On the Divinity of Second Chances (3 page)

I remember thinking, Oh, here we go again. I remember looking at his face, noticing it wasn’t nearly as handsome as I had thought it was these last four years, watching his mouth move even though his jaw was clenched. I remember wondering how he could think living in a tipi year-round was the answer to our problems. I remember picturing myself showing up at my job at the bank in un-ironed clothes, muddy shoes, greasy hair, and reeking of body odor and menses—then envisioning myself unemployed in the tipi. I remember seeing myself in a smoky tipi with a sick baby and a pile of dirty diapers. All day long, I melt snow so I can wash the diapers by hand. I’m angry—too angry to be a wife or a mother. Above all, I remember envisioning myself feeling trapped. Matt’s mouth was moving, but I wasn’t listening. I was seeing my future.

“It’s not forever,” he said. “It’s just for a couple years so we can save a down payment.” I knew that was a lie. I had seen my future. It was forever.

I remember thinking that if he had made a different choice at a crossroads earlier in his life, we wouldn’t be in this position now. He had chosen to snowboard instead of going to college, and now he wanted me to pay the price. I wasn’t going to do it. I had paid my dues for a better life than that. I remember looking at his face and realizing I had stopped loving him—just like that. How do you love someone who wants to sentence you to the life I had just previewed? That’s not love. I don’t know what it is, but it’s sure not love.

I submerged myself in a hot bath and listened to him pack. I didn’t want to watch; instead, I sat there thinking about how my hot water and his backpack were indicative of the separate paths we had just chosen.

He barged in near the end to get his shaving kit, his vitamins, and a few miscellaneous toiletries. I felt naked in his presence for the first time in years. I wanted to cover myself, but I didn’t. I acted like everything was normal. He took one last look at me, scanning my naked body. I didn’t recognize the look in his eyes. Finally, he barked good-bye and left. I felt nothing but relief at his departure. I felt the promise of a greater peace in my life, though anger still hung in the air. Even though I knew someday I’d praise Jesus this hadn’t worked out, right then I just felt used up. Plus, it’s harsh to have any man walk away from you when you’re naked. We all know that’s just not natural.

When Matt was still trying to take my hot water away, I felt panic about the threat of losing something so vital. Stepping into the hot, steaming water soothed something deep inside me. After Matt’s departure, the threat of losing this vital steaming water was gone. Once the threat was gone, the bath was just a bath again and suddenly felt significantly more tepid.

Later, I felt overwhelming grief and had trouble sleeping. Four years is a long time. It’s a long time to have someone in your life, and it’s a long time to dream the same dream. I sifted through my memories and I sifted through my grief, and I realized my greatest grief was for the loss of my own picture of my future. That picture was pretty detailed, and I had to accept my future wasn’t going to look like that anymore. For me, there is no grief more devastating than the grief for what could have been.

For the first time in my life, I found myself with no vision, no dreams, no goals. My heart sank, taking the rest of me with it.

Pearl on Sunflowers
(May 17)

I put my letter in an envelope and leave it by the door so I will remember to take it with me to the post office tomorrow.

For now, I sit on my porch in the old rocker my mother used to sit in while she shucked peas, and look out onto my freshly planted fields. Soon, little sunflower seedlings will sprout their first leaves, and shortly thereafter, bright sunflowers will shine their cheery faces at me. They will be a sea of sunshine. Sunflowers have been such a welcome change after those decades of corn. My parents grew corn on this land, and then my husband followed in their footsteps. Not sweet corn, mind you, but feeder corn. At last, this farm is mine, and the corn siege is over. And at last, my life is mine, and the husband siege is over.

I suggested sunflowers to my husband once. I was only proposing a few acres of it at the time. He chuckled at me and told me women didn’t know anything about the business of farming. Shortly thereafter, the sunflower oil market boomed.

“What do I want to grow this year?” is a great question, one I love mulling over, even if I do make the same choices year after year. Each year, it’s my choice. This year, I decided to grow sunflowers, a new dress, and some groundbreaking choreography integrating my two favorite things: guns and tap dancing. In the garden, I decided to grow more of those Fort Laramie strawberries. I don’t make preserves anymore. I just stick everything in ziplock bags in the freezer. I think I might like to grow a braided rug made out of all my husband’s old wool suits. Next winter, maybe. I have always wanted a pair of red cowboy boots to wear on special occasions. Yes, this just might be the year I grow a pair of red cowboy boots.

But at this moment, I watch an early summer storm come in to water my freshly planted sunflower seeds and simply grow satisfaction. I watch Beatrice return from her brisk walk along the west fence, noticing the way she kind of swishes and her cropped hair bounces, the way she stops to study a flower through her cat glasses. I love everything about her. My heart feels so full, like it might just burst.

“Dean’s cows made it through the fence again,” she informs me. “I chased them back.”

My heart no longer feels like it might just burst. Anger boils up inside me. “That’s six times in the last month. Dean isn’t learning,” I say. I think he’s hoping I’ll shoot one of them; he knows that in order for me to avoid legal trouble, I’d have to cough up a compensation price for it higher than what he’d get at the auction. I have a plan for Dean and his cattle, but timing is everything.

“Dean is such a special man,” Beatrice says in the way only she can. She sits next to me and sighs. I put my arm around her, and she pats my leg. “What would you like for dinner?” she asks.

“One of Dean’s cows,” I answer.

Anna on Growing Old in Mont Soleil
(May 18)

Don’t get me wrong. Mont Soleil, Idaho, is a beautiful place to live, and after growing up in South Dakota, I am thankful for the elegant life I’ve had here. Mont Soleil is a ski resort town, nestled in a long valley that runs north-south, where the Cottonwood River winds through the valley floor, lined, as you might imagine, with ancient cottonwood trees. The hills and mountains are arid on the south sides—just sage and yellow grass, but the north slopes, where the snow does not evaporate in the high-altitude sun, host handsome groves of aspen, pine, and fir. The residents of Mont Soleil are a mix that seems to work. Most are rich, athletic, and beautiful in a way you expect to see only in California. The majority are friendly and genuinely caring. Residents pass each other on the Rails to Trails training for some sport modified with either “power” or “extreme.”

It is both a good place and a hard place to grow old. It’s a good place to grow old in that there are many people in their eighties who do their yoga every day and are still among the first on the ski slopes on powdery winter mornings. Old age is not equated with inactivity, boredom, or poor health, with the exception of knee replacements, which are a given, of course. It is, after all, a ski town. It’s a hard place to grow old in the way that it’s a place where many women have made the pact “I’ll be beautiful, if you’ll be rich.” The men continue to hold up their end of the bargain as they age and good investments continue to pay off, while the women begin to struggle and grasp to maintain their only idea of beauty—the youthful beauty they knew at twenty. Plastic surgeons do very well in Mont Soleil.

I sit in my breakfast nook, the only place in the whole house where I truly feel comfortable, and paint a raisin using black and white acrylics. With my smallest brush, I add more white highlights to a wrinkle, bringing it out. A colorless raisin—it is exactly how I feel.

I take a break to prepare a cup of jasmine tea. My earlier paintings of emerging fruit still hang in the breakfast nook and in the kitchen. I began painting when I was first pregnant with Olive, and that half flower, half fruit was exactly what I felt like then. Apples, pears, cherries, plums, apricots, peaches—my paintings were sensuous, luscious, and succulent. They were all about maternity and femininity. Sometimes, in the kitchen, I stop and study one of these old paintings. Gone are those days. That era is over. It’s strange really, to wake up one day and realize that your youthful kind of beauty is gone. Your tight skin and smooth legs are gone, and they are never coming back. Never. Another kind of beauty awaits, but it’s not the same. It’s not a beauty associated with the sense of still having an unlimited life ahead. It’s not a head-turning kind of beauty, but rather a beauty more rooted in the expression of one’s eyes. It has something to do with love, grace, and wisdom. Actually, it has everything to do with love, grace, and wisdom. It’s a beauty people have to take a minute and look for. It may even be more of a feeling people experience in your presence than an appearance. I don’t know for sure. But I know I don’t have the peace of mind and heart to pull off that kind of beauty. I’m caught between two kinds of beauty, falling through the cracks.

I study a photograph of my mother that sits on a shelf in a silver frame. I always thought she was so dowdy in her farm clothes and plain hair, but as I study her eyes now, I see her beauty exceeds mine. She has attained the phase two kind of beauty.

My kettle whistles, so I put the photograph down and pour my hot water into a pot. While I wait for the tea to steep, Phil’s newspaper catches my eye. Words jump out at me: Invisible. Ignored. Unseen. Grief. Irreversible. I take the scissors from the junk drawer and cut out these words to collage onto my raisin painting, maybe in the background, maybe in the highlights. Maybe I’ll cover them with a thin layer of paint or two so people will have to look closely to see them.

I return to the window in the breakfast nook with my tea and continue to paint my raisin. Crone. I roll the word around in my mouth like an awkward jawbreaker. When I think of the word “crone,” I think of raisins. Crone. I think that’s what I’ll call this painting.

I don’t paint to sell. I used to paint to celebrate, but now I simply paint to process. I can’t even chew on the crone jawbreaker without hurting myself. I can’t swallow it. I can only suck on it for a while until it dissolves into something I can deal with.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window yesterday and saw my grandmother’s face. Not my mother’s, which I regularly see now. No, I saw my grandmother’s face.

I wear black. Sleek, black, tailored clothes and trendy shoes. My hair is cut very short, and my eye makeup is dark and dramatic. I always thought of myself as sleek, but how does one go about being a sleek raisin? Nature is cruel, giving you an identity you get used to, only to have it transform into that of your grandmother. My grandmother was not sleek; she was severe, angular, and mottled. The only soft thing about her was the downy hair on her chin. I look for my reflection in the window. Yes, I’m on my way to becoming hollow and bony, just like my grandmother, sunken and mottled just like a raisin.

Forrest on Lightning Bob and Self-Imposed Solitary Confinement
(May 18)

I was fourteen and in shock, horrified by my own capabilities and terrified by the way my life could change in an instant. A rash impulse that felt so right in one moment now felt so wrong. I felt betrayed by my instincts. After hitching back from South Dakota, I wandered aimlessly in the sage-and-pine-covered mountains beyond Mont Soleil. At some point, I just started walking up. In retrospect, I was trying to climb out of the depths of Hell.

I spent my first night on a hillside, hungry and dehydrated. After burying myself in pine needles to stay warm, I listened to the wolves and wailed with them as it hit me how truly and irreversibly alone I was. It struck me that my innocence was gone. My virtue was gone. Anything that connected me to God was gone, and I grieved for it. I was in Hell now. My existence no longer had worth. I wailed and the wolves wailed with me. A chorus of grief.

I awoke to the sound of sniffing and opened my eyes to see not a wolf, but a German shepherd. Behind him stood a man in a Forest Service uniform with black hair and a mustache. He took a few steps closer to me and squatted down. His name tag read “Lightning Bob.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Are you injured?”

I shook my head.

“Do you need water?”

I nodded. He handed me a small canteen from his belt. I knew I didn’t deserve the water. I deserved to be left to die. I drank half his water anyway, and then felt guilty about it.

“Do your parents know where you are?” he continued.

I shook my head.

“I imagine they’re pretty scared by now.”

I shut my eyes. Not only was I a murderer now, but a source of torture for my parents as well. I hung my head and let my tears fall.

Lightning Bob didn’t ask any more questions. He led me to his tower and fed me bacon and eggs. I felt so unworthy of his concern and limited rations.

“Do you play cribbage?” he asked. When I shook my head, he proceeded to explain the rules. I tried to concentrate, but my mind was filled with fire. He coached me through our first game. In actuality, all I did was hold the cards.