In the Kitchen

A bounty of tomatoes, bulbs of red and green (tomatillos) crowd our counter tops, cover our table, even perch along a window sill.

Kitchen’s human population: two. Feline: one.

I’ve made multiple shopping runs for the occasion, to Wal-Mart twice and the liquor store once. Now numbered among our possessions: the Ball Blue Book of Canning, mason jars, and new utensils: can lifter, funnel, head-space measurer/bubble remover, and my favorite, magnetized lid wand.

We’ve never canned before and we hadn’t exactly intended to start, but as with all descents through underworlds—drugs, madness—one thing has led to another. T.’s been blanching and freezing greens since the start of the season, a benign project, without risk of botulism. Then one day he comes home with a recipe for putting cherry tomatoes in a jar with vinegar and herbs. Now we’re knee-deep in boiling, which is what canning is: boiling sauce, boiling lids and bands, boiling jars, and then boiling the lidded, banded, jarred sauce a little while longer. In this process a stove gets cooking (cooking: the application of heat to food) with water roiling, steam rising, utensils clicking, and tomatoes everywhere juicing and reducing and finally rising to float toward the top insides of jars. Plumpy, weirdly fetal mass.

It isn’t canning, at all, T. says. It’s jarring.

And it’s addicting. Winston, he instructs the cat, watch out.

Because even meat can be canned, or so says our new book. If, say, we had a squirrel we could can it, leaving in the bones or taking them out.

The only thing more odd about this mid-summer spate of preserving (more odd than our sudden, unplanned and yet energetic turn to it, more odd than its wacky labor plus cost to outcome ratio) is that we’re doing it just as we plan to leave Illiana.

We’re packing up and moving in three weeks.

Good-bye.

A Short Discussion of Seasons and Literary Shaping Devices

Early summer, like say May, is a bad time to visit Illiana. If you come here then, you’ll want to stay. I visited in May of last year, interview suit cleverly wadded in my carry-on. This year in May, same suit wadded in the same case, I waited at a train station in Effingham, town noted here previously as a crossroads of Illinois, with its Amtrak station and towering, lit-up-by-night cross surrounded by open parking lot, Mecca for long-distance, worshipful truck drivers. I was on my way to Chicago.

In the daytime in May in Illiana, there is nothing at all but the sounds of insects, weltering chorus. (This is only matched out at the farm by entire field of cows, munching.) Noiselessly, when your back is turned, tomato and green bean seedlings inch a little higher from their tidy rows, which dot every other backyard, and on the horizon in every direction—like this land so far from the ocean has actually been, all this time, a floating island launched out to sea—tractors pass, ghostly, shadowy as ships.

I grew up four hours north of Chicago, T. about four hours south, but for both of us, Chicago might as well have been located in New York City, and New York City on the moon. Skyway rather than ship, Amtrak rocketed us to the city, swirling slowly farm and farmland into soup.

Out at the farm the day before, I pulled up to the sight of three of the small grandchildren, fair-skinned redheads hiding from the sun in a copse of pine trees. Do you want to see our fort? You can come back here! The three-year-old yelled, his Owen Meany voice giant and husky, as if understanding the role of speaking for all of them, for his less voluble older siblings, to call chiefly for volume. Farm kids, they aren’t playing so much as working, still, actual tools in their tiny hands, knives, an axe.

We’re getting rid of all this poison ivy! He shouts, armful of the wilty green stuff aloft.

At the site of their new house, further down the lane, their parents and grandfather and T. drink water in the shade. They’ve worked this afternoon to erect a concrete wall. This house is being built to stand. It will overlook even the crumble of the grandparents’ two-story wooden farmhouse, which is next to an even older structure, their great-great grandparents’ place, now garage-like in modern home dimensions, but sturdy in its red brick.

The farm isn’t ours—not our family, not our place—but I’ve come to think, like some crazy hippie once told me about The Mountain in Taos, it has had some say in drawing us here, in permitting us here.

T. knows what I mean, he says. He works there every day. “Are you saying you want to stay?”

But I want to pursue interviews. I am a modern woman, ambitious.

“Oh, but then it will turn into romantic comedy,” I joke. “My blog. This story. You know. We meet our new town. It is so different than us! Love-hate relationship ensues. Love wins out.”

There are even going to be weddings this summer, weddings and interviews.

“Classic shape,” T. says. “Nothing wrong with that.”

In the Kitchen

It was the parents of the redheaded farm kids who gave T. the recipe for the cherry tomatoes in vinegar, and they are the ones who tell T. and me about canning tomatoes. It isn’t really necessary to process the canned sauce again in boiling water. Leave the hot jars with their hot contents on the counter and you’ll hear them pop, sign of a set seal.

It’s scandalous, but it’s what his mother did for decades. Plus these farm friends of ours are a horticulturist and an engineer, people who’ve already taught us about raw milk, hand-churned ice cream, homemade sauerkraut; after going away to college, working in cities, they’d returned to their hometown (they’d grown up neighbors) to build their own house from concrete, to home school their children, to grow everything they eat.

I also ask our in-town friend, the cashier at the liquor store, about canning tomatoes. She cites this same method of leaving the hot jars on the counter to pop on their own. Tomatoes are a “high acid” food. In the world of preserves, canning high-acid foods to canning low-acid foods is like scuba diving is to free diving.

Yet, for all this advice, I end up taking that of the Wal-Mart cashier’s—well, part of it. (I’ve begun asking everyone I see about canning.) She says the jars must be processed, given the second, thorough boil. It’s also what the Ball Blue Book of Canning says, among some other things about bacteria spores.

I always prefer things the hard way—if there’s a hard way that’s the way I’ll do it.

If I’m canning, I want to feel like I’m canning.

If I have one interview in Chicago, I’ll go to the second one too—even while I’m wondering if I could live in a city again, with a tiny apartment, a commute.

Even while T. says, hey, if you want to go to Chicago, go. Have a great life.

Go West, Young Woman

I’ve been thinking about the west again.

In moving here, we came east, of course—some 2,000 miles east. But we moved west mythologically, seeking open country, the unknown, a name and a place for ourselves.

It’s the story of America, from the Mayflower to land grabs to the gold rush. What to do, though, after all that west was gobbled up? Go to San Francisco to wear some flowers in your hair. To move west is to stake your own claim, if not to land then to identity, your identity as an individual, tribe and family free.

And so I’m on a train station platform in Effingham, Illinois, a city where truckers, passing through, can pay their respects at a giant cross—without having to climb down from their cab. Next to me, also waiting, is a family of women: a young, sixty-ish grandmother, two sisters in their thirties or forties, and the two daughters of one of the sisters, about eleven and seven, I guess, because they remind me of my sister and me at that age—the older one (like me) chubby and awkwardly pubescent, imitating the squeals and slang of a teenager as she discusses a problem with her footwear, her crocs, she keeps saying, as if only for the love of the word, yet she’s also carrying around a doll and a stuffed dragon. The younger one, still skinny, flings her long hair with a more natural femininity, already eyeing the older sister suspiciously. Is that who she’ll become? Will she have to?

The mother and her sister stand a ways apart in their shorts and tee-shirts smoking and talking—of all things—about the family plans for the Fourth of July. The one has already rented the cabin. They’ll have the golf cart again to get around the whole week. She’s purchased the streamers and flags to decorate it—last year it rained, but they wrapped the golf cart in saran wrap and were able to proceed like that.

It’s a mystery looking in at any family to try to understand how the members see themselves: if they can see how they grew in relation and opposition to one another. To what extent they define themselves as members or as individuals. One sister is blonde, the other dark haired, like the two girls. “I got tee-shirts for all the kids,” she says. Teal for the girls and blue for the boys, all with American flags.

The grandmother is different from her daughters—conspicuously so. If they didn’t call her Nana no one would know she was with them. She’s trim and tan, her hair short and sleek, her outfit with its lime green sweater a tick or two hipper, of a different fabric, with a different thread count. She doesn’t sit but roams the platform, as if interested in the signs, in staring down the track, tilting back her head for a breeze on her throat. She has no luggage save a Carnival Cruise tote bag. She joins her granddaughters on the bench, but sits up on the seat’s back, her feet on the seat. Her granddaughters immediately copy her. Later, after she’s left to wander dreamily again, she rushes back to admonish the girls to get off the one bench so an elderly black woman can sit.

Through all this her grown daughters eye her warily. They light new cigarettes, discuss a place called Holiday World. It’s all this eyeing that gives them away as family. Am I of you? What does your life have to do with mine?

Two more white-haired women join us, in pink tops and denim pedal-pushers and rolling one brown suitcase between them. Because it’s the Midwest, I assume they are sisters, but because I’ve lived out of the Midwest too I don’t assume it all the way. A father and a daughter join us. The train is the Saluki Express, running between Southern Illinois University and Chicago.

Then there are two college-aged guys blinking in the early morning light, a little sheepish and sleepy and shaky. One has low-slung jeans, expensive sneakers, and when he opens his mouth to tease the other about why doesn’t he just give him a ride to Chicago, he’ll pay him sixty bucks, I’m surprised it’s a British accent.

They are looking both ways down the track, jokingly debating about which way might be north, which way south.

T. and I had the same debate when he’d dropped me off at the station. That’s just what we need, he said, me to end up in New Orleans. Another direction, another possible decision.

On the train a college-aged girl sits next to me. She flips open her laptop and begins to watch a movie. After a while I watch over her shoulder. It’s a romantic comedy, with a wedding at the beginning and one at the end.

Wisconsin Wedding Season

My mother has long had an idea about how this would all turn out—our year in Illiana, the end of my blog.

It’ll be like that movie, she’s said.

What she means is the movie Sweet Home Alabama, and what she means is not that I’ll leave my rich, dreamy New York fiancé to return to the Southern country boy I’d already married (but now he’s going to be rich too!) but more generally that I will realize I’m the one who, in my decade of living away from the Midwest, has become a snob.

I understand that she has a point. When I’m at my parents’ house in Wisconsin, I marvel a little too wickedly at the accent. I tell a few too many stories about Illiana moments that have cracked me up, or annoyed me. (The scary barfly did with a glare reach to turn off the volume when T. and a visiting friend wanted to watch—of all things—a World Cup game.)

My mother lives in the same county where she grew up—though she left for about a decade when she was my age. Who knew my father would take a job back in her small hometown?

My sister has moved away too. For years while I lived in New Mexico and then Portland, she was in Wisconsin still. Now she’s moved to Kansas, and in less than a year she’s lost the accent. She and her fiancé will come home to Wisconsin to be married, and then go back to Kansas where their life is.

I’m at two bachelorette parties in one week in Wisconsin, my sister’s and a good friend’s from school (elementary, middle, high school). At my sister’s, girls drive in to Oshkosh from other, mostly Wisconsin, cities: Milwaukee, Madison, Appleton—though one flies in from Austin. They are not from cities originally but from small towns, like we are. Yet one asks me where I live, and when I give my rural coordinates she says, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m sorry.” By this point, we’ve all had a lot of punch. I don’t take it the wrong way. If the frontier is no longer the west, then it is the city. The frontier is the girl on her own.

At the second bachelorette party, perhaps because the women are my peers and not my sister’s, it’s a little harder to ignore what suddenly seems a marked weirdness about my life, where I’m living. Our group is small but intimate. We’re drinking wine, cozy in our friend’s parents’ house, where the wedding will take place in three days, where right now a storm that has come in from over the bay is beating on the windows. On the couch, our arms wrapped around one another’s necks, one friend has come from Minneapolis, one Denver, and the bride from New Jersey (she works in the City, glimmering City of all cities). The fifth woman of our high school group will arrive tomorrow from Seattle, and the bride’s sister is up from Madison, her sister-in-law from Dallas.

And one woman, a girlfriend of the bride’s brother, is flying in from Portland, and will arrive a little late.

Though it’s been years since high school, and we’ve all scattered, holiday gatherings back home, group trips to each other’s fun cities, and an email group have kept us in touch. (And, I always think, pop culture models must have contributed, at least given permission: Ya Ya Sisterhood, Sex in the City.) It’s a little weird given one factor of our congealing in high school was that all of us expected to leave, immediately, and with no two college choices the same.

There was camaraderie in that, especially at the end, a mutual respect but also a worked-out efficiency. We’d divided our territory. Our bond was one that—with Midwestern niceness intact—we could expect to disintegrate naturally, no hurt feelings. I don’t know if any of us planned to keep in touch forever, but that year we left for college, the Internet happened. We all got our first email addresses. Then it was so darn easy.

I also realize now, because I’m in the college business, that we had in common the luxury of leaving: parents who supported us and expected as much from us, that we would move away.

At the party, we are a retail buyer, teachers, a therapist, a dentist, a pilot. I don’t feel embarrassed to be living my small town Midwestern life, though I realize I would be if I had never left.

When the woman from Portland shows up, she has that easy, casual Portland look: the glasses, the fleece, the thick camping socks once she kicks off her shoes. I miss Portland intensely: the identity it offered, the identity I’d picked up there, for a time.

In the Kitchen

The other advice the woman at Wal-Mart had given me about canning, but which I had not taken as seriously, was not to can while on my period.

That was her grandmother’s wisdom. If she canned while on her period, the whole batch would spoil. Those days of the month, her grandmother would do all the washing—the jars, the lids—but she wouldn’t touch the produce, wouldn’t touch the stove.

It has to do with the Ph balance, she said. Reacting somehow with the tomatoes.

If I were a woman of that generation, I tell T., I’d also come up with a short but rigid list of chores I couldn’t do, at least on a few days of each month. I’d put mowing the lawn on there. And yes, standing all day in front of a hot stove.

What would you put on your list? I could ask T. But I know what we’d both say: moving.

I withdraw from the search in Chicago. We're going to stay here, we say, and begin to re-imagine it.

And then I’m offered a job in the north woods of Wisconsin. It’s a weird, crazy dream job: I’d get to teach creative writing. And T. is offered teaching too. We visit together. We drive around the town, through which a river flows, in which there is a farmer's market, an organic grocery store, breweries.

We still spend twenty-four hours agonizing, weighing, debating. Even a few days seems a ridiculous amount of time to make this kind of decision.

How can all this moving lead to a real way to live?

In the booth of a restaurant, this song will actually be playing on the radio: “Did you ever have to make up your mind? Did you ever have to finally decide?”

Okay, we say,but whatever we do this time had better last.

At least for a while.

Good bye

And so we find ourselves jarring tomatoes. It’s as logical as anything, probably. We’re preserving, laying in, packing up. We want to take these tomatoes with us, the ones we grew from seeds in Styrofoam cups.

We resign from our jobs. We start telling people goodbye, awkwardly. Leaving a place—leaving where other people live—seems always insulting. It goes with the Oregon license plates we’ve kept all this time.

Someone says, “It will be more expensive there you know.”

Someone else says, “We’re used to it, rising stars coming through here, on the move again.”

It’s a great Midwestern tradition: abandonment. They don’t know how prepared, how well-versed, we are.

That Little Girl Across the Way—She’s a Chemist!

Across the street from our house, a couple our age is moving out of their house. In all our months, we’ve never met them though we’ve seen them a few times out on their porch with wine, and once while I was walking I waved to him, jogging. We were several blocks away though, in a different neighborhood, and I don’t know if he recognized me as a neighbor from across the street.

I learn a few things about them from another neighbor: he’s a professor (wait—where? Not where I worked), and has been offered a job on the East coast. She’s a chemist at the oil refinery (I’ve been told about her before). Why they want to leave—with the big bucks she must be making—word on the street doesn’t know. What might be the problem is that they’re too smart to get along here, too educated. (I feel a little uncomfortable being told this: what do they say of us? And wait a minute, what do they not say of us?)

The final nail in the coffin, the final marker of this couple who is leaving, is that he—the husband—wants to get rid of his new grill. It won’t fit in the moving van or something (my source cannot fathom the reason; the grill works perfectly well). So he plans to leave it on the edge of the driveway, only absent its tank, with a sign that says free. But what he fails to understand—and this pains my source—is that people here will just think there’s something wrong with it then. No one will pick up something that says free. And that grill will sit there until it rusts, totally wasted.

I think of another neighbor’s yard, with the two riding lawn mowers for sale for $200 and $150. There’s a market psychology here that I never understood. (Probably, there is much here I have failed to understand.) It’s the same neighbor who lit off more fireworks than anyone at the Fourth of July, a bevy of children in tents in the yard, a volleyball net that recalled to me a low-slung clothesline of my childhood neighborhood, one we all knew to avoid in the dark, running in night games, running after fireflies. This same neighbor is also one whom T. once watched get so angry at his child that he pushed him down into a kiddie pool.

I can’t believe we never met them, I say to T., meaning the neighbors who are leaving.

Yet T. declares he will not meet them now. He wants a perfect streak.

After a few days of watching them pack, we see the van. Soon after they’re gone.

Love and the Art of Lawn Care

I despise mowing the lawn. In fact, take all aspects of yard maintenance, from picking up sticks to shoveling snow, and you can hack it all to pieces with a giant weed whacker for all I care. Chase with a leaf blower each last remain all the way to kingdom come. But where does this antipathy come from? A dorm room and apartment dweller, I’ve engaged in relatively little lawn care. T., of course, is an avid gardener, and only trusts me with spade and hoe as much as he trusts me to remember to take the bread out of the bread maker after it beeps. This even though I’ve spent whole Saturday mornings pulling up by hand each pokey green piece he’s identified for me as weed, and mispronouncing humus like hummus at the Rural King. This even though, to support him, I’ve changed my Facebook interests to include gardening, like putting the cart before the horse, faith before the leap.

Growing up, I lived in a house with a woman who loved yard work so much that she only relinquished it upon occasion, and then only if she could have more fun concocting ruses of the Tom Sawyer variety. Neighborhood kids would come from blocks away to pick our fallen crab apples and throw them into the buckets my mother had simply set out and magic-marker labeled “5 points” and, further away, “10 points.” She’d also sacrifice her fun for my edification, handing over the task of riding dizzying, increasingly smaller co-centric circles around the family backyard in the name of my “practicing my shifting skills.” Why couldn’t we have wood chips? Concrete? What could the neighbors really do to us if we didn’t keep neat and trim our own little patch of Earth, maintain its chemical-green? I hadn’t yet read any David Foster Wallace, but on my own I could have made a case for the alignment of Midwestern lawn care and fascism.

When after college I left for New Mexico, it was the steadily thinning and browning grass along the way that buoyed me. I’d invited my mother along to divide the drive (yes, in my now well-mastered stick shift car). In fact I asked her to make the hardest part of the drive, which I knew, but didn’t tell her I knew, would be pulling out of the driveway. Fifteen hundred miles later, it was August in Oklahoma and all that dying foliage had completed its metamorphosis, had become ditch weed, scrub, scraggle. At the moment we crossed the state line—desert sunset brewing—the thinnest, palest rainbow hung splayed as exactly as a movie marquee over the sign Welcome to New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, but I couldn’t be bothered to gape, so taken was I with my new lunar landscape, its unapologetic fruitlessness.

Surely this signaled a new possibility for world order. Certainly it heralded a new view that would be afforded to me, new resident in such a landscape. Later I learned that all those miles of empty middle were seen as great for missile testing.

And a decade later, a few states and a few moves later, I live with a man and a cat and a yard, smack-dab in that Midwestern country that so inspired (if sometimes through horror, sometimes amusement) the great DFW, a man with sentence patterns like the death scenes in Westerns, all that choking and clutching and then the last surprising stagger before the finish. I aspire to write sentences that die so gloriously. I also aspire to convince my lover that gardening might really be a hobby of mine too, maybe if, in trade, we do over the lawn in gravel.

I suspect T. would prefer an even bigger lawn, that in his native Illinoisan soul he takes a flat green expanse as signifier of the magnanimity of a man, prairie-conquering homesteader. He tricks me into pushing our mower up and down its rows by marveling about the workout it is, by claiming the ritual of the cold-beer finish, grass stuck with sweat to his arms and legs and even inside his ears as he tips back his head to guzzle. I suspect he’s been talking to my mother.

And so, out of love and desire for cold beer, and maybe because I was also always tricked, every time, by my mother’s apple bucket ruses, the other day I mowed our lawn in Illiana.

And, out of what might have been a mixture of love and spite, I trimmed with the good kitchen scissors the rangy grass that rings our unlandscaped house, where it’s too close in for the mower.

“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” T. had pronounced when I first floated this alternate solution to buying a device called a weed eater, a contraption sure enough to condemn our souls to that same circle as Il Duce’s, as Franco’s.

I had to sneak out the back door when he wasn’t looking. I began at a corner, laying scissor-edge to brick foundation. Were the neighbors watching? I felled green fronds like tall hay in a field, or like relatively tall hay in a relatively miniature field, and then I went around the lamppost. I was working along the front of the house when I felt the first stinging blisters, a sudden pain like what as kids we’d called a Snake Bike, and what T. and his naughty Illinois neighborhood kids had called an Indian Burn. I choked up with my grip. I attempted to switch hands. The scissors were harder and harder to work. I kept going. Was I a fascist now? Was I having fun? Was this love?

I finished. Ruined hand, ruined scissors, panting in the grass.

“So that worked?” T. said, calmly from the steps.

Something for Everyone

There’s something for everyone at the downstate Flea Market and Swap meet: fishing rods, DVDs, tomato plants, children’s inflatable pool toys, King-sized bed linens, knee braces, ducks, handguns, cigar boxes, antacids, bras. All of this and only a dollar (per person) to get in. The center of the property is scooped out by a pond, where children fish for free. At an edge lies another swampy moat, where buyers may be treated to the rare sight of a cow with a blond flop of bangs, a little like Mary J. Blige's, swimming.

We hadn’t even heard of the flea market until our neighbors told us. Since they see us too often in our backyard, childless and apparently friendless, drinking cocktails from re-purposed jars, and since they once caught me attempting to barbeque tofu, they do their best to take care of us, sending one of their amazingly sweet and polite sons over with venison, homemade fudge, or a paper sack of morels. Once they wondered if we wanted to come over for “the fight.” Sure, I nodded. Sure, sounds like fun. What was that about? T. asked. I have no idea, I’d had to say, bolting our door behind me.

So on a more recent afternoon on our front porch steps, watching the neighborhood kids on their bikes in the street bring themselves to peeling stops by direct application of flip-flop to pavement, I heard about the swap meet, and this time had the sense to ask for more information.

It’s open only the second and fourth weekends of the spring and summer months. Vendors roll in to town with their campers and trailers, pulling off the highway to turn down the long gravel drive that runs just next to an oil field and another business that sells oil pipe, right where the red and blue streamers have spent the winter flapping above the tiny signs advertising “Green Peppers! Tomatoes!”

I’d thought the Rural King our local shopping gem, with its selection of deer dressing kits, muck boots, cast iron cookware, belt buckles, and varieties of hard candies that I’d believed extinct, like circus peanuts and fireballs.


















At the end of the gravel drive, a sign greets us: hand-lettered, super precise, its message apparently one of great swap meet-specific significance: Please do not leave your trash lying around anywhere.

“Don’t litter?” Translates T., the poet. Buyers are to park to the right, vendors to the left.

“I’m going to buy a flea circus,” he announces next, rubbing his hands with glee.

“I’m going to buy that fishing rod,” I say of the first one I see, at the very first booth not two feet from the car, giddy that we have for once brought cash.

It’s taken us months to get used to the deep disapproval our debit cards induce—and they’re from the local bank! I was even rebuffed at the town newspaper’s main office, though my attempt to purchase a full year’s subscription aroused the first suspicion. Now what do you want? They’d made me repeat myself, as if I were the one a decade behind the times, a hold-out believer in print journalism.

I’m so pleased with my $12-tagged rod and reel—its brand is Shakespeare!—that I don’t even think to haggle. How about I give it to you for $10, the pitying vendor finally says to me, very slowly, just as a Juarez border guard once had to, shaking me down. Handing over my change, he looks at me the way our neighbor did upon discovery that we have an indoor-only cat, whom, when he is not sleeping on our breakfast table, I carry from room to room and coo to like a human infant.

But buying the pole early on turns out to be wise choice, providing each old man behind his table an opening to tease me. Catch anything yet? How they biting?

I take advantage of the joking so I will be permitted to take photos. I call over T. Will you buy this for me honey? T. pulls out a crisp dollar or two, leaning in for his punch line. Now watch, she’ll make me carry it. He’s a hit, the men wiping the tears from their faces. I do make him carry a metal wash tub and some wooden bowls back to the car. I eye garden rakes, tee shirts, He-Man action figures, pink leather purses bejeweled with Crusades-style crosses, a rabbit in a hutch, a scythe, ammo, bins of eye make-up and Herbal Essences hair conditioner, afghans, badminton rackets, a pirate ship lamp, and an antique telephone in its train station box.


A swap meet, it seems, is an entity unto itself.

It is a little like a Portland market in weirdness, though some of the weird factors signify oppositely, politically. The "fresh produce" turns out to be a bunch of bananas. (Local? T. jokes). A man with a long gray beard, almost like a bar-hopping Portland Saturday market Santa Claus, tries to bully me into buying a clearly dead pepper seedling, scowling that he “worked hard” to grow it. Someone has pitched what could be an REI tent by the side of the pond, where he is also casting. It would be like a farmers' market demo, except no one is watching, and the angler, taking the DIY concept further than any Portland market-goer I ever saw, seems likely to clean, fry, and consume right in the midst of the market. That swimming cow better be careful.

At one table an Asian woman with non-native English wants me to examine a pillow slip: “feel how nice, feel how nice." Some things are familiar, familiar to being in a foreign country.

Unlike craigslist, the Portland Rebuilding Center, or a garage sale or consignment shop in any city, the swamp meet seems to put less emphasis on utility and more on collection, the point not housecleaning (for room to buy new) but laying in. One vendor (from whom I want to buy something!) is absent, doing his own shopping. The eclecticism of most vendors’ wares—spanning type, decade, state of repair—makes for curious booths. Yet a few things come to seem true across the board: the items most valued are those that are 1) old, and 2) cheap.

And one gets the feeling, because so many of the old things are also cheap that there is really only one overriding criterion.

At the side of a flat-bed trailer stocked with bins of soaps, lotions, cosmetics, and over-the-counter medication, I decide to ask a vendor where he gets his things. From places going out of business, he replies readily, Wal-Greens, that kind of thing.

In my life I’ve been an avid thrift-store-shopper—beginning with my grandma in the church basement, sniffing at garments that “might need laundering.” I'm not squeamish. I've ordered raw meats from outdoor markets in foreign countries, and drunk things handed to me by strangers, as well as water I filtered myself, while squatted on a bank, thirsty, tattered “how to filter water” instructions in hand.

But I decide to draw the line at after-market allergy, headache, or other pain relief.

I'm over thirty now, and picky about what I ingest. After all, I've spent a year hemming and hawing over where to live, matching my survival needs to my social values and political identity like putting together an outfit around a pair of shoes.


T. finds me. The day is growing hotter—swampier, if you will—and he has been checking out the swap meet’s livestock barn. “You’re not going to want to walk through there,” he says.

“What is it?” I’ve been photographing an antique washing machine, crouching to get it from the best angle while a man who told me he’d sell it for twenty, and then once I took my camera out, forty, told me how he’d found it in his mother’s basement, how she’d used it for years, how it still worked, but just needed a new cord, but how those things were dangerous though, how he’d known a young kid, oh this was years ago, who’d died in one just like it.

T. grimaces. Maybe we have a draw. “Kittens in an aquarium,” he says.

We decide to take that lap around the pond. At a vendor’s table on the far side, I zero in on an old screen door. “Look—could we put this over the garden frame?” We’ve had a bunny lately, at night. The neighbors told us about him, a little guiltily. Their kids feed it. They’ve made a small home for it under their porch. That’s okay with me, though. I think it’s cool that they have their pet. I’m still examining the door, pulling another door away from it, chattering on about the neighbor kids’ bunny, and how the woman with the rabbit in the hutch had given me this tip, that we should just sprinkle a little cayenne or chili pepper on our plants and then the bunny wouldn’t eat it, and I’m prattling on, should we use our good chili pepper though, or can we get some cheap stuff, and finally T. has to say, his voice half-cracked with laughter, with disbelief, “Look.”

I’ve set my fishing pole against the mesh-wire wall where the screen doors are leaning, but all this time I haven’t looked in the cage.

Meeting my eyes when I do bother to look is the biggest peacock I have ever seen, his green shimmering tail fully fanned, the purply-blue eye of each feathered tip staring back at me.

I’m in fourth-grade again, lost to the world for the ending of A Wrinkle in Time, tesseracted to an oxygen-less planet to confront face-to-face a hovering, fluttering deity of feathers and eyes.

Doppler

I am on the couch watching our Doppler radar channel while T. is doing something in the kitchen. “What’s it saying?” he calls. We’re looking for a tornado. The sky looks likely, the air likely, but the on-screen weather map displays the quilted graphic of area counties, no text, and I’m not sure which one we are. There’s a red and a yellow zone.

T. comes in. “Oh,” he says, tapping a spoon, leaving again. I don’t say that I can’t tell, don’t know where we are.

Maybe that squiggle is the river, the state line, drawing down through the otherwise straight rows like a knife through frosting.

Either way, it is only a watch, not a warning, and neither of us is afraid, not unduly, of Storms in the Midwest—for which there is a theme song and an MTV montage on our local news channel, lightning snaking a purple sky. This Saturday afternoon, we have cows to check out at the farm. In particular, we are to scout for new calves in the grass. On the ride out, the rain falling through sunshine, the whole of the cultivated countryside lit up by springtime, by late-afternoon, blowing-storm color, T. says we can listen to the Ramones. Hey pretty girl, I wanna be your boyfriend….

It’s been a month of color: things shooting upward in our lawn. T. gave our grass its first half of a mowing and our seedlings in cups in the upstairs office-turned-greenhouse grew all the way to poking into the florescent bulbs, requiring the use of more and more books in our jerry-rigged lighting suspension system, the result of which, I knew from the start, will be ruined books but possibly vegetables.

Also this month we took in our second community theatre production, this one, so appropriately, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

I didn’t tell T. what I’d been hearing about the show until we were in the car, on our way. It was the guy who plays Joseph: some dream boat, beef cake. An actual six-pack, I overheard some women in town discussing. And he doesn’t wear a shirt through the whole play, a student told me.

And the show was selling out; every lonely seat matched with cash-paying mate in that gemstone of a new county auditorium. Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Pack. Not to disappoint, the twelfth son of Jacob strips to his white loin cloth by the second song, and the house lights dwell attentively. In line in the bathroom at intermission, one woman asks another which number of performances this made for her, and a sixth-grader at the hand dryer interrupts giggling: four. In the program, we read that Joseph works at Marathon, and that his future plans include “making lots of babies with my trophy wife.”

A week later, T. will see Joseph at Wal-Mart, with the trophy wife. Guess who I saw at Wal-Mart? He’ll report. You didn’t get his autograph? I ask.

At the end of the show, back in our car and nosing our way into the line of cars headed out the one highway, past the one Dairy Queen—conducting a brisk business given the few hundreds of us who’d just sat transfixed by one fellow human’s sculpted shape—T. maintains in a disapproving whisper: No man has naturally that hairless of a body.

T. comes out to the farm to work three days a week, but I’ve only been a few times. The drive takes us south and east about twenty miles, tacking the dizzying grid of county roads. There are wild turkeys to watch for, and today craterous, road-washing puddles. “This will get your gilly-hopper,” T. says accelerating over the one small hill so that we hang in air. Immediately thereafter, he points out a dilapidated, one-room schoolhouse, next a set of county-historic-register oil pumps, still working, somehow rigged to pump in concert by means of an underground lever system, the whole thing so wonderfully mechanical and quaint even an environmentalist would have to love it.

Mechanical is the last age of technology I understand, or so I imagine. But perhaps that is also untrue. Send me back in time and give me one of those enormous, rusted scythes and I would not know how to use it. I would not know what was wheat.

It is pouring, and I pull up the hood on the red slicker I still have from a Goodwill in Milwaukee. It says I am Summerfest Security. We stop at the barn to exchange our car for the Chuck Wagon, an ATV with a golf-cart-like roof that we can use to tool out along the muddy path to the field. I think we will tip. There are no doors and I am hanging on to that small roof, rain pouring directly down my sleeve, and my butt sliding around on the vinyl seat in my purple wind pants, these from a Portland Goodwill. We will get stuck in a rut, I know, but T. laughs, gunning through. The first herd, the steers, clump out of sight, back in the woods. That’s when we begin Y-turning, slide, and get our wheel stuck in the bottom wire of the electric fence. I yelp, pull back my hand, pull up my feet; the sky cracks with rain and storm, and T. says shit.

He gets out a pair of pliers, climbs down from the chuck wagon. He grabs the fence with his hand and yanks it.

What are you doing?

The fence is hardly on, he says, totally annoyed with me. I try to back out of my own mental confusion: we are in something metal and we are entangled in an electric fence. Then I get a feeling to look behind me, where the steer, en masse, have drifted a startling ways from the woods. They think we’ve come to move them to their next pasture and they bellow, advancing in the rain, mounting up on one another’s backs, silhouetted against the almost midnight-blue sky.

He does this all the time, stands among these enormously-breathing animals. At the next field, where the Mommas and calves are, we get out to walk its full length. 2015 stumbles over, and T. scratches the space between her eyes. Then her gray tongue—like the one we have in thick plastic wrapping in our freezer, planned for Lengua Tacos—darts as if to wrap his finger. Here there are pools of poop; it pours from the back ends of cows like the rain is still pouring on us, like small showers, right and left, turned on and off sporadically. The cows watch us, but don’t bother to move—either to get closer or to move away as we cut through their field. The baby calves lie amongst the half-chomped tops of orchard grass, clover, and rye. They can stand immediately, but get tired on their spindly legs. T. looks for the one that has been walking on his knuckles for the past two days, the first two days of his life, tipping awkwardly forward as if unconvinced that the bottoms of his new soft hooves are the part that is supposed to touch the ground. He’s going to have to walk right soon, or he’ll get left behind when the herd moves, when his momma moves. The last time I was out here, T. and the farmer opened a pasture gate and the cows took off at once in their customary group-think gallop, the new calves left mewing behind like kittens. Finally remembering, a couple of the Mommas circled back. They gathered up the other cows’ babies too, neighborhood busybodies, mooing crossly at everyone.

The good Mommas will be kept around longer.

I hope I’ll get to see one born. T. has watched at least one shoot out, legs unfurling in the air, parachutist with sinewy cord trailing. Clearly by their wide sides, several moms are very close to birthing, and maybe they’ll do it right now, out here in the rain. The closest I get is that we do find one newly born calf, new since this morning when T. was last out here. First I spy a long piece of bloody mucus hanging from one Momma, and we look nearby in the grass to see him—he’s huge and square in the shoulders already, bigger than your dog, but sticky, blinking.

T. will tag him, paint his umbilical cord. We’ll record the birth in the spiral notebook, holding it away from the dripping ends of our hair. Back at the farmhouse, the real farmers pull in the driveway as we are leaving; all of us wave from behind our respective windshield wipers.

This whole week leading up to this weekend I have been sick with something, a cold or flu or allergies; I lost my voice for two full days at a conference where I had to honk and rasp through a presentation on Encouraging Classroom Discussions, and where there were people for me to meet, people who might be on hiring committees, but where I was delusional with Day-Quill.

So by the time we get home from the farm and I am peeling off wet layers and running the shower, I am also sneezing.

You’re not a farmer, T. says, smiling, in the kitchen stripped down to his underwear and eating something off the end of a knife.

I’ve got a stack of papers to grade. Maybe, I’m not a teacher either, I say.

By the time I get out of the shower, T’s on the computer, updating his Facebook with something crass, checking out poetry journals.

It’s Saturday night. We grill hamburgers. We read on the couch with the cat. The tornado watch continues until 11, though I am asleep at 10:30, in my bed. The next day, we’ll take our walk, past the Drive-Thru liquor store where the manager agreed to put on order for us some Full Sail and Deschutes beer (from Portland); and past Gabriel’s Family Restaurant, where we have never eaten but which, we’ll see, is closed for Patty’s surgery.

We’ll bicker a little because it’s raining and because we’re out in it again—and with no purpose at all this time really, just a walk, a reason for me to avoid my grading. I have this idea that I want to see the county historical museum, which is near us and which—among all the things that are not open on Sundays—is open from 2 – 4. T. has this idea that walking in the rain is stupid. He also claims not to be big on historical museums.

But then again, he didn’t want to go to Joseph, did he, and that was a good time!

In our raingear, cars whooshing by, we’ll come across the only other person out here walking, a long-haired kid, maybe twelve or thirteen, in jeans and a Rodman Bulls’ jersey, his bare shoulders streaked with warm rain and a wood-handled handgun jammed in his front jeans pocket.

“Really?” I’ll turn to mouth to T., trudging behind me, and also to make sure the kid is leaving, moving on and moving away from us with that gun.

He gives me a look like shuddering—like being weirded out.

But by the kid and the gun? Or still by me and my insistence on this walk in the rain to the county historical museum and maybe that last thing I said about him being a big baby who never wants to do anything I want to do?

I turn around again because we’re almost there.