Things You Need on a Farm

I can’t even imagine how often the heat would be going on if I didn’t have a woodstove. Thank god we got the woodstove. I have the stove going around the clock and still the oil heat kicks on every time I’m in the smoking room, aka, the basement.

I’ve relegated myself to the basement in a desperate attempt to cut down. It’s working pretty well. I’m smoking half as much as I used to smoke. Who wants to go down into the basement every time you want to smoke? It’s not a finished basement. The floor is cement and when there’s a lot of rain, a trickle of water runs down the center of it to a pit where the sump pump is. There are paint cans, buckets of joint compound, and plastic jugs of water in case the electric goes out and it’s not worth pulling out the generator because we think it’s going to come back on again. Like if there was no reason for the electric to go out—no snow, no wind, no rain. Nothing’s happening weather-wise. That means there was probably an accident—someone went into a pole—and as soon as they clean it up, the electric will come back on again. But if there’s a reason, if there’s any kind of precipitation, it could take days.

These are things you need on a farm. A woodstove and a generator.

People don’t realize that, when you’re out in the country and you lose your electric, you not only lose your lights and can’t watch The Bachelor, but you lose your water too because you have a well and the pump runs on electric. My sister thinks I’m out there hand-cranking it, but that’s not the case. For someone who has horses, it’s a disaster since horses drink about a dozen gallons of water per day each and if they don’t have water, they can colic. My first pony died of colic so I’m really paranoid about that. If you have six horses, that’s seventy-two gallons of water a day. That’s a lot of water. It’s not like you could run down to Walmart and get a few jugs off the shelf. Well, you could, but that would be the last thing you’d want to do because it would be really expensive. Like if it was an apocalyptic situation. You know, an end-of-the-world thing and your horses were dying of thirst. Of course if that was happening, even though I love my animals dearly, I think we’d be hoarding the water for ourselves. The horses get their feet done and their teeth floated before I get new shoes or go to the dentist, but you have to draw the line somewhere. So I would go down to Walmart if I had to. It would have to be really bad but not end-of-the-world bad.

Last summer it got really bad. We had a fierce storm that knocked out power for a week. I almost had to resort to Walmart but then Kelly’s boyfriend showed up with a 250-gallon container full of water sloshing around in the back of his truck. He had rustled up the container from his grandfather’s farm, brought it over to a friend’s farm where he rinsed it out (including using bleach because he knows what a fanatic I am about the horses) and filled it up, and then brought it back here for our horses to drink. I felt like the Calvary arrived!

Since then, one of our neighbors who is an electrician, rigged something up on the electrical box so that now all we have to do is plug the generator in and flip a switch if the power goes out and we’ll have water. He didn’t charge us a thing. I tried to pay him, I was so grateful, but he waved his hand and said to just give him a good deal when he needs new carpet someday.

The electric has gone out twice since we got the woodstove put in and the gizmo installed on the box. I dared it to. It was flickering. I said, “Go ahead you sucker! I don’t need no stinkin’ lights!” It came back on so fast I didn’t even have to get a log but I felt very secure knowing that, no matter what, we were going to be warm and the horses were going to have water. Because we have a woodstove and a generator.

And good people around us. That is something you need on a farm.

The Virginia Houses

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.

The Simple Life

Five years ago, we left New Jersey to live the simple life. We figured we’d kick back a little, ride the horses, grow some tomatoes, maybe even spin some wool. Nah, not spin wool. Who am I kidding? I can’t even hem a pair of pants. But I figured I could manage a couple of tomatoes. This is what an average morning is like for me now:

I get up at five and get the fire going again. Even though we put in new heat, and the plastic on the windows, which are also new and shouldn’t even need plastic, and even with the woodstove going—which before we moved to the country, I thought would be romantic—I am still freezing my ass off here.

I get the coffee going. I read a few e-mails. Then I get the kid up and out to school. This involves cries about homework that was forgotten and suddenly remembered, papers that need to be signed that I wasn’t told about the night before even though I asked, the need for new pencil lead or hand sanitizer or a one-inch binder with a picture of Hannah Montana on it or else she’s going to get into big trouble, plus disagreements about whether the child is warm enough or looks nice enough (“You look like a rag-picker!”) and won’t she please let me make her some grits or a nice soft boiled egg?—Toaster Strudels are okay once in a while but not every morning. Might as well eat a candy bar. Kelly says that’s a good idea. Kendal’s mother let’s her eat candy in the morning. Then I let her go out the door with her coat hanging open and no hat because I can’t stand to annoy her one more time. I tell myself, she knows if she’s cold.

Next I get Kurt up. I make numerous trips up the stairs. The first trip consists of loving kisses and cheerful statements such as, “It’s a beautiful day in Virginia!” and “Com’on you handsome devil!” On trip number four, there is rough shaking, lies about what time it really is and warnings that if he’s late, his boss might fire him. This causes hysterical laughter. It doesn’t necessarily get him up.

But I can’t keep farting around. I have to go outside to feed the horses before they start stampeding. I peek out the window and see them leaning against the fence, trying to pop the boards off. They are staring at the house hard. They think if they concentrate hard enough, they can will me to come out. Actually, it works. I tell Kurt he better get up because I’m not coming back—I’ve got to go feed. He kicks the blankets roughly like there’s a big spider after him and furiously pulls them over his head and barks “Go away!” Now his feet are sticking out of the covers but I don’t say nothing.

I go downstairs and feed the dog. After he’s done, he takes a drink and forgets to close his mouth when he exits the bowl area. Half the water dribbles onto the floor. I step in it. I grab a new pair of socks which I keep on the shelf by the phone just for this reason and put them on. I put his blaze orange collar on so he doesn’t get shot in the woods. I put on my boots, a ski mask like the kind burglars wear, my Giants jacket if it’s normal cold, or the heavy duty mother that’s made for Michigan or Maine, if we’re getting an Arctic blast. Meaning really really cold. I top it off with Thermolite gloves with micro insulation (don’t ask me, that’s what it says on the tag and I assume that’s how it translates from the Chinese writing on the other side). They are so thick I can’t wiggle my fingers. I have to keep taking them off to do things like pick up the newspaper or open up the trash can. Which defeats the whole purpose. My fingers are numb before I even get to the barn.

The horses are thrilled to see me. They adore me, those horses. Why wouldn’t they? A large part of our relationship consists of me feeding them. And it’s not easy. They all have to be separated or else the herd leader, who lives on air, will gobble up his grain and then go eat the next-in-line’s, who in turn will go eat the grain belonging to the one below him and so on. (Not unlike the Wall Street guys.) This will leave the old guy, who needs the most and takes the longest to eat it, with nothing. (Kind of like our senior citizens.) So I catch them all and separate them. (Similar to government regulation.) It’s tricky. When they see me, they are like a busload of sugared-up school kids let out for the summer. Run! Yay!

While the horses are eating, I fill the water barrels, drain the hose, feed the barn cat, empty a fifty-pound bag of grain and empty the ash can which weighs about thirty pounds. I carry a bucket of water with me to pour on the ashes in case they’re still hot and that weighs about twenty pounds. I’m like a Dutch girl carrying two buckets to the dam. Next, I get kindling, more batteries for the electric fence which is dead again since they don’t make anything in America anymore, and I bring some moldy hay over to Pearl and Eldon who will give it to their cows. Then I pick up manure.

This is when I do my best thinking. This is when I came up with the idea for this story. This is when I mull things over and decide what exactly my sister-in-law meant by that remark anyway and wasn’t that Amish guy who was selling ham steaks in the town market gorgeous? I didn’t know they could be that good looking. I mean, he was seeexxxxyyyy. I wonder if he is considered hot in the Amish world? Maybe they don’t think he’s all-that in those phoneless dark houses? Maybe they think he’s really ugly and that’s why they make him go and sell the ham steaks to the heathens in town who talk on the phone every waking minute? Every culture is different about what it finds attractive. Oprah did a show about a country that thinks fat ladies with big butts are the ideal. The fatter the better. Talk about paradise. We all ought to move there and take the pressure off. I mean, imagine being encouraged to gorge on macaroni-and-cheese and chocolate cake and bragging about your cellulite?

While thinking such important things, I make two trips down to the manure pile to dump the wheelbarrow. Four if the horses have been in the stalls. On the way back up the hill, I say something slightly derogatory about Kurt—okay, I cursed him—because the wheel on the wheelbarrow is still broken and he hasn’t fixed it. I can hardly push it. I stop to rest. The guilt I was indoctrinated with in Catholic school kicks in. The poor guy’s been working day and night for God’s sake! He’ll get to it when he can! I make a mental note not to vie for the clicker tonight. If he wants to watch Two and a Half Men or CSI even though it’s a repeat and The Bachelor’s on, that’s fine. I look at the beautiful mountain behind my farm and remind myself that this is my dream. I cry, “Look at that mountain, will you?! Just look at that, you ungrateful thing!” The dog runs over. I bend down and pet him. “No, I’m not calling you.” Then, recharged, I start pushing again.

I get wood. I hose out the broken wheelbarrow and wash the mud off the wheel so it’ll turn easier and squirt off my boots. Clumps of clay fall to the lawn. No matter how careful I am, my ankles get wet and my sweatpants are spattered red like I’d been slaughtering pigs. Which I would never do. Farm or no farm, I’m one of those hypocrites who eats meat but who thinks the people who butcher them are mean and cruel. Someday I am going to get a pig as a pet and call her something funny like Paris.

I drain that hose. I fill the wheelbarrow with logs and start pushing. Even with the broken wheel, it’s still easier than carrying it by hand. See, here’s the thing. All the wood-getting I saw on the Waltons or read about in books showed the people carrying an armload of kindling into the house, whistling, leading me to believe that that was all it took. A simple armload. No wonder I thought it was romantic. Anybody can get one armload of wood. One armload of wood would be worth doing for the atmosphere alone. But in real life, one armload is nothing. One armload would barely warm my cute little button nose. One armload of wood is like spitting on the windshield of the truck, wiping it with your sleeve and saying you’ve been to the car wash. It’s nothing.

At any rate, I push the wheelbarrow to the deck and make eight trips up the steps to the sliding glass doors on the side of the house where the stove is. Up and down….up and down….up and down….up and down….up and down….up and down….up and down….up and down—just to give you an idea of what eight times feels like. Only carrying about forty pounds of wood per shot. (Funny how I know how much everything weighs except for myself—I don’t own a scale and I’m not getting one and if I’m unaware that I put on a few extra pounds from all that Peanut Butter Panic Ice Cream, well then, so be it; after all this work on the farm, I think I deserve it.) I stop and look at the mountain again.

Then I check the heater in the well house and I spend ten minutes (while squatting because you can’t stand up in there since the roof is only yay high) turning it higher, because I’m paranoid the holding tank is going to freeze, then turning it lower, because I’m worried about my electric bill, then turning it up again, then down again. No spot on the dial gives me peace. Finally, I curse Kurt again because he hasn’t insulated the well house or fixed the door and if it was insulated and if I didn’t have to hold that door closed with a rock, I wouldn’t have to worry about this and I can’t do it, I can’t do it all, I can’t do everything here, I’m a girl, I’m just a girl, I shouldn’t have to do the guy stuff too!

Then, the nuns from Catholic school again. Sister Grace Gabriel is poking me in the head and swinging that crucifix like she is going to smack me with it. It’s brutal. I better toe the line and be nice. I make a mental note to check if I have the ingredients to make Kurt’s favorite dessert tonight. Maybe even give him a massage while he’s watching Two and a Half Men.

Next, I drag the garbage cans over to the truck, heave them up onto the bed and the dog and I go down to the dump. I pull over and pick up any litter that’s on the road. I stop on average from my house down to the main road about six times. Slam on the brakes when I see a Chick-fil-A wrapper, throw it in park, jump out, ding, ding, ding, the door’s opened with the key still in it so it’s beeping, the dog is rushing from window to window, whatever side I am on, getting drool all over the glass, grab the trash, shove it in the trash can deep so it doesn’t blow out, and jump back in. Effie drives by while I am bending down for an Old Milwaukee can. She taps her horn and an empty Wal-Mart bag flies out of the back of her truck. I get that too.

Back home, I clean the house (I suppose if I wasn’t a clean freak I could forgo this part, but I am, very anal and Felix Unger-like, so that’s not going to happen—I tried it once and went into a deep depression and I still have nightmares over those unmade beds and the coffee cup in the sink), do the laundry, stoke the fire, pay bills and make the phone calls. Kurt needs his cholesterol medication renewed. There was a mistake on the insurance bill. I have to call Kelly’s school where hopefully they won’t mention that she looks like a rag-picker and is not wearing a hat, and I need to make an appointment with the accountant and the horse vet.

On some days, I do what I call “an extra”—paint something, clean bookshelves or wash the blinds and the curtains which are full of soot from the woodstove. Sometimes I do errands. Sometimes they’re kind of fun like yesterday I got my hair cut at Wanda’s House of Beauty where the entire procedure cost me less than what my sister tipped the girl for doing my hair up in Jersey. I didn’t tell Wanda that—I don’t want her getting any ideas. Then I picked up ten bales of hay, two gallons of milk—whole for the coffee and one-percent for drinking—and one jar of peach butter that the lady in the bank sells for the rescue squad.

When the weather is nice, I somehow squeeze in riding a horse.

This is an average morning in the country. I didn’t spin any wool, but it was a lot. Next time I’ll tell you what happens after lunch.

Bad Weather

I’m a weather wimp. I know you’re supposed to be used to it when you live on a farm. You’d think I would be since I am out in it all the time. It doesn’t matter what it’s doing out there. If it’s raining or snowing or so cold the hairs in your nose feel like fiberglass, I’m still out there carrying flakes of hay and buckets of grain. There are certain jobs I can get away with not doing when the weather’s bad, but at the least, the horses still have to be fed.

I think I have it bad but my friend in Iowa says it is so cold up there that when the temperature drops below zero, it stops being cold. Everything gets still and farmers are tempted to unzip their coats and take off their hats. Some of them let their guard down and they plant seeds too early or jump in the pool. These are the ones who are found days later encased in blocks of ice. Whole families chip away at them using ice picks and hammers and then they thaw them out by the woodstove and make them promise to never be so gullible again.

The wind is the worst. I just got done chasing a piece of vinyl siding down the road. Then I couldn’t get the garage door to stay closed. Even two cinder blocks and the iron head of a sledge hammer wedged against it didn’t keep it shut. I found a boulder and pushed it because it was too heavy to carry. Luckily it was right behind the garage so I didn’t have to go far. When I got everything jammed up against the door, I realized the Big Stupid, aka Motley, the dog, was inside.

The wind was one of the reasons we left Oklahoma. I didn’t know about the wind when we moved out there. That’s supposed to be Kansas where the Wizard of Oz happened. But in Oklahoma, the wind blew all the topsoil away and tumbleweeds the size of small ponies, all the patio furniture and half the roof bounced across the hard red dirt that was left behind on a daily basis. If I had any inclination of moving back there, where there are rodeos galore and all the men wear cowboy hats even when they’re just going to Wal-Mart, wind whipping nips that idea right in the bud.

When the weather is bad in the country, the electric is iffy. Most people have a generator. And we do too but it’s in the shop even though it’s brand new because it’s probably made in China like the rest of the junk we are forced to buy nowadays. The last time I was in Wal-Mart, buying Kurt a belt, I was determined not to buy anything made in China. Usually I am in a big rush and I don’t have time to get out my glasses and turn the thing over, trying to find out where it’s made. Just finding the price is hard enough. But this time I pawed through every single belt on the shelves, throwing them over my shoulder where they landed behind me in a big pile on the floor. I could not find a single belt in his size that was American-made. I said to myself, “What am I in, Hong Kong?”

Up north, it’s not the end of the world when the electric goes off even though they think it is because they can’t use their hair dryers or their high definition TVs. They scream their heads off and threaten to sue. But they don’t have it as bad as they think because they still have water. Most people up there have city water. But in the country, we have wells and since the pump works by electric, we lose the water. You can’t flush the toilet, you can’t finish rinsing out your hair if it was all full of shampoo when the electric went off and you can’t do the dishes. Which is a big problem since the dishwasher is always full when this happens and there are no more clean forks.

After I got back from chasing the siding down the street and getting the garage door to stay shut, the electric went off. I had nothing on in the house. No radio, no TV, I wasn’t running the vacuum. But all of a sudden, it was dead quiet. Still, like Iowa gets when the temperature goes below zero.

You don’t realize the sounds a house makes even when it’s quiet until there is no more juice. It skids to a halt. You don’t hear the humming of the refrigerator which you never noticed until it stopped or the drone of the digital clock. You don’t hear the heat pump kick on. It gets cold fast. Luckily, in the country, most people also have a woodstove. For some people, even though this is 2008, it is their only source of heat. We use our woodstove to save money on the electric bill and also because I like the way it smells and the way the smoke looks coming out of the chimney. It looks like the cover of a country music CD. And whenever the electric goes off, at least we can stay warm.

I ran right outside and gathered up some sticks for kindling. It seems appropriate that the wind knocks the electric off and also makes all the dead branches fall into the yard for starting a fire. I got the fire going and then sat at the dining room table reading a book in front of it. Even though it was still day time, it was hard to read. I thought about how people didn’t have any electric in the old days, and how some still don’t, here in the country. No wonder why they went to bed early. Not only can’t you see, but there’s nothing to do. When Kurt and Kelly come home from doing errands, I would suggest we play a game of checkers. Or talk. That would be funny. We talk all the time. But we talk while we do things. While Idol is on. While we’re reading our e-mail. While we’re carrying our pajamas to the bathroom to take a shower. Would we suddenly feel pressured because that was all we had to do? Maybe we’d go to sleep. But if we went to bed too early, the fire wouldn’t make it through the night and we’d wake up at two in the morning with frostbite. Maybe I’d make an egg on the top of the woodstove. By all rights you should be able to cook on top of it. That should be right up my alley. Very country-like. But forget it. No water. I’m a clean freak. How would I clean it?

After I got out the candles, the house roared to life. The refrigerator came on, the DVR on top of the TV powered up, everything started beeping. Kurt and Kelly came home with Dairy Queen because I had called them on the cell phone to say don’t think I’m cooking any eggs on the woodstove. And then it started raining. It was an icy rain, hitting the windows hard and bouncing off the deck like a broken strand of beads. I jumped up and started the dishwasher real quick. If the electric went out again, at least we would have clean cups.