I have found it somewhat difficult to gain entry into country-folk society. Not because people around here are unfriendly. Not at all. The main problem is you hardly ever see them up close. There are precious few opportunities for chance encounters when folks are all off in some field tending to a llama or training a horse or clank-clank-clanking on a stuck tractor part. Around here, neighbors are people who wave across the acres as your car goes by. I have come to appreciate the waving. I often think about how in the city people sharing the same sidewalk avoid eye contact, while out here, you’re flagging each other down, flagging each other down as if to say, “Hey, over here! I’m a person! And you’re a person! Why, we have something in common!”
So, Equine Clinic. We thought it would be a good idea to get to know some of the horse people around here, folks with whom we have at least something in common. It is, we are just now discovering, quite a large population. Either that, or maybe word is out that Agway is giving away free stuff.
We find seats way in the back. The men nearby are wearing cowboy hats. The women have fringe on their shirts. There are lots of big silver belt buckles. Alex is in his Eddie Bauer khakis and shirt, and I’m Little Miss Land’s End here. “Think we’re dressed too much like … clothing catalog people?” I ask Alex.
“I think we’re okay,” he says.
“Well, let’s just relax now and enjoy this,” I say.
“Right.”
“It’s all about being present in the moment,” I say. “The here-and-now. That’s what happily-ever-after is, you know, it’s living in the moment.”
“Right-o.”
“Because, if you think about it, if you aren’t living in the moment, you risk missing out on happiness completely. Unless of course the moment isn’t happy …”
“What about interrupting?” he says.
“Huh?”
“What about when people interrupt your moment?”
Right. But I’m not quite done. “Let me just go on record as saying that I’m not saying that the unhappy moments aren’t worthy of living in, you know, those are every bit as vital, it’s just—”
“Honey!” he says. He gives me big eyes. Big eyes that say: Your talking is causing me actual pain in my brain.
Ahem.
And for his information, I would also very much like to hear what the speaker up front has to say about inspecting a bale of hay. It’s awfully hard to hear back here.
Suddenly the front of the room erupts into laughter.
“What did he say?” asks a woman near me.
“Timothy is the Slim-Fast of hays,” someone closer up yells back.
Guffaws go around the back of the room. Alex and I look at each other. We are new at hay-humor. We laugh anyway, trying to fit in. It’s weird the way fitting in can feel like the most important thing in the world sometimes.
I’m getting that kindergarten feeling again. This could be because two plump women behind me are setting up the refreshment table: cookies and juice. This could also be because the need to belong to a larger community is as natural to humans as it is to dogs and horses and coyotes and all the pack animals. Who do you think invented the whole family concept in the first place? It was probably the dogs and the horses and the coyotes.
Now the lecturer is saying something about how clover can make a horse slobber and alfalfa can give it bloat.
“Did he say ‘get a goat’?” Alex whispers to me.
“I think he said ‘bloat,’ ” I say.
“Get bloat?” he says.
A woman behind us snickers, leans forward, grabs Alex’s shoulder. “I thought he was saying something about a mare’s coat,” she says.
We really can’t hear. And an organ has suddenly started playing. The people near me are looking around. Where in tarnation is organ music coming from? The people in the front of the room seem oblivious to the music as the tune reveals itself: “Amazing Grace.” It’s coming from the other side of the partition. That would be Conference Room B of the Ramada Inn.
“Can you please speak up!” says one of the guys in a cowboy hat.
“Let us renew our lives by the spirit that is within us!” says a very loud voice coming from behind us.
We all look around at one another. What do you do in a situation like this? We are sitting in Conference Room A, but now all we can hear is what’s going on in Conference Room B.
“I’m having some serious here-and-now interference,” I say to Alex.
“Sir, we really need you to speak up!” the guy in the cowboy hat says to the lecturer in the front of the room.
“Fermentation in the hind-gut produces volatile fatty acids!” shouts the lecturer.
“Alleluia!” says Conference Room B.
“We need to maximize forage.”
“In the name of Jesus!”
A guy in front of me is the first to crack up, slapping his palm on his knee. Oh, that feels good. That gives us all permission. Two ladies in fringed shirts let loose, followed by the men in hats, who remove their hats, shake their heads, and surrender to laughter.
“So anybody want juice?” I ask, and head over to the refreshment table and begin serving drinks to these, my neighbors, wedged here as we are between this and that. I meet Alice and Jim. Nancy, Susan, and Hank. We learn little about pasture management, virtually nothing about worms. We swap horse pictures. We say, hey, let’s get together sometime, in the way you do when you know you probably never will.
“Well, that was fun,” I say to Alex as we head out toward the car. “Nothing wrong with a little stupid fun.”
“Stupid fun is probably what happily-ever-after is all about,” Alex says.
“Are you mocking me?”
“No. I actually sort of mean it.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
It’s an easy drive home, fifteen quick minutes down a highway threading through suburbs, then you exit at the brawny town of Eighty Four, where there’s a truck stop and a couple of gas stations and the Eighty Four Lumber Company, and then industry fades and gives way to sheep and hills that appear covered in a patchwork quilt of brown, yellow, tan. Our tiny town, without so much as a stoplight or a drugstore, is the village that sits on the highest hill around, and so the name: Scenery Hill.
I love that name. I love living here. Driving around, you feel like you’ve entered a very good dream.
It’s a gray March Sunday afternoon, and we’re in the bright red Ford Explorer we got when we first moved out here. We feel okay about owning an SUV, really we do, even though it’s fashionable nowadays to feel guilt and embarrassment and shame. As country-dwellers, we have some fairly legitimate four-wheel-drive needs, so really, we’re okay with it. Then again, the fact that I’m even bringing this up probably means I’ve got some SUV-owning issues. See, this is another problem with being married to a shrink. You’re always on the lookout for issues. Pretty soon you have an issue about having issues. This is another reason I need to get out more.
The landscape out my window is now all knobs and valleys, knobs and valleys, pasture rolling out like ribbons billowing in the wind. This is the landscape we fell in love with. It always reminds me of the Cotswolds in England, where the villages are tucked comfortably inside the creases of the hills, and every cottage has lobelia blooming. Except here, instead of adorably cute cottage after adorably cute cottage, you do get the occasional double-wide thrown in. A double-wide is a mobile home that is, well, double the size of other mobile homes.
It’s okay, though. I’ve learned to accept the occasional double-wide. What’s not to accept? I mean, when you think about it, the real jump is not between people who live in adorable English cottages and people who live in doublewides. The real jump is between the dogs, horses, coyotes, and us, which is not even that huge a jump. We’re still all just a scared bunch of pack animals. All of us huddled together, family after family, doing what we can do.
I’m so much more of a pack animal than I used to be. There
was a while there when I gave up on family. Well, not gave up, exactly. I just decided it wasn’t for me. I come from a huge family. Mom, Dad, two sisters and a brother, a million nieces and nephews, not to mention assorted spouses with their own families. They all live back east, most of them in the Philadelphia area. I love them. I mean, you can’t not love my family. Not a bad seed in the bunch. Just a gang of overachievers applying the overachiever’s work ethic to the happy-family objective.
You can’t argue with that. You can’t argue with a pack of people that places its highest value on the pack itself. But still, there’s a certain suffocation factor. It’s not something you would even think to complain about. It would be like complaining that you have too many best friends. You expect, what, you expect sympathy?
I’m the youngest of my parents’ four kids. The baby. So in a way I was the tail. The tail of a very mighty dragon. On the one hand, it’s nice to have stuff already figured out for you. The dragon has plans for you, and your voyage to happiness is really just a matter of hanging on for the ride.
But I felt devoured. I didn’t want everything already figured out for me. My religion, my political affiliation, my favorite flowers, and my taste in furniture. What would I pick if I had no one around me already doing the picking? The urge to know sent me running, finally. I was twenty-one when I moved from Philadelphia to the other side of the state, to Pittsburgh, five hours away, which might as well have been Alaska. It was just supposed to be a temporary thing. A graduate school thing. A figure-myself-out thing. But I discovered: alone. Alone! I bought a little house on the south side of Pittsburgh. I made a garden. I got a cat and I got a dog. That was it. That was perfect. That was my happily-ever-after. I loved alone. When you’re alone, you have a chance to form your own actual thoughts. That was it! That was the life for me. Family, I figured, was something that was better placed five hours away. Family was there when you needed it. It was always waiting for you back east.
Then, in my thirties, came Alex. And love. And marriage, and a whole new happily-ever-after on a farm. With Alex, I am still able to be alone—except with another person. He doesn’t devour me. And I do my best not to devour him. One thing we’re good at is remembering that our relationship is made up of two separate individuals.
And so we are a family of two. We are a family of two living happily-ever-after on fifty acres in the middle of nowhere. And now we are starting to finish each other’s sentences. We think we need to get out more. We want to be a part of something larger. There is something going on.
Have you ever noticed the ticking of your own kitchen clock? Imagine. This is important. Imagine what it would be like if your kitchen clock was starting to get so loud, you could actually feel it, and what it felt like was a bird pecking you on the head. That’s how mine is. And see, that is not right. You shouldn’t be able to hear the ticking of your own kitchen clock. That should not be a noise you even know about. The tick-tock in your kitchen should be drowned out by family noise.
This, anyway, is the way I see it. And this basically brings us up to date. I mean, this is the raw truth of my here and my now. It’s not something I talk about much. I barely even mention it to Alex; I rarely allow myself to contemplate it. But the truth is, I am craving family noise. Craving it in a way that makes my teeth hurt, if only in those moments between sleep and wake, in those tiny blasts of consciousness you do your very best to ignore.
CHAPTER TWO
We live on a dirt road. It’s a rosy-orange dirt that escorts you through a protective cover of woods, mostly walnut, maple, and cherry. Our driveway runs along the southern edge of our farm, where it hugs the pond, then climbs to the base of our small barn, cobbled together a century ago by Amish farmers who used no nails, just wooden pegs.
Here is our farm, our wondrous farm. And now here we are, pulling up our driveway, the proud owners of a new side-by-side refrigerator. We’re feeling good about ordering that Amana. After two years of marriage, not to mention nearly a decade of friendship, we are just now discovering that neither of us has ever had a home appliance that can spit crushed ice.
“This is going to be great,” I’m saying.
“Really great,” Alex is saying.
When I fling open the car door, I’m greeted by Wilma, who is carrying her usual log. Wilma doesn’t play stick; she plays log. “All right, girl, all right.” With a heave-ho I hurl the log toward the old chicken coop. It lands with a crack, then a swish as it goes sailing over the ice that has accumulated on the driveway. Wilma goes skidding, her legs flailing like paddles on a paddleboat, right into a bank of snow. “Sorry, girl!” She returns happy as ever, the log firmly in her mouth, wagging her tail with that unique brand of dog joy that makes you content just knowing about it. If there is any actual living proof that happily-ever-after exists, it is Wilma. She is the embodiment of it. She is the Jesus of that church.
Alex climbs out of the car, looks around in the bitter March air. Snow is falling again, gently this time, winter’s smooth, weary sigh. “Did we leave Betty and Marley in?” he asks.
“I guess so. I sure hope Marley didn’t chew anything.”
“Marley?”
See, he thinks Marley doesn’t chew. He thinks Betty chews. But Betty would never chew. Well, this is the way it goes. He brought Marley with him into our little family, and I brought Betty, so naturally there are allegiances. And equally as naturally I suppose, Wilma is the one who ends up getting blamed for most everything.
We head toward the house, our oddly expanding house. You can track a lot of rural architectural styles by reading our house from left to right, room after room added on over the years, all of them headed east. It could use a central vision, our house. That would be the first thing you would want to do for it. You would want to make it so the dignified cedar siding on the east end had some relationship to the old aluminum siding out west. You would want to make it so there was a reason this house has six, yes, six front doors and not one back door. We should offer this house up as a contest for architecture students, that’s what we should do. You solve this one, you get the job.
We bang our feet on the porch to knock the snow off our boots. Inside I’m greeted by Betty, who is dancing on her most delighted dog toes. I see no evidence of anything being chewed.
“Well, hello, girly girl,” I say, reaching down to scratch Betty’s head. “You been in here watching TV all day?” Betty’s a dainty yellow mutt with bedroom eyes, a sensitive, excitable creature prone to barking feverishly at the sight of very tall men—and cops. I don’t know why. I got her from the pound when she was just eight weeks old. Perhaps, in utero, she and her mother were involved in some criminal activity?
Marley comes bounding over. Alex smiles, pounds on his chest, inviting Marley to rest his front paws up there. Marley obliges. I’m telling you, it looks like the two are going to break into a tango when they do this. “Oh, Marley,” Alex says. “What in God’s name did you have for breakfast this morning?”
“Stinky dog breath?” I say.
“I still have some of those doggy breath mints in the drawer there,” he says.
I reach into the kitchen junk drawer. “See how my life is?” I say. “A shrink with a bad-breath poodle. I am married to a shrink with a bad-breath poodle.”
“It’s terrible, your life,” he says. “It’s a tragedy.”
“It is.”
Whoops, there’s the phone. The machine picks up on two rings, meaning there are messages waiting, which I’ll have to remember to retrieve.
“Hello?”
“Um, yeah, hello,” says a thick voice. “This is George calling. Your neighbor?”
“Hi!” I say, a little too cheerfully. (Hey, it’s a person. I’m like a kid with a dead butterfly collection. “Here’s one now!”)
“Yeah, well,” George says. “Mother and I were wondering if we could stop over to your place in about a half hour.”
“Um, sure,” I say, leaving out the rest of my resp
onse: Um, why? and Mother?
As an ex-city person, I’m not used to neighbors calling unless it’s to complain.
“Why do you think they want to come over?” Alex asks, when I hang up and tell him.
“Something about the sheep we were supposed to get?”
“But he didn’t say anything about sheep?”
“Nope, just that they wanted to stop over,” I say. “Hey. Does George live with his mother?”
“Huh?”
“He said he’s coming over with Mother.”
“I’m pretty sure his mother is dead,” Alex says.
We stop and think on this point.
Now, George. George is a sheep farmer. His property borders ours. We’ve really only spoken to him a few times. In fact, up until recently George was more your basic waving neighbor. Then one day last fall we ran into him at Scenery Hill Hardware. We got to talking. We told him we were looking to hire someone to help us at the farm, specifically with our grass-cutting situation. How in the name of alfalfa, we said, was a person supposed to find time to mow fifty acres?
The Exact Same Moon Page 2
