Better Farm

Chapter 1: Better

I sing along with the rough voice coming from my car’s speakers, left foot tapping along to the melody. My eyes are on the road as it curves with the hills. In the final bend, Millsite Lake appears beyond a grove of pines, birches and maples. The trees bow down, in quiet awe of that blue expanse somehow lost on so many of the drivers racing over flattened frogs and bug splatters as they make their ways along Cottage Hill Road. This sight is a marker for me: two more miles to Better Farm.

I took this ride as a child in my family’s brown Chevy Tahoe, sitting next to my sister Nicole as our parents told us about Better Farm, and how they’d helped it come to be. The stories took on a fairy-tale quality, “once upon a times” of a different era and characters that would have worked as the center of any storybook. I also took this ride as a girlfriend, and later as a wife, spinning my own yarns and weaving in new additions to the legend. I’ve taken it with my children in the back seat, after Steve passed the property on to our generation, babbling away that “we’ll be at Better Farm in a few minutes” as they chomped on goldfish crackers and sipped apple juice out of metallic pouches.

For the first time in my life, I am alone making this trek. My husband, Jeff, is playing a gig an hour south in Syracuse, and our daughters are home now, in the care of their grandparents for the weekend. In the trunk, my photographs—part of an exhibit I’m putting up in the barn-turned-gallery—are wrapped in towels and linens for safety. This solo mission is a chance to return to a passion I’ve had on hold since college, in favor of the traditional job-wife-mother role I’ve embraced wholeheartedly.

It’s been a rough year, though. My husband had shoulder replacement surgery after five failed prior procedures, and is in constant pain. Life revolves around making him ice packs, and tiptoeing around his injury and anger at his situation. Our youngest broke her leg three days after his last surgery, after I slipped down the stairs carrying her, and she was in a body cast for a month. In addition to being Supermom, doing all the household chores and running a company, I’m also working as a teacher. I’m ragged, I’m irritable. I need this weekend away.

Looking out over the tops of the trees at the water, I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding in. It’s the end of a long journey north, away from the go-go-go of schedules, the constant tugging, and the barrage of sensory onslaught by machines. Sometimes, it’s important to step away from the normal, remember what you can be when given the chance, and my Uncle Steve’s words- every day is an opportunity for better–better for you, better for the world around you– play through my head like a mantra I need to savor.

*          *          *

In another life, Steve had owned Better Farm. It was how he spent his compensational settlement from a car accident that saw the loss of his ex-girlfriend from this world, and his mobility from his chest down. He only talked about it once, almost in passing, in the almost-30 years I knew him. Janet was driving through the night while Steve slept on one of the bench seats in the back of the VW bus. She fell asleep at the wheel, and both were tossed from the van, he severely injured, her killed on impact. A truck driver finally found him hours later. He radio’ed for help and while he waited, dragged Steve back toward the road, probably crippling him further.

She shouldn’t have been driving, Steve lamented, she was too tired. I fell asleep against the back door, lying down. Seatbelts weren’t required in cars then. It was 1963, I’d just graduated Columbia the month before. I thought I was invincible.

It didn’t seem unusual to have an uncle whose hands formed claws, who drank water through a plastic straw sticking out of an old glass coffee pot, and who wore his wispy white hair in a ponytail, and a patchwork quilt over his legs. I thought people naturally lived in large groups in houses in the middle of nowhere, that Wagner regularly flowed from other people’s record players, and that sloped floors were architecturally common.

I told them to build the ramp at the edge of the back door, Steve had said, but to be sure there was enough room so I didn’t go flying off into the swamp. They were blasting Ride of the Valkyries, carrying around pick axes and shovels, throwing wet dirt that dried in grayish pile. They dug that hole next to it for bathing, before the plumbing was done, and before realizing how mucky it was. It was abandoned after something slithered around somebody’s foot.

My octogenarian grandmother would play Scrabble in the kitchen with Steve, the two of them going head to head in epic battles of wit. Granny was in charge of the bag of squares, and would hold them out so Steve could reach his curved hand in, drawing out the letters one at a time.

If you look carefully, Steve would remind us, each Scrabble square has a different wood grain, unique to the piece—kind of like a fingerprint. After one game where Mother particularly trounced me, I decided I would memorize the backs of the pieces. So I did. When she figured it out, I turned white as a sheet as my confession. Without a word, she got up, removed the board—and all the pieces on it—and tossed the whole thing in the trash. From that day, she kept all the pieces in an opaque container when we choose ours.

As children and teens, Nicole and I slept in the loft at the top of the stairs, on a mattress that had been up there for several decades, and held contaminates we chose not to think about. It got stuffy, snoozing twelve inches from the wooden plank ceiling, no insulation and a hammer’s length away from the roof. The stairs leading up to the bed were more of a slanted ladder, slats that were painted blue after the wall was torn away to create the sleeping space at the top. There was a small window, always cloudy and never clean, looking out over the field, which allowed reddish orange light to stream in from the setting sun.

It was worth the sleeping arrangements, though, as Steve was full of tales about our family, from the hushed ones about the 70’s drug bust that made New York Times headlines to Granny outdrinking the men at the paper she and my grandfather worked for. He told us about how my parents had spent the summer they got married, at age 20, working on the multicolored farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. They spent the next thirty years completing the roughly six-hour drive from New Jersey to visit, offering stories of the suburbs, friends growing older and procreating, bringing Nicole and me and our cousins and friends along for the ride, while Steve existed in the timelessness that is rural Redwood.

When I was 16, we had a reunion of the people who built the farm, and set up a slide show in the library, courtesy of an old projector and a series of sheets, which my Dad affixed to a wire over the sliding glass doors with clothespins.

On the screen, men with long hair and bandanas smiled crookedly over joints protruding from their mouths. There was Mom, hair down to her waist, tanned, sinewy limbs bent as she carried rocks and wood, beaming and squinting in the sunlight. Dad, his red hair a firework, leaned against a half-built fireplace, and Cousin Bill, long hair and a Magnum mustache, posed in Technicolor with firearms. Finally, there was Steve, his hair in a turban, directing traffic from the back porch. My cousins Nate and Luke laughed along with Nicole and me as the machine whirred and sparked, the light bringing the images to life as I gazed around the room at housewives with perms, men with thinning hair and bald heads. Pulling out my camera, I snapped photos of my own, capturing the same smiles, slightly yellowed, and limbs, somewhat plumper, of the refugees of youth who had taken shelter in suburbs across the northeast after doing their time in the North Country.

It was the last major group gathering at the farm. Dad died on a Tuesday night a few years later, at a basketball game for an over 50 league, two weeks shy of his own half century mark. I spent the next several days aging, making decisions about funeral music, readings, and delivering the eulogy to the packed church. I remember sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows, full of multicolored roses and crucifixions, highlighting the teenage soccer teams Dad managed, their uniforms standing out amid the suits and ties, their hair hanging loose in their eyes. The smell of too much perfume and incense made my eyes itch and my nose run. Steve was there, transported south in a car for the first time in years, and sat atop a pickup truck in his wheelchair on the way to the cemetery, bundled in blankets, hat, and scarves, a strange float in the middle of a January funeral procession.

I didn’t crack until weeks later, back at college during a 15-minute break from my photography class. That break turned into seven hours of lying on my bed, pouring over pictures, my hands shaking while my dorm mate rubbed my back and handed me bottles of water. “You have to hydrate,” she’d said.

*          *          *

The memory jars me into the present as I slug water from a plastic container. One more mile to Better Farm. After we lost Dad, I dove into school work, my notes becoming epic and my grades rising to Magna Cum Laude status. Nicole and I took to making the trip north ourselves, when it was too painful a reminder for Mom of what she had lost, and for me and my sister, a beacon of what we had to gain. Steve’s stories allowed us a look at the man I wish I’d known as an adult.

I think back to the last conversation I had in person with Steve, in his kitchen with the linoleum peeling up in the corners, and the fly paper over the sink, loaded with little insect carcasses. He was 66.

Nicole was in the other room, cataloguing the books, and removing duplicates for Steve to sell on eBay. Jeff and I were angling for Steve to stay with us for the winters in the future, the long drive to Tucson for its dry, warm air getting harder and harder the older he became. The converted Ken Kesey bus traditionally used for those cross-country drives lay tangled in the weeds next to the old barn, waning in its appeal. I had completed my teaching degree, was looking for a steady job in the heart of suburbia where Steve had grown up. It was a comfortable normal, the kind none of us necessarily see as our future when we are younger, but turn to for the sake of survival as adults. We were going to expand the doorways in our Cape Cod-style house, to make them passable for his wheelchair, and install ramps out to the back yard. He was excited at the notion, and we made a pact that this would be his last winter traveling south of Jersey for the bitter months.

I stood at the stove, sautéing garlic and onions for the night’s meal, puffs of buttery steam rising through my hair as I handled the ancient cast iron skillet with expert precision, when talk turned to his will.

I’m going to leave the farm to all of you- Mike, Danny, Nicole, and you. The words were steady as we discussed the notion of my agoraphobic, alcoholic cousin, and the other one the life-long gambler, living thousands of miles away, taking on a real estate investment alongside my sister and myself. It was a brief conversation, as life-and-death ones are. He was looking down, his voice clear while his hands trembled, the last remaining sibling in the group we referred to affectionately as the Gods of Valhalla (a nod to their father’s Wagner obsession). Here was Woton, the wisest, nobly attempting to split the heavens among his brood.

I looked at him and started.

“Don’t.”

I took a breath as I watched my sister walking back and forth between the couch and bookshelves.

“Nicole. Give it to Nicole.”

His blue eyes were fixated on me, and I could see Dad and Granny, all of them really, dancing in his irises. “We want to make this into the artists’ retreat in the next few years, do what you’ve been planning. She’s old enough now, she needs to get out of New York. Writers, artists- the two of you can sit on the deck with your laptops.” I smiled, and flipped the mixture in the pan. “My God, can you imagine what it could be like? And if you die- and you’d better not for a long time-“ I pointed the spatula end at him for emphasis- “she’ll take it over, continue the work. That won’t happen if you put all of us on the deed.   It would be a nightmare and I don’t want to be in the middle of a family split over property.”

“I suppose I could even it out, leave the rest of you money,” he said, pondering.

“Go for it. And if you do, I’m giving half to Nic to set up- no buts. But please, put the farm in her name.”

He nodded, and said he’d think about it. Nicole came back in, asking a question about a particularly worn copy of On The Road, and life continued as usual.

Steve called from Arizona a few months later, his voice gravelly and low over the phone. He had a bronchial infection, and was fighting it. He laughed hoarsely, as he did, saying Don’t forget: better. Every day is the opportunity for better. This is a hiccup.

“Don’t die on me, or I’ll kill you,” I’d said.

I’m too old to die, he’d said. He had flat lined twice in his life, as a child learning the harsh reality of allergies, and as an adult experimenting with drugs, and lived—lived through the accident, lived through the deaths of his two brothers and sister, lived in rural backwoods America for 40 years while the rest of the world kept on turning.

*          *          *

He listened to me and changed the will. I say a silent call of thanks up to Heaven as I pull into the driveway and the house looms on the right, large and weather beaten. There are people milling about, and a cacophony of chickens clucking.

“You’re here!”

My sister sashays out of the house, cutoff shorts betraying the massive number of insect bites on her legs. Gangly arms embrace, laughter begins. It is the start of a madcap of bonding exercises. She regales me with tales of hatching chickens, and boats being towed by swimming interns, while we walk through throngs of poultry, before setting me free to wander the grounds. Her tattoo in memory of our Dad, a purple Grateful Dead bear dancing across her lower back, peeks out from under her yellow tee shirt as she heads for the main house. It reminds me that the only body alteration I have is a five inch scar from my two c-sections- the first an emergency, the second planned.

The camera strap hangs loosely around my neck, my birthday present to myself earlier in the year. The shutter clicks in my hands, capturing images of strutting roosters and hand-painted signs in pixels and JPEGs. I mentally check off how many matted frames are in my car, calculate how many old windows can be salvaged from the pile in the shed as found frames, and how many more photos can be printed for the art projects to be displayed in the gallery later.

Lyrics run from my lips under my breath, my mind wandering to younger years, when I was on my own on a more regular basis. I squint in the waning light, making my way across Cottage Hill Road to the recently renovated art barn, as flashes of childhood unfold. Summers of sneaking across the divide with Nicole, peeking in on the pigs through the deteriorating planks of wood play in my head like a grainy movie. They were gone the next year, we turned vegetarian, and took to chopping celery into salad, the firm stalks, sliced into half moons, distracting from the lack of crunchy bacon.

The former pigsty has been rebuilt for storage, the barn now houses a white-walled gallery downstairs, music studio upstairs, and boasts a deck with a natural amphitheater around it—a detail discovered during a massive hacking back of the overgrown brush the year Nicole took over. Salads are concocted in the kitchen from our own freshly picked produce, and adorned with hard-boiled eggs left by the grateful spent hens that were rescued from becoming pot pies and nuggets. Humming a melody, I place my camera on a folding table, pick up a paintbrush, and dip it into creamy black tempera. A drop of paint is pulled down the pane of glass, as I think about the little instances in our lives, those moments that seem so inconsequential, yet alter the course of our history, and that of the world around us.

I glance out the window, at the arms of the setting sun as they reach out to the trees and round bales of hay, lighting them on fire before turning them black in her wake. Placing the paintbrush down, I reach for my iPod, tapping the icon to make the music louder while I think about when we knew Steve was gone and that this world was just too much for him. He was the one who made the decision to take himself off the ventilator

*          *          *

He scrawled the note on the wipe-off board: I’m too tired, love to you all. Nicole, Danny, and Mike stood around his bed, holding hands for the first time since they had lost their parents. Steve’s other witnesses shifted their weight and held their breaths, waiting for one final miracle from the man who shouldn’t have survived several times over. I sat in a classroom in Ridgewood, watching the clock and my cell phone, too new in my job to make the journey south, while my students read about Scout and Atticus, discussing the mystery of Boo Radley in hushed voices.

Weeks later I would stand over Steve’s grave, reading my words and borrowing names from his beloved operas. “There was a time once when he was the stuff of legend, surrounded by his Rhine-maidens, sitting atop his throne at his Delphi, a haven for the masses of uber-intelligent, anti-establishment miscreants, from the bowels of the suburbs, from the dusty roads leading to the rock-eating dogs and the Acropolis on the hill. He was Woton, raised with Erda, Donner, and Froh, those too great to continue on its terra, as the mortal realm was, simply, too small to hold them.”

*          *          *

Steve’s journey, my sister’s to owning the farm, my own to this moment of isolation and freedom, all intertwine in the midst of the tangle of country. I pick up a hammer, and pound the nails into the walls for my artwork, each stroke splitting the wood as I try to strike the thoughts running rampant through my head as my brain chants a line from a story I read once: remember… remember… reMEMber… and my voice belts with enough resonance to shake the beams over my head, jerking me between the present and the past, the real and the imaginary as the last of the sunlight disappears, and the moonlight streams in.

This is the introduction to my book on Better Farm- I figured I’d release bits of my book here, and let the masses (or at least my family and friends) read them as they like!   The book in its entirety is available on Amazon.com