by Amy Minato
And here’s the catch: Living in the country is one thing. Owning country property quite another.
Gradually at house meetings I notice a disharmony among us. Some begin to see others as possible landlords and the camaraderie fizzles. Luke chafes at chores and Rita whines about the phone. Usually, house meetings are joke and dessert fests. Now power has laid his big stick on the table and the community spirit I love catches her gown on the windowsill as she scurries out.
We just want to continue as is, serene citizens of Oz with our Wizard in the next room. But someone will buy the land and we’ll all have to move. The meek may inherit the earth but only after the rich have died off.
Douglas fir trees rim the oak meadow: implacable, patient. They know that according to the laws of succession they’ll move in on grasses and shrubs. Conifers grow taller and shade out deciduous trees. They send their stiff, pointy soldiers into the field each spring.
What keeps them at bay are fires, or mowers. Established oaks with their armor of bark can tolerate fire much better than Douglas firs. Still, each year the border of conifers advances into the meadow. It’s only a matter of time.
Californians looking for a quaint retreat home come to check out the property. Bewildered by the number of cabins and by the number and look of us maybe, they decide not to buy it.
In the dim light, the dark line of conifers appears to recede from the house. We temporarily return to ignorant bliss.
Courtship
Meanwhile, my mind and other parts circulate around the idea of Joseph, with his bicyclist’s body and charcoal eyes that smolder at me over his glasses as if waiting for a reply.
For the past few months everywhere I look things are mating. Dragonflies hook together over the pond, swallows tilt in pairs through the sky, squirrels careen over each other along tree trunks.
Garter snakes go into brumation, where they stop eating for two weeks to clear their stomachs before sex. Pheromones slinking off a female’s skin attract male garter snakes that roll around her in balls of up to a hundred snakes.
Even the plants seem aroused. Cattail stalks wave their corn dog tops while a chubby bee with a gold-dusted abdomen snuggles into a smug iris. They are my cheer-leaders, cueing me toward love. I clean out my cabin, skip meals, and caress Joseph’s phone number taped to a photo of an otter above my pillow.
Aerial
We could begin
as dragonflies in fringed hover
lace wings in rapid spiral
abdomens throbbing
the myriad facets
of our large eyes aglow.
Or as swifts
cupped by wind
caressed by cloud
feathers smoothed to silk
in the sky’s palm coupling
and uncoupling.
We could fold flesh
curved and furred as bats
fast and warm-blooded waving
and snapping like castanets.
But finally I would want
to fly in fierce orbit with you
surrender to gravity clasp talons
scream through hooked beaks
and hurtle toward earth falling
like eagles in love.
Nomads
The Siesta Lane property has been sold to a woman who lived here before, who moved to town and came limping back. She’s working several jobs in town to afford her daily minutes of peace here. She’s also raising the rent, and cleaning house. We have to move out by June.
We hold a house meeting to discuss our options. I’m the only one without a plan, the only one who has soldered myself to the place—Scarlet O’Hara clenching her clod of dirt.
Sara will go to Minnesota, Jack and Rita to England; Luke will take a studio in town, Raul a job in New Mexico; Paul and Natalie want to live nearer to her school; Mick will marry and move to a house in town. At our last meeting, Raul plays his drum and Mick brings flowers. Sara pours sweet tea into tiny cups. Natalie crochets goodbye washcloths for everyone. Luke looks around with the soft sympathy of the very shy. We exchange well-wishes and addresses.
It’s them I’ll miss as well, it’s “us,” our community. The squirrels and grasses and oaks and people who share the riches and secrets of this land.
Nerve endings flare—my alliance to this place rages like a rash. I lie awake at night, heavy in my bed, under the moon and branches, feeling the pull of each and every vein growing from my body into this land. Imagining that the weight of my desire to stay can somehow root me to it.
But the owner paid for the place, so it’s hers. She has power to affect what happens here, which bonds are formed and which severed. She mowed the meadow right off, and yesterday we found half a bunny head on the living room carpet, a gift from her cat.
Leavetaking
It is our last day at Siesta Lane, this place of rest and replenishment in the middle of my life. Joseph, who will soon become my lover and eventually my husband, sits next to me on the porch swing. He is providing me moral support and chocolate chip cookies.
Joseph, whose unenviable task it is to teach me all the physical science I should have learned in high school, tries to distract me with an explanation of geologic time. Tertiary, Quaternary, Miocene. These sound, to me, like heart muscles, which reminds me of strains and strokes, which brings up pain and loss.
I don’t want to go.
“Look at it this way,” he says. “Siesta Lane has taught you how to be in a place, how to really love the land. That capacity is inside you. You’ll always remember this place for that gift, which you’ll bring everywhere you go.”
I squint and try turning the prism of my sharp hurt to see if it will flash such rainbows. Maybe. Maybe.
We watch everyone else briskly and methodically carry boxes to their cars.
“Bunch o’ bees,” Joseph says, gently kicking the swing.
Oh, yes! We are like bees leaving in a swarm for new lives.
And what honey will we each make from our time here, what flowers will be fertilized with the pollen stuck to our fortunate, bewildered souls?
“Will you help me with my bed?”
“Of course.”
Beyond Siesta Lane
Hearing about Thoreau, one gets the impression that he lived the whole of his life at Walden Pond. Actually, he moved back to town after two years of his experiment. I’ve often wondered how he reconciled such a change.
Years later I live in a tiny house behind a large field, in Eugene. A long-awaited child grows within me. Joseph and I work together to encourage appreciation and stewardship of nature and the practice of simple living.
We try not to use our single small car. Nearly everything we own is secondhand and our diet relies heavily on organic, locally produced food. When possible, we buy in bulk and use recycled paper. We are lucky to live in a place conducive to our ways.
Still, we use phones and computers, refrigerators and washing machines, even as our hydroelectric dams squeeze out salmon populations and industry waste poisons our land. Homemaking has invited more belongings into our lives. It’s an imperfect balance, but we walk the tightrope with our hearts in our throats.
We attempt, at least, to move in the direction of walking lightly on the Earth. Because we believe that the key to a profound life is lower expectations of quantity, higher of quality, we strive to have few possessions that we take good care of, and to do less, better.
How can I walk to work and stop to watch bufflehead ducks skim a pond if I have ninety more errands to do that day? Fast food culture and the automobile depend on the desirability of convenience, and convenience is mainly important when you’re trying to do too much.
Slowing down my lifestyle was easier in the country, where time passage is measured in cloud drift and shadow shift. In the city, it’s hard not to collapse exhausted in front of the TV every night, but finding ways to cut down on stress reduces the desire to zone out.
In our culture we’re taught that more is bet
ter, and conduct our lives accordingly. A Colombian friend once remarked, “When I ask Americans, ‘How was your day?,’ they reply either, ‘It was a good day. I got a lot done,’ or, ‘Lousy. I hardly got anything done.’ In my country, our answers would be more like ‘I enjoyed today. I walked with my sister,’ or, ‘I’m sad because my friend moved away.’”
As Joseph and I lessen our “to do” list, we’re plagued by guilt and a sense of inadequacy—puritan residue. Until we remind ourselves that overproduction is what’s hammering our planet.
I buy a small daily planner that will fit only a few obligations per day. We figure a small house is quicker to clean, a yard turned to wildlife habitat requires less work. The time freed up allows us to volunteer for good causes, cook food from scratch, give massages, watch birds. Buying only essentials (and these secondhand) makes high-power, high-stress jobs less necessary.
Sometimes, as we bike along in the cold rain, passing drivers give us pitying looks. But we wouldn’t switch places. Even if we were tempted, the child within me, rocking closer to life with each turn of the pedal, would have none of it.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to those who read Siesta Lane and offered tactful and sensitive feedback even when it called for major surgery: Diana Abu-Jaber, Ed Alverson, Mary B. Fort, Alan Dickman, Cath Fleischman, Jenny Koll, Donald Snow, Barbara Scot, Jack Shoemaker, Stephen Williams, Mary Wood. Thanks to my agent Janet Reid, for her faith in the book, editor Ann Treistman for her sensitive suggestions, copyeditor Jesse Shiers (sorry for all those extra periods!), and Jan Muir for her inspiring illustrations.
Thanks to David Memmott and Ice River Press for extending rights to reprint the poems.
Thanks to Beth Stein for taking me to re-visit Siesta Lane and for sharing her exquisite photos of the place.
Thanks to all the courageous, creative folk dedicated to leaving a healthy home for our descendants, alone or in groups such as Aprovecho, Nearby Nature, the Center for Appropriate Transport, Community Supported Agriculture, The Nature Conservancy and others.
Thanks to my parents, siblings and other members of my large, extended family and network of friends who are my sustaining web.
And in appreciation of folks who have ever lived at Siesta Lane, and those who aspire to—in flesh or spirit.
1 All species mentioned are currently threatened.
