Love, Dirt & A Ruby-Throated Radish

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The truth is I did not love the man who was about to become my husband. What I loved was the romantic notion I had in my head about being the wife of a man who, with his father and his younger brother, farmed the sixteen hundred acres of Red Willow County land thirteen miles outside of McCook, Nebraska that his grandfather farmed before him. 

It’s Alive!!!

They grew acres of golden wheat that was harvested the first week of July. They grew corn and alfalfa that was gathered in the autumn as feed for the cattle. Not far from the main house was a barn and corral from which the hogs would sometimes escape. Next to that, I seem to remember, was the chicken coop.

There was a part of me for whom choosing that life – a life connected to the earth and one that I imagined felt purposeful and authentic – felt like a calling. But I was only eighteen and the story I was telling myself about a life on the windswept prairie was just that. A story. And my heart knew that it was a story because another part of me knew being a farmer’s wife would not be the whole of my life. 

(To be honest, I didn’t need my heart to tell me. In one brief summer break from college I had a few minor misadventures – including being seconds away from having my head crushed in a bale catcher – that were proof enough I wasn’t cut out for farm life.)

We married on June 18th, 1977, next to the farmhouse, under an arbor built by cousin Tom and laced with fresh cut grape vines. Colleen, a friend from college, played ‘Come Saturday Morning’ on her mandolin as I walked down the grassy aisle in my beige off-the-rack Gunne Sax dress. Seventeen months later, on November 24th, 1978 my husband drove me to the bus station in McCook. I boarded the Greyhound mid-morning on an overcast day and rode Interstate 80 for four hours across Nebraska’s earnest landscape. Back to our one-bedroom apartment south of Lincoln and within walking distance of my college campus. I turned twenty years old the day I separated from my husband. It was the last time I would see the ranch. It was the last time I would call myself a married woman. A farmer’s wife. I would spend the rest of the winter, into early spring, with my bare necessities packed in black bin bags, sleeping on dorm room floors or the art building’s threadbare sofa and stealing meals from the campus cafeteria while the lunch ladies turned a blind eye. I wasn’t happy but I was stupid enough to never doubt that my life would turn around. I spent the next four decades living metaphorically out of a black bin bag but in the end – albeit a little late in the game – my life did turn around.

What does an eighteen year old girl know about romantic love? I’m not proud that I married a man I didn’t have feelings for. I’m not proud of the hurt that caused. He was a good man but he was also a means to an end. An escape route. 

What I loved was the possibility of wide open spaces. It’s not that I’m a great outdoorswoman. You won’t find me camping in the wilderness or scaling mountain peaks. After decades in California I’ve never been to Yosemite. 

It’s the small things I’m in love with. The dirt beneath my feet. The earth. Fog banks hovering over the mountains. The sky and the stream. Birdsong and flowers waking up in the spring. And that has never faltered. This morning, just outside my living room window, I’m in awe of the mist that rolled down from the Blue Ridge to drape a sparkling grey scrim over the trees – the same trees whose bare black branches will slice into the pink dawn tomorrow. Later today, when I take my walk, the dank perfume of decaying leaves and muck rising up with each step from the muddy trail will anchor and soothe me. I’ll hear the the red shouldered hawks calling back and forth and see the turkey vultures circle over the hill. Bright red cardinals will flit before me from branch to branch, as if showing me the path to take. In a few weeks time, as seasons change, I’ll wonder when the bears will wake from their winter slumber and if my hiking poles will be a reasonable defense. 

And, as seasons change and the earth warms, Ben and I will embrace our first growing season in Virginia and the romantic notion we have in our heads about the joy we’ll find in the growing of our own food. The sprawling fourteen hundred acres I married into all those decades ago is now a fourteen square foot mirpeset at the back of our townhome plus a slim little balcony off the living room and a small shaded porch next to the front door. Just enough for a kitchen garden: herbs, radishes, tomatoes and lettuce. Maybe some short and stubby variety of carrot. I’ve read that a potted fig can do well in our hardening zone if we protect it during the coldest part of winter. Ben loves figs and I love Ben. And we both love our cat Bruce so we’ll have catnip growing, too.

I’m certain the soft-focused images Ben and I have in our heads about our lush, verdant paradise have no basis in reality. No matter. There’s something primal about driving our hands into a freshly opened bag of potting soil. A tenuous connection is made with the generations who plowed the land before us to feed their community. Plus, there are no bale catchers or combine harvesters or flatbeds full of irrigation pipe to threaten injury. The worse that can happen (knock on wood) is a strained muscle from too much lifting or maybe a splinter or two from my refusal to wear gardening gloves.

Of course, it’s still too cold to plant anything outside. Even though it was eighty degrees in Virginia last week (and snowing in Bay Area!!!) the threat of another frost has not passed. And so I’ve taken over half of our dining table, using re-purposed salad containers as mini-greenhouses for two varieties of radish and cut toilet paper rolls as compostable seed starters for cherry tomatoes. The bell pepper and poblano pepper seeds are resting comfortably in little egg cartons.

The anticipation that builds as we wait for that first bright green sprout to find its way through the moist dirt toward the sun, and then to see it burst from the compost of our little toy garden is worth a sore back or bandaged finger. It’s enough to make Ben verklempt as I shout at the top of my lungs, “It’s alive!”

Six weeks from now, when our first harvest arrives, we’ll pull a ruby throated radish from the soil, brush it clean, slice it in half and – with a sprinkling of salt and perhaps a bit of butter – take one small, spicy bite and declare that radish to be the best radish ever grown. Ever.

Comfort

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I enjoy Caitlin Kelly’s Broadside blog. Kelly is the author of Malled and Blown Away and, as a journalist, has written for the Financial Times, the New York Times and Forbes. And every Monday morning, without fail, I can count on finding Broadside in the dozen or so emails that have landed during the night.

Tiny treasures: a bag of vintage buttons and century old sewing needles.

What I enjoy about Broadside is Caitlin Kelly’s concise, sweet, simplicity. She has a way of taking quiet moments from her own life and writing about them in a way that makes her readers feel as if she’s writing each one a personal letter. Kelly is not maudlin nor does she over-romanticize stories from her life. She writes with touching economy and clarity that’s easy to read with my morning coffee. And more often than not what she chooses to share resonates because I either have been or am ready to go through a similar experience. I’m certain it’s because we are about the same age and life events tend to align, but sometimes I can’t help but say, ‘dang girl, you too?’.

For example, in a recent Broadside Kelly wrote about a small inheritance she received from her mother with whom she was estranged. The inheritance included a large pastel of Kelly’s great-grandmother and a small framed sampler – the embroidered alphabet grey with age. Having never received an inheritance, she found comfort and continuity in having these objects around her. And then she asked her readers, ‘what brings you comfort?’.

Many things, of course, bring comfort. A good meal. A loving partner. The purrs of your feline purr baby or the unconditional happiness of your canine best friend.

But other things – other circumstances – bring me comfort, too. I find comfort in surrounding myself with objects that have a history and the energetic imprint of the people from whom they were received. In fact, from where I sit this morning, I’m surrounded by things given to me by others: the painting on my wall, the brass lamp, the sofa and chairs, the tea chest and pillows, the porcelain box and the ceramic vase. Everywhere I look I’m reminded of friends that feel more like family and am I filled with love.

I wasn’t always so blessed. I’ve lived what I might describe as an IKEA-like existence. Easy to assemble, sometimes quick to fall apart, ready to go at a moment’s notice. No matter where life took me I managed to get there with as few boxes as possible. With as little excess weight as possible. 

There are a few things, of course, that managed to stay with me through my many moves. I still have the capo I was given fifty years ago when I played 12-string guitar. I still have the little plastic box that held my guitar picks. I have a few of my picks from those days, too. But these things don’t speak to who I am. They speak to a time in my life when I borrowed my roommate Sissy’s Gunne Sax dresses, which were always a size too small. They speak to a time when I rode shotgun in Mike’s green Chevy Nova from our college campus in Crete, Nebraska to a shopping mall’s fern bar in Lincoln where we’d unpack our guitars and sing Dan Fogleberg songs. 

I love that I have that old capo and those guitar picks even though I no longer have the guitar. It’s nice to have a few things that hold the memory of moments decades old. But what do I have that tells the story of who I am and why does knowing who I am – where I came from – bring comfort?

Over this past weekend I drove five hours north on Interstate 81 to clear out the books and tchotchkes and photographs and furniture that filled every square inch of storage locker 2011 at the East Penn Self Storage emporium in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania. These things were the remnants of my mother’s life and had been collecting dust and bugs and spiders for four years. My mother was still alive when I sold her trailer; when I threw away her sofa and shoved her clothing into a collection locker I found in the parking lot of the Walmart off of Hamilton Avenue. She didn’t know that I needed to do that; that she wasn’t going home. And I didn’t tell her. Instead I saved what I thought was important. Furniture that had been in the family for a few generations. The dog tags she wore when she joined the Women’s Army Corp. Family photos, marriage certificates and divorce decrees. A complete set of the Harvard Classics. I saved a wooden 12-inch ruler advertising a long since closed life insurance company headquartered in Pittsburg. And her knitting needles. I really wanted her knitting needles. 

What I saved has little monetary value. Not the ugly Edwardian pendulum clock that stopped working before I was born nor the yellowed newspaper clippings my mother taped onto lined binder pages, her perfect Palmer penmanship taking note of why and how and who. I saved them anyway.

I don’t need these things. And while friends who, like me, are approaching the middle of their seventh decade choose to downsize I’m choosing the opposite. I’m gathering. Surrounding myself with a collection that others might describe as junk but to me is a treasure that exists to remind me of a time long past and a place that no longer exists.

It’s important for me to do this because it connects me to a history and to people I never knew but who gave me my nose, my blue eyes and my propensity for weight gain. These strangers whose blood is in my veins also gave me a passion for art and music. A love of nature. Keeping my great-grandmother’s writing desk and my great-aunt’s crocheted doilies honors my history. It honors them. I know the fragile aperitif glasses, the shell shaped plate from Japan and the lustreware casserole dish in which my grandma made my favorite corn pie could be gone in an instant. And after the sorrow of loss passed my life would be the same. Every new day people move through the loss of the things that remind them of who they are and I know how lucky and how blessed I am and I understand the impermanence of this jumbled collection of artifacts that until Sunday were covered in grime in a storage locker five hours up the road. But having these things around me now helps me feel less lost in this world; less like an uncertain, aimless wanderer and more like a woman secure in who she is and how she came to be.

And that brings me comfort.