Loving the Old Farmhouse
By MaryAnna Clemons -- First published in Christian Science Monitor (print edition) Jan. 2008
Have you ever thought about a house, long after you moved out and wondered who lives there now? Do they have kids that climb the trees? Do they have dogs that sleep on the back porch like ours did?
The house that fills my thoughts from time to time isn’t fancy. In fact, anyone else, given the choice, likely would never have rented the one-bathroom farmhouse to begin with. But our small family of one child, with another on the way, and a husband who was returning to college, needed a reasonable rent. And a landlord who didn’t mind that we were owned by two dogs, two cats and two horses. The rent of $285 for a three bedroom farmhouse ten miles from town, with five acres, was right up our alley. Our landlord, Marvin, wore overalls, had pens in his front jean pocket and wore his combat boots unlaced. He was right up our alley too.
The tenant on his way out was a single man who worked at the local community college, past the low-water bridge, down one dirt road, one paved road and to the left. We walked through the door of our new rental home, and it felt so empty.
“It seems hollow,” my husband said.
"It seems like it was waiting for us,” I countered.
And it did.
The house had been waiting for some life – kids, animals, hand-sewn curtains and furniture that fit without being cramped. We heard the echo of our laughter all the way down in the basement and back up through the heating vent. (The basement was a huge selling point and our future safety in Tornado Alley.)
My first job was to make the curtains, as I do in every house we move to. Without a Wal Mart in town, I had to use some of the old fabric I’d had to make curtains at the last house, another small farmhouse that sat in the middle of a cattle yard on the outskirts of the Kansas-Colorado border. I’d left the curtains there, since the windows had been so oddly shaped, thinking I’d never find a new home for them.
Pulling out fabric I’d bought for a $1 a yard, I started measuring windows, and filling a bobbin with strong cotton quilting thread, deciding on a style. The house seemed to talk to me, asking for double-layered curtains to keep out the chill of winter and hold in the cool during the hot summer months.
Outside, the house needed work, and we vowed to paint it, never expecting that the landlord wouldn’t want us to. We finally realized that he just didn’t want to pay for it. No problem. For the rent we were paying we splurged on bright white paint for the outside walls, dark green for the trim and gunmetal for the porch, the propane tank and the porch ceiling.
I took a small wire fence and added it to front of the porch, planting Fall flowering bush plants whose name I can’t recall. They were on sale at the farm store though, and at the time, that was all that mattered. The lawn was really a compilation of green weeds, but the ground was covered, so we wore flip-flops and thanked nature for covering up the sand and cockle-burs.
The county workers cut down some trees along our county road, leaving big hunking chunks of tree behind. I took our old pickup truck and drove around collecting the biggest and best chunks of tree, and brought the pieces (that weighed quite a bit), back to our little farmhouse that sat in a three-sided shelter of trees. The trees - pines, oaks and hedge-wood - stood proud, as elderly as the century old home.
I rolled the cut tree pieces down one-by-one along the property line between the dirt road and our lawn of weeds, creating a pseudo-fence/decoration.
The Angus cattle across the dirt road, held in only by a single strand of electric wire, watched me in fascination, while my husband reluctantly helped me cozy up the front yard.
“Who does this?” he asked.
“I do.”
The effect the logs had on our home was instantly individual. Couple that with the new paint job, the flowering pink dogwood just outside the kitchen window, the porch swing and newly painted propane tank, the greening of the weeds and the two beautiful girls sitting by the flowering bushes, and I realized happily that once again we’d made a home.
We offered to buy the farmhouse with five acres, but our jovial landlord loved the house too. He always thought he’d move out to the house from town, not realizing as he said the words that his wife stood behind him, in her craft-sale decorated sweatshirt, drawing her hand across her throat in a fashion that let us know that they’d never live in the house.
Today, we live miles away in Colorado, in our own home this time, but I often talk with a friend just down the road from that farmhouse. Barb says that two other families have moved in and moved out, but none have planted flowers. The log fence is still there, but the green weed lawn is back to sand and gravel, and the dogwood doesn’t seem to bloom as much.
I guess the old house misses us too.
For the Love of a Horse
By MaryAnna Clemons -- First published in Today's Caregiver 2003
"Why don't you just sell that horse?"
The words came from a friend who meant well, but they were hurtful nonetheless. I realize now I shouldn't have been complaining about the cost of feed if I didn't want to hear what everyone close to me had wondered: if you can't afford the horse, why do you keep her? I'll have to tell you how Smiley came into my life.
I was living in Baumholder, Germany, serving a two-year term in the U.S. Army, when I got a call that my mother had been diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was the hardest call I've ever taken. I was released from my tour of duty a scant four months early to return to America and care for my mother. At the cost of a military career I'd wanted, my husband's military career and almost at the cost of our marriage, I moved my family into my mother's three-bedroom house to be her caregiver.
As the oldest of three children it fell on my shoulders to care for my mother, whether I wanted it to or not. But I did want it. I needed my mother to need me. She'd been my rock as a child and now I had the chance to help her. I reveled in my newfound position, for a while.
Soon, the evilness of her disease showed through. The physical requirements of being her caregiver were nothing compared to the emotional aspects of dealing with her disease. My mother’s once vibrant hair was dull and lifeless, her once bright eyes were angry and sad, and her once elegant hands were crippled and shrunken. I could only straighten her fingers with much massaging and pain to her, but she wanted me to keep doing it. She wanted to see her fingers straight and graceful, even though, as soon as I let go, they would curl up again against her will.
She'd lost her voice first . . . maybe lost isn’t the right word, more that she’d had it stolen from her. Stolen by an insidious and violent disease that even the best doctors don’t understand. Now, as she lost the ability to communicate through writing, it was like telling her she had already died but she couldn't leave just yet. My mother signed up for an experimental drug trial before I had made it back home. Some of the patients got the real medicine, and some of them got placebos. The day the specialists told her she was in the placebo group was the day she gave up. To relieve stress, I started taking riding lessons from an old high school friend. I didn't need the help riding, as much as I just needed a horse to ride.
So many years before, when I was just eight, my mother who was single at the time and raising three kids, bought me my first horse, Julie, $300 tack and all. I missed being able to ride, and my friend had a great buckskin mare, Smiley. One sunny California day I took my daughter, who was almost two, and my mother to a lesson. It took me at least 15 minutes to get my mother from the car to the wheelchair and then, with my daughter on her lap, to the arena. I was exhausted and I hadn’t even saddled the horse yet. But riding around the arena, my smile was contagious. Even though my mother had to keep a dish cloth in her mouth to catch the drool, she was smiling around its terry cloth corners. On the ride home I mentioned that the buckskin was for sale and to my surprise my mother offered to buy her for me. The horse wasn’t cheap, but my mom wanted to say thank you for all I’d given up to come and care for her.
Several years after my mother had passed away, my husband was using Smiley to round up cattle in Western Kansas, when she collapsed and refused to move. Apparently, the vet told us, her muscles had stopped utilizing electrolytes properly. The vet, after flushing her system with saline three times, couldn’t believe she was still alive.
I can’t help but find a connection between my mother, whose body had betrayed her through muscle deterioration, and my horse, whose muscles had failed her as well. I didn’t give up on either, no matter the cost. I'd already spent good time and money to haul my horse from California to Kansas, then to Arkansas, and then back to Kansas. I’d invested my feelings in her and transferred the pain of my mother’s death into conversations with my horse while we rode the back roads.
Smiley was as important to me as a child, nuzzling me at all the right moments. Selling Smiley would be like giving up on my mom. Even though I know I can’t bring my mother back through a horse, I can keep my mother’s memory alive every time I ride, feeling the wind through my hair and picturing my mother, right there with me, enjoying the ride.