How We Lived

When I first got together with the X, it was early August, and we lived on the land he had recently bought, 47 acres, former night pasture of a dairy farm, with hills and woods, and ponds and a stream, on a dirt road. He planned to start another organic vegetable farm. He had lost his last farm in his divorce. I had been farming that entire summer, and the autumn before, with Janelle, over across the river. I had the opportunity to continue on with her, as partners, or have my own farm with him, in a deeper partnership. Of course I went for that. It wasn't very nice of me. I did to her what girlfriends in high school did to me whenever they got boyfriends--ditched her. Even though I had such high hopes for my life with the X, that was no excuse for leaving her behind. But, she forgave me for it. I think in her heart she knew she would have done the same thing, given the chance. She loved the X, like most people in the organic farming community did, and still do. He is an impressive, charismatic man. He sure has them all fooled.

We lived in an old camper trailer in a grove of trees tucked up beside a pond. He called it the 'strange boat' after a Waterboys' song. We had no running water, we used an outhouse, and as long as the weather was warm enough, we bathed in the pond. It was great. I saw double rainbows. I saw the moon turn red during a lunar eclipse. Monarch butterflies landed on my hands and stayed there, fanning their wings. It was magical. I felt so blessed.

Of course, I couldn't have my dog close by, and he got strangely controlling and unpredictably upset at times, but I ignored that. I knew from the women in my family, my mother in particular, that part of living with men you loved was putting up with their crap. And I was so In Love.

I spent that winter of my pregnancy in the strange boat. It was the fourth coldest winter on record at that time. We heated it with a stinky old kerosene heater that burned dirty and left us with sooty faces when we woke up. I would blow my nose mornings and black oily soot filled the tissue. One frigid winter night I walked out to use the outhouse (being pregnant, I had to pee a lot). The skies were full of stars blazing in brilliance. I would think how blessed I was to be able to see such a night sky. The moon shone full and bright. My shadow fell on a little mouse. The mouse actually screamed and ran away.

I worried about not having enough to eat to support the pregnancy. I could cook on the burners of the stove, but not use the oven, and I liked to make dishes that had to be baked. So, I would pile the dogs in the car and go out for chocolate milkshakes or turkey subs. I took expensive vitamins with lots of herbs in them that I got from my friend who owned a natural foods store. They were the same kind his own wife took. She had taken one look at pregnant me and said, "Oh, a love child! I was a love child!" (She later left my friend and their 4 sons for a man 20 years younger than her. They went to California.)

It was so unbelievably cold that winter, but I got used to it. The baby kept me warm too. We heated up water to wash. A woman neighbor asked me if my skin was dry from the intense cold, and I laughingly, truthfully, told her, I didn't wash enough to get dry skin.

On my birthday in February, I waited around to do something with him. It was snowy and cold. He stayed in bed all day, ignoring me. I sat and read and drank raspberry leaf tea. I walked around with the dogs in the woods and fields. I wondered why he was like that, thought he would change with time. I hoped he would come around. I guess I thought maybe because it was my birthday and I was pregnant too that we might do something special.

He finally got the house structure to the point where we had a bathroom in there. The phone was in there too, and a washing machine. A shower stall and a double sink. I would carry the dish pan full of dishes up and down the hill to the house. One time the dog Yoko crashed into me and I fell down flat, dishes and all. She blind sided me. Scared the crap out of me. I folded like the proverbial pregnant house of cards.

We were able to move into the house a week before my due date, but it was an empty space with kitchen cabinets and a bathroom on a concrete slab. He never got the furniture out of storage except for a bed and a kitchen table and chairs. And this old straight backed chair. I guess I kept waiting for him to come to his senses and get the furniture, but he didn't. I ended up having an emergency c-section after 36 hours of labor, and I came home to that bed, that table, that straight backed chair. Because of the surgery, I couldn't climb the stairs to our bedroom where his flat old hard-as-a-rock futon was. Just as well. We all slept downstairs in the bed in what was to be our daughter's room. I really was too tired to complain about the state of things, too dumbfounded, in a way, that he didn't do something to remedy the situation, since I obviously couldn't. But I was also too engrossed in caring for my daughter to even want to complain--because there she was, this miracle! I think I thought, too, that if I didn't complain, he would admire me more.

He went down to the state capital one warm autumn day to some lobbying event for organic farming. While there, he talked a TV news crew into coming up to the farm. Imagine what that woman reporter, in her styled hair and little dress and high heels, must have thought when she entered that empty house, with a concrete floor and no trim, a clothesline strung across the room above a picnic table with dog beds underneath it serving as his desk and me there, sitting in that straight backed chair cradling my infant. (Not to mention there were absolutely no crops in that summer! None.) Here all that time I was thinking he was the crazy, deluded one for dragging a TV news crew up there to our domestic nothingness, while I should have been thinking that I was the crazy one for not getting in my car and driving as far and as fast as I could. But, I was In Love, I thought I would live there forever, and I had no reason not to believe it would not get better.

I need to point out here that this is a man with a bachelor's degree from a private college, who came from a family that sent its kids to boarding school so that they would become judges and lawyers. His grandparents lived in a house that had a name, for goodness sake. Only rich people name their houses. His grandfather, the Judge, was one of 5 men who actually bought their town. His mother spent her entire life living off the proceeds of her trust fund. All I can say is, What the hell?

My step-father had a crazy brother who lived on an isolated back road in an unfinished house and had various grandiose schemes, like turning his place into an elite pheasant preserve for hunters from the city. He had lots and lots of dogs running all over. The house seemed to always be surrounded by muck and mud. He'd make dressing for holidays, stuffing you might call it, that had whole hard kernels of corn in it, like unpopped popcorn kernels. My mother said one time we were all hanging out in the unfinished garage at his place and she idly glanced into a bucket beside her lawn chair and discovered it was full of dead puppies. As the years went by, I came to realize I had married someone very much like that crazy old uncle. The X never, ever finished that house in the 10 years I lived there, never even put on the siding, just left it with the tarpaper exposed, and with scaffolding up on the west end of the house (the cats used to climb that scaffolding to yowl at the bedroom window so I would let them in. That, or they'd climb it to do midnight Gestapo raids on nests full of innocent baby birds and I'd lay there frozen and appalled, listening to them kill the terrified birds.) But, by the time I knew I had indeed married Uncle Arthur, I was on my way out. The antique Adirondack chairs my grandfather had built and which had been given to me after my grandmother died had already fallen to pieces because he wouldn't let me bring them inside winters, and I had already had a nervous breakdown and become anemic from the stress, but my dear friend Frieda gave me a check for $1000 shortly after I told her I was leaving him. I was on my way out of there. It would be many years before I felt healed and whole again, but I was on my way.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai