Letter to My Father on April 18

Dear Dad,
I am not going to read past letters to see what I might have said on April 18 before -- I am sure I have said it all before, but now we have arrived at 35 years since April 18, 1984, a very long time ago. So many of us remember those days clearly. I am sitting in my house with my back to the window that overlooks the wooded area where you are buried.  We chose our house site partly because of its proximity to your grave, but we hardly ever think of it. We do think of you all the time, and speak of you often.

Today was a perfect April day in the middle of a perfect April.  This April 18 is much bloomier and more beautiful than the one 35 years ago.  There are so many more trees that bloom now because we are surrounded by suburbs on all sides and they come with cherry trees and crabapples and forsythia. Our own Blueberry Hill is full of beauty -- my weeping cherry still has pink blossoms mixed in with its new leaves.

I spent the day in Loudoun and at the weekly potluck I sat next to Susan Planck. She just turned 78 last week. She remembered that this was the day that you died.  There were only four of us at the table today who remembered that day -- Jon, Susan, Chip, me.  There were about 15 people who were born later or who arrived much later. Two were your grandsons Michael and Stephen. Your great granddaughter Shaia was asleep on the couch in the office, with piles of sweatshirts and other clothes on the floor next to the couch in case she woke up and rolled off.

Today the workers picked all sorts of greens  we did not grow 35 years ago (I didn't help so I don't even know what they picked but there was chicory, chives, chard, lettuce, choy, spinach, nettles foraged from the woods), getting ready for markets.  This weekend we have to go to five markets, which seems excessive for the middle of April but that's how it goes.  We planted onions, using plants that were purchased from an Amish grower in Pennsylvania (instead of onion sets from Southern States in the olden days). We even planted tomatoes outside today, which seems very early, but it is warm and the soil is ready and there seems to be no threat of frost in the next few weeks.

Michael learned to lay plastic, had a lesson from Jon, and now we work together to stay ahead of the people who are planting.  Plastic laying is so non-stressful compared to the old days. I remember so much aggravation and yelling, so much fixing and fidgeting, so much rocky ground. Now I prepare all the soil myself, from start to finish, using tillage equipment that did not exist when you were around.  When all goes well, which is usually, the soil is fluffy and ready. The plastic layer is probably a few generations better engineered than the one we had way back when. Michael makes adjustments, the plastic goes down tight and straight, I drive pretty straight but not perfectly, there is no yelling and nothing to fix. My plastic never blows up in the wind. I think back to those days at Deramus, struggling to get the edges down in that terrible soil. What a mess. For years after that I never wanted to grow anything in plastic. Only in the last ten years have I learned to lay plastic, and a big part of that is the invention of biodegradable plastic, so we can skip the nastiness of pulling it all up again.

You did not have the opportunities that I have had to learn to do things ahead of time, to do them with a lot of planning. I have so much help. People keep the equipment in working order. People even help me hook up the equipment to the tractor. Everything works so much better with a lot of help, and plenty of time.  When you were farming, we were so often behind schedule, barely getting the ground ready before the next step, or at least that is how I remember it.

The whole farm has evolved from where you started it, and there is much that is the same.  The original shed in Loudoun, at the intersection in the middle of the farm, still stands.  Just in the last few weeks Stephen cleaned it out (it has been cleaned out many times in 35 years) and converted it to a shop.  He has learned to build stuff by growing up here and being the most interested, and very talented. He has built many sheds, constructed greenhouses with others, and stayed true to the architectural language that you started here. About five years ago he rescued a sinking Truck Shed with his friend Cory, by jacking up the posts (two feet of sinking at some points) and putting new bases below and sticking them together. The Truck Shed lives, and looks almost the same as it did when you first built it.

Mostly things are just a lot tidier than they were in 1984. We haven't got rid of everything you accumulated, but only a small amount residue is still here.Charles and Hugh revel in that residue. We just saw Philip for the first time in over a decade, and he poked around in a pile outside the barn, looking for something he had built when he was in the eighth grade (about 40 years ago). He found it.

What I really want to say, of course, is that you continue to be all around us, every day and in so many ways.  When I talk to Stephen or Lani, I think of you. When I drive a tractor, I think of what you taught me. When I drive on Beulah Road, I think of you.  And when I have a good idea of my own, I think of you.  We have done a lot in your absence. We have built and evolved and grown and had families and done stuff that you would never have done. You would have had other ideas.  But the way your mind worked is still relevant to the way our minds work, even though most people don't know that.  We are frugal in unique ways. We like to make our own versions of everything. We like to solve problems ourselves.  You were right when you told me to stay with Jon. That was a good call.

I got cancer myself this winter but it seems for now that it was not the same level of dire that you and Jon experienced. Unlike you, I have had the pleasure of resuming my life in all normal ways and reveling in the joys of being healthy. I do remember how much you hated being sick and being a patient, and I did feel great trepidation about needing to become a patient, but I got very lucky and mostly skipped that part. 

I have some things from Grandma's house that Sarah N. gave me, and I am sitting below Grandpa's clock with that semi-terrible portrait of you as a boy on the wall next to it. I never really liked that painting but I like having it now. I don't even know if it looks like you but it does the job of reminding us that you were here.

You were here and you left a big impression, even for people who never knew you.  I will be 60 this year, which seems like a crazy number. This means that I have had the opportunity to live ten years more than you ever did.  Lani and Charles and Anna and Mom and I are all doing well, and we love you forever.  We are doing stuff that you would be so interested in, and so are your grandchildren. Remembering you tonight and always.

Love, Hana

Ten Years Ago Today

I once wrote about all the April anniversaries that bounce through our lives -- birthdays, death days, wedding days, first day of onion planting.  I feel like I wrote that one after April 3, 2009 because I remember how much Lilah liked that piece and this blog isn't that old.  April 3, 2009 was the day that we learned that Jon has Multiple Myeloma.  It was a scary day and the beginning of a tumultuous couple of years, trying to get our balance again. Early in those years, Jon decided that he wasn't going to be around for very long -- and he told me not to prolong the agony -- partly because he read on the internet that the average life expectancy for him would be 3 - 5 years.  He actually stopped buying new shoes for himself, thinking it would be a waste and he wouldn't get to wear them out.  Gradually he started to buy very cheap shoes.  Now he is back to normal, buying things that he needs and wants without thinking about dying before he uses them up.  I asked him to stop thinking about the 3 - 5 year number and to just give me ten more years.  What I meant was I wanted him to think in bigger chunks, and not to be such a fatalist.  He said okay.

So now we are at ten years. Of course I want another ten years. I really want more, but ten years is a good amount of time to think ahead. A lot happens.  In the past ten years, Jon has regained his health, he is once again overwhelmed by a list of tasks that never ends.  All of our children have graduated from college and spun around some and found a direction for now.  Ten years was not quite enough time to have any grandchildren of our own, or even to have any married children of our own, but in those years two of Anna's boys have gotten married and one has a lovely daughter and the other has a baby on the way. So we are making progress. It all counts.  We have lost both of Jon's parents in that time. The farm has gone through some major transitions --bringing in some new managers that had the potential for staying a long time, saying goodbye to them after four good years, saying goodbye to Ellen who had worked with us for 25 years,, and finally Jon and I moved our collective focus to Loudoun to learn to farm that farm.  Meanwhile, many things have stayed the same -- Blueberry Hill is still a cohousing community, Carrie is fully entangled in the farm and is now one of the owners, my mother is still healthy and strong, and we still have two family members from the generation after me who have returned to the farm to be part of it all.

The trajectory is excellent. I had a brief blip of my own -- all exhaustively documented on the couch blog (my own diagnosis on Feb 13, surgery on Feb 19, six weeks later I am almost all back to normal with just one remaining point of soreness on my right side).  That story is winding down, and it has been such an interesting and revelation-filled winter for me, with so many unexpected benefits.

In those ten years, just about everyone we know has gone through some big life changes -- people dying, people being born, people getting divorced, etc.  I think it is helpful to look back and forward in big chunks of time. It all seems less scary and out of control. Nothing is actually in our control, but we can enjoy the arc of our own history and we can also get a little less frantic feeling about the current disastrous state of affairs in our country.

Benjamin (and Rebecca too) has concluded that the only thing that matters now, the only determining factor in our lives at this moment is climate change.  He says that all the work that is happening in other important realms (social justice, racial equity, immigration reform...) doesn't matter if we can't address and fix that problem because there will be so much turmoil and large scale chaos and crisis, not very long from now. This is an incredibly sobering thought. I don't disbelieve it but I am not quite sure how to confront it. It is like we are walking on a pier that is shorter than we think it is and we are focused on the conversation we are having and at some point we will step off the pier and the conversation will be forgotten.  Can we figure out how to have a crew ahead of us building a longer pier?  It doesn't seem very hopeful with the current administration in place. But there are small crews working diligently.

We may all look back at April 3, 2019 and see how little we understood about our condition.  This is always true.  It might be much more dire than we realize. In some ways, it always is, but perhaps we really are on the edge. 

That is how I think about Jon's health, when I think about it. We are living on the edge. With every rise or dip in his M-spike, the possibilities shift.  We have enjoyed a long time of low numbers.  Some day his disease will become active again, or that is the expectation, and we will have to go back to thinking about that issue. For now we are living in a golden age, just getting older in the regular way.

It has been an excellent ten years. I would like to order ten more, please.

A Tale of Two Kitties

I am doing a 10 day Writers Bootcamp, writing 1000 words a day in response to a prompt or a word or a suggestion.  It has been fun, especially since I have had plenty of spare time so I don't feel stressed about it.  We have committed to sending 1000 words by midnight, and we don't have to edit anything, we just have to crank it out.  We really aren't meant to share these things, but this one entertained me enough to publish here in its raw form.  Those who already know this story will see that I cut some corners or forgot some parts of the story and perhaps I mischaracterized some nephews.. Ah well. It is meant to be read as a children's story, so you can just imagine the illustrations.

The prompt was: end the story with this phrase, "which was all she really wanted."  

It all started in the chicken house. The farmer could tell that an animal was coming into the chicken house in the night but nothing harmed the chickens.  There was just a flurry of movement, the sensing of a shadowy hurried exit when the farmer came in to check on things at dusk. And then one day she noticed some tiny little furballs, snugly tucked under the hens. She looked more closely – kittens! Their eyes were still closed and they looked warm and cozy, so she left them there. Now she knew who was slipping in and out at night. A feral mama.

For a few days everything seemed just fine, with the little black and white fuzzies rolling around in the henhouse. But then the farmer noticed something was amiss.  There was one less kitten.  She looked closer at the remaining kittens. They were missing some toes, or even entire feet. The chickens were quietly eating the kittens, bit by bit.  No one can accuse chickens of intentional malevolence. This was just another tasty morsel, a convenient snack bar. Kitten toes, mmmm.

The farmer gathered up the three remaining kittens and took them into the barn. She fed them and coddled them until they could stagger around on their own. They did not know they were missing toes and they didn’t have anything to complain about.  One of them had two full front feet and no back feet. One had a total of ten toes on four feet. And one was only missing a few toes.

The farmer’s nephew couldn’t resist those kittens and he wanted to take them to college with him. He took Pogo and Candi (short for Candi-Hat), and the farmer kept the least damaged kitty for herself. Taking them to school was a short-sighted plan – he left the kittens in his dorm room with a full bag of cat food and he let them have the run of the place.  It didn’t take long for the authorities to figure out there were aliens in the building.

But where should two differently-abled kitties go?  Why, to another aunt’s house, one with no pets at all. Safe from dogs and the big outdoors.  The farmer told the new hosts to be sure the cats never got outside because they could not protect themselves and they would be eaten in a flash. It was an ironic twist, having the cats move to the only house that had never wanted pets. 

So Pogo and Candi slid and slithered all over the hardwood floors, did all the cute things that cats do, and had a deluxe life.  They had special cat doors constructed for them, allowing them to go through a window onto the porch. Since they couldn’t climb, they couldn’t climb down off the porch, so it was laughably easy to keep them secure.  From time to time a bad kitty from the neighborhood would come to harass them and Pogo would puff up into a huge, round, spluttering, screaming ball and chase that cat off her porch.  Candi made herself invisible on those occasions.

Then the mother of the college boy came to live at the house and she fell in love with the cats.  When she moved to her own house, she took the cats with her.  This seemed like the best of all possible worlds.  The cats had a truly loving home, not just a pleasant and adaptive home. But nothing lasts forever and a man with a big dog moved in.  This disrupted the cats’ world immensely.  They became anxious and unpredictable. Candi couldn’t cope and she began to pee on rugs and towels and laundry. Pogo was a little more rugged and she just told the dog to keep its distance.

Candi moved back to the house with fewer challenges, but also less love. She didn’t pee on anything. She settled in and made the best of her new life as a single cat.  In fact, anytime they brought Pogo to visit her, there was a hissing fit and the visit was brief.

Then one day, another nephew decided he really wanted the cat. He knew that his aunt and uncle, the caretakers, would be okay if they didn’t have a cat anymore. So he just came one day and took it away.  In fact, this was a bit of a shock to the caretakers who had grown accustomed to the cat, but they hoped Candi would have a loving home again.  She did, sort of.  Her new house was much smaller and she had many fewer options for prowling around. But the new nephew held her and played with her and made her feel very safe.

But nothing lasts forever.  The boy moved to another place called the tree house and took the cat with him. For a while things went well, but eventually the boy found a girlfriend who had a cat. And the cat was not very tolerant of Candi.  Once again, Candi was a stranger in her own home. She began to pee on everything. And since the boy and his girlfriend left their laundry and linens on the floor, she peed on those every day.  The boy and his girlfriend learned to pick up their clothes but it was not a happy place for Candi.

Then the boy and his girlfriend built a yurt for themselves and they moved out, taking the new cat with them and leaving Candi behind in the tree house.  They would come and visit her every day, scratching her head and giving her a few minutes of attention.  But she was alone in that cold, quiet house for days and days.

This was untenable to the uncle who had created cat doors and cat spaces in his home for Candi and Pogo.  After a few weeks, he couldn’t stand it anymore and he went to the tree house and stole Candi back.

Which is all she ever really wanted.

Ranking Everything

We have been away from home since the evening of Sunday, December 30 -- and there is a long and wordy blog to prove it (hanajonramblingon.blogspot.com).  We did have one brief two day layover at home a week ago, but other than that we have been moving from apartment to hotel room to motel. Two days here, three days there. Lots of time changes but sleeping has been fine because all the beds are good, everywhere we go.

We rely quite a bit on reviews that others post: where to eat, what to see, the state of the apartment.  Because it is Jon who does the research most of the time, he probably gets a lot of requests to post reviews himself.  He never writes them because that is a form of documentation, and documentation is not at all natural to him.

This is further proof that opposites attract.  If those requests came to me, I would fill out the form instantly, with comments.  I did do a bunch of the Airbnb reviews because reviews are required.

Public feedback is not our strength but we have been privately ranking just about everything.  And when we are on a trip, Jon is religious about recording every financial transaction, in categories. This travel habit dates back to his youth when his family took road trips and Jon absorbed the importance of the record keeping rituals. In any case, he is meticulous about the accounting when we are away from home.

So we rate every meal that we eat out, and we compare it to its own potential, not to other restaurants. We rate it on the experience/venue, the quality of the meal, and the value.  Because we are generally frugal, we are not rating fine dining establishments. We look for local places with good reviews. 

Yesterday we drove from Shreveport to Texarkana so I could get a bus to Little Rock.  Jon left work so he could drive me 75 miles north on the wide open highway.  We didn't have a lunch plan but we figured we would deal with that after we successfully purchased the bus ticket.  Bus ticket in hand, we had 25 minutes to spare. Jon did a quick search and found a popular barbecue place just up the road.

Venue: a renovated gas station.  Tables in the area where the garage bays were. Orders taken in the area where the cashier used to be. Kitchen was outside in a repurposed fire truck. The person who takes your order takes three steps to a door, opens the door and walks to the truck and delivers a piece of paper with the order on it. Rating:  5 (out of 5)

We didn't have time to stay and eat in the dining room, so we took our sandwiches and went back to the bus station (because I wanted to, Jon would have pushed the envelope and eaten in that rustic room).

Food: That was the best barbecue we have eaten in years and years.  Whenever we go through the South, we stop and find what is supposed to be good barbecue. This was outstanding. 5. Great flavor, perfect moisture, not soggy not dry not too spicy but full of interesting tastes.

Value: Who cares.  It was so good that we might need to go back to Naaman's on purpose some day.

Okay, now I want to rate the two Marriotts that I have stayed in this week.  The one in Shreveport was smaller and fancier, in a lousy location.  The one in Little Rock is downtown, attached to the convention center.  Location much better, but no pool!  The one in Shreveport has a lovely pool but it is outdoors and you can only drool over it in January. The Shreveport room had a delicious love seat couch that was perfect for spending the whole day lounging, knitting, reading. It also had multiple work stations and a highly satisfactory office chair.  So I give the Shreveport hotel a 5 and this one a 3.

When we get home, we have no plans to go anywhere for a while.  But when Jon cooks, he always critiques his own dishes, and it will probably take us a few weeks to get out of the habit of rating the food.  But the bed is going to get a 5, no question about it.