Month: April 2021

Pasture Walk

/ Tessa Pagones / 2 Comments

I have, once again, been in a mood for the past two weeks. I thought about taking up the negativity challenge my cousin sent me a few years back when there were too many gratitude and positivity chain posts sweeping Facebook. The gist of the negativity challenge is that you name ten things that get on your nerves, the pettier the better. It is quite fun and even a little cathartic, but the problem right now is that the things that are getting on my nerves aren’t petty. The other problem is that when so many people are getting on my nerves with big things, it’s probably a pretty good sign that I have some work to do in those areas myself, and I don’t feeeeeeeeel like it. So there.

I had two different writing exercises assigned in this same two week time frame. One was a praise poem, and I got one of the projected five stanzas done because the only thing I felt like praising was coffee. I tried to move from coffee to other things in the kitchen that I wanted to praise, but I stalled out at:

“I give thanks for the dogs that lie under my feet
Tripping me as I gather ingredients.”

Looking back, even the coffee stanza is a little disgruntled.

The other exercise worked a little better, since it did not require me to be actively grateful, but just to think about something I do regularly that I take pleasure in. Here it is, in hopes that anyone else who has been having the same kind of April I’ve been having may feel better for a little walk through the pasture:

This is a walk I do every day, but not a walk from any particular day. It’s a walk that I do in all seasons, but for today I will walk in the fall, with its background music of geese muttering on the pond next door, the leaves on the trees changed or fallen, the still-green grass eaten down to a haze interspersed with patches of bare dirt.

I’m walking through a field, on my way from one pair of horses to the other, a fence on my left, a small hill on my right, a bucket of grain in one hand. The field, like all the fields around it, is a minefield of primarily horse manure, but also that of fox, goose, skunk, and any other creature who takes this path when I’m not on it. A lot of my looking is down.

My downcast eyes start to steer me around a pile of horse manure, but then I stop, and stoop. This pile is covered with something that from above it looks like a convention of tiny parasols. Each one is open and translucently striped, and I pull my cell phone out of my pocket to take pictures, which is the main reason I have a cell phone. I stare at it in paralyzed horror on the rare occasions it rings, but it is silent now as I crouch down to photograph the last signs of the fairy party.

The sun is up but not high enough to clear the trees in front of me, so the rays pierce the scantily clad limbs only to get caught and fractured by the chilly morning fog. The parallel lines of the fence boards are periodically connected by spider webs, which with all due respect to Charlotte have much more beauty in their rainbow sparkling dew concentricity than any words. I stop again, angling so that the web is clearly visible against the backdrop of the ground, and the light reflects off the dew droplets but does not shine directly into the lens. I’m interrupted by an indignant whuffing and the sound of fifteen hundred equine pounds landing from an impatient but balletic leap. I pause by the big bay body after I tip his breakfast into his bowl, trying to catch his whorls of hair in the dawn light but he steps his hind feet away, muzzle still firmly planted in his food. I settle for the silhouette of his withers, back, and croup against the fog: sunrise over Mount Finn.

On these morning walks, I feel compelled to try to record these sights as I see them. If I succeed, they will look not like what they are, but like what they feel like to me, a city child transplanted into these country fields more than half my life ago, starting my days on my knees in the wet grass amid nameless scat, trying to capture the view from behind my eyes.

Ancestry

/ Tessa Pagones / 6 Comments

A few years ago, some time after I did DNA testing to find out my dogs’ breeds, I sent in my own DNA sample (to a different site) to find out my own breeding. The only surprise was that there were no surprises: I am exactly as advertised on both sides of my lineage. I put up a family tree with roughly four names in it and then forgot about it.

Last September I got a message from someone who appears to be related to me, with some pretty detailed information about my maternal grandmother’s immediate relations. I ignored it for several months, because once upon a time when I was in junior high I answered the phone and the man on the other end asked to speak to Darcy (my sister) and I told him she was away at college and he asked if she was staying in Charlottesville (which was where she was) for the summer, and then he asked if my mother Dorrie was still working at the Renwick, and he asked after my father John and how the real estate business was at Chatel Real Estate, and then he said “Do you fuck?” so I have forty-odd years of trust issues with strangers who know a lot of details about my family.

But eventually I decided that not every stranger with a lot of details about my family is a creep, even on the internet, so I responded, and I’ve been having a lovely conversation with – hang on a minute while I go look up first and second vs once- or twice-removed cousins again – my second cousin, who has a much better knowledge of our family and also a much better memory for those things than I have. I know almost all of the names but have forgotten most of the relationships, and somehow it slipped my mind that all of my great aunts and uncles with names like Toddy and Kitty and Sweedie and Appie and Nanie had more regular given names, and that even some of the names that didn’t sound like nicknames were (Pete’s given name was Nathaniel, for instance). As someone who has a name that isn’t a nickname but sounds like one, I appreciate this.

My sister Darcy was the one who would have known all of these family facts. I would have loved to hear a conversation between her and this particular cousin, tracing our family back who knows how many generations. I can’t hold up my end of the conversation very well but I am enjoying it, and I feel a little like I am talking to my sister again.

For this and many reasons, I’ve been thinking about my grandmother (Dutch or Dutchie, born Frances) and the stories I wish I could hear again and listen to differently this time, and the things I’d like to ask her. Thinking about that also got me thinking about my mother, my father, my aunt, my sister – the people whose stories I can no longer listen to. I think of the questions I wish I could ask them, or that I wish I had thought to ask them. In my family, most of these people did not tell a lot of stories or answer a lot of direct questions, so some of this wishful thinking includes wishing that they had been different people, or that I had been a different person, or that we had been a different family.

In the absence of a do-over with any of my family members, I’ll do my best to pay attention to the ones that remain when they have something they want to tell me. It may not matter much in the grand scheme of things if anyone is left who knows that Gene was the third brother or that every one of my relations named Frances chose to go by their middle name, but it makes me feel better to try to be one of those people. If it meant enough to someone I loved for them to tell it to me, then it can be one of the ways I remember them and love them still.

Late Bloomer

/ Tessa Pagones / 10 Comments

It’s spring, it’s sunny, it’s warm, and in the words of Stuart Smalley, I’m shoulding all over myself. This is the time of year I’ve been waiting for, right? The weather I’ve been waiting for, the time to shed off the winter blahs, the time to do all the things. This I know: I don’t feel like it. I don’t even feel like writing, but here I am. I am taking two writing classes right now and haven’t written anything I like for either one of them. I don’t like the pieces we are using as models, and I like the pieces I’m writing from the models even less. I did just take a look at the next assignment for one of the classes and the instructor began her analysis of the piece by saying “I’m not sure we’ve ever studied a narrative technique revolving around bad-temperedness” and I thought: FINALLY! Something I can get behind.

The only thing I have felt like doing is baking cake, but even cake did not go as planned this weekend. I had a custard disaster, in which I was first reminded of the important lesson “don’t multi-task when the custard is on the burner” (chai flavored scrambled egg) and then that it’s important to know the right amount of gelatin to use (chai flavored egg soup) and then that you don’t try to reheat the watery custard if you’ve already put gelatin in it (I’m not really sure what to call the result: hot chai flavored egg soup with bits of rubber cement?). Fortunately the custard was a non-critical element. I tasted all the other elements individually so I’m fairly sure they will work out together. It’s a dirty chai layer cake, so it’s coffee and chai cake, white chocolate coffee ganache, nameless coffee crunchy bits, and coffee and chai buttercream. That has to be good, or at least edible. Maybe I’ll try it out for breakfast.

I’m not really sure what to do when baking therapy, writing therapy, walking therapy, horse therapy, and even dog therapy aren’t working. The cat has her own ideas which mostly involve attacking my legs as I walk by, so I haven’t tried snuggling her (a dangerous proposition on our best days, which most certainly neither of us is having right now). I don’t feel like gardening, and anyway it’s mostly too early for that here. Debris from last year is still sheltering this year’s beneficial critters, and it’s far too early to plant most new plants. I could be digging holes for trees, but I haven’t bought the trees yet, and in my experience it’s best to wait or you just have a yard full of holes.

The full impact of the past year is still sinking in. I haven’t seen two of my kids since January of last year, and the third who lives only one state away I’ve only seen maybe four times. I am pining for them all. I complain about traveling for work but I also miss it. I don’t care for the big city but I even miss going to New York. I have been saying for years that all of my line of work can be done remotely, and I have been mostly working from home for many years, but it turns out that going to an office never and seeing zero people in person is actually too much of a good thing. I miss live music. I miss having a regular level of anxiety about regular anxiety-producing things.

I spent some time this morning walking around my property being irritated at the trees and their cheerful busyness. If I stand still by the willow or the weeping cherry I can watch the leaves and flowers unfurl, and instead of giving me hope, this annoys me. The sweet gum is suddenly popping leaves all over, and most of the maples – autumn blaze, hedge, sugar – are putting out their early pollen-makers. Good for the bees, not so good for me. Only the crimson king maple and I seem to be on the same page. I know it is healthy and that it will leaf out, and I’m sure it’s getting busy somewhere inside its bark, but for right now on the surface it is doing exactly nothing. This is my kind of tree.

For now, I will keep reminding myself that our frost-free date isn’t for five or six more weeks, and maybe I’ll stay hunkered down until it’s time for my annual mid-May ritual of planting way too many tomatoes. Some of us are productive in April, and some of us are still dormant, and that’s ok.