My Million-Dollar Donkey (12 page)

I winced, thinking the grand total would be even more when labor was included. According to the book, we would need to erect a fence around the coop as well. How was I going to spring that one on Mark?

“I’m sorry, but something just doesn’t seem right. I really thought a coop thrown together by a handyman would be more in the range of $400. Just how big was that chicken coop, anyway? Did you notice?” I said.

Mark paused. “I’ll call you back.”

Turns out the plans in the book were for a chicken house that could easily house 200 chickens. I had under a dozen birds. Oops.

“I didn’t pay attention to dimensions when you showed me the plans,” Mark said sheepishly. “So, I told him to make it smaller, but this chicken house is still going to cost us about four grand by the time he adds his labor. You better really like harvesting your own eggs, ‘cause it’ll take about thirty years to make this project cost-effective.”

“Not everything in life has to add up on a balance sheet. Raising chickens will be a learning experience, and perhaps I’ll use the coop for other things as well. Like raising a turkey.”

“To eat?”

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“Then no turkeys. I hereby declare that you can only raise what you are willing to eat. I hear turkeys are smelly and dumb, anyway.”

“OK, no turkeys. I wouldn’t want dumb poultry hanging around.”

I vaguely wondered what birds I
could
keep that my husband wouldn’t expect me to eat because my animal husbandry experiments were the only thing filling my days while the kids were at school and he was devoting our wildly amazing newfound freedom and resources to his own personal interest of building. The animals weren’t simply a hobby. They were my lifeline.

I once thought New York was the Santa capitol of the world. Every December in the city Santas rang bells in front of Salvation Army collection pots on every street corner. I’d throw in a few quarters as I passed, smiling and wondering,
Are you the real one?
Sometimes these Santas had dark skin, bushy eyebrows, or the wrong colored eyes. They might be abnormally short or tall. They might even be women, young yuppie types, elderly, or just a guy lacking “jolly-ness.” I wasn’t fooled a bit.

As Christmas came to Blue Ridge, I noticed men who looked like Santas everywhere, and not one of them wore a red suit or rang a bell. Here, a Santa went about his day like everyone else, with a twinkle in his eye and his bushy, white beard ungroomed. Often, he wore overalls over a Henley shirt and well-worn work boots. I even saw Santa at the hardware store one day. He was loading his truck with two-by-fours. As I passed, he nodded and winked.

One morning, I spotted two Santas having breakfast at the Waffle House. Their round stomachs filled the booth, leaving little room for expansion after they finished off their plates of biscuits and gravy. White hair and beards covered the collars of their flannel plaid shirts. One wore a John Deere baseball cap. They were talking about how the endless rain was making a mess around their barn.
Must be tough on the reindeer
, I thought.

Blue Ridge also had a few Good Samaritan Santas decked out in red velvet. Santas passed out gifts at the bank or made an appearance at fundraisers. A traditional Santa rode the train to the
Light
Up Blue Ridge ceremony every season. He would sit in a decorated gazebo in the park to take pictures with the kids. Mrs. Claus handed out peppermint sticks by his side. I enjoyed the festivities, but my eyes couldn’t resist slipping to the crowd where, it seemed to me, more authentic Santas lingered, the kind with a bit of chew in their cheeks and mud on the hems of their work-worn jeans.

In the country, commerce didn’t drive Christmas so much and people were not too frazzled to pause for a cup of homemade eggnog. The holidays were as wholesome and natural as the holly growing in the woods outside our cabin door. For the first time in as long as I could remember, Christmas was not a flurry of malls and boutiques. I didn’t spend evenings reading about Christmas traditions in
Martha Stewart Magazine
. Instead, I had the time and inspiration to actually dabble in wholesome holiday projects. I sent Christmas cards to friends who hadn’t heard from me in years and made baskets of goodies for my neighbors. I spent an evening with the kids stringing popcorn and cranberries to go with ornaments made of bagels and birdseed, and decorated a tree outside for the wildlife. I cooked homemade dog biscuits with my daughter and mixed up a batch of horse cookies and placed them in festive containers. We watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
in front of a roaring fire while I crocheted my husband a homemade scarf.

But although our country Christmas was not focused on presents, I was excited to buy one special gift because the holiday provided me with the perfect excuse to buy Kathy something useful without the gift seeming like charity. The problem was, what? Kathy could use a new coat, but perhaps that was too personal? A gift certificate to the grocery store would be nice, but maybe that would seem like a handout.

One day, as we were talking about our children’s wish lists, Kathy told me she’d met a man employed at a fancy dentist office in Atlanta who makes false teeth “under the table.” Her husband had given her one hundred dollars for Christmas to put down as a deposit, and she was going to set up a payment plan for the rest so that, in a year, she would eventually get dentures. She was thrilled.

We’d never really discussed her dental problems beyond acknowledging how her lack of teeth made pronunciation difficult, but with the subject now open, I gently asked questions about her experience of living without teeth at age forty. In her honest, unassuming way, she shared stories of her self-consciousness and the ongoing physical and emotional pain that came with having no teeth. Kathy’s wants were few, but getting a healthy set of teeth was high on her wish list.

“I just want to be pretty and like other people,” she said shyly.

“I’ve been trying to think of just the right gift to give you for Christmas and I’d really love to pay off your teeth if you’d let me,” I said.

She didn’t respond immediately, so I added, “After all, teeth will make my job easier since it will help you pronounce words correctly. This will be a gift for us both.”

I had put aside money for a gift for Kathy and several hundred dollars was tucked in a compartment of my purse. I pressed the money into her hand, insistent and encouraging. Her resistance melted away and she took it graciously as we ended our lesson.

We were scheduled to take a break for two weeks while the kids were home on Christmas vacation, and Kathy called to tell me she was getting fitted for her new teeth the next week. When we returned to our lessons in the New Year, she’d be a new woman, or at least a woman with a new mouth.

On the day she actually got her false teeth, she called to share her joy, her voice lisping slightly as she struggled to adjust to a mouth full of dentures.

Finally, the day for resuming our lessons came. I arrived early with donuts to celebrate. Promptly at nine o’clock, Kathy walked in, purposely holding back a smile.

“Oh, no, you don’t. Let me see,” I said.

She flashed me a euphoric grin and I caught my breath. Her teeth were straight and white. The dentures filled out her face, making her chiseled features look softer. She looked more intelligent with teeth, too. With only three rotting teeth, she had looked like the stereotypical illiterate country gal, someone from a skit on the
Hee Haw
show. Now, she looked like an upper middle class housewife, and a very pretty one at that.

“You look gorgeous. Do they hurt?”

“They feel weird. I don’t think I’ll be eating any donuts for a while.” “What does your husband think?”

“He said I was a knockout and insisted other men will want to take me home now.” She giggled. “It’s funny, but I swear people treat me differently, like the checkout girl in the grocery store. Used to be she wouldn’t give me the time of day, but suddenly she’s talking to me, asking me how my day is going.”

Of course people are going to treat you differently,
I thought
. You no longer look like an indigent, ignorant bumpkin. You look like an intelligent, beautiful woman and no one would ever guess you are handicapped by the inability to read.
I felt no small amount of pride over my part in her transformation; a self-serving feeling I suppose. Mostly I felt deeply happy for Kathy, a woman who seemed to appreciate every small advantage afforded her with a reverence I couldn’t help but admire.

“A lady from church offered to get me a makeover and a haircut, and I think I’m gonna do it,” she said, fondling the ends of her long, shapeless hair shyly. “It’s been so long since I’ve felt good about myself.”

“Well, this will come in handy for you then,” I said, handing her a Christmas card with a small gift card to a neighborhood clothing store. “I wanted to get you a more traditional gift for Christmas too, something you can open.”

She looked over the card, thanked me, and slid the envelope aside. “Read it,” I said.

She looked embarrassed. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can; I picked this card specifically because you know the words.”

Kathy looked at the card again and shrugged her shoulders. “What kind of writing is this?”

I grabbed the card to point out how simple the sentiment was, and only then realize that I’d chosen a card with cursive writing. Oops.

So I explained what cursive writing was, and promised we would practice that too, in time. Then, because she hadn’t made any comment about the gift card I decided to ask her what she thought of that, too .

Her jaw twisted.

“Do you know what that card is?”

“Not really.”

“The card represents a certain amount of money. You swipe the card in machines by the register in a store and you get credit to use, like cash.”

Kathy flashed her new, brilliant smile. “Hey, I’ve seen people do that before. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I was deeply aware of Kathy’s limited exposure to society’s systems, and yet I missed this one. Kathy had never had a bank account and so, of course, had never used a credit card, much less a gift card. She also never applied for or used food stamps, coupons, or anything else that required reading to maneuver through rules or regulations.

I walked her through the motions of using a gift card, realizing my gift wasn’t at all going to be the new sweater or pair of jeans she would pick out with the little fifty dollar certificate. My gift would instead be something more meaningful - a new experience and expanded awareness.

On a grander scale, the same theory applied to all the acquisitions Mark and I were accumulating. None of the trappings of a country lifestyle that we seemed to be stockpiling were really needed or warranted for the life of simplicity we originally planned. The stuff we kept buying was more about what the lessons and new skills attached. Were these the lessons we needed to learn? Tractors and chickens and living in a home-made cabin of rustic logs with animals outside our door felt nobly organic, but our consumer attitudes and drives were not unlike those we had before, when we were living in bustling suburbia. The reserved, quiet life we set out to achieve, a life that was available to us at anytime and anyplace if we just chose to embrace simplicity, was in fact, still being put off until later. There was simply too much to do to prepare for the simple life to allow us time to pause and actually live simply.

Had we stayed put in Florida where we had an established business, house and community and chosen to reprioritize our life and make small changes, we would likely have created our coveted life transformation easier, quicker, and with far less upheaval to those we loved. So, what were we really striving to do by moving to the country?

As an avid cook and someone ultimately curious about the world, raising chickens was more about seeing nature’s process firsthand than raising birds for practical reasons. I’d read dozens of magazines about hobby farming, and now I had a hankering for a garden too. I wanted to plant, prune, weed, and harvest. I wanted to feed my family homegrown organic vegetables and fruit picked right off the vine. Local eating was considered the socially conscientious thing to do, and with a garden of my own, I could bring food to our table without consuming the gas an avid environmentalist would use to drive to the local farmer’s market.

I dreamed of homegrown tomatoes, beans, peppers, garlic, melons, asparagus, and squash. I had a basket in my kitchen filling up with seed packages to prove my intent, and
Organic Gardening
,
Herb Enthusiast
,
Vegetarian Times
, and
Georgia Gardening
magazines began fighting for space in my overstuffed mailbox. I read books with titles like
The 64 Dollar Tomato
and
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
as if they were academic textbooks rather than inspirational memoirs.

All I needed was a place to do the planting and help getting started. I’d never grown anything beyond a house plant. Mark, on the other hand, had been an avid gardener for years. In Florida, due to the weather and the size of our yard, his interest hovered primarily around orchids and flowerbeds, but he was enthusiastic about planting a vegetable patch to feed the family. He shared inspirational stories of a neighbor he much admired as a child, telling me how much he loved helping put vegetables up for winter. He spoke with such reverence and passion that canning sounded like a great aphrodisiac to him, and if the ability to make my own pickles would make me sexy in Mark’s eyes, I was game. I missed his touch and his earnest attention terribly.

Mark deemed the garden should go in a corner of the field adjacent to our pasture. We didn’t have a source for watering plants there yet, but we might be able to rig something from the rambling stream nearby.

Despite the array of tractor appendages we’d purchased, we hadn’t included a tiller, so Ronnie dropped by with his tractor to turn up a huge swatch of dirt for the garden. Mark also purchased a freestanding push tiller for additional preparation. For two days, I tossed rocks aside as Mark made defined rows, mounding the dirt into neat humps for future lettuce, beans, carrots, beets, corn, cantaloupe, and squash plants.

A month later we undertook stage two. Mark made impressions with the handle of a rake in the earth, and I crouched over to push tiny seeds into the holes, gently piling dirt on top. We planted some tomato starter plants and, as a last minute thought, scattered pumpkin, gourd, and watermelon seeds on a nearby hill. The ground in this area had not been prepared for a garden, but we figured a planting crap shoot for gourds couldn’t hurt.

Inspired, we continued to purchase additional plants a
nd seeds like someone at a buffet table piling their plates to overflowing because their eyes are bigger than their stomachs. As the days grew warmer the extra plants shriveled in the garage. Other seed packets never made the journey out of my to-do basket. We ended up planting only one half of our proposed garden, but the truth was, starting a garden from scratch was far more labor-intensive than I had anticipated, so starting with only half a garden turned out a blessing.

Mark came home with a huge bag of daffodil bulbs to plant around the new house. The flowers may or may not bloom in the first season, but we’d have an explosion of color to curl anyone’s toes from then on, he explained. Never averse to working towards a promising future, I devoted a weekend to planting bulbs. My husband, always a master at delegating manual labor, stood upright making holes with a hoe and I was the one expected to bend down, nose and fingertips in the dirt.

“Stomp on the dirt to pack it down. Any air that gets into the root will make it rot,” he said, leaning casually against the hoe handle.

I stood with a groan, holding my aching back as I stomped on the dirt.

“You don’t have to do a daffodil dance on every one. Just stomp on it.”

“I
am
stomping. Who said gardening can’t be done with finesse?” I continuing to do my little cha-cha-cha on top of each potential flower as if dancing might bring good luck to the bulb.

Mark had purchased 450 bulbs at the neighboring garden center. The fifty sale bulbs I bought on-line seemed paltry at best but demonstrated my enthusiasm and desire to be a part of the landscape planning if nothing else.

“Whatcha got?” Mark said, looking at my purchases and wrinkling his nose. “Mixed bulbs? We hate mixed bulbs.”

“We do? Since when? Mixed bulbs offer diverse color. See, that’s written right on the package. Besides, they’re pretty.”

“They aren’t
naturalized,
” he said.

“Of course they’re natural. They’re plants.”

“I said natural
ized
. Flowers grow and multiply on their own, so for the landscape to look natural, using one color is best.”

“Anything we plant will multiply on its own and over time and become naturalized, right? Problem solved. Besides, why does a flower bed have to look natural? Not like bulbs would spring up in nice rows along a house if someone didn’t plant them in the first place.”

“Mixed flowers are corny.”

“And yet, companies sell mixed bulbs and people do buy them.” “They also sell Day-Glo pictures of naked ladies painted on black velvet but we don’t buy them and hang them over the mantel.” “Why plant a garden with only a few primary colors when you can offer a rainbow?”

He looked at me as if I had just suggested we cover the sofa in the living room with plastic.

“I also bought hyacinths,” I said, thinking my knowing the name of such a fancy flower might impress him.

“They’re too small for a huge plot of land, and... um... looks like you bought them in mixed colors too.”

“Because I like mixed colors.”

Again, his reaction was as if I bought a mermaid lamp with a clock in its stomach for the living room. To his credit, he did try to feign appreciation for my bulbs and made a few polite suggestions for where they might look best, such as planting them off to the side of the driveway half way into the forest, or maybe on the far side of the house near the air conditioner, perhaps behind the big rock.

I decided to give him an out. “If you feel that strongly about my bulbs, I guess we could plant them near the chicken house.”

“Good idea! Why don’t you plant them there some other day?”

“You’re not going to help me plant them today while we are on a bulb planting mission? I’m helping you plant the 450 expensive bulbs you purchased.”

“Landscaping this house is a big project and I’m busy creating just the right look. I don’t have time to waste playing around in the animal area.”

“But it’s OK for
me
to waste time in the animal area?”

“The animals are your thing. Building this house is mine.”

“OK,” I said with a sniff, not relishing the idea of hours spent alone planting unwanted bulbs in a place where the only creature who would notice was my donkey. The barnyard was becoming a symbol of my loneliness now and I spent many a quiet hour there, wondering what I could do to entice my husband to join me for a nice roll in the hay, or at the very least, a little hand holding.

As it turns out, planting bulbs is a little like buying a new couch. You add a dash of something new to your home and suddenly everything else looks lacking, so you’re compelled to paint the living room. No sooner had we finished planting the bulbs than Mark had us back at the garden supply store for more plants. Now we needed trees.

“How about we get a bunch of those?” I said, pointing out apple trees on sale.

His eyes widened. “You only need a couple of apple trees for a grove. Just buy one of each type. You can’t handle more. Trust me.”

“I want lots of apples,” I insisted. “Enough for cooking and for horse treats too.”

“Four trees will provide enough apples to drown in.”

I chose one Gala, two Granny Smith, and one Golden Delicious. For good measure, we picked up peach, plum, and pear trees, too.

“Hey, there’s a fig tree,” I said, spotting a small tree off to the corner of the garden center. “What can I make out of figs?”

Mark’s brow crinkled. “Um... figgy pudding?”

“Of course. Figgy pudding! But that’s only for Christmas. What else can I make out of figs?”

He thought some more. “Fig Newtons?”

“OK. So not a lot of fig recipes come to mind, but if we ever want to run around naked playing Adam and Eve, the leaves will come in handy. Come on. Let’s get one.”

I put the small tree in our cart, but when the checkout girl explained that Georgia fig trees don’t really bear fruit, I put the bucket back on the shelf.

When we got back home, we used the tractor to plant the trees. Mark sat in the seat of the Kubota drinking lemonade while I plunged my hands into the dirt to smooth out the topsoil, ever the laborer bending to his orders. I chose to focus on the fact that our Garden of Eden was taking root, a metaphor for the future I imagined us living where we existed in harmony with nature and each other.

Each morning thereafter, I gazed out at the vegetable garden looking for signs of life. Within days, small sprouts emerged from the warm earth.

“Lookie! Our plants are growing!” I squealed, delighted to watch nature on autopilot.

“Um, honey...those are weeds. Somebody’s going to have to pull those.”

I waited a few days for ‘somebody’ to pull the offending weeds.

They grew taller. Thicker. Eventually, I figured out that ‘somebody’ was going to have to be me because Mark was too busy doing his own thing to ever again join me in the garden after the initial planting day.

I pulled the weeds, but the next day, more weeds had taken their place. I was reminded of the roaches that used to return to my apartment in New York City even after I had fumigated the place. That was a lifetime ago. Feeling warrior-like now, I marched out and pulled the new offenders. The next day, more weeds appeared. I pulled them again. And again. And again.

Our vegetable plants made a meek première and I started worrying that I couldn’t distinguish between weeds and legitimate plants, so I dragged Mark to the garden to help me figure out what was what. He gave me a quick lesson on how to tell plants from weeds so I could continue my daily vigil.

One morning, while giving Donkey a morning carrot, I spotted something fat resting under a tangle of leaves. Sure enough, there hidden among the thick leaves was our first homegrown vegetable, a 14-inch zucchini brimming with sun-generated goodness. I also spied a yellow squash, a more normal sized-zucchini and some banana peppers. Gleefully, I returned to the house to show Mark my bounty. He commented that lots of zucchini grew as big as the one I was holding. My veggie was no big deal.

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to keep a zucchini plant alive; zucchini is a prolific grower and all, but I thought my first homegrown vegetable deserved more recognition from the master of the house than received. I myself couldn’t help but prance around doing the ‘I grew a veggie’ dance, which is far funkier than the daffodil dance, I assure you.

That night, I sat down at my computer and searched epicurious.com to peruse the 271 zucchini recipes available. My first round of produce already sat simmering in a veggie chili, but I had to plan for the windfall ahead.

The next day, I revisited the garden again, hoping to see new produce, but all I found were hundreds of little yellow hairy bugs on my bean plants. I quickly beckoned the man of the house again, hoping a seasoned gardener might know what to do.

“You can always use a pesticide, but if we want an organic garden, somebody will have to have to pick those bugs off by hand.” “Somebody?”

I was now privy to the fact that ‘somebody’ meant me, so, grumbling, I spent three hours picking little yellow hairy bugs off of bean plants. Organic gardening seems a romantic ideal, but in reality, going au natural can be yucky. I couldn’t even get my little nature-loving daughter to help. She took one look and said, “This is gross. Besides which, I hate beans. Who cares if the bugs eat them? You’re on your own with this one, Mom.”

For all that I tried to explain how noble and important organic gardening is to our health and the planet, Neva couldn’t be swayed, so I devoted the afternoon to bug annihilation all by myself.

The next day, just as in the case of the weeds, my garden had been infiltrated with more yellow bugs. There was no way I could spend every afternoon picking them all by hand, so I decided to employ home remedies. I sprayed the plants with soapy water. That night, we had rain and the bugs had a grand time playing in the bubbles, but they didn’t desert. I went back to hand picking.

A few weeks later, Mark drove by the garden, came home and said, “The plants look great. Why haven’t you been picking the beans?” “No beans yet,” I said.

“By now, there must be beans. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.
Somebody
has to be involved in this gardening party we started.
Somebody
is pretty busy picking weeds and bugs. Trust me;
somebody
would know if we had any beans.”

After dinner he dragged me down to the garden and slipped his arm around my waist. “Um, honey... the plants are so loaded with beans they look ready to cave. What are you waiting for?”

“No, sir....” I crouched down, and dang if there weren’t hundreds of string beans hanging off the branches, hidden in the leaves like praying mantises. Not knowing what to look for, I hadn’t seen them. “They look like a part of the plant.”