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.