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.

Conversation Piece

Conversation #1:

Blip. Blip. Blip.

“Now what are these. Collard greens. Can’t say I’ve ever seen those before.”

“You have plenty on your shelf.”

“And fish.” (Makes a face.) “I don’t eat fish. I catch ‘em, I clean ‘em, I cook ‘em, but I don’t eat ‘em. “

“Well, you should try collard greens sometime. Oil and salt on them, they’re great.”

“Nope. No green stuff for me. Just a little bit of lettuce maybe. And every once in a while green beans, but only if they’re cooked right. And I mean just right. I do eat corn. And potatoes.”

Takes one last look at my food, reaching for the end of the bag of greens with only the tips of her fingers, and shudders in disgust.


Conversation #2:

“I used to give a seminar for women and their money. ‘Smart women finish rich.’ I used to have all these figures then, showed how much you’d save over time if you start putting something away a little each month.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen those charts.”

“You’re so smart to be thinking of this now, when you’re so young yet. Man. So many kids around here, they just want to make the monthly payment on their car, make rent. Nobody thinking anymore about the future.”

“And we’ve all seen where that leads, haven’t we?”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah. Take banks. It’s our fault too. We were lending people money we shouldn’t have been. So, English teacher. You know, I’ve written books. Three of ‘em actually. Novels. I’m always working on something, just scribbling away. Course the writings not real good—but that’s what editors are for, right? Clean it all up.”

“ Um, sure.”

“I got a kid, trying to get him to go to the junior college first, get some credits. But they all want to spend the big bucks to go live in the dorms, have freedom. You got your whole life to have freedom, I say. You can wait a few years and save some money first. But they don’t see it that way.”

“Uh Huh.”

“I mean, that’s why you’re so smart to be thinking about your future now. I mean, with this political situation. What we got in Washington, what mess they’re up to now.”

“Mm.hm…”

“I mean, look—I don’t try to get political with anyone. Anyone’s politics is their own business and of course I can work with anybody. But that snowstorm in DC? Now wasn’t that the Lord?”

“Mm.”

“But saving money. Yep. Now here’s how I think of it. Say you walk by a window, and you see a purty dress. I mean, a real purty dress. You want that dress! But it’s way too expensive. So you say, no , I’d just really better not. I mean, a smart girl like you, that’s what you’d say. Then, the next day you come by, and it’s 50% off! Well, now you could buy it. Now you could buy it, and look at all that money you’ve saved. That’s saving money.”

“You know…. I think I’ll just take your card here….”


Conversation #3:

“Excuse me?”

We’re in the pool, sapphire-tinged water, vaguely medical in its hue, lapping chest deep. I push my goggles up, and an older woman, one of the water walkers, is bobbing toward me, parting the surface with her fingers as she glides. “Yes?”

“Did you read that article in there, tacked up to the bulletin board in the locker room?”

“Yeah,” I say, though I didn’t really; I just saw the headline.

“Well what can we do to help? All those teachers are losing their jobs.”

“I know. Mine’s been cut too, actually.” I tell her this as some kind of fair warning. Without my contacts, I am only peering in the direction of her white shape, the sound of her voice, but I know she can't know who I am either.

“And the swimming teacher!” the woman continues. “You know, every fourth grader in the county gets their swimming lesson from her. Every one. Now what are those kids going to do?”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“And they can’t close this pool. Where will people who need it go? You get a lesson from that swimming teacher, you get a work out, I tell you.”

After my swim, I stand in the locker room, dripping and squinting, and read the article. A few decades ago, a local fourth-grader drowned in a river. The PE teacher at the college here started a swimming lesson program, and later it expanded to include all the fourth graders in the county, so there is now a full local generation taught to swim by this one woman.

It’s like my grandmother who, in my town, taught spelling and cursive handwriting to thirty years of third-graders.

And what a power in that, I’ve often thought: a creepy, secretive power, flying under all of our radar.

Group Discussion

“Above all, it’s important to ignore rumors.”

“Oh—and they’re flying!”

“There’s the one about the pool closing…”

“I heard that one.”

“At the pharmacy the other day, there was this woman. Said she knows all about because of where her friend works. Well she went on and, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

“…build a new Wal-Mart.”

“Everyone in town has something to say. And I’ve been getting emails. And you can read all about it on Facebook too.”

“Oh yes. Guess-who was on there. This isn’t a rumor. It’s true and you can go look at it yourself.”

Conversation #4, in Stirrups

“Man, you just got here and now you’ll have to look for a new job! That’s the pits.”

I know.

“Still. You don’t have any family here, how’d you end up here?”

It’s a good question, and one everyone here asks—with that same awe in their voice that seems to end, so weirdly, in disapproval or suspicion. Don’t they live here? Have they no faith in the merits of their own town?

I try to explain; we’re from the Midwest. We’re from small towns. It is a good little college they have here, and I was glad for a job.

“Now, if you want to have a baby some time, I always tell people, six months it might take, after you go off pills. But, it could happen soo-oner.” He ends in a sing-song, a joke with a happy wink.

But I have not asked about having a baby. I’m here, as I’ve specifically explained, to refill a birth control prescription.

“Okay,” I say, and think wistfully of my Portland doc, and her most serious, searching question: Do you wear your bicycle helmet? Every time?

“We’ll see you again next year,” the doc says, and then stops. “Or—man, maybe we won’t huh?” He shakes his head, then shakes my hand. Good luck to me.


A Walk with T.

“Careful. Or I’ll hear about this Monday.”

But he shoves me again toward a mud puddle. I respond by launching myself from a curb into his side, a wrestler descending from the ropes. He grabs my head and scrubs my hair with the flat of his fist.

No one was coming out of any of the houses to save me. We joke about this. What will they say after we’re gone? Remember that teacher we had that one year? The one whose boyfriend beat her?

Or, they’ll remember him as my husband, since that’s what so many call him here, bank tellers, grocery store clerks, co-workers. People here even mention to me “my husband” when I am alone and when I have never met them before, causing me always to want to double-take, to turn around in a circle looking over my shoulder.

It’s like I suddenly grew old enough, crossing those 2200 miles to get here. Maybe it happened at the Continental Divide. But maybe it was halfway through Nebraska, where, for me, the bartender gallantly opened a Lite beer.

If we did stay here, they’d marry us off for sure, just through force of repetition. Even people I gently correct forget by the next time I see them, so it’s like sweeping a drift of sand.

“See? We should have brought the movies,” I say as we pass the video store: Spotlight Video, with its neon sign and new release painted windows and one strangely boarded-over window, like a car drove through it.

Once I’d walked in to return some movies, and one of my students was sitting behind the desk, working on an assignment I had given. She looked up at me in total surprise. I was an apparition.

It made me remember a math teacher, new one year to our middle school, who was not married but living with her boyfriend, to whom she referred, in a way that deeply embarrassed us all, as her partner. She also went by “Ms.,” the first woman I ever knew to do so, and as if it were related, was skinny—skeletally skinny—could be seen around town running, of all things, and gave us her home phone number so we could call if we had homework questions, even at night. We thought she was the weirdest adult we’d ever met. I don’t think anyone ever called her with a homework question. I think that because one night when I called her she seemed so surprised, and even annoyed, like she’d forgotten that she’d offered.

Any questions? I joked with my student at the video store, and was grateful when she shook her head no. I was in a nubby jacket, not in my teacher clothes.

Everything is mud. We walk along the road, where it is less muddy. Grass everywhere is browned and matted, the fur of a long-sleeping or dead animal; trees are sticks and twigs.

“Look.” T. grabs my arm. There’s a small dog inside a house, stock still and staring over the back of a couch. Framed by the front window, it’s like a painting, the dog’s little face rigid, ears perked.

“Doesn’t it look like a painting?” T. says. “I thought it was, for a moment.”

On and off, in different places, at different times of day, we talk about where we’ll move next, when, what kinds of jobs we’ll find. What can we get? But also, what do we want actually?

We don’t know, of course. But we keep talking in the same circular way that had been enough last spring to tornado us here.

I MapQuest our route again, and that purple line stretches so unbelievably long back across the country.

“Let’s go to that library.” T. teases me as we approach a dip, a ditch, and then a looming brick building, new and tucked behind winter bare trees. “I’ll vouch that you’re my friend.”

“Very funny.” There, to my mortification, I’d nearly failed to qualify for a library card, unable to provide the name and number of one other person in town, someone not living with me, who knew me.

I’d had to pull out my big guns: I’m an English teacher. At the college. The librarian—after looking over her shoulder—whispered that I could just put down my office number for my reference.

It was too bad the student of mine I’d seen outside the library, on my way in, had ridden away already. He lives about ten miles out of town, and in my class had written essays about riding his bike long, and then longer distances, starting with the first time he’d left the end of his grandparents’ long driveway. We’d chatted there in the parking lot, and he’d showed me the big four-wheeler gloves he’d outfitted to the handlebars of his bike, for the wind.

Now he’s ridden as far as the state line, and across it.

Passing the library, T. and I come upon a street decorated with basketball cut-outs. The boys’ team has won the state basketball championship. We pass a small boy on a makeshift pitcher’s mound in his side yard, a bucket of baseballs at his side, and a man squatting to receive these pitches eyes us. What do we think we’re doing—walking around?

“Pitchers and catchers,” T. says gamely. We turn on to a street named Oil.

Earlier—while I was upstairs prowling for jobs and googling cities, and T. was making a spinach soup—he reached far into our second-hand dishwasher to fiddle with a metal loop sticking up, something out of place. Extracting the thing, he found it to be a tiny, child-sized engagement ring, with five plastic diamonds in a row. He’d called me downstairs, wonder in his voice. It was like our dishwasher had proposed to him.

For a minute—for one minute—it was like this town had tried to marry us.

I take the opportunity near the end of our walk, while T. leans to inspect the new buds on a tree—he knows the names for everything, he knows the genus and the species—to give him one more good, loving, relieved, terrified punch to the arm.

The Candidates' Debate

Post Removed.

Village People

Remember those Christmas village sets (maybe your mom or Grandma has/had one) that depict wintery scenes from Victorian-era towns, each little ceramic building maybe white-bulb-lit from within, and the whole set connected via running electric cord that had to be somehow hidden beneath white cotton batting (the snow) or behind plastic evergreen sprigs sprung from bark bases (the trees)? Yes—it was holiday time in some European-ish northern-clime, and transported to your living room. The bells from the steepled church were practically ringing in storybook satisfaction. There was a bread maker’s shop, a post office, a grocer’s store, and maybe a cobbler’s. One set in my family included skaters jerked along by magnets over a small Disco-blow-sized mirror pond (half hidden amidst the felted snow). A great aunt’s collection was locally famous, stretching across multiple card tables in a new arrangement each season—the spread reflective of arduous, minute, and entirely fictive civic planning. As a granddaughter, I remember the Styrofoam packaging most distinctly: the perfect negative of each house and the squeak as each was (delicately) pulled from its place, and then refitted at January’s end, even the cord and plug re-nestled in their bed.

The idea of a small town is appealing to a certain part of the brain: the idea that there only needs to be one of things; that a town’s layout, involving so few things, could be so simple and logical so as to be apprehended all at once, as if viewed from above. That people and the businesses their families owned could be synonymous, and as permanent as brick buildings.

Can you imagine anyone now taking a name to denote his or her trade? Baker, Blacksmith, Occupational Therapist?

Maybe it’s the same part of my brain mesmerized by form-fit Styrofoam that wants to idealize a small community. But ride with me here, for a moment. Forget the bad stuff: gossip, groupthink, nepotism that isn’t even recognized as such. Think of a cemetery where some of the names on even the oldest, most sunken and crumbling tombstones match those in the yellow pages, the local Ford dealer’s name or beauty salon owner’s name, and where some newer stones have names with birth dates and a waiting hyphen, someone—maybe working out at the gym right now—nevertheless claiming her place. If this is getting too Spoon River for you, go back to my previous paragraph. Imagine inheriting a needed and respected trade: being taught all the skills of the craft right along with your abc’s, and then handed a capital investment and an assured place in your community.

On a bike ride last fall we came upon just such a cemetery. We propped our bikes against a gate and walked around. We were so newly arrived that I felt a physical uneasiness leaning my bike against a gate and walking away without locking it—this in an empty cemetery on a deserted state highway, miles from town, surrounded by thousands of acres of corn. I kept my bike in view as we moved among the stones, as if some ghost had been waiting for something just like it.

Some of the gravestones were so old they had begun to sink, even these markers of retracted life in retreat. Others lay toppled or crumbling; their decay seemingly paused to us, even while ongoing just as we were stepping along through the rows. We made out names and dates from as late as two centuries ago etched into soft purplish-colored stones and on a few towering monuments, complete with their own tiny fenced gates and carved angels. Of course there were veterans’ slabs and baby graves, and paired spinster sister graves, and, yes, there were two graves for women from a century ago not labeled with their names at all but only their titles, in this case weirdly identical: “wife of Dr. ____. “ From the dates, and study of nearby markers, I didn’t gather that these were in-laws, but Dr. ____’s first and second wives.

He, of course, was the one with the private fence and stone angels nearby.

There would have to be a cemetery or two in a Christmas village set of my town—along with a water department building, salt trucks, the Goodwill, Rural King, Taco Bell, and Napa Auto Parts.

If seen the other night from above, roofs peeled back, I would have been found in the yoga studio in final relaxation, some of us in a variation called "feet up the wall."

The studio doesn’t have its name on the front, by the way, like the Mill from my grandma’s Christmas village, because why does it need a sign? Everyone knows it’s the yoga studio.

And next door to that would be the The Curling Iron, a beauty salon, and on the other side of that Cellular One, and a block further the GM dealer. In our town, small as it is, there are more than one of many things: three banks, two grocery stores (one, Super Wal-Mart), about ten car washes, three or four insurance agencies, a Verizon Wireless place, a cable company, a Mexican restaurant, a few consignment stores.

We do have a skating rink—but it’s indoors, for roller skating, and used now mostly for Zumba.

As well there are not one but about fifteen different churches, each with its own separate, active congregation (according to an events listing that takes up a quarter of the newspaper).

And there are bars, dry as it is on Sundays. One of the rowdier ones is on the other side of the Yoga studio. This night, as we lay in corpse pose, staring upward, a woman in the street outside began to yell. I pictured the bar as if its roof had been peeled back: its karaoke machine, Nascar flags, and Budweiser taps (still considered here, proudly within a driving range of St. Louis, an American beer).

Her voice wafted over the studio, crisp on the wintery air.

“If I don’t want to have fucking sex with you, I won’t have fucking sex with you.” She was not endangered, but lecturing. We in our corpse pose were a group of women stretched on floor mats in a room without furniture—not a non-silly contemporary pastime for an adult. Each of us was trying to relax, trying not to think the racing thoughts of our day, me trying not to think of Christmas village sets, what could be for dinner, how I ever ended up in this room, on this ground, in this Christmas village set that is really not mine at all, but that is as odd to me as tiny ceramic eighteenth-century German carriage house to my aunt’s living room in the 1980’s of Brussels, Wisconsin.

And all of this not two hundred yards from the courthouse, yep that one with its Back to the Future clock, its white moon face to the night.

Piece that begins and ends with partial listing of season-specific sensations

Knuckle skin cracking from dry winter air; lips a mess

Smell of car heater air mixed with chlorine smell coming from me, after lap swimming, wet hair under my hat stiff brushes sticking to wool of hat

White, white light—so diffuse, is it seeping in at the horizons? Whole sky one cloud sweater. Then all light pinkish at night before blue, and then total black, save lights from the refinery, like a carnival cruise ship come in to dock in the middle of town, white spume and Olympic torch, nude fire blast like fog horn

Total dearth of street lights. Blank windows like black paintings on our walls. Inside house at night, lights out, coffee table vs. shins

Most corn fields in sight from the road hacked down to stubble, but tractors still float past at morning intersections. Picking through New Year’s this year

Smell of fully melted pumpkin seeping over my desk

Shock and then even a little anger at mini, inflatable holiday nativity scene tethered, like hot-air balloon, to the courthouse lawn of our town. Then amusement at sight of it in daytime, deflated. (How seriously can we take these culture wars?)

Also inflated penguins sliding atop inflated mailbox, waving letters to Santa in the direction of the post office, courthouse south lawn

Winter branches, first top-frost of snow, grass blades and mud still poked up through; neighbor kids on their trampoline bouncing the shards of an ice puddle

Whole dead deer on highways, backs twisted acrobatically

Coming to full stop at a desolate country four-way, accelerating again all the way back up to highway speed

Letter to the editor: Our Christmas spirit needs revitalized. We’re the only town with no Christmas tree? And those same old wire snowflakes.

Christmas office party treats made with Eagle Brand, Tostitos Queso, marshmallows. I make a dessert with Vanilla wafers.

Trips through many towns, all the way to Iowa for Thanksgiving, up to Wisconsin and Minnesota for Christmas and New Years. One wonderful absence from list of seasonal sensations: airports. Anything airport related. Motoring (still, with our Oregon plates) through towns with names like Oblong, Eureka, Montezuma, Mount Pulaski, each with its own water tower, grain elevator, church steeples, Dollar General. At every town entrance, proclamations of local high school greats: division-clinching girls’ softball program; state champion football team; a pole vaulter, a wrestler. Along the main streets, names of more young people, each nailed to its own telephone pole with a yellow ribbon.

Invitation to a living nativity stuck in our back door. Will there be live donkey? Someone’s real baby? We are actually curious and want to go, but fall asleep on our couch.

When we visit the main streets—Story City, Iowa; Palestine, Illinois; Vincennes, Indiana—we get the feeling shop owners are calling ahead to one another down the line, letting them know we’re coming, though we’re really not buying much of anything. In Vincennes, we are given free peanuts in a newspaper cone, and organ music is piped out over the sidewalk. T buys a cast iron pot, and the clerk teases me: Now what will he want me to cook? Even the small PC repair shop seems to be in the antique business, even the record store, where the gray-ponytailed clerk/owner ambitiously offers to mail me a copy of the Dylan Christmas album on Tuesday, once it comes in (which he does, though not after calling me on Monday to assure me it’s coming). A woman in a thrift/Antique store has set up a murder scene from a famous play we do not know, but which once appeared at the local theatre currently being restored, she told us as if we knew all about that theatre. There are antique gun and blood and poker chips and liquor bottles on an antique bed. She has also turned off the heat in the shop. We drift through with our hands shoved under our armpits, searching for something we can pay her for. Her inventory includes remnants of her real life. She jokes about how she inherited the china in the glass case from an in-law, earning the set after decades of hand washing each piece after holiday gatherings, never breaking a one. Of course she’s the last one living of that clan too. That, she reflects, is also why.