Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the altitude is certainly not a problem. That is because at 3,400 feet, which is what our elevation is out here in the high plains, the air is thick, although not as thick as that air soup at sea level that makes a mountain dweller's lungs feel as though they will burst through one's ribs and forces shallow breaths.
So much has happened in the last week. After I posted that last post, I packed my bags, swished a token rag about my house, scooped all of the odds and ends from the top of the dresser, desk, etc into my underwear drawer so the house at least looked clean should our realtor get motivated and decide to actually maybe, I don't know, list it? Show it? She seems to have decided to not do a thing with it in the month since we signed the papers agreeing to give her 6 percent of the selling price. I packed the car full, put our road bikes on the roof, loaded up Andy, and hit the road. After a few stops in Denver, I drove out into the endless prairie with the sunset in my rear view mirror. At midnight, I was in a different world, that flat place where churches tower and kids reign and the air reeks of feedlot and rotting corn and freshly applied chemical blows off of fields and ditches and leaves it's oily taste in the back on one's throat. I pulled up to the tiny wheeled box that housed my husband, and let the dog out. Their reunion was joyous and exuberant. We cuddled up together on the couch that folds down into a sort-of bed, me curled around him curled around Andy. It felt so good to melt into a pile of blankets and warm bodies and not be alone, it was worth the five hours in the car through flat darkness, straining my eyes for deer and trying not to speed as the mile markers flashed past.
For two days, I rode with B in his truck. He was hauling manure out of a small private feedlot to a field several miles away, so we spent the day talking in bursts punctuated by his pulling into a pen, jumping from truck to loader, and loading the truck with tons upon tons of caked, rock-hard poop.
It has been years since I have had the chance to observe cows. They amaze and amuse me. B thinks I am nuts, that cows are the dumbest creatures on earth. I beg to differ. They are excellent examples of social hierarchy, habit, and creative ways to cope with a mind-numbing life. Cows live their short, cruel lives with nobody looking out for them, at least not unless someone's dollar is threatened. Nobody cares about a cow's emotional well-being. They stand all day in their own poop, and they eat corn that comes from the back of a feedtruck twice a day. When they arrive in a feedlot from whichever ranch they were born in and lived and romped, they are hearded, terrified, into a squeeze chute and hurt by humans armed with electric prods, their ears are ripped open and tags punched into them. If they thrash, a boot to their jaw. Huge and occasionally dull needles into flanks. They learn that a human one-sixth their size is a terrifying, predatory creature, and they learn that machinery, loaders and feedtrucks, will never run them over, will always stop for them, and their dinner comes from these enormous, noisy, stinking, smoking creatures. And they are bored. A pile of poop and a moving loader provides hours of entertainment in the time that they should spend grazing instead of being forced to stand around in their own poop without a blade of grass in sight. I was explaining this to B after he came back to the truck sputtering about stupid cows and how they cut down on his productivity by standing on top of the pile he was trying to load, following the loader, not moving with any amount of bucket-shaking and engine revving. The next load, I hopped out of the truck and stood on top of the pile myself while he loaded, making eye contact with the bravest cows, the ones who crowded closest. They trotted to safer corners and B loaded his truck in record time. But he said that as helpful as it was to have a scary woman out there scaring the cows away from the pile, it was a little embarrassing. He was pretty sure the cowboys would laugh at him. No normal wife would volunteer to go stand on a pile of poop and frighten cows for her husband, so they would probably assume he had made me do it, which would cause them to question his manliness and all manner of other things. Oh, dear.
After three days of spreading, it rained. We were sleep deprived. It is one thing to cuddle on a bed too narrow for two people and too short to stretch out for one night, but by the third night, we were beginning to snap at each other and fight for our sleeping rights. We decided that we absolutely had to find a house to live in.
Now, we plan on moving into Grandpa and Grandma's farm house in March, when the tenants who are in it now move out. I am so excited I can hardly stand it. A garden plot, pasture to bike in and run a small herd of happy cows, room for Andy to run, space for a chicken house, a barn for goats and cattle, a house empty and begging for sticky fingers and tiny feet. I have all manner of crazy notions running through my mind about building structures on the place, finally experimenting with straw bale construction and eco-sustainable utilities. There can be composting and planting trees and guinea hens. I can be barefoot and pregnant and my hair can get frizzy and my nails dirty and my arms tan. We can live close to the earth, of the earth, our food can come from our own hands and our own soil instead of being processed, poisonous, unrecognizable rubbery lumps of questionable meats and faux vegetables that are wax and miracles of geneticism and chemistry that have travelled thousands of miles from a questionable source to find their way into our bodies, to be called nourishment and to convince us that tomatoes are supposed to be pink and cucumbers are supposed to be shiny.
But before all that can happen, we need to be able to sleep this winter. We need to not get hypothermia spending a winter in a drafty camper heated with a propane bottle. I need to be able to cook so we can live on as real of food as I can manage, not Pop Tarts and Shells&Cheese.
B has spent the last six weeks inquiring, exhausting every channel, exploring every option looking for a house for us. Houses in Western KS are not easy to find. Every little farmhouse has a little farm family in it, a little farm husband providing the money for the little farm wife to buy pretty little curtains and new carpet. Things have changed since we left. Farmers have money now. Rent is still cheap, but not as cheap as it was, and home prices have risen. And the things that are available for rent are not what one might call liveable. I mean, for a meth lab, they work just fine. Mold on the walls and holes in the carpets and linoleum, centipede infestation and mouse poop, a history of murder-suicide, that's just fine if you're junkie who's cookin'. It might even be fine for us, as an alternative to our camper. The problem out here is not that the houses aren't there, it's a booming farm ecomomy and a mindset that only low-class people and transient workers rent, while functioning members of society own homes. The farmers do not need the extra money that would come from renting the old homesteads they aquire in farmland purchases, nor do they want the headache of upkeep, or to have to repair the damage that 15 transient workers can cause to a little farmhouse. With depleted aquifers, many of the wells have dried up. Little farm houses that once held little farm families and cradled little farm babies now crumble from neglect, sad windows watching the weeds grow around them. If it's a really nice place, (I.e. brick construction) a farmer might keep it for his little farm sons to move into, which they do as soon as they are married, and live in it until they can afford to build their own large, nice homes for their little farm brides on their yards surrounded by established trees, at which point they bulldoze the old house. At any rate, it is extrememly difficult to convince a farmer who just purchased another big, shiny green tractor that your rent money is valuable to him, and if you do convince him, one mention of your exuberant Golden Retriever and the deal is off. No inside pets allowed. Western Kansas farmers do not like pets. As a result, pets in Kansas are not the adored, well-behaved, easily forgiven members of society that they are in Colorado. And oddly, as trashy and unloved as the sad little farm houses that have escaped the bulldozer are out here, a slobbering, grinning, shedding house dog is a thing of abject horror to their owners.
At last, however, we heard of a recently vacated house 29 miles from town. In a twist of fate that I am not sure how to feel about yet, it is the same house in which I spent the first 15 years of my life. It is a solid little house, stucco over cinderblock, a tall house because an upstairs was added to a basement house 80 years ago. It stands sturdy agains battering winds. Not a single light apart from a blinking red tower is visible to the north, in spite of the fact that the house sits on a ridge, and only a few hardy souls live in the Smoky Hill River breaks to the north. It survived the dust storms of the 30's. It survived years of farmers battling with a terrible farm economy. A family lived in it, raised children, saw them get married and move away, saw them die. They left letters, postcards, photographs, books and clothes in the crawlspace, which I discovered when I was about 8 and spent days living in the 1930's. They left hay in the hayloft, which I spent a significant part of my childhood in, and in which dozens of kittens were born. I climbed over stanchions and imagined I was anywhere but there. The front porch of the house was the bow of my ship, the undulating waves of wheat surrounging the house my ocean. The grainery out back was my castle and playhouse, as was the much older homestead a mile down the road that I walked to, used the leaning outhouse oblivious to what might be living below the cracked seat, played Pioneer, pretending to draw water out of the frozen pump handle, lazily floating in the stock tank under the windmill, not really sure if the lumps on the bottom were dead birds or bits of sunken tumbleweed. It's really no wonder I had to be dewormed on the same schedule as the animals. My companions, a long line-up of short-lived Chows, Border Collies, Australian Shepherds, Great Pyrenees, and Chihuahuas, watched out for me, barked at rattlesnakes to warn me away, chased jackrabbits, dug goatheads from between their pads with their teeth. I lived outside, barefoot, my feet splaying out until no shoes would fit, the bottoms as hard as a dog's. I carried eggs in my skirt from the far corners of the yards as I found nests hens had hidden. I found bleached deer and cow bones in the pasture and brought them back, as well. I rescued a baby cottontail, a baby barnswallow, baby garter snakes, but all had to eventually be turned loose. I was a busy child, perfectly happy with being alone most of the time. And in hindsight, I know why. While the yard, the neighbor's yard, and the surrounding 3,000 acres of grassland and dry river breaks was the scene of the best parts of my childhood, the house was the scene of the worst. It was here I learned to be who I am, all the good and bad, the beautiful and terrible. All the laughter and tears of my adult life pull strings attached at the other end to this place and the things that happened here. The ghosts that haunt this house are not the usual kind. They are me. They are the things that I have tried to rise above and forget and deny. They are the pain that I have chosen not to feel, begging to be let back in so it can grow. They are the forgiveness that I have chosen to give, to myself and to parents and to friends, thoughtlessly cruel because nobody knew what really happened out there in the white house on the north edge of civilisation. It is the anger at certain adults in my life who punished me beyond my crimes, heaped punishment on top of the punishment I gave myself, because of their lack of understanding. Because they somehow thought they needed to be harder on me because of my parents. Because I was different and an only child. Because I didn't always wear a dress. Because I had seen more ugly life than their kids and it colored how I responded to situations around me, made me less like them and made them like me less.
In the 13 years since I moved away, I have become someone my 15 year old self would envy. I have salvaged all the best parts of her, and have scrubbed away most of the hurt, self-hatred, and insecurity that made her such a target. I have embraced her wild hair and her love of nature and her adventuresome spirit, while banishing most of her painful awkwardness with a constant stream of affirmation. I am thankful to whatever common sense she possessed that in spite of her self-destructive tendancies, she found a boy to share her life with who would let her know that she was his world, that he loved her just the way she was, while helping her try to rid herself of her anger and her depression and her self-hatred. I watched her rip her relationship with him to shreds before she realized what she was doing. I watched it circle the drain. I watched as it dawned on her that her low opinion of herself had caused her to mess things up so badly, he would never look at her in the same way again. Then I let her sob long nights away, wallowing in self-pity, and laughed as one day, she found herself laughing and wondering where the pain was. I watched as they laughed together, him and her, in their new reality and she felt, for the first time, something like self-respect. Something like unconditional love, washing over her as she discovered she could never mess up so badly as to make him stop loving her. Something like a dawning understanding of what the love of God must feel like, and something like joy and reverent gratefulness at the sort of love that would create someone like her and then still find it beautiful. I smiled as she looked at herself in the mirror and was glad for life, her own life, and promised her wild-haired, sad-eyed reflection that she would become more like me.
She's the ghost that eases out of the closet in the middle of the night and walks the hallway. She's the icy breath on the back of my neck as I stand at the kitchen sink and wash dishes the same way my mom did for 15 years. She's the reason I put the tupperware in the utensil drawer, the napkins in the silverware drawer, the silverware in the knife drawer. Every time I open the drawer next to the sink to get a fork, as I did for 15 years, I see napkins instead and I remember that it wasn't yesterday, it was a decade and a half ago, and she isn't me. Then I walk outside and I go for a ramble in the pasture, because that was where she had the least power all those years ago, and she still has less say out there. But still, every corner of this place causes an old emotion to come alive and walk the earth, creeping along in my shadow, ghostly fingers plucking at my heels.
But at the same time, I could move into this house and it was instantly home. No need to feel as though I don't belong, as though I have no roots. I know what every pop, every creak in this sturdy old house means. We speak each other's language. The sunrise through the dead tree branches to the east is the same one I saw every morning as I prepared for school, my steps across the yard trace the ones I took as I fed the calves, chickens, sheep, goats, horses, cats, and dogs, carried water and feed, chopped ice, buried my face in fragrant, hay-scented fur, brushed manes and tails, patted silky noses, stumbled over purring cats twisting around my ankles and greeted doggy kisses with belly rubs. So I think it's a good thing. Maybe it's okay that I revisit those old memories, too. Maybe I can finally put them to rest. Maybe being here will force me to move past my old self for once and for all, and plant the notion deep in my brain that Western Kansas does not have to turn me into anyone I don't want to be.
As soon as we got ourselves moved in, it was time to leave again. Heather, my cousin, snowboarding pal, our occasional winter help in Colorado, has finally found a man. Heather thinks there are those who believe those words deserve lights and a banner, or at least caps and italics, but Heather, bless her, has danced to her own tune and traveled the world and has been an incredible, independant, strong woman while waiting to meet a soulmate, one in several billion, who actually deserved her. And he does treat her like a queen. We love seeing her so very happy and cared for. The wedding was at her home church in Michigan, where she has lived, and I have never been there. We drove for two days to get there, through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, a corner of Illinios, and the bottom half of Michigan. There were more cornfields than I care to remember. Bobby stayed home, but the car was full- my mom, my friend Laci, and sister-in-law Marci. We slept in Davenport, IA on the way up, and made a quick detour off a random interstate exit which took us through the little town of Sagintauk and ended on the shore of Lake Michigan, so just in case I never get back, I can say I have seen a great lake. We walked down to the water, took off our shoes and dug our toes in the sugar sand, and got back on the road. After arriving on Thursday evening, we met all of Heather's "girls", the group of friends she has collected over the years, all having heard of each other, only a few having met. I found an instant kinship with several, that strange feeling that you most certainly must have known each other well in the past and merely forgotten. The weekend was a long series of fun and giggles, conversations of a nature too intimate to merit having just met. A little Too Much Information a time or two, a few deafening moments as everyone tried to talk over everyone else, an uproar here, a moment of hilarity there, and visuals that may stay with onlookers, in spite of them really wishing they wouldn't. (It seemed all such moments inevitably involved underwear- whether it was a cringe-worthy first impression and introduction made indelible by my own underwear, Superman briefs worn over jeans and dress slacks, striped underwear worn over yoga pants- although that one was definitely more cute-wrong than painful-wrong, an underwear moment that should never leave the cabin, because you just had to be there to appreciate it, or a moment involving a boomerang, cat tails and a green pond, me the damsel in distress- or should I say dis dress?- the pantsless husband of a friend coming to my rescue, and a whole lot of mud.) Uncle Warren and Aunt Silver (a.k.a. Sylvia) fed us well, and took care of us and were beyond hospitable. Heather provided a cabin out on Crystal Lake in the quaint and Dirty-Dancing-ish summer town of Crystal for the overflow, since all of her girls would have been far too many for the house. It was quiet there, being fall, and the mornings were crisp. Once the sun came out, fog hovered over the water. Some of the best parts of the trip happened in the cabin, like the long afternoon Marci, Laci and I spent relaxing in the screened-in back porch, saying whatever came to mind, cracking up over the odd things we delight in finding in common. Swans glided past the end of the long wooden dock that stretched into the water outside, water lapped at the shore, the old woman reading her book on the back porch of the house next door may have wondered if we had lost our minds. We ate an inordinate amount of chocolate and had girltalk like we haven't really had since we married boys.
The Friday night dinner and wedding saturday morning were beautiful affairs, and in spite of all the people attending, the couple kept the tone intimate and relaxed. It proved difficult getting them to leave the church after the wedding, with so many good friends around, and when they did, their car keys had accidentally gone home with the groom's father, who, along with all but maybe 20 people, had grown tired of waiting for the bride and groom to make their grand exit and had left. So the grand exit was made in the back seat of a friend's car, which seems highly appropriate and summarizes the spirit of the entire weekend- the focus on friends and the need for all involved to be flexible and plan on the unplanned.
Although there were those very sad to see Heather leave Michigan, they will be living for the foreseeable future in Brian's house in Copeland, Kansas. Copeland is south and a little east of Scott City. There are definitely those of us excited that they will be in Kansas.
After the bride and groom left, it was late, too late to consider starting home yet that night. We decided instead to get up early and make what turned out to be a 17 hour, 1,100 mile trip the next day. Besides, everyone left who was of a kindred spirit decided to trek out into the woods and build a campfire. Which we did, and it was a wonderful way to unwind after a weekend of activity- leaping flames and dancing shadows on the faces of new friends. We instructed my mom to sleep and prepare to be the driver on the first shift the next day, so we could stay out late. We returned to the cabin about 1:30, were sleeping by 2:00, and our alarm rang at 5. We were on the road by 6, watched a Michigan sunrise, a Nebraska sunset, ate wedding sandwiches and wedding candy out of a soft-sided cooler, stopped for gas four times and a potty break five and a half times (the half-time was a guard rail in the Illinios rain) and home by 10:00 that night, a time zone earlier.
And now I am back in the Land of Odd- I mean Oz. I still experience shock every time I lift my head from my computer and look out the window at the russet heads of milo around my house, at the sky that extra atmosphere and dust have turned a paler shade of blue than I am accustomed to, at the silence I remember from my childhood- the sound of such silence is the faint roar of bloodflow in my ears, my breath whispering in and out, in and out, a meadowlark outside. This house is quiet. The wind can howl and not a sound is heard in here. It feels strange, no barking dogs, no kids playing in the street, no backing garbage trucks or distant hammering, no sounds that one accepts as silence when one lives in a populated area. Just the occasional thwack of a loose piece of tin on the barn roof, a cricket, a meadowlark, a gust of wind rattling a windowpane, then back to loud, loud silence. It's wonderful and terrifying.
