Scenes from the Farm

Noon at the farm. As always, we went over to our neighbor's house for breakfast (maple bacon and pancakes), and this morning she treated us to a box of old letters to and from her parents... most dated between 1905 and 1915. Even though she speaks German, she has a hard time reading the script, so she had them out to show to an even older German farm lady who could help her translate the text. The handwriting on some was just lovely, and one letter even had a hand-stenciled and -inked border that was so dainty and sweet.

I really get a kick out of seeing old stuff like that; the paper, the stamps, the penmanship. She laments that her sons won't care about these sorts of things when she's gone and fears it will all end up in the garbage, and I sincerely hope that isn't true. I've often tried to convince her youngest son that he has enough letters and pictures and farm implements to start a small museum in Bulverde, but somehow I doubt that will ever come to fruition.

She'd helped birth two baby goats yesterday, and so after breakfast, we all headed down to the pen to watch her bottle feed. The bub gets so excited seeing the animals and has started naming the goats (Priscilla, Cookie, etc.) and calling them "his friends". Around this time, a friend of Mary Ann's son showed up who is a real character, and not really in a good way. She is very New York and hard and usually turns me off, so I wasn't psyched when Mary Ann suggested she walk back over to our house with me and the bub to see the work the hub was doing on the deck. I have absolutely nothing in common with this woman. She's loud. She cusses like a sailor.... wait a minute... those things aside, you can just tell she's had a really hard life. Been on and off of heavy drugs. Makes her living being the guinea pig for medical research studies. (Seriously, she told me she'd made $1,800 in one day last week testing blood pressure medication.) I've always been nice to her out of obligation to our neighbors, but the less time I have to spend with her the better. So, needless to say, I was thoroughly annoyed.

Once we started walking, she began to tell me about her fiancé who just happens to be an inmate at Riker's Island, and as her story went on, I started to feel something besides annoyance. She told me that at almost 50 years old, she's never felt love before. That no one has ever held her hand... that she doesn't know how to kiss even... that her whole life has been this fucked up mess. Apparently she lived next door to this man growing up. They'd been best friends and each other's protectors, and when she moved away at 12, both had been devastated. She'd spent all those years thinking about him, and two years ago decided to look him up, thus how she found him in prison. The first time she went to see him was on his birthday, and they both cried and held each other for six hours. Letters started and phone calls... things went from there. Just going back to that young, warm safe place for them, when they were kids, before they fell into the horrible realities of life in inner city New York. He shot heroin for the first time at 12, and did his first paid arson job at 13. He's been convicted of armed robbery 28 times, and has spent most of his adult life behind bars. She's been used and abused by men, and been jacked up on every illegal substance known to man.

As she is telling this story, the bub is chasing chickens and dodging in and out of the various implements of junk scattered off the road. At one point, he ran over and grabbed her hand and then insisted that she hold mine too. It was strange at first... the three of us walking hand and hand down this little dirt road, but then the woman's eyes began misting up. I'm sure it isn't often (never) that she walks down the street holding hands with strangers and the moment was really moving in a way. She said that she wanted to get off drugs, to go to the Rodeo and eat cotton candy and take walks in the park. All that normal stuff she'd never had before. She was trying so hard to stay clean, and wasn't sure how she was gonna be able to keep him out of trouble once he got out. She believes that he's really reformed, and that they might actually have a chance to make a go of it. Come Septmeber of next year, they're gonna find out.

Once we got back to our house, she spent most of the time playing with Sugar and Spanky (despite the fact that Spanky got skunked yesterday afternoon and smells like a baboon's rear end). The bub was laughing and playing, throwing rocks into the stock tank for Sugar to retrieve. When we finally said goodbye to her, the bub kissed her on the lips and then she really began to cry, turned and quickly walked back down the road...

You know, we see people. Or at least the hard outside core that is visible, and we make assumptions about them. Yet, here was this woman, struggling so hard with life and trying to hold onto love in this horrible hand she's been dealt. I watched her walking away, her hair shining in the sun, and my heart went out to her. Just what a crapshoot life is... and how truly lucky I am. Sometimes it is so easy to take love for granted.