I'm Cranky and that's Tough Shit

Smoking stand my nana and I used to use on her front porch. We were big smokers together. Nana died of lung cancer.

I’m not smoking. It’s been two weeks. It’s hard. But I’m doing it. That’s all I feel like saying right now. Wait. I’ll say this. For a while I was pissed because it seemed like all the people who’ve been nagging me and pressuring me and getting on my case and driving me crazy all these years to quit have suddenly dropped off the face of the earth. Dropped off the face of the earth! No calls. No pats on the back. No inquiries about how I am doing other than the perfunctory questions at the beginning of our phone conversations—“So how’s it going?”—followed by obvious disinterest in the details of how it’s going if I actually attempt to get it off my chest. Forget flowers. How come no one sends anyone flowers when they quit smoking? This is big! And we get no flowers.

What are they thinking?! Two weeks have gone by and I’m supposed to be over an addiction I was doing every fifteen minutes for almost forty years?! I never even had a job where I couldn’t smoke freely! It’s like they think, She’s good. It’s been two weeks. And then they tell me about their vacation plans and Girl Scout cookie orders and Brazilian bikini waxes. As if this fight for my life is suddenly over-with because I could actually get out of bed this week and wash my face. Which goes to show that they had no idea what I was grappling with when I was smoking if they think I could function and care about vacation plans, Girl Scout cookies, and Brazilian bikini waxes two weeks after quitting.

Then I thought, fuck ‘em. I didn’t quit for them anyway. I don’t need their approval or their support. I am doing this for me.

As you can see, I’m a bit cranky. One time I lost a friendship when I quit smoking because I was cranky. Well, not only that, but it was morning and everyone knows I’m not a morning person. So what happened was, this girl Sherley and I had an argument about how mules are stubborn. I said it in passing and she took a shit fit. She’d just bought a couple of mules. I had no idea she was going to be so touchy. I didn’t mean anything by it. Mules have a reputation for being stubborn. Everyone knows that. Great jokes have come from it. Plus god knows Sherley freely said many things to Kurt and I that most people would construe as very rude and we didn’t take a shit fit. She’s not exactly the sensitive type. Like one time she asked us what we paid for one of our horses, a horse we were very proud of, and when we told her, she screamed, and I quote, “Are you people f-ing crazy?!” We let that, and all the other obnoxious crap that used to come out of her mouth, go. So I was quite surprised that my comment about mules being stubborn got her so upset. But that’s not why I’m saying I was cranky—because I made the comment. I was cranky because I didn’t have any patience for her reaction to the comment. When she started screaming, I said, “Bye bye,” and haven’t talked to her since.

I’m not saying bye-bye to any of my other friends. They really haven’t been as non-supportive as I made out. I am cranky. But I’m not smoking because when I set my mind to something, I'm as stubborn as a mule.

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.

A Girl of Steel

Kelly put up the round pen by herself. She said, “That’s it; I’m not waiting anymore.” We’d been here for two months but hadn’t been able to get to it. We had to put up fences, bulldoze dirt, and find places to put all the stuff sitting in the middle of the barn that we used to keep in the garage because we don’t have a garage here yet. We had to paint, unclog bathtubs, fix windows, change faucets, and put up a mailbox. (The mailbox might have been a bad idea because it was promptly stuffed with bills.) We had to repair the washing machine (washing machines are always broke when I move to new houses, even if they are brand new, which made me madder at Slow Bob for extorting me for mine), install a dishwasher, and change light fixtures and light bulbs high up on the roof of the barn so we could see where we were walking at night.

I’m not even talking about the unpacking. I’m not talking about finding hay, a farrier, a vet, a doctor for the humans, the dump, a new bank, an oil company, and motor vehicle where we went back and forth a half dozen times to change our licenses, registrations, and get the vehicles inspected. Of course the van failed because Kurt didn’t get all dressed up and lead the guy on like I did. So then we had to find a new car mechanic. I still don’t have one of the trailers done. It still has Virginia plates on it and is, in fact, illegal. So the round pen was low priority.

But Kelly was itching to ride because it turns out we’re in a real horse community and she joined the 4-H club and Future Farmers of America and made friends with the other girls in town who wear blinged-out belts, pink camouflage caps, and barrel race like she does.

But I wouldn’t let her get on any of the horses until they’d been worked in the round pen first. They had been sitting around for months twiddling their thumbs while we packed and unpacked and were jumping out of their skin being in a new place and on a busy road where a whooshing car made them all throw up their heads and take off. The perimeter of the property was not fenced in yet so there was no safe place to ride if someone bucked while Kelly was texting and she fell off. Even though she swears she never texts when she rides.

I’m a worrywart mommy. She’s got the helmet and the emergency-release stirrups and I insist on working a horse in the round pen first after he’s been off from work for any length of time. It’s not the same as on a lunge line. In the round pen, they can really blow off steam. At the least, you can see what you’ve got under the hood. Some people might say I’m overprotective. I don’t care. It’s a dangerous sport. She’s lucky she’s riding period.

So she put up a whole sixty-foot, steel round pen by herself. She had to drag it over, panel by panel, from the other side of the yard. I have no idea how she got it started and got the first panel up. You have to hold the first one up so you can attach the next one to it. Then you angle them like a Hallmark card to keep them standing while you get the third one. You can’t angle one panel all by itself so I don’t know how she did it. It’s a job for two men! But it’s up now and she’s been riding. She rides most days, trying to get her horse conditioned so that she’s ready for the barrel racing season.

Now I have to figure out how to get her to put the stall mats down. I’m thinking, how can I link the stall mats to the prom?

A Love/Hate Relationship with a House

At one time, I had more rooms in my house than I knew what to do with. We had ten rooms if you count the scullery and the enclosed porch, but not the exterior porches (three down and an upstairs sleeping porch),

the bathrooms, the attic, the cellar, and the hallways which were big enough to rearrange the furniture that was in them when I had a better idea. Of course that house almost killed us, trying to heat it.

We had two gas furnaces, one up and one down, four fireplaces (two with woodstoves), and an outside wood furnace that took two pickup truck beds full of wood per week to keep going. And still we were cold.

I have a love/hate relationship with that house. I feel guilty for unloading it because it was incredibly beautiful with original details like bead-board on all the walls and ceilings (one of the reasons we couldn’t heat the place—I’m talking about individual slats of one-inch bead-board, not paneling),

unpainted woodwork,

windows with wavy glass, a built-in china cabinet with the original owner’s name penciled inside and the date—1904,

turn-of-the-century light fixtures, and fifty-three acres of land abundant with flowers and flowering trees like purple plum trees, ornamental cherries,

rhododendrons, azaleas, and hibiscus. There were also red bud trees, crepe myrtle, a weeping cherry, wisteria, and daffodils. There were cobblestone paths, gurgling creeks with hand-made bridges,

meadows and fields, barns, a cottage, and a carriage house that once was a rest stop for horses and buggies.

It was truly a beautiful place, more than anything I ever imagined having, and I continuously worked on it, feeling like I was saving it from the previous owners who had wrecked it. It took me two full years just to paint it. I couldn’t use a roller because of all the gaps in the bead-board and so I had to do it all by hand, including the ceilings. It took three coats of paint altogether because it had to be primed first. The ceilings were high, maybe another three feet or so higher than most standard ceilings, so that added to the painting, giving me more wall to cover and adding to the difficulty since I had to maneuver the ladder around. I finished painting it right about the time we sold it. Maybe it was the painting that almost killed me but I didn’t care because I loved that house and I worry about it because a house can so easily fall into the wrong hands and fall into disrepair and an old house, especially, needs constant attention and definitely constant painting.

I also feel guilty because I like the person I sold it to. I didn’t tell her about the Evils who lived next door. If you can call it next door. It was across the road, through the creek, and over the mountain if you went by four-wheeler or horseback. If you drove, it was three miles around. But it was the adjoining property nonetheless. The Evils were the previous owners who had wrecked it. Even though they were only there for a short time, perhaps they felt they had a claim to it forever, or maybe they just felt they had the right to ride roughshod over anyone in their path. At any rate, it was close enough for the Evils to stalk, harass, vandalize, rob, and assault me and my family. For what reason in their sick, demented minds, I really have no idea. The only thing I can come up with is they thought I called Animal Control on them. I hadn’t. But I was thinking about it. This was a bit of information I neglected to share with the person I sold the place to when I was telling her how lovely the purple plum trees looked when they were blooming.

I justified it by telling myself that I was going to die from the stress if I didn’t get out of there. I also told myself that the new owner—let’s call her Naomi—sort of deserved it because she tricked me into giving her the place for fifty grand less than I had planned to. Okay, forget “sort of.” There’s no “sort of.” If I’m going to be honest here, I wholeheartedly thought she deserved it, I was so mad that she scammed me on the price of the house. (Of course business is business and she was clever—I really can’t fault her for that.) I also thought that just because the Evils were attacking me, didn’t mean they would attack her, though I have to admit, if their record of fighting with everyone around town was any indication, it didn’t look good for the new owners.

But all’s well that ends well. Naomi was stronger than me and I think she was meant to be there (someday I will tell you the harp story) because she gave the Evils a run for their money and was instrumental in them finally getting arrested for animal abuse and it wasn’t long before they lost their house and hightailed it out of there, leaving the neighborhood the bucolic and peaceful place it once was.

(Ironically, they rented a place in the same county I had moved to and though I lived in fear of running into them, and did in fact see them in Walmart one time, which caused me to abandon my cart full of Great Value paper towels and Suave conditioner, I never saw them anywhere near my side of the county and so they had no idea where I lived.)

In addition, Naomi forgave me for selling her the place. When I finally came out with it, the story of what the Evils had done to us, and apologized for not telling her, she didn’t sue me, retaliate, or even get mad. We keep in touch. The Evils are gone and she got the place for a good price. Of course she’s freezing her ass off in there. But once the purple plum trees start blooming, she’ll forget all about that.

Transformations

I decided to finally use my nana’s glasses. I’d been carrying them around, from house to house, for thirty years. Thirty years! I didn’t want to break them. They were too sentimental to be mixed up with the I Love Horses mug and the cereal bowls in the sink. Also, I thought they were ugly. But they’ve somehow gotten beautiful, transforming themselves inside yellowed newspapers and a Pabst Blue Ribbon box, like a butterfly transforms itself inside a cocoon. Though they look exactly the same. Now I love them. Not only because they were hers, but because they’ve gotten old enough to be cool. I’m waiting to see Don holding one on Mad Men.

So now I’m looking around for what else is cool. I hate it when I suddenly remember something that at one time I thought was ugly, mostly out-of-style items that weren’t old enough, that I got rid of. I might have called these things “hideous.” Then I remember that I gave it away, or worse, threw it away, like the floor lamp with three cone-shaped metal shades perforated in an atomic starburst design to let the light shine through. I threw this cool piece into the garbage when we moved to Sturm Lane (our first house in Jackson) and were cleaning it out because it was an estate sale and it was full of junk.

We had to get a Dumpster, there was so much junk in the house. Mostly old stuff, so I was thrilled. It had been an old man’s summer home in the woods near the lake, a sort of Adirondacks in central Jersey, because that’s what Jackson was in the thirties up until the nineties (when suburban sprawl took over), Adirondack-like, mixed with chicken farms, and towards the end, horse farms. The kids (kids—they were senior citizens themselves at this point) sold the place with everything in it, picking out choice items they wanted, and perhaps fought over, like the oak barrister bookcase and a round table with paw feet, leaving us the rest.

I could kick myself for throwing out the floor lamp. And the old Westinghouse stove in the basement. But I kept the God Bless Our Home picture,

the maple bed, Bakelite silverware,

and the dining room table where Charlie Sturm, the old guy who lived next door and who was born in the house, got his tonsils taken out on the top of. That’s what they did in those days on the tops of tables between the bread baking and pie making—performed minor surgery like tooth extractions and tonsillectomies.

I started using the glasses because I stumbled upon them when I was unpacking and saw how beautiful they had become. I figured, what the hell? So what if I break a few? If I don’t use them, my daughters will be carrying them around in a Pabst Blue Ribbon box when I croak. Is that why I’m saving them? So they can save them?

I’ve already broken one. They are delicate. You have to be careful you don’t bang them into the side of the sink or clunk them into the faucet. They are not dishwasher safe. Forget putting them into the microwave because of the gold leaves. I’m not doing that again. I put one of my new antique china plates that have a thin gold band around the edge (I didn’t think it was real gold) into the microwave and the thing started sparking like crazy. Not that I have a reason to put a drinking glass into the microwave. But I wouldn’t try it if I did.

Kurt said, “A-huh,” when I told him that we were going to start using these glasses. He was skeptical that this was a good idea (due to their ugliness, not their fragility) until I said, “Don’t they remind you of something on Mad Men? Wouldn’t they be perfect for cocktails? This one is a rocks glass!” I held one up and turned it in the light.

Kurt endorses anything that supports the making of a good cocktail. He started thinking the glasses had become beautiful too.

I don’t know how I’m going to talk him into the puffy pictures I’ve been carrying around for twenty years.

The last time he saw them he said they were hideous. I used to think the same thing until last week, when I spotted them in the corner of the attic, they suddenly looked incredibly cool.

The Keeper of Things

My sister gives me all the junk that was our mother’s: blue and yellow bedspreads, clearly out of style; a pocketbook; brass butterflies; an old ironing board (I already have one but this one was our grandmother’s); the praying hands.

No explanation was needed for the praying hands. I knew what they were. Just like I know what the horn-of-plenty is, also white ceramic with a pearlized glaze, and the cutting board in the shape of a teapot that says, “Cookie’s Kitchen.” Things that have always been there. Things I always assumed everyone had—praying hands, a horn-of-plenty, a cutting board with their mother’s name on it…

She told me I was getting them. It wasn’t like she was bestowing upon me some valuable family heirloom. It was more like, whether I liked it or not. She’s a little bitch. She knew I’d take care of them, even though I am not religious, because they sat on my mother’s dresser for years, even though she was not religious. In fact, one time, she threw a crucifix into the garbage, that’s how not religious she was. It was a big one, about a foot tall, made out of oak with a ceramic Jesus attached to it. It used to hang over my parents’ bed until one day I spotted it in the garbage. Somehow it had gotten its arm broken and my mother didn’t want it anymore. But we couldn’t just throw it away! It was Jesus!

I rescued it from the trash and carefully put the arm back together again. The jagged pieces fit into each other, elbow into forearm, like a puzzle. You could hardly see the crack and if you didn’t bump it, it stayed. I carefully hung it back up. The next day it was in the garbage again. I pulled it out. My mother took it down off the wall, broken arm swinging, and dropped it back into the trash can. She said, exasperated, “Debi, it’s broke!”

She kept throwing it in the garbage. I kept digging it out. She hid it under the potato peels and wet newspaper, her passion about disposing it in such a disrespectful way proof that she was not passionate about religion and as soon as her back was turned, I dug it out again. She put it in, I took it out. Toward the end, I hid it in a shoebox. Though my dedication to saving it was no proof that I was religious. I just felt sorry for it.

Now it’s because these things were my mother’s.

I’m very sentimental about things. My sister knows this about me so I am an easy mark. She’s worse than my mother about throwing things out and so I know not to hesitate, not to question whether I have the room for something, not to suggest that she keep it because it will be out on the curb the next day if I even blink an eye. So she pawns off all the stuff on me. I am the keeper of things.

She even gives me her own crap. I knew she was angling to give me the old picture of a little boy that looks like her son for a few years now. Every time we passed it in her house, she said something about it. Isn’t it nice? Doesn’t it look like Michael? Like she was warming me up. Finally, somehow, I found myself the owner of it. I think she stuck it in with a bunch of other stuff that I actually wanted—the retro kitchen stool, the aluminum canisters, and the aluminum spice set that goes really nice in my kitchen with all the stainless I have in here. I had to take it. I took it even though I don’t have a wall to put it on and now I feel guilty because it’s not hanging up. But she has a load off. She knows I won’t throw it away. She knows I’ll find a spot for it.

She gave me a dented Thermos from the fifties that used to go in her retro kitchen in her old house, curtains that don’t fit any of my windows, gadgets that were my grandfather’s, a black milk can, and a stuffed chair that I had to make room for. She gave me the other half of the set of family silverware that I never knew she had (all these years I thought what I had was the whole set), photo albums, and dishes my mother once used for pudding.

And then the praying hands. They were in a box with a Bible. Not my mother’s Bible—I don’t think she even owned a Bible—but one with her name scrawled inside that the funeral home had included in our “package.” Even though she had never laid eyes on it, and I will never read it, I can’t get rid of it. Her name is inside.

Any day now, I will get the horn-of-plenty.

Since writing this, my sister has, in fact, given me the horn-of-plenty.

Thinking Outside The Box

I'm sorry I've been late. It's been hectic here. I don't even have time to blog right now but just to prove I'm still alive, I thought I'd post some pictures of what I'm doing to my bedroom. That's right, that wall is black. Black is shocking enough but for those of you who really know me and know how much I love old things, country things, and homey things, and light sunny colors, black is downright unorthodox.

The problem is, the bedroom was looking a little too "old lady." Once I put out all my antique clocks, lace doilies, and pictures of someone else's ancestors in round picture frames around the room, I knew I had to add a little modern. So this is what I am working on.