distant and uninterested. At worst, they are mean and disrespectful. And so, I have to, for my own sanity, give up any expectations I had of being one big happy family like The Walton’s. It ain’t gonna happen. I’m sad about that. But I’m also okay because I have given up. If you don’t expect something, you can’t get disappointed.

And so all these things I cry about. And that includes the horse. I cried about him to a stranger the other day. I tried to reach the guy I sold him to but none of the contact information I had still worked. That freaked me out, that I lost track of Lowdown. My girlfriend helped me dig online and we found an old advertisement that they were trying to sell him. That really freaked me out but also got me excited. Maybe I could buy him? But oh no!—the ad was a few years old—he must have gotten sold! Maybe the new owner would sell him? Of course I would never be able to afford him. I had sold him for a lot of money back then. More than I could ever afford. That was one of the reasons I sold him. For the money. And regretted it even before I delivered him to the new owner, the rich people, with a big red bow on his neck.

I called the contact person on the advertisement. It was the barn manager where the owners were boarding him. They were still at the same place. He hadn’t sold. She told me that the daughter had lost interest and the owners had been leasing him out to various kids around the stable for the last few years. Didn’t surprise me because he was so good. She promised she would tell the owner that I was trying to reach him and I wiped my eyes.

I began having fantasies that maybe somehow I could buy him back. Maybe they’d let me make payments? Now that I quit smoking, I could afford to make payments! I even fantasized that maybe something was wrong with him and they needed to find a home for him and I would take him even if I could never ride him because I love him so much and that was the stupidest thing I ever did, selling that horse. And here I am crying again…

I don’t know if I’m going to make this no smoking thing because it’s been a month and I still feel like I want to die.

Day Fifteen--Why I Need to Buy a Horse

2010-01-20T20:39:00.006-05:00

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing that’s going to make me feel better is if I buy a new horse.

That’s it, plain and simple.

Therefore, I’m horse shopping.

Honestly, this started before we quit smoking. I’m just using the quitting smoking as an excuse to buy another one. The horse shopping actually began when I told the story about the bucker and one of my blog buddies contacted me about a horse she had for sale. That’s all that has to happen to get me going—the mere mention of an available horse. Even if I am on full-horse-overload (the ratio of horses to stalls is unbalanced), if someone tells me about a horse they think I could use, I have to stop and consider.

Due to Christmas and having to go up to New Jersey to visit my mother, we were not able to move fast enough on my blog buddy’s horse and he was sold to someone else. But it was too late. I got the bug.

The truth is, now’s the time to buy. In fact, now is the time to get a free one if you’re not picky. The whole bottom has fallen out of the horse market and people are driving by horse sales, slowing down just enough to kick out some horses and then speeding away before anyone makes them load them back up again; that’s how bad it is. We knew we needed a horse. Actually, we knew we needed two horses. My favorite horse, Harley, has headshaking syndrome.

And Kelly stole Kurt’s horse Bullet because we retired the old guy.

But we were going to wait until the summer to start looking. Then my blog buddy opened her mouth. Then my friends from Nicotine Busters told me that I should reward myself with something that has the most incredible flowing mane and tail in the world and a nice big booty to match.

I thought, “That’s a great idea!”

So Kelly and I set out on a road trip yesterday. I’d been horse shopping online for the past few weeks and I made appointments for two prospects, about two hours south of me, and an hour apart from each other, in North Carolina. We’d mosey along, stop and get some snacks, stop and have some lunch, maybe take of a few pictures of interesting things for my blog and go see horses! And since I got my singing voice back because I quit smoking, I stocked the truck with some good music including my new Smokey Robinson CD. I would sing along and serenade Kelly at the top of my lungs. People say I’m the life of the party ‘cause I tell a joke or two… It’d be fun!

Do not trust the GPS or Mapquest. Why can’t I have a map like the old days where you simply pulled over to the side of the road, figured out you had to get on Highway 10 and then get off on Highway 6 and then make a left onto Main Street? But nooooo. It doesn’t work that way anymore. The GPS had me going left and right and following motorways into brick walls and getting me all nervous telling me I was going to turn soon where there was no turn but a simple bend in the road that you would have never noticed if the English chick hadn’t piped up to begin with. Then, luckily I have a great sense of direction because it had me going north, away from my destination, and I noticed it right away.

“This don’t seem right Kel,” I said to the kid. “See if Mapquest jives with what the GPS is saying.”

“What’s ‘jives?’” she asked me.

Oh man, now I had an English language barrier along with the GPS getting me lost? I was starting to feel irritable. I wanted to smoke.

“Jive talking! Don’t you know what jive talking is? Haven’t you ever heard of the Bee Gees? Okay, reach in the back and get the CD case and look for the Bee Gees. You’re going to really like this one. I can sing the Bee Gees real good.”

The kid rolled her eyes and then denied doing it.

Let’s put it this way. I tormented her the entire trip. The only good thing she got out of it was I was very agreeable about stopping to buy junk. Whatever she wanted to get, it all looked good to me. We got Bubblicious Sour Citrus, Tom’s Coconut Slices, Lance cheese crackers, Uncle Al’s sugar wafers, Combos, some kind of sour wormy thing. We got these peanut butter things that were kind of like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups except they were covered in a cluster of nuts. How can you go wrong with that? And of course barbecue-flavored corn nuts because what road trip is complete without the corn nut?

We got bellyaches. But we didn’t get a horse. One of them bucked just like Spirit did when I was buying him. I learned my lesson from that one. Never buy a horse that bucks when you are looking at him to buy. In fact, never buy a horse that does something wrong for the first time when you are looking at him to buy, as in, seller scratches his head and says, “He ain’t never done that before.” Whatever he has never done before will, in fact, be an ingrown, incurable habit.

The other horse I wasn’t gaga over. Therefore I’m having major nicotine fits and am at serious risk of relapse.

Day Eleven and the Divorce

2010-01-12T21:24:00.001-05:00

I’m so cranky the word “divorce” was bantered about last night. This should make all Kurt’s ex’s, who read this blog secretly, get excited. But don’t. We didn’t really mean it. What happened was I had this thing on my toe. I was sure it was a cyst or a tumor or something that was going to really tick me off for having since I just quit smoking. What a kick in the pants that would be if I quit smoking after all this time and wind up getting cancer anyway. Especially toe cancer. It’d be just my luck.

Kurt said it was just a pimple. That annoyed me. A pimple? A pimple on my toe? Who gets a pimple on her toe?! Now if I would have said I had this thing on my cheek or on my nose. Or even on my butt. I heard people get them there. In which case they are called carbuncles. I have no idea if they are called carbuncles. I don’t even know what a carbuncle is. But it sounds like something some old guy would get on his butt along with the hair on his back and coming out of his nostrils. Gross stuff like that.

One time Kelly had a pimple on her elbow. This was how I knew she’d never make a vet. It had come to a head and so I took a warm wet washcloth and simply washed it away. That caused her to start gagging and she ran into the bathroom where she threw-up. She threw-up from her own body stuff! That’s pretty bad when your own body stuff makes you gag. I said, “Forget a vet. How about being an architect? They make good money.”

Anyway, it’s Day Eleven and we’re still staying married.

Day Five to Seven

2010-01-09T15:17:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I felt like committing something. Murder. Suicide. Something. Luckily I stayed within the law and just stomped around the house, picked on my loved ones a little, and wondered how in the world I could carry on with fresh air in my lungs? How do people do it?!

I swear, I think it’s harder for some than others. People tell me, trying to inspire me, “I just threw them out the window on the way home and never touched them again.” Like, since they could do it, I should be able to do it.

All it does is confirm what I’ve always known. They are not as addicted as I am. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so easy. I can’t imagine ever being so flippant about it. La, la, la, la, la. Yes, I simply threw them out the window. La, la, la, la, la. Then I skipped all the way home. La, la, la, la, la. Then I ate a piece of minty fresh gum. Yeah, right. How about I ate a piece of the exhaust pipe on my truck?!—that’s how easy this is!

I know I’m a bad one, carbon monoxide aside, because I have very good willpower and I haven’t been able to beat this. My willpower is world-renowned. For example, I’ve never slept with a guy on the first date even if I wanted to. Even if he was really, really good-looking. Even Kurt, who proposed on the first date. And though I had a feeling it wasn’t a ploy to get into my pants—he really meant it—I said, “Let’s see what happens if we’re still going out by the time of the Outlaws…” (He’d also wooed me with concert tickets, none of which got me into bed any faster, or married, but were decidedly cheaper than what he buys me nowadays—horses.)

I have girlfriends who say they’re going to wait until they sleep with a guy and then boom! Next thing you know they are sheepishly admitting to me that they did it and now they hope he’s going to call and should they call him because maybe he lost their phone number? They have lack-a-willpower. Or lack-a-self-esteem. It’s a lack-a-something.

Not me. Say I would like to eat what Kelly left on her plate at breakfast. I’m often tempted by leftover Toaster Strudels. Blueberry, apple, doesn’t matter. But I give it to the dog instead. I don’t pick. I wait all day long before I have my snack. This way I can sit down and savor it. A nice big bowl of it. I favor Blue Bunny Peanut Butter Panic ice cream and I am very mad that I haven’t been able to find it lately. In none of the stores. What did they discontinue it after they got me hooked on it?! I hate when they do that! Like I can’t find Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby anymore either! Everything else I’ve been trying to replace it with is crap! I’m about ready to quit ice cream right along with the cigarettes if they keep getting me hooked on a flavor and then discontinuing it! Like I need this torture!

Anyway, I have incredible willpower in that I don’t sleep with guys or eat junk when I shouldn’t. I’ve also stopped chewing the inside of my cheek.

But I’ve never been able to beat the cigarettes. Why can’t I go to rehab like heroin addicts? Why can’t someone do an intervention where they take me away and they take care of all my responsibilities at home so all I have to do is concentrate on going to group and beating my addiction? But nope. No one takes this nicotine addiction seriously. Just because some people have it easier, doesn’t mean everyone can just throw them out the window. It’s not right.

Quitting Smoking--Day Four or Something Like That

2010-01-05T19:44:00.003-05:00

Warning: there is a teeny weenie obscenity in here so if you think you might be offended, skip this one.

I don’t believe that anyone feels this bad when they quit smoking. It’s something like the third day now and I still can’t function.

Now it’s the fourth day and I still can’t function. All I’m doing is sleeping when I’m not ripping heads off. Ripping heads, rolling heads. But not giving head. Who’s in the mood when you want to die?

Ut! I just hurt Kelly’s feelings and now I can’t write! I just woke up and wanted to get some of these thoughts down and she came over and wanted me to look at something she was doing, making cards for people or something, and I said, “Not now, I’m writing.” She walked away sad. I was going to say, “She walked away dejectedly.” But that’s not the way I speak. Actually, I should say that’s not the way I talk. I’m a little cranky. I’m going to talk like I wanna talk. Wanna, wanna, wanna. You got a problem with that? Okay, so I considered saying, “She walked away disappointed.” I wouldn’t have said that either. I would have just said, “She walked away sad.” So I said it.

Anyway, I feel guilty. Now I can’t write. Now my stomach is clenching up. I was feeling pretty good there for a while but now I feel like crap again…

Okay, so I just called her back. “What do you want to show me?”

Kids are very forgiving.

Now that that’s over with. Okay, let’s see. I don’t think people realize how bad this is for some people. Maybe I’ll go into some examples of why I’m a bad one another time. All right, here’s one. I could never take a job where I couldn’t smoke freely. Hence, my bartending career. Some people might think, “Oh, she must have been a big drinker.” Nope. I was never a drinker. Could care less about drinking. One of the reasons I liked that job was because I could smoke my brains out while doing it.

One time I almost set my horse on fire. Horse. Not house. The head of the cigarette got lost in his mane. Yikes! I had to jump off real fast.

A lot of women stop smoking when they’re pregnant. I was always jealous of that. Even though I was super duper Earth Mother who worked in a health food store and ate only organic, whole foods, heavy on the vegetarian; and delivered my children with the help of a midwife who wore Birkenstock sandals and patchouli perfume; and breastfed until they were able to drink from a cup because I wasn’t putting any crap formula into their precious bodies; I continued to smoke. I’ll never forget seeing a notation on the midwife’s ledger right after we had Kelly: “Baby crying, parents outside smoking cigarettes, grandmother trying to console baby.”

It’s always gone against everything that I am.

Part Three: The Lowdown

2009-12-29T07:44:00.003-05:00

The old horse turned out to be two. Twenty-three months to be exact. But wait. Before you get all excited, he had thirty days on him. And this was the prettiest horse I’d ever seen. I’m not kidding. This one was really pretty. I say Cherokee was pretty. But Lowdown. Let me put it this way. He was so pretty that when we pulled up somewhere and I got ready to take him off the trailer, I braced myself for the paparazzi. As soon as people saw him, they crowded around, oohing and aahing. Their mouths dropped open. They swarmed all over him trying to get his autograph. But I didn’t buy him because of that.

Kurt told me to.

Back when we first started horse hunting, I was quite shocked that I couldn’t find one for seventy-five dollars like what I paid for Cherokee who walked over rickety old bridges and jumped off cliffs if I asked him to. I was fuming when I had to go up to almost three grand to get Spirit. This was highway robbery! I felt that way even before I found out he was a bucker. But when we were horse shopping for Kurt, money was no object. This was going to be his first horse and it had to be perfect. I didn’t want him to have any bad experiences. At least before it took. The magic of horses, that is. That addiction that is sneaky and cunning and makes you buy saddles you can’t afford and whole houses, in fact, so you can keep your addiction right in your own backyard and ride him anytime the urge hits you. No, I wanted him to love it like I did. Get hooked on it so that when he did run into the buckers, it wouldn’t rattle him. Therefore I wanted him to get whatever his heart desired. Which meant black. And it had to be beginner-safe. Which meant expensive.

We found Lisa, Kurt’s dealer (his horse dealer, not his drug dealer, though horses and drugs—what’s the difference really?) who at any given time had a dozen gorgeous, top-quality horses for sale with prices to match. Lisa sold us Chance, a black Quarter Horse gelding who was gorgeous and bombproof. There was no running around sorting through broncs and agoraphobic show horses who didn’t like living alone. And it worked. Kurt was hooked. He stayed up till two in the morning bidding on studded headstalls that complimented Chance’s face. He instructed me to have Chance all saddled up and ready for him so that when he pulled into the driveway after work, he could just hop on. He even started wearing a cowboy hat.

After the Spirit fiasco, when I started horse shopping again, he said, “That’s it. We’re going back to Lisa.” I opened my mouth to protest. I couldn’t see paying that. Not for me. Him? Yeah. Me? No. He reminded me of all the money I lost trying to get a bargain. “Stop crying and just pay,” he said.

Lisa specialized in pretty. Mostly horses of color—Paints, palominos, blacks, even the occasional grulla. Lowdown was a palomino Paint, the best of both worlds. However, I never expected anything this pretty. But he was a colt. Kurt, who I hadn’t seen this excited since I gave him my number in the Halfway Bar, lost his mind. “He looks quiet,” he said.

“What are you crazy? He’s two-years old!” I cried. “We came here to get one that’s twenty!”

Even though my heart was thumping. Already I was secretly hoping he’d talk me into it.

Kurt said, “He has a kind eye.”

I said, “He’s two!”

Kurt said, “Yeah, but look at him.”

Lisa stepped in. “Let’s put him in the round pen and see how he goes.”

He went real good. He went so good, we bought a round pen to go with him. Naturally, if I was getting a colt, I needed a safe place to train him.

Now you may see trouble brewing and you may or may not be right. Young horse and novice rider, because that’s what I was, (even though I spent every waking moment on my pony when I was a kid) is never a good mix. Add fear into the equation and all the wallets in the back pockets of every horse whisperer in the state were flapping open. And I was fearful all right. Skeerd, scared, whatever you want to call it—after Spirit, I was afraid to lope. I had a loping phobia, if you will. I was a little nervous about everything, but loping was the worst.

Trying to prevent Spirit from bucking when he loped had gotten me into a bad habit. For a long time, whenever I cued a horse to lope, I automatically pulled his head up to stop him from bucking. Whether or not he was going to do it. It was like a Pavlov’s dog reaction—horse lopes, I yank his head up. If I even got the courage to lope at all—that’s how scared I was. I made excuses to avoid it. The ground is too hard. The ground is too soft. I have a headache. The horse looked crooked today… Which was frustrating since running was what I loved to do the most. It was why I’d always dreamed of being a barrel racer. I was ruined. But now I was armed with the round pen. And I became, how do you say?—round pen dependent.

Sometimes I think they ought to have a twelve-step program for people addicted to their round pens. It appears horses are the gateway drug that lead to many others. Dependency on the color coordination of polo wraps, pads and reins; overuse of Cowboy Magic; and the hoarding of bits in search of that first high when you threw out the Tom Thumb snaffle and bought a three-piece twisted wire, copper mouth, with a dog bone in the middle.

And the round pen. I don’t know how people ever trained their horses without them. In fact, I don’t know how people even ride their horses without them! Because, to this day, I will not get on my horse if he’s been twiddling his thumbs out in the field for any length of time without throwing him in the round pen first. Just to see what’s under the hood. And if there’s anything sinister going on since I mounted him last, we have a little lesson in who is the herd leader and who is second in line. Then I’ll get on.

So when I bought the palomino Paint (who I named Lowdown after the Boz Skaggs song, Lowdown, for no reason other than I thought it sounded cool and his registered name, Im Justin Image was boring), I used the round pen on a regular basis. And I guess I hit all 7’s because mellow personality and compliant nature along with the round pen training enabled me to actually ride this horse. Even though he was, don’t forget, two-years-old. We went on many trail rides with many friends and no bucking. We even rode on a trail past the lions and tigers and bears that were caged behind Great Adventure in the safari park and not a peep out of him. We rode alone. We rode down neighborhood streets and across busy highways. We went to showdeos, parades, team pennings, and clinics where horses ten times Lowdown’s age made it clear they needed to be there and I, with the colt, could come up with no answer when the clinicians asked me what I needed to work on.

I even fell off a couple of times. Which is ironic, since I’d never fallen off any of the others.

And yet… I lost my fear.

It appears, and don’t tell him I said this since his cowboy hat is tight enough, but Kurt knows how to pick a horse. Either that or the horse Gods had mercy on me. Or you get what you pay for. Or it was bound to happen sooner or later if I kept buying them. Or Lowdown and I just clicked. I don’t know.

I do know that I’m glad I never gave up.

Part Two: The Bucker

2009-12-07T20:58:00.002-05:00

After I got Dancer all tucked into her new home with the little boy, I decided to look for something with a little color again. (But not a little spirit.) Obviously buying a plain ordinary sorrel was no guarantee I’d get a horse like what I used to have when I was a kid. You know, something you could just hop on, with a saddle or not, even with a bridle or not, and mosey down the road, with another horse or not. You’d cross busy highways to get to strange trails in the woods, where you’d trot past scary waterlogged recliners and the skeletons of washing machines, suspiciously out of place and ready to lurch forward at any given moment and eat a horse! And your horse doesn’t blink an eye. No, buying a sensible looking horse was no guarantee I could get that again. If they even made them anymore. Therefore I figured I might as well get a Paint.

I hated the fact that everyone was on the Paint bandwagon. They were about as popular as the horse whisperers and round pens. I didn’t want anyone to think I was following the crowd. I’ve never been a crowd follower. I just found out the other day what a Coach bag is. I was standing in line next to a lady in the post office and I was checking her out because she was all dolled up in expensive clothes with an expensive blonde dye job and expensive manicured nails you can’t do chores in. I could tell she was from the lake.

Then I saw the pocketbook. Since I was right next to her and I had my glasses on because I was looking at the Ten Most Wanted pictures, I could see it had C’s on it. I realized that’s what they’re all talking about. That’s a Coach bag. And I thought, eew, what’s the big deal? I wouldn’t pay ten dollars for it. It’s ugly! This is what everybody is putting their stuff in because it’s the fad. It can’t be because it’s nice. My orange leather pocketbook fellow blogger Di from Snappy Finger gave me could run circles around it. Even my canvas bag with the picture of the barrel racer on it was nicer. Certainly more functional since you can carry a few magazines, a package of Little Debbie Nutty Bars and a tube of dewormer in either one (which I did just this morning instead of asking for a bag in the feed store). Or a lot of money. Which is ironic because the lake lady with the ugly bag was the one who has the money. Not me. But I could carry a lot of it if I had it.

Anyway, I’d always liked Paints. Because my first pony was a Paint. I’m imprinted with the tendency for loving anything that reminds me of Cherokee. Because even though he was a 13-hand, splay-footed, cow-hocked pony with lop ears, a sway back and no gas in the tank, he was absolutely beautiful. Stunning. The prettiest pony in the neighborhood! And he’d do anything I’d ask. One time I made him walk over a rickety old wooden bridge that had holes in-between the slats just the right size for a pony’s foot to go through and get stuck, dry-rotted boards and rusty bolts barely holding it all together. It wobbled when you walked on it and you held your breath until you got to the other side. But I didn’t think anything of making Cherokee go over it. There was no question. It was the shortest way home.

When I have my mind set to something, I make it happen. I take action. And so I found the fourth horse before I even got a chance to remove the nameplate on Dancer’s stall door. He was a brown-and-white overo with a black mane and tail and a slight Roman nose that was actually quite handsome. Made him look like an Indian horse. He was real quiet and mellow, not jumpy at all. But there was a red flag. Red flag! Red flag! Red flag! I ignored it. Of course. How could I not? He was so pretty!

The owner, a dealer named Pepe’ who had dazzled me by performing reining spins and side-passes, brought him over to the round pen for me to try. It was the middle of summer and obviously no one used the round pen because the grass in it was waist-high. That was a plus. If I fell off, it wouldn’t hurt so bad. Since having Dancer, and perhaps because I was a mother now, and older, I’d started to realize that I wasn’t invincible anymore. Images involving shattered bones and chests impaled on metal fence posts occasionally popped into my head. Even though I had never fallen off her, I was, how should I say it?—a little skeerd.

For those of you who are reading this before you’ve had your morning coffee, that misspelling was on purpose. There’s a difference between scared and skeerd. You get scared when you almost get into a car wreck. It’s not funny. When you’re skeerd, it’s kind of cute. Like I was skeerd getting my bellybutton pierced. (Hey, that was Kurt’s idea, not mine! And in my defense, I don’t have any tattoos.) Or I was skeerd riding the mechanical bull in the Bar-H, back when it was a country-western place and I owned a pair of cowboy boots that were too pretty to ride in but they looked great hooked over the chrome rung of a bar stool.

But I didn’t really expect any trouble. So when I started loping and Spirit bucked, I was shocked.

“He bucked!” I cried. “Did you see that?!”

“Oh, the grass just tickled his belly is all,” Pepe’ assured me. And since I’d already named him—Spirit (of all things)—I said, “Okay.”

That sucker bucked every time I loped him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did everything we did just like with Dancer trying to figure it out, trying to get him to stop. But nothing worked. Somehow I didn’t fall off him either. But the day we were out on a trail ride with a bunch of friends and everyone started loping and my horse started bucking and then I “got to” crying, as they say out in the country, Kurt said, “That’s it. You’re selling him.” And I was relieved. Because I wasn’t going to say it. I loved him! And though Kurt is not the kind of husband who bosses me around, even if I was the kind of girl who would take it, I was grateful to him for putting his foot down. Because by this time, I was full-blown scared.

Nowadays you can’t even give a horse away, the market is so bad, but back then horses were selling great. Still, I put him up for sale for half what I paid since he had “an issue.” The first guy who came to look at him was a big cowboy, quite unusual to see in the suburbs of New Jersey. He was wearing a real cowboy hat. I thought, “That’s a Stetson. This will be good. He won’t let Spirit pull any crap.” But I warned him double and triple anyway. I said, “If you lope, he is going to buck.” The cowboy pooh-poohed it, waved his big hand with the crooked index finger on it and swaggered over to the Roman-nosed bucker with the confidence and assurance of a seasoned rodeo rider. Honestly, I wasn’t too concerned because of those bowed legs of his. But I don’t think they loped three strides before Spirit threw him onto the neighbor’s roof next door and the cowboy lost his hat in the process, exposing more skin on his skull than I expected. I felt sorry for him. He was no cowboy. He was only human. And Spirit needed a different kind of human.

Spirit needed The Mexican.

The Mexican, barely five-feet tall, little, like a little Mexican peanut, and shy, like a boy on a first date, was a friend of a friend who got wind of what was happening through the grapevine. He came over with our mutual friend, took one look at Spirit, and said, “I take heem.” He didn’t even want to try him.

I warned, “He’s going to buck every time you lope him.”

He said, “That no matter. He es so beauty-full.” He peeled off the bills and paid me in cash.

I have to say that I was a little worried. I was not only worried about The Mexican getting hurt; I was worried about him getting hurt and then getting mad at the horse and sending him to the sale. But I got regular reports from my friend that surprised me. The Mexican took Spirit on a trail ride. The Mexican took Spirit to a horse show. The Mexican took Spirit to the beach. The Mexican took Spirit team penning. The Mexican was riding Spirit all over the place and he never bucked! I even started to see him around, on the side of the road, heading for the power lines where there were miles of sandy road to lope down and he’d wave wildly as I passed, a happy Hispanic cowboy on a horse who could care less about grass tickling his belly.

Even though I was happy for The Mexican and relieved that Spirit found a good home, it was a kick in the pants. Still, I was determined to keep going. We started looking for the fifth horse. This time I wanted an older one. Like twenty. Spirit-less. Color-less. I didn’t care. As long as it was like… half dead. Maybe that would work.

Part three: the story of Lowdown.

Horses Named Buster and Other Unsuitable Purchases

2009-11-25T19:12:00.004-05:00

When Kurt and I started looking for our first horse after I hadn’t had any since I was a kid, I declared, “I want one with a little spirit. I like ‘em with spirit.” Ha! The first one I bought, but who never actually set foot on the property, was a black Quarter horse named Buster. That should have been a clue right then and there. Oh, he was beautiful. And he had spirit all right. Luckily he failed the vet check and after chasing the seller for two weeks for my money, I felt a weight was lifted. I knew when I was trying him out, when he was prancing down the road with smoke coming out of his ears and fire coming out of his nose, that he was too much for me. But my pride wouldn’t let me admit it even to myself. Fear was not what I remembered having as a kid. Who gets happy when a horse fails a vet check?

The next one was just as suitable for a middle-aged woman getting back into horses after twenty years. Basically a beginner. This one was a two-year-old Paint mare I bought at the horse auction. At the time, I thought, “This is good—she is really slow and mellow, not like Buster at all.” In fact, the owner had to drag her by the lead rope and tap her on the butt with a crop just to get her to walk down the aisle even though I was kicking till I was blue in the face. Later, when I got a few more years under my belt and I thought about it, I realized that she wasn’t slow and mellow at all. She wasn’t even broke! She didn’t know how to walk with a rider on her back—that’s why the owner had to drag her—and the only reason she didn’t buck me off was because I wasn’t on her long enough. But I didn’t know that at the time. Plus, she was so pretty. I gave the seller half the money and promised to come back with the other half before the sale started.

Luckily, depending on your perspective and if you count that no real damage was done, Kelly had a little mishap with Thrush X and had to be taken to the hospital where she got an endoscopy and a lollipop and which caused us to be late getting back to the horse auction to give the seller the rest of the money. Even though I somehow had the presence of mind to call to assure him we weren’t standing him up—we still wanted the horse, please don’t put her in the sale, we were simply delayed in the emergency room making sure our daughter didn’t have third degree burns on her esophagus but I was sure everything was going to be okay and we’d be there lickity-split—even though I told him all that, he sold her at the sale that night. I also had to chase that seller for two weeks to get my money back.

While I was chasing those two sellers, I bought a third horse. So technically, I owned three horses now since none of my money had been returned. And we didn’t even have a barn yet! Who knew I’d find so many nice horses so fast? Kurt was building the barn himself. I told him he better get hopping. This new horse I found was a sensible buy. This was one that even Jamie could ride. And Jamie didn’t even know how to ride.

Dancer was a plain, ordinary sorrel. She was nice-looking but she was nothing special. One of the boarders from the stable down the road was selling her. The kid had lost interest. Key word being “kid.” I went and tried her out. She was perfect. We loped all around the arena, turned this way and that way, and even jumped a little cross-rail though I am western and know nothing about jumping. She was easy-going and quiet, well-mannered and willing. Even the vet was impressed with this one. She stood sleepy-eyed while we looked her over, one back leg cocked in the sand. He nodded his approval. “Now you’re talking,” he said. She passed the vet check with flying colors and Kurt finished the little barn he was building just in time to take her home.

Where she promptly went berserk.

Dancer bolted around the corral for two days, crashing into the fences and banging into the walls of the barn. Slivers and splinters flew, nails popped out. She introduced me to the combo. That’s where a horse rears, bucks and whirls all at the same time. She tried to bolt. She balked. She spooked. She was dangerous to ride and I dreaded trying. One time when I was saddling her up, even though I’ve always cinched up slowly and carefully, she reared, broke the lead rope and fell over backwards. The crash was so loud, Kurt came running out of the house. My neighbors, all experienced horse people, were sure it was me. Or my saddle. They came over with their advice and their saddles and cinched her up themselves. But she blew up on them too.

I was starting to suspect that Dancer was drugged when I bought her. What else could it be? How could she have changed so much? How in the world could a child ride her and I couldn’t even lead her through the yard without her spinning around and lifting me off my feet?

This was right around the time of the new trendy thing called “horse whisperers” and the phenomenon of an old training method, repackaged and reintroduced called “the round pen.” Since I was a middle-aged, middle-class woman newly back into horses who had a problem horse, a little money to blow and the determination to fix her because…“I love her,” I was the perfect mark for gimmicks like training halters, motivational sticks, tie-rings, videos, clinics and anything magical that was akin to the snapping of fingers but that worked for no one except the person selling the idea or product. I even, I admit, bought a book by Pat Parelli, desperate for the secret. The cure.

But nothing worked.

Now some of you experienced horse people might be rolling your eyes right now and saying, perhaps smugly, that Dancer obviously had a pain issue going on that caused her to be such a freak and you’re waiting for me to come out with it. But I can assure you that it was not the case.

When I called up the people at the boarding stable and cried when I told them the trouble I was having, they said they had another boarder who would love to buy Dancer. I didn’t even have to ask them. I was surprised it was so easy, hence blowing my theory that they had drugged her or hid something sinister about her, right out the window. Otherwise they wouldn’t have offered to take her back. They would have been glad to be rid of her.

Long story short, Dancer went to another child. That’s right. A kid. A little boy who did hunters and jumpers. He won all over the place on that little sorrel mare and the last I heard there was talk of the Olympics and someone offered his parents a lot of money for her but they said no way. They knew a good thing when they had it. I didn’t feel bad about it. I was happy for the horse (and the kid). A problem horse is at risk and she obviously had no problems now. So was it me?

The only conclusion that any of us could ever come to was that Dancer had spent most of her life at that busy boarding stable where there were thirty other horses and people coming and going and she had never been alone before. Or ridden anywhere except in an arena. At my house, she lived by herself and the only place I had to ride was on trails. I didn’t have an arena or another horse to ride with (I’ve since created a herd. And an arena to go with it.) and she went crazy like I would go crazy if someone transported me to a place without, say, books and paper. Or spaghetti.

Next time I will tell you about the fourth horse. The bucker.

The Virginia Houses

2009-11-14T20:45:00.005-05:00

Why is it so cold in here? This house is the worst house I’ve ever lived in temperature-wise. This and the Amityville Horror House. I thought it was going to be better when we moved here but the only thing that’s different is there are less cold rooms. I’m never comfortable. It’s cold in the winter and hot in the summer. I don’t know which is worse. Well, yeah. The cold is worse. I can’t take the cold. Let me ask you something. Why does seventy degrees feel nice when you have the air on during the summer, but it’s downright freezing in the winter? Brrr. And why is it colder in the house than it is outside? It’s not right when you step out onto the porch and say, “Oh.” Surprised. And take off your jacket.

It wasn’t like this in the Jackson house. People came inside in the summer and thought I had the air on. I never put the air on. In fact, we really didn’t have any air conditioning except for a window unit in our bedroom that was used so little, when you turned it on, leaves and dead beetles blew out. And one in the kids’ bedrooms so no one could say I was a mean mother. In the winter, we never even turned the heat on! We started the woodstove at the beginning of the season and never let the fire go out, emptying the ashes from the door down bottom, and it heated the whole house. Ah, it was toasty warm in there. And yet we used very little wood. Good thing because we used to have to buy wood in New Jersey. If we used a cord of wood in that house the whole winter, it was a lot. It was a good house and a good stove.

The little bungalow we lived in on the Jersey Shore and the Oklahoma ranch were the same way. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer. But these Virginia houses… They’re about going to kill me. If you hear on the news that they had to carry a frozen body out of a house that had frosted eyelashes and white eyebrows, fingers frozen in a position as if poised over a keyboard, that’s me. It’s not even Thanksgiving yet and I have on two pairs of socks right now, a sweatshirt, a vest, and a sweatshirt jacket. If it gets any colder, I’m going to put on my hat. I’ve worn it in the house before and Kurt hates it. Says it doesn’t flatter me one iota. It’s one of those kind of hats that burglars wear with holes for your eyes and your mouth. Plus he’s sick of seeing it because once winter starts, I put it on and I don’t take it off. Even if it’s not very cold that day and I can get away with a light jacket, I still have to keep my head covered. I have two of them. I mean, I have many hats but I have two of my favorite. I have to have a back-up. You never know when you’re going to get the original all dirty. Maybe a horse will step on it, not with your head inside, but say you took it off to listen to a heartbeat and it blows off the nail you hung it on. It could happen. And so it needs cleaning. You have to have the back-up for cases like this.

My mother was so cold when she was visiting us when we were living in the Amityville Horror House that when I came downstairs in the morning, I found her sitting next to the stove, the oven turned on to broil and the door propped open. The sugar bowl, her coffee cup and the ashtray were on the oven door like it was a little table and she was reading the morning paper with a scarf around her neck. “Good morning,” she said, like it was normal to be sitting in front of the gas stove reading the paper.

Oh, but I knew the stories she was going to tell when she went back up north—Debi and Kurt are freezing down there! They are roughing it! They might as well be in Alaska and they ought to burn that damn house down they are living in and come back to civilization where it’s warm! (That was the year Jersey became Florida and people could go swimming year round because it was so nice up there and why did I ever leave anyway?)

Now there is no reason for these houses to be this cold. Yes, the Amityville Horror House was a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse with beadboard walls but prior owners had taken down all the beadboard, numbered it, insulated, and then put it all back up again. There was blown-in insulation in the attic, batting in the cellar, weather-stripping and plastic on the windows. We had two propane furnaces, one upstairs and one down. There was an electric wall heater in the bathroom. We had four fireplaces, two with woodstoves, one cranking continuously. And we had an outside wood furnace, the big daddy of all woodstoves. You could burn whole barns in that outside woodstove and in fact, we cut down and burned enough wood to fill two pickup truck beds every week. You don’t even want to know what the propane bill was. And still. It was cold in there.

Why can’t I be warm? That’s all I ask.

I thought this house was going to be better. This is the pig farmer’s house—a little Depression-era farmhouse one third the size of the Amityville house. The ceilings are low. I can touch the ceilings upstairs without standing on my toes. Handy for changing light bulbs and removing batteries in touchy smoke detectors when you’re cooking pork chops. Insulation and new vinyl siding were installed over the original clapboard. All the windows in the back were boarded up and sided over. (I didn’t do it—the lady I bought it from committed atrocious acts of destruction on this place in an effort to improve and modernize—someday I’d like to remove it and expose the charming, three-over-three windows that line the length of the back porch and put up little red-and-white checked curtains.) The rest of the windows are new. We put in a woodstove as soon as we moved in. And new electric heat with an impressive energy star rating. And still. It’s cold in here.

I’m getting that hat.

A Bad Influence or Why You Shouldn't Hang Out With Your Mother

2009-10-24T18:42:00.005-04:00

I’m such a bad mother. When Kelly came home from school yesterday, even though she had a lot of homework, I made her come riding with me. Well, I really didn’t have to make her. I just said, “I’m going riding after we eat. You’re welcome to come with me if you want...” Knowing full well she couldn’t pass up riding. I rinsed out my coffee cup and watched her out of the corner of my eye, nonchalant. Of course she wanted to go riding! She’s horse crazy just like me. I brainwashed her good. See! I am bad. What kind of mother brainwashes her kid to do something? I’m about as bad as those stage mothers who put fake eyelashes and red lipstick on their daughters and would stuff toilet paper in their bras if they were big enough to wear them because they want to catch the judge’s eye. Or a pedophile’s. I don’t know.

But horseback riding is different. I don’t just think that because it’s my thing to do. It really is different. One time I combined the two. When I was sixteen, my mother talked me into entering a beauty contest—the Miss Middletown Pageant. I did it because I was flattered she wanted me to enter. But when I was already signed up, I realized there was a category called talent. And since I didn’t play the flute or tap dance, I didn’t have any. Oh why did she make me enter?!—I wailed. What was I going to do?! The girls in the contest took lessons and had voice coaches and one of them even entertained the governor by playing Chopin on the piano at the governor’s ball. All I did was write stories and ride my pony. Now I knew I was halfway pretty even though I didn’t know how to walk in high heels or fix my hair, being a tomboy. But how was I going to compete with rich girls (those were the ones who got the lessons and the voice coaches) crooning Somewhere Over the Rainbow and playing the violin and the piccolo in fancy ballroom gowns? (What is a piccolo anyway? Isn’t there a Jenny Piccolo on Happy Days?) I didn’t have any talent per se. I was freaking. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I wrote a story about my pony.

“Does your motorcycle nicker to you in the morning? Do your roller skates run up to you at the pasture gate for a pat on the neck?” Never mind. Hopefully I’ve improved since then.

But I won it! I won the talent award! I couldn’t stop crying up there. (Interesting since the ones who won the contest, didn’t even shed a tear.)

Anyway, even though I didn’t place in the beauty part of the contest, I never felt bad about it because the irony of winning the talent award outshined anything else. I sure showed them! Ha! Turned out I’m pretty talented after all! Forget that trombone I was thinking about taking up! Who needs it? Plus, I had some fierce competition. The winner later went on to become first runner-up in the Miss America Pageant. Besides, I already knew at sixteen-years-old that talent and what was inside a person was more important than outer beauty. Otherwise I would have known how to walk in those high heels.

I would enter Kelly in a beauty contest in a minute, she’s so pretty.

But I’d much rather her come out riding with me. Even if it means she’s up late trying to get her homework done. At least I’m not making her wear false eyelashes and red lipstick. And I can always write the teacher a note…

My Favorite Horse and Spaghetti

2009-10-12T20:30:00.002-04:00

The wind is whipping like a mother today; otherwise I was going to ride. That’s why I left Oklahoma. Because of the wind. It makes me feel uneasy. It makes me feel like a storm is coming, even when it’s not. Every time I feel sorry for myself for getting rid of my hundred-and-ten acres out there, a windy day happens and I feel better.

You’d think the horses wouldn’t mind the wind because they’re used to it, having spent time in Oklahoma. But they don’t like it either. I’m sure they feel uneasy as well, and perhaps they expect a storm. Or at least some branches to fall down and clonk them on the heads. The last time we had real bad wind, a storm did come and it knocked down three trees. They fell on the roof that goes around the tobacco shed, where I’d just thrown down some hay and where Bullet and Minnie had hurried over to get out of the rain and start eating. I walked into the barn and as quick as it took me to walk out the other side, the trees were down and the horses were all up by the barn looking in the same direction. They were staring at the tobacco shed, huddled together like crowds huddle on curbs and stare at accident scenes. The three trees were down, and the tobacco shed roof, two minutes ago above my head, was sprawled out beneath them like a bug beneath a shoe.

I could ride those horses out there if I really wanted to but it’s no fun in the wind. I’m a fair weather girl. I don’t like rain either. Or cold. Or snow after the first day. Any sort of precipitation or conditions that require me to put on anything more than a sweatshirt jacket. But it turns out I’m going to be riding in the cold this year whether I like it or not. Normally I take a break from riding from Thanksgiving until March and concentrate on family stuff. Do all the extras. Cook using actual recipes, play Scrabble, put up new curtains, go ice skating. Well, not really the ice skating since I tried that once when I was a kid and I’m not willing to try it again. I fell a hundred and twenty-three times. Of course I fell a hundred and twenty-three times when I was learning to ride too but that’s different. Anyway, you get the picture. In the winter, I do all those things that are fun or good to do but can’t shine riding’s shoes.

Not many things can. Kurt wants to get a boat someday and I agreed I would go out on it with him and in fact it sounds like a good time driving it across the lake and getting some lunch on the other side. But I’d really rather ride one of the horses up the mountain, even if I’d just done it yesterday, and look at the lake from up there. Because horses are like spaghetti. I can never get enough. I could eat it every day. I live for my spaghetti. I mean my horses.

One of my horses I can only ride in the winter. He has headshaking syndrome. Harley jerks his head up and down uncontrollably during exercise like he just got stung by a bee. It’s impossible to ride him. The first time he did it, while we were riding out in the field in Oklahoma, I thought bugs or seeds popping up from the grass were bothering him. I urged him on. He was so irritated that he tried to wipe his nose with his forefoot and he fell down with me on top of him! Luckily, he’s very athletic and he scrambled right back up before I even knew what happened. But it could have been bad.

Right away I knew what it was because I read a lot. I have a vast supply of bits and pieces of knowledge in my head, a little about everything, especially horse stuff. Though I never went to college. I’m a big reader. I like books about as much as horses and spaghetti. When I was a kid, I took out every single book in the library that they had about horses. Even if it was about English riding. I mean real English riding, from the actual England, where their horses wore rugs instead of blankets and I had to decipher the jargon before I could even understand the discipline. If there was a horse in it, I took it out.

They only let you take out a certain number of books on the same subject and I thought that was terribly unfair especially since nobody else was reading them. Back in those days, they stamped the card in the back of the book so I could tell that The Fundamentals of Horsemanship hadn’t been taken out in eight months. So I borrowed a couple of extras without checking them out and snuck them back in when I returned the others.

Some of this reading must have stuck because whenever there is something going on with a horse, nine times out of ten, I know what it is, and know what to do, though I usually call the vet because I don’t trust myself. Sometimes I get the vet out so I can diagnose it for him. But it makes me feel better to have someone out who actually went to school for this.

So right away I knew Harley had headshaking syndrome. And I called the vet anyway. He suggested a few different things. Nah, that doesn’t work. Yep, I did that. Nope, they tried that and studies show no improvement. No, I won’t give that drug because some horses colic on it. Etc.

Nothing works consistently or regularly with these horses. There is no cure and they don’t know what it’s from. It seems like all they know for sure is the trigeminal nerve in the nose gets triggered and your horse is basically shot. Not literally. Well, I guess sometimes, some mean owner would shoot his horse if he couldn’t ride him. But I was talking figuratively.

Some of these horses are seasonal and so I’ve been waiting for the right time, hoping and praying that Harley wouldn’t do it when summer was over and I could at least get some use out of him in the winter. Even though I am a fair weather girl, I would put on my ski mask, the kind that burglars wear, my thermal gloves and goose-down coat that you can’t move in and be happy that at least I can ride this horse sometime. I love to ride Harley. He’s my favorite. He thinks I’m his mommy and will jump off a bridge if I ask him to. He’s light and fast and he loves to run. It’s like flying, when you’re riding Harley. I would do anything to ride Harley. I would even ride him in the wind.

The Attack of the Spotted Donkey

2009-09-20T16:01:00.001-04:00

Spot went on the warpath. Spot is the polka-dotted donkey next door who has long ears like the dishes for banana splits and round, pink-rimmed eyes like he’s been crying. He’s the one Eldon puts his grandniece on, the little girl who is his pride and joy and whose knees Pearl keeps padded, even when she’s not on her bike—that’s how careful they are with her.

One morning, very early, before I was quite awake, I saw Spot’s long, banana split ears bobbing past the deck. That wasn’t right. I blinked to clear my head like I blinked that time I reached up into the kitchen cabinet to get a mixing bowl and there inside, as casual as cake batter, coiled like a garden hose, was a snake. I screamed even though I’m not afraid of snakes. It was the shock of it.

The dog, AKA the Big Stupid, was as shocked as I was, and he started barking and running from window to window, jumping on the sills, threatening to crash through the glass, spittle flying every which way and then Kurt’s alarm started ringing. I grabbed the phone, slid into my flip-flops, and even though I was braless and still in my guinea tee, hair sticking out all over the place and teeth unbrushed, I ran outside while I dialed Pearl and Eldon.

By the time I got into the yard, Spot was trying to crash through the barnyard fence and the horses, who are unaccustomed to uninvited visitors of the equine kind and especially those who are attacking, crowded around on their side of the fence, the old guy, Doc, in the back, and the little one, Minnie, looking quite like me, with hair sticking out all over the place, behind him. Bullet and Harley were in front. Everyone was screaming—the horses were whinnying and Spot was hee-hawing. In between hee-haws, with his neck stretched out as far as it would go, his jugular quivering, his nostrils flaring, Spot clapped his teeth together and bit the air. Once or twice he made contact and grabbed a hold of the skin on Bullet’s neck. Bullet reared back, releasing himself. I looked for blood. Then they spun around and kicked at each other. Wham! Wham! Wham! Someone’s foot landed on a rail with a loud clunk. But the board stayed up.

“Get back!” I screamed. “Get back!” I waved one hand and dialed the phone with the other.

It rang. And rang.

Com’on, com’on.

I ran to the barn and grabbed a halter and lead rope and ran back out again. I broke a flip-flip. I discarded the good one. It went flying up by the pool and perhaps landed in the water—I don’t know—I never found it.

Finally Eldon answered the phone and I blurted out what was happening, “Spot’s loose! He’s attacking the horses!”

“What’s that you say?”

“Spot’s loose! He’s trying to crash through my fence!”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Debi! Spot’s loose!”

“Alright. We be right over.”

When I got back over to the horses, Spot was on the top rail and it was making a cracking sound like how a log sounds in a wood splitter. I don’t know how he got up that high. He’s only as big as a large pony. But to see him in action… It was pretty impressive. My horses hovered around him even though, fence and all between them, and he was sorely outnumbered, he was getting the better of them. If that rail broke, he’d get in there and he’d kill at least one of them, if not all. I didn’t know what to do! He wasn’t backing off because I was yelling. He was completely oblivious to me. So I took aim and whaled the halter and lead rope. It hit him dead on. Whump! He jumped down off the fence, surprised, and ran back a few feet. Then he turned around and faced me.

Now I had to catch him. He took a couple of steps toward us again, trying to figure out a way to get around me.

All this time I could hear Kurt’s alarm still ringing and the dog barking in the house. Eldon was probably still putting his shoes on. I was going to have to do this myself. But I was barefoot. And I was scared. Spot is a stallion. Now I knew why they say don’t keep stallions unless you’re a breeder. Who would have ever guessed Spot to be so violent? Spot, the one whose pink nose I tickle and who loves to get his neck scratched. Spot, who lives peacefully on the other side of the lilacs along my driveway and gallops clumsily to the fence when he sees me coming with an apple. This was not the Spot I knew. This was more like one of those stallions fighting to the death on a National Geographic documentary, ripping flesh and cracking skulls with flailing forefeet.

I’ve heard stories about stallions. I’ve heard that one will suddenly, for no apparent reason, maybe he smells a mare on you, or you made some sort of an error with your body language, grab a hold of your arm in his mouth and lift you off your feet and shake you like a rag doll. If you are lucky, he will dislocate your shoulder. If not, he will take the whole arm off. But I had no choice. I couldn’t let him get my horses.

I squatted down, and while keeping my eyes on him, I picked up the halter and lead rope. I stood back up. I took a few steps forward, reached out and talked to him in baby talk. But he stared at me, stock still. I didn’t know if he was suspicious because I’d just whaled him, or he was getting ready to attack me. I got closer and closer. Easy. Easy. I could feel his breath on my knuckles. The horses behind me were running back and forth along the fence, still whinnying, they were so shook up.

I slipped the halter over his head. Nothing.

Around that time, Pearl and Eldon appeared. They scratched their heads.

“How in the world did Spot get hisself out? Someone musta left them gates open.”

They were not fazed by what happened. They couldn’t picture it. I knew they didn’t get it because they were too calm, thinking about getting back to their coffee. Eldon slipped a piece of baling twine around Spot’s neck and handed me back the halter.

“Well, thanks a lot,” he said. “Com’on Boy.”

“Sure looks like it’s gonna be a pretty one,” Pearl said, looking up at the sky as they walked across the street.

“No harm done,” I called after them. “I didn’t see any blood!”

Perhaps they think I’m some hysterical Yankee who gets all riled up because of some loose livestock? Spot is as gentle as a lamb! Next thing you know I’ll be complaining about roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing or flies congregating. Maybe they thought I was mad at them and they felt funny? Which I was not. Because accidents happen. Especially concerning animals. My own horses got loose one time and ran down the middle of a highway causing traffic to be stopped in both directions for two hours and damage to the manicured lawns of brick McMansions newly built in the neighborhood. So I know shit can happen.

I just wanted someone to say, “Oh my God! That was close! I can’t believe he did that! You must have been scared to death!” Anything! But only the dog seemed concerned.

A couple of days later, Pearl brought us over a big mess of green beans and we brought them over some watermelon. That’s what you do in the country to make sure there are no hard feelings.

And put up good fences.

A Crisis

2009-09-12T15:57:00.004-04:00

Kurt got fired. I might as well have said Kurt grew another arm, that’s how unbelievable it is. Especially because it wasn’t due to the economy. And certainly not because of Kurt’s performance. Turns out the boss was using him to get his store up and running and then when he thought it was stable, he fired Kurt and hired some hayseed who doesn’t know half what Kurt knows for half the pay. We put our all into that store. I even worked there for free. Who does that?

We all worked there--Kelly came into the store to help me clean

It was a major shock. Kurt has never gotten fired in his life. There was no warning. We had no idea. If anything, we were getting pats on the back. So we weren’t prepared. And we were hurt. How could this guy do this to us after how hard we worked? How could he do this to us after we did exactly what we said we were going to do and ran that store like it was our own? Knowing, knowing his store was our only income (don’t forget, I worked there for free) and we had a child to take care of? He didn’t even have the decency to give us any notice, not a single day’s notice, causing us to be in dire straits. In fact, the day before this happened, we spent Kurt’s entire paycheck, part on work clothes for that place. And I couldn’t even return them because I removed all the tags and washed them.

Everybody got sick from it—there was so much stress. This happened right around the time my mother took a turn for the worse so if you want to look on the bright side, if this hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been able to go up there for as long as I did because I was working at the store.

Even so, bright side, dark side, I couldn’t even talk about it on here until now.

The Chinese character for “crisis,” when translated into English, means “opportunity.” Maybe this was the kick in the pants we needed. In Jersey, we had our own company. But when we moved here, Kurt got wooed by a flooring store who heard abut his background and experience. A company van was dangled in front of our faces. There was a 401K plan, health insurance, vacations, raises. Still, we had to really think about it. We’d always been our own boss. But we were scared. Virginia is not New Jersey. Maybe we wouldn’t be successful around here? There just aren’t as many people down here to even buy flooring. And there’s that Yankee thing going on—will they trust me to do a good job for them? It sure would be nice to have a steady paycheck and not always have to worry and maybe even take a vacation like normal people do… And so we took the job.

Does anyone see the irony here? Couple works for themselves and does fine. Couple moves to a new area, feels insecure, and so works for someone else for the security. Ha! The first guy, though not intentionally bad, ended up giving us bounced paychecks because he was a poor businessman. He didn’t mean it. He was actually very good to us. But he put us in a hole. The second guy, who bought out the first guy’s store, had it all planned. He was the bad one. But that’s okay. If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s what goes around comes around. Anyone who has ever hurt me over the years has always gotten bad luck of some kind. I’ve sat back and waited and watched and something bad always happens to them. I don’t have to lift a finger. It’s nature. It’s karma. It’s even in the Bible. Whatever. The point being is if you are a bad person and you hurt people, your time will come. I’m sorry but somehow that makes me feel a little better.

My other consolation is that I know we are now going to be successful doing what we should have done from the get-go—being in our own flooring business—and the guy who screwed us is going to be crying when our company kicks his company’s ass and he realizes he blew it because he had two of the best people in the industry putting their hearts and their souls into his business.

Now we are putting our hearts and souls into our own business. It’s called Shop-At-Home Floors. I admit, it’s going to be tricky. We’re doing this on a shoestring because we’ve had no time to prepare and the economy is really bad, but that’s okay—if anybody can do it, we can.

And so now comes an exciting journey in our lives. The opportunity.

My Farm Girl

2009-08-31T12:18:00.003-04:00

Turns out, I have a real farm girl on my hands. Kelly has been itching to drive the tractor. We just started letting her drive the riding lawnmower this past year and that was out of desperation because the grass grows like it’s on steroids around here and the weed-whacker, a weapon of mass destruction even with goggles on and long pants, was out of the question. But the tractor? The tractor is big. It’s a vehicle on steroids. I don’t even drive the tractor! And I probably would have kept saying no but it happened while I was taking a nap and the father was in charge. I heard it running when I woke up and looked out the window. Kurt was raking the riding arena. Maybe he’d do the trails next. He’s so sweet. I sat down at this computer to do some work and the next thing you know I saw a shadow behind me as someone stepped up to the back door and came inside. I turned around. It was Kurt. Odd, since I could still hear the tractor.

“Is that our tractor?” I asked.

“Yep. Kelly’s driving it.”

“Kelly who?”

“Com’on, com’on, come and see,” he waved at me to get up. “Now don’t get mad,” he warned as we hurried across the yard.

What could I say? She probably wouldn’t be riding a bike either, if it wasn’t for Kurt telling me to stop being a big worry-wart. Or feeding the horses because they’re rude and obnoxious at feeding time so she might get stepped on, or even baking the cake like she’s doing right now in the kitchen because what if she gets her fingers caught in the mixer? I know, the tractor is a little bit different. But farm kids have been helping on the farm by driving tractors for as long as tractors have existed. Plus it’s much better than sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of iCarly or playing Farmville on the computer. This is the real farm.

Hay Day

2009-08-24T22:53:00.003-04:00

Hay day is the worst day of the year. Actually, it’s two or three days, depending on how much I can get from one hay supplier. I like to get as much as I can so it’s off my mind. That’s one of my big worries—feeding these horses. I always worry about the availability of hay. You’d think I wouldn’t have to give it a second thought in hay land. But I have a harder time finding hay down here where it grows right next door than I did in Jersey where people don’t even know what hay is.

For one thing, I don’t know if they take care of their horses different down here or what but no one seems to care about feeding their horses dusty or moldy hay. Whenever I warn that I won’t feed dusty or moldy hay, the farmers act like I’m one of those pain-in-the-ass Yankees who nitpicks about silly things and doesn’t know his head from a hole in the wall about raising farm critters. They eye me suspiciously and accuse me of putting blankets on my horses and talking baby talk to them, which I don’t do. Well, maybe the baby talk. Like Minnie. She’s just so cute you’ve got to.

I have to come up with reasons I won’t feed crap hay or else they’ll ignore me and sneak it in with the good stuff. Not because they’re necessarily trying to screw me, but because they think I am wrong. I should stop treating them horses like namby-pambies because them jokers are lucky they’re eating at all. Period. So I tell them I have an old guy who colics if he even looks at moldy hay. He’s allergic to it. Or he has heaves and can’t have any dust. And I have show horses, expensive show horses, and no they won’t eat around the mold—I have no grass here—they’ll eat every wisp of hay I put out there they’re so dumb. I’m still paying the vet bills from the last time… Not really but that’s what I say.

That usually stops the good guys but I’ve gotten hay from bad guys who’ve unloaded entire moldy, weedy loads on me that looked perfectly fine from the outside but was rotten and smelled like a grandmother’s basement on the inside and full of trash to boot. Very odd since the one we opened up to inspect was clean and green. I throw this hay over the fence for Eldon’s cows and he throws me back good bales even though I keep telling him don’t do it, I’m just glad to get rid of the stuff.

Forget bringing it back. After you get a bad load of hay, the supplier conveniently stops answering his phone and if you catch the wife, she has no idea what you’re talking about. She didn’t even know her husband was making hay for goodness sake. You might as well have the dog on the phone. You can take a chance and reload the whole thing and hope the supplier is there when you arrive or just drop it off whether he’s there or not, but either way, he’s not going to cough up your dough now or when he comes home because he’s already spent it on four NASCAR tickets, the light bill, not the electric bill, the light bill, and if it was a really big order, new tractor tires. Plus that hay was fine.

I never have the strength to bring it back. I’m lucky I go get it. In Jersey, I had it delivered. Every month I’d get a delivery of forty bales and they were always clean and green. Of course they were also double the price but you have to wonder how my hay man in Jersey could acquire good bales and in small quantities, when I have a hard time here where they make the stuff and when I do find it, I have to take all they’ve got and squeeze it in every nook and cranny, sometimes even filling up stalls to the ceilings, because there won’t be any more till the next cutting which is eight months away in May. They don’t store it for you down here. And they don’t deliver it.

So I take what I can and act real nice to Kurt when we have to go get it because he’s about ready to kill these horses for all the trouble they put us through including producing tons of manure and making us call the vet and then mysteriously getting better right before the vet arrives and stuff like eating the barn walls and breaking the electric fence, that kind of thing.

We got two hundred bales the other day. They were about forty pounds each. The hay guy, his wife, and the old father, all in straw hats and leather gloves, helped us load it into the horse trailer and pickup truck. I kept trying to make small talk so we could take a rest but they were in pretty good shape and kept on going, even the old guy who had white eyebrows and knotty legs. In fact, the old guy wasn’t even breathing heavy. It was kind of embarrassing since we were about ready to die.

They got us loaded up pretty quick. But when we got home, we had to do it by ourselves. Kelly and Motley got in the trailer and pushed the bales down. They came tumbling out onto the grass right in front of the hay shed and Kurt and I picked them up and stacked them inside. After a hundred, we had to go back and get the second load. By number one-hundred and eighty, I didn’t think I could go on. We were exhausted and we were starving. You really work up an appetite moving hay. The horses hung their heads over the fence and watched us like they had nothing better to do.

Now is the time that you would call and order a pizza for lunch but there’s no delivery of any kind out in the country. Now and then you might get lucky and the firehouse is having some kind of a fundraiser and you can go down there and buy a quart of Brunswick stew or barbecue, but in general, the best you can expect when you are exhausted and starving is putting some Pizza Bites in the oven. Times like this, you are too tired to even drive to town to get some Dairy Queen.

But the horses have hay.

Cleaning Up

2009-08-03T07:14:00.001-04:00

The farm was still standing when I got home. It was even straightened up. But it was dirty. This is how bad it was: It stunk. It took me two days to clean up the clutter that was thrown into the pantry. When I finally got inside, I found a plastic gallon with sour milk inside and the shelf was stained where the potatoes rotted and melted through the bag. The hot dogs in the refrigerator were green-molded. Hot dogs are full of preservatives—they last forever. I don’t think I can get the stains out of the toilet. Kurt said that’s okay; we need a new one anyway. It was dark. I replaced two light bulbs in the chandelier in the kitchen. I soaked the kitchen sink and the coffee pot in bleach. I Windexed, polished or scrubbed every horizontal surface in the house causing my sponge to disintegrate and my mop to fall apart leaving wet yarns all over the floor. The weeds were growing up through the deck and the deck is high. I’m sorry, it’s a cliché, but it was a jungle out there. The barn smelled like a cellar. Saddle pads were speckled with mold. Mud daubers built nests on the pommels of saddles and there was cat poop or puke, I couldn’t tell which, on the floor. No one picked up manure in weeks.

I’ve been cleaning non-stop. I’m glad to be home and get my place back in order. Even more glad to be with my husband and daughter again. (Even though those two were the culprits in this mess.) But I feel guilty about going on with my life, sweeping the porch, riding a horse, while my mother is suffering up there. I haven’t been able to talk to her since I got home. She’s been too incoherent. They have her on a heavy-duty pain drug that is knocking her out. I couldn’t help thinking, this is what it will be like if I lose her. I won’t be able to tell her about the stains in the sink or the weeds in the yard. I won’t be able to say, “Do you believe this Ma?”

And yet…I am distracted by the dust.

Mothering My Mother

2009-06-25T23:55:00.003-04:00

My mother needs me. I'll be gone for a while. I don't know if I'll be able to check in, but if not, I'll miss you all. Thank you for all the kind words, support and prayers. And the gifts from The Blue Ridge Gal and Blue Ridge Blue Collar Girl. You guys have made me feel better. Now I hope to help my mom feel better.

The Dreaded Wal-Mart

2009-06-10T19:43:00.002-04:00

Today I had to go to the dreaded Wal-Mart. I say “dreaded” because I hate that place. It’s a half day project and I don’t like to leave the farm period. Double that if it’s not horse related. I might leave if somebody says, “Hey, come and see my old farmhouse. It’s got bead-board walls and a claw-foot tub.” I might be excited to leave for that, especially if there’s a chance they’ll unload something old on me, perhaps a dusty old dresser they have no use for or even an old picture in a chipped and cracked gesso frame they think is ugly. Or I might leave for, let’s see…okay, I might be easily persuaded to go to a bake sale. If it’s not too far. Like say the firehouse was having something. I’d go down there. I’d be on the lookout for a pecan pie. You wouldn’t find any cheesecake. They’re not into that down here. That’s okay. I make my own. Three different kinds: New York style cheesecake, amaretto cheesecake and cream cheese pie. Kurt says I ought to sell my cheesecakes. That and my sauce. He says I can cater to the people from up north who can’t get good cheesecake and real Italian spaghetti sauce down here.

At any rate, I’d leave for a bake sale but I wouldn’t be happy about leaving for a candle sale, even though I like candles. Or a Christmas-in-July sale. Or a grand opening sale for a tire-and-auto parts store. It just wouldn’t be worth splitting for that when I know full well that when I get back a few hours later, the grass will have grown another foot and the horses will have dropped another ton of horse manure. Things pile up on the farm when you’re not home.

Sometimes you have no choice. Like when you are out of toilet paper, cat food and Blue Bunny Peanut Butter Panic ice cream. I mean, there’s no putting it off at that point. Plus I needed new socks again because they don’t make socks like they used to and about a month into it, you can’t keep them up anymore, no matter how careful you were about not stretching them out. Might as well think of them as disposable socks nowadays. So I had to go.

Like I said, it’s a half day project. It takes forty-five minutes to get there. That’s an hour-and-a-half in travel time alone. Then I talk to everyone. I can’t help it. Yankee or no Yankee, I am friendly. I like people. Especially the regulars, like the kind you find in Wal-Mart. I often want to stop and chat with the Wal-Mart greeter but they’re paranoid about having that job. There are so many jokes about Wal-Mart greeters that after they say, “Hi, welcome to Wal-Mart,” they just want you to not look at them and keep on going and don’t tell anybody you saw them there.

Don’t laugh but I’d love to have that job. I’d be wiping off carts, sanitizing handles (I’m a clean freak) and yakking my head off to whoever comes in. Say some old guy comes in to pick up his prescription. If he is wearing overalls, I might engage him in some conversation about the cutting of hay and the weather—how we’re all at its mercy and when is this rain ever going to stop? Or say a redneck guy comes in for a case of Mountain Dew. I might mention the NASCAR race. Like, “How about that wreck the other day?” If I had any idea. I’d have to keep up on those things if I was a Wal-Mart greeter.

I’ll tell you what makes me mad about those greeters. How come they don’t have a chair to sit on? They’re standing there all day long and what?—they can’t sit down for a minute? And most of them are old. That’s why I couldn’t have that job and I’m not even old. I’m one tough cowgirl out there pushing wheelbarrows full of horse manure and unloading grain, pulling weeds, pulling half-buried junk out of the mud in the dump that surfaces after it rains looking for something good. I mean, I have dents in my arms that define the muscle. I’ve got Michelle Obama arms. And strong legs like bull. And I wouldn’t be able to stand there all day long and not sit down for five minutes. I’m tough but my back would be killing me!

Anyway, the other reason I hate going to that place is because of the color. It is grey. It is dreary. It is the color of wet cement. It about makes you want to suck on an exhaust pipe if the conditions are right, like say you are due for your period. There are no windows. Where are the windows? You know, in the old days you’d go into a supermarket or a department store and hit songs would be playing (that’s what they called them back then—hits) but only the instrumentals, not the words: “Love is Blue,” “Close to You;” very soothing. There were big plate glass windows up front and you could look outside and see smiling ladies pushing shopping carts with little kids skipping beside them because no one dreaded going inside. They were in for a sunshiny shopping experience. They had a list that included cheerful groceries like Chex, Kool-Aid, Nestle’s Quik, a rump roast. Not a plain old roast. A rump roast. Whatever that is. A pineapple upside-down cake, peas-and-carrots, Jiffy Pop popcorn, St. Joseph’s Aspirin for Children and the ingredients for fondue. Perhaps they would pick up a Ladies’ Home Journal on the way out and the children would ride the mechanical horse up front in the bright sunshine that spilled in the windows and turned everything golden.

But the way Wal-Mart is today… I don’t know if they want you to actually forget there is an outside but when you’re in there, you might as well be in a cave. Maybe they don’t want the workers to see what they’re missing and make a run for the parking lot. There isn’t even any good music playing. I can’t get in and out of there fast enough. I often fill two carts since I put off going till I’m out of everything because I hate it so much. It takes forever. I have a lot to get, and in their defense, they usually have everything I need.

Except for American-made products. Like one time I was on a mission and decided, that’s it. I’m not buying Kurt a belt unless it’s made in America. I must have been making good time that day. Usually I just throw everything in the cart. I don’t care if I squash the bread or crack the eggs. I’ve got to get out of there! But I took out the glasses and looked for the tiny stamp on the underside of the belts. Made in China. Made in Pakistan. Made in Indonesia. Kelly and I went through every single belt on that rack. We were knee-deep in coils of leather like snakes around our legs and nope, not one American-made belt. That bothers me.

Looking on the bright side, I would probably spend more money if it wasn’t so dreary in there. But who has time to pick up a new toilet seat or a Swiffer WetJet Starter Kit on sale for sixteen-fifty when you’re rushing like a mad woman to get away from all that grey gloom? I did manage to grab a few cheerful groceries when I was in there today. Cream cheese, sour cream, graham cracker crumbs. I think I deserve a nice New York style cheesecake after going to Wally World. With cherries on top. I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rump roast.

(Check out www.GoingCrunchy.blogspot.com for another reason not to go to Wal-Mart.)

Bucking

2009-05-29T20:00:00.006-04:00

My parents offered to give Kurt and me their boat. It’s a beautiful 27-foot Sports Craft called the Cookie Too, named after my mother. Not being able to go on the boat is one of the things that Kurt misses the most about New Jersey. Occasionally he would drive all the way back there, just to go fluke fishing with my father. Eight hours one way just to go fishing when we have a lake right down the block. It’s crazy. But sailing along the Hudson, cruising around the Statue of Liberty, reeling in fluke or bluefish or even sharks, is a little bit different than standing on a bank casting a line. Plus, I know that part of it is the special relationship that he has with Dad.

So they offered us the boat when they got too sick to keep up with it. Even though they could use the money by selling it, they would have liked it if Kurt had the Cookie Too. Kurt is dying to get a boat. We’re walking distance to the lake. We could hop in it and cruise across the lake and park it, go have some lunch or go shopping. We’d catch some fish. No sharks. But maybe some of those country fish like catfish or bass. Do people even eat bass? I don’t know, but it’d be fun. Even without the Statue of Liberty.

But we had to say no thank you. The boat is too big to pull back and forth on a trailer. It needs to be docked. And it doesn’t make sense for us to rent a slip, which is very expensive, and we really can’t afford, when we can keep one right here in our own backyard and just pull it down the block when we feel like going out and not have to pay a dime. It broke our hearts to turn it down. Not only because this was a free boat, but because it was the Cookie Too. Someday we’ll save enough money to buy something smaller.

In the meantime, I’ve been riding that buckskin out there, affectionately called “the Bad Boy.” He’s not really a bad boy but he’ll buck at the blink of an eye. His mode of operandi is to buck. Even if the situation doesn’t call for it. Even if it’s overkill. For example, the other day while eating grass in the barnyard, he farted and scared himself. So he bucked. He’s very flamboyant that way.
But at the risk of jinxing myself, and to his credit, he’s never bucked with me on him. Still. I know he’s got it in him. And so I wear a helmet. I don’t normally wear a helmet. I’m going to be honest here. It’s dorky. I look like a big egg head. Yeah, yeah, I tried those helmets with the cowboy hat attached. I looked like a big egg head with a cowboy hat attached.

Maybe that’s why that chick tried to run me over the other day. Because I was really ugly in that helmet and needed to be put out of my misery.

I wear a helmet when I’m on a new horse, or training a young one, or on one I don’t completely trust. Don’t bother telling me that an accident can happen on any horse, it can be the nicest Rusty in the barn and I’m stupid as well as ugly. I know. I have no defense.

Kelly’s a different story. Kelly is not allowed to ride without a helmet and even if she was, I don’t think she’d do it because I’ve got her brainwashed about it. At least give me credit for that. She’s been wearing a helmet since she was three-years-old and she thinks she looks quite happening in her brown suede Troxel. Even if she thought she looked like an egg-head, and even though I don’t normally wear one and it might occur to her to demand that I practice what I preach or else she doesn’t want to wear one either because it’s not fair, too bad—she’s still wearing one otherwise she doesn’t get on the horse. That’s the rule. She’s lucky I don’t make her wear body armor…

Anyway, poor Bullet. I’ve given him a bad reputation by badmouthing him all over the place about how he’s a bucker and I’ve got to wear a helmet when I am riding him when everyone knows I don’t normally wear a helmet so he must be really bad. And the poor horse hasn’t done anything wrong! He hasn’t even given me a dirty look! Of course he has that gate issue. But that’s why I’m taking him to Ducky, the trainer. Kurt calls him “the Duckster.” Now he’s got other people calling him that. My girlfriend the other day, on the phone: “So, did you bring the Bad Boy over to the Duckster?” I don’t know. Maybe he’ll like that name. It’s much cooler than Ducky. It sounds fast. And barrel racers want to be fast. Ducky is one of the fastest barrel racers around here. He’s like a monkey on a horse and wears a cowboy hat with a big feather in it but no helmet. I did take Bullet to him last week and he gave Bullet a good workout. He never once called him “the Bad Boy.” In fact, he was quite impressed with him and asked who trained him. I looked at Kurt. Kurt looked behind him. When he realized no one was there, he said, “Uh, I did?”

“You did a great job,” the Duckster told him.

I saw Kurt’s chest well up. In that instant, I thought he was actually going to start riding again, being so proud and inspired. But no. He’s still bucking for a boat. No pun intended.