Friday Night in the Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.