Family

The Road More Traveled

/ Tessa Pagones / 4 Comments

I am a creature of habit. You only have to look at the paths I have worn on my way to each gate I use during daily chores. It is easy to see at this time of year when the grass is dead everywhere, but completely flattened along the habitual trails of deer, horses, and me.

Recently I started seeing a new chiropractor. Chiropractic work is one of those things like yoga for me: I almost always hate it, but keep thinking if I can find just the right practitioner or just the right method, I will love it, or at least benefit from it. I am optimistic about this chiropractor, though I admit it’s partly because she told me to stop trying to do yoga. It’s also because she’s the first of any kind of medical person I have seen about my back who seems to think it can be fixed. On the other hand, she has given me some things to do, or rather things not to do, that are causing me to have to pay attention ALL THE TIME and in many cases change how I habitually move through my day, which is clearly crazy talk.

A small example: I am not supposed to close the angle of my right leg to my body more than 90 degrees. That sounds simple enough, but try to tie your shoes or wash your feet or feed all the animals whose food bowls are on the ground (which is all of the animals) or trim the dog toenails or pick out the horse hooves or even pat the cat or the shortest dog, and see how easy it really is.

Some of what makes it hard is about habit, of course. Here are the first few steps of feeding the horses: Take four buckets of feed from where I make the feed up outside, two at a time so I can have a hand free to close the door behind me, which means putting the first two buckets down on the ground and then picking them up again to carry all four buckets to the fence along one of the Tessa trails through the yard. Put buckets down on ground. Climb fence. Reach under fence to get bucket for first horse, repeat for second horse, etc.

Day one of trying to obey the 90 degree rule, I stand on the patio (step 1) looking at the buckets on the ground in annoyance, thinking “How the hell does she expect me to pick these buckets up from the ground with the other buckets in one hand without bending over at the waist?” Ahem. I look around and notice that my patio is, as it has been for years now, surrounded by stone walls. They range in height from about 18 inches to about 3 feet, with several levels in between. I’m fairly sure there’s a place I can put the buckets that not only does not involve bending, it does not involve lifting. Then I decide to time the walk from the patio to the fence, should I commit fully and make two trips with just one bucket in each hand. Walking slowly to the fence and back again takes a minute and five seconds. Maybe my schedule is loose enough that I can add two minutes and ten seconds to my morning and evening chores.

This is not the first time I have considered using my body in different ways. I have made changes in how I move when I have hurt something (ankle, knee, back). I have made corrections to try to even out my body so that when I ask my horses to even out theirs it’s a fair request. I have made changes when I have realized (or had it pointed out to me) that I am doing something halfway left-handed (holding a golf club or a pool cue or a gun with my hands in the leftie position but trying to do the activity in a right-handed direction). If I fully commit to the left handed approach I can do the thing much better. Each time I feel like I’m having to learn the lesson all over again, but really every time I’m just learning it at a different level, or learning to apply it to yet another area of my life or my body. And yet: here I go again, realizing that I have a habitually uneven way of climbing both up and down over a fence, and changing something as simple as which leg I lead with feels as awkward and slow as trying to write with my left hand.

This is also not the first time I have had to consider slowing down. When I had knee surgery nine years ago I had to move more thoughtfully through my day, though the need for this didn’t fully sink in until I slipped and fell because I was walking incautiously in bad shoes down a steep hill on wet grass because it’s where the path is because I always walk there. Thank goodness for the knee brace that only allowed my recently repaired knee to bend so far, but it was still a painful and scary moment, not aided by unhelpful dogs trying to take advantage of the unexpected opportunity to get in my lap outside. The larger problem is that once my knee felt better, I stopped slowing down. Until the next time I sprained my ankle or wrenched my back. I go fast until I can’t, I slow down when I have to, and then as soon as I can, I speed up again. I don’t even realizing I’m doing it until the next time I can’t.

I am well aware that my desire to speed things up usually takes a lot more time than slowing down. I have plenty of evidence of this, usually involving sentences that begin with “I’ll just…” or “I don’t need to….” “I’ll just take this halter off before I latch the gate” will invariably lead to me being led on a merry chase around the farm by at least one horse. “I don’t need to put the leashes on just to let the dogs out to pee” will (and in fact did, once at 4: 30 a.m.) end with me under the truck with a dog and a skunk, trying to pull the dog out by his hind legs. Really it ended a couple hours later after multiple dog and human baths outside in 35 degree weather.

Changing the way I move is hard, but changing the speed at which I move is even harder, no doubt due to hurrying being a much longer and more deeply ingrained habit. I come from a family of early people. Not on-time people, but chronically early. I have never heard the expression “late to be polite” outside my family, though perhaps it is a recognized expression, but it was something my parents used to say. I suspect someone once told them that it was rude to show up early to a dinner party, or maybe they commented on someone else’s lateness and that person said they came late in order to be polite. Of course, “late to be polite” in my family looked a lot like being on time to anyone else. It just kept them from arriving earlier than the stated start time. This rule did not apply to family, so if my parents said they’d be at my house by 11 a.m. for lunch, I knew to expect them any time from about 9:30 on.

I also have always lived in chronic fear of keeping up. I believe this is a condition of being a youngest child: everyone in the family is always bigger and older and more coordinated and faster, and I scrambled to keep up as best I could. I didn’t want to be the reason my parents were late (or not early), or to annoy my older sisters more than I already felt I did just for existing. None of this was aided by times like when I lost track of my father at the drugstore and ran up to another set of legs that looked like his only to look up and realize these legs were attached to a complete stranger. Writing that down I realize that if my face was at knee height to adult humans, it’s probably more accurate to say my father lost track of me and not the other way around, but that’s not how it is in my mind. Similarly, when at the zoo with a neighbor adult and probably entirely too many kids (he usually had his own four kids, me and at least one of my sisters, and maybe one or two others from our block), I stopped to look at the hippos. By the time I looked around, no one I knew was still in the building so I went outside and sat on the steps of the Large Mammal house and cried until they came back and found me. All of this was nearly 50 year ago, but here I am still trying to keep up with ghosts and to make sure they don’t forget about me.

When I say “ghosts,” I do mean ghosts. The neighbor and his son who was my age have both been dead for over 25 years. My mother has been dead for almost 17 years, my father for almost 10, and my oldest sister for almost 3. There are also ghosts of Tessa past: I no longer have three kids living at home who need me to make them breakfast or pack their lunch or take them to school or pick them up from soccer practice or madrigals rehearsal or go watch their lacrosse games. I no longer have a job I commute to. I’m no longer trying to work full time and go to school full time. There really is no one but me tapping their watch expecting me to be anywhere, or to do anything faster. Breaking the habit of not looking at why I have the habit of rushing seems like a good use of my time. If my back can be improved through some attention and thoughtful change, maybe my brain can benefit from coming off of auto-pilot too. If I slow down – even when I don’t have to – I can decide which path I want to take, which foot will take the first step, and what speed I want to go.

Three Little Words

/ Tessa Pagones / 4 Comments

A friend recently reminded me of Gordon Lightfoot, which reminded me of one of my favorite guitarists, Tony Rice, and one of my favorite albums of his, Tony Rice Sings Gordon Lightfoot. To share this with my friend I pulled up YouTube to pick a song from that album, and settled on I’m Not Saying.

My sister and I often listened to the double record set Gord’s Gold in high school, and this song was one of our favorites. For quite a few years we borrowed from it when we wrote letters to each other (remember letters?) – one of us would sign “I’m not saying that I love you” and the other would reply in the next letter by signing “I’m not saying that I care if you love me.”

“I love you” is not something we said in our family. It wasn’t until I went to college and heard other people talking to their parents on the phone that I realized that many – perhaps most – people I knew ended phone calls to their parents by saying “I love you.” The Gordon Lightfoot song was both a joke and the closest we came to actually saying the words within our own family.

My grandmother had a dresser drawer filled with drawings we made when visiting her, and letters or cards we wrote when we were young. Almost all were just signed “From” and then our name. Often our whole name, as in “From Tessa Pagones” in penmanship one step away from writing half the letters backwards. My whole family has always talked easily about literature, politics, movies. We have not ever been given to talking about personal things, closely held thoughts and beliefs, or feelings. Especially feelings.

When I started, at age 19, to say “I love you” when getting off the phone with my parents, my father started to begin his conversations with me by picking up the phone and saying “Love me!” It would be another 19 years and my mother would be dead before I heard him say “I love you.”

When my sisters and I we were kids we never had a Christmas tree, and one thing we all agreed on was that as soon as we had our own places, we would have our own Christmas trees. The three of us had varied ideas about what “normal” kid things our kids should get that we did not have: piano lessons, swimming lessons, band or orchestra practice, the chance to fill up on bread at a restaurant if they wanted to, and definitely a Christmas tree. I don’t know, if anyone had asked, that any of us would have said “A house where people say “I love you,” but it was something we all created. Probably in all cases (certainly in mine) with the help of one or more other parents who say it more easily.

My kids say “I love you” easily, even to each other. There are a lot of moments as a parent that make you marvel at your kids for how like you they are, how different from you or each other they are, how they have some talent that seems to have come out of thin air and is unique to them. Hearing my kids say “I love you” to their siblings is something that will always make me feel a little bit of awe.

A Very Very Very Fine House

/ Tessa Pagones / 3 Comments

In the thirty years we’ve known each other, Rose and I have never fully stopped house hunting. For the first seven years we were together we rented different places while looking for a home to buy, and also while waiting for both of us to be ready to buy a home at the same time. We finally bought a house twenty years ago and we are still in that house, but somehow we had made the habit early on of looking for what might be next and we never stopped looking.

When we first moved here, the kids were between 5th and 10th grades. Our plan then was to stay here until they all graduated from high school, and then move somewhere else like Colorado. Or Arizona. Or maybe North Carolina. Or Vermont. But probably Colorado. The kids all graduated from high school, and we stayed here. Then the kids graduated from college, and we stayed here. Two of the kids have moved to Colorado, and here we still are, but we are also still looking.

Even while we dreamed of other states, we also kept looking at other houses in Maryland – bigger farms, mostly. There are several free local horse publications we received through all our moves – free horse publications rival alumni associations when it comes to tracking people down, and they all contain ads for horse farms for sale.

I often read the real estate ads in the free horse publications for the same reasons I read the horses-for-sale ads – a little bit to see what’s out there and a lot to be entertained. The horse ads bring us “ex racehorse with old ocelots” and “works well in arena in on trails nightmarish at all”. In the second case I presume voice text is to blame for this accidental truth in advertising (and the utter lack of punctuation). In the first case, possibly spell check (ocelots, osselets – potato, potahto), or possibly the ex racehorse did time at a wildlife refuge and made some elderly friends. Real estate ads say things like “Secluded and majestic. Sleep peacefully to the sounds of a genital creek flowing directly across the road.” Honestly I don’t even know where to start with that one.

When our oldest child was looking for his first house, we read the ads with a little more purpose, but we often got distracted by things that were nowhere near his price range or taste. One evening we were all sitting around the living room browsing real estate ads on our phones when Rose sent us a link and then said “Look at the beautiful old trees this one has!” Our son said “Mom. For three million dollars that place better have Oompa Loompas and shit.”

Before we found the house we live in now, we spent those seven years looking at houses in four different counties around where our kids went to school. Mostly we looked at places with enough land that we could keep our horses at home, which meant that in our price range some of them barely had a standing house. For a while we could keep track of the houses by location, but after a while we developed a different kind of taxonomy.

The Cat Pee house was distinct from the Pee house (which smelled like baby pee on one end, dog pee in the middle, and incontinent elder pee on the other end). The Jesus Bacon house smelled entirely like bacon and had crucifixes and/or biblical cross stitch in every room. The Drywall house was the old farm house where the bedrooms were made by loosely affixing single thickness drywall sheets to create walls that seemed likely to blow over if you opened more than one upstairs window at the same time.

It was in the Drywall house that we saw the ad for this house for the second time. We had seen it once in a web search, dubbed it The Castle (for the stone turret), laughed at the price, and moved on. Our realtor brought the listing to the Drywall house, anticipating correctly that we would not actually be interested in that one. The price had dropped steeply – we later found out the owners were trying to get out from under it after a divorce – and it had everything we were looking for in terms of land, location, and a house that looked like it would keep standing up for the foreseeable future.

When we moved in, there was grass and there was house. Two azalea bushes, two dogwood trees, and a big lilac bush made up all of the landscaping. The first year we started picking out and planting trees. The soil here is quite rocky, and digging a hole big enough to plant even a small tree is both exhausting and satisfying. The kind of manual labor I like best is kind that is the farthest from my job, which I do sitting in front of a computer. I like to do tasks that have a visible start and end, where when you are finished you have something tangible to point to. I like tasks that use my body – hammering fencing nails, stacking hay bales, digging holes for trees. One of the most satisfying tasks I have done here, one day when I was in a very bad mood about a job I had at the time, was to pound three ten-foot lengths of half inch rebar into the rocky dirt with a sledgehammer. (I needed them to hook up the electric fence, but if you have the land, the rebar and the sledgehammer, I highly recommend this as a form of therapy.)

Most of the trees we have planted are now taller than the house. The fields are set up for our horses, their needs, and our convenience. We have a list of additional projects we talk about doing. We sometimes divide that list between “Things we will do if we stay” and “Things we will do if we sell.” We have a five year plan that involves moving to Colorado, and another plan that doesn’t involve moving at all.

There are three horses grazing in our fields right now, and five horses buried here. The first one went in the ground the summer we moved in, and the last one two summers ago. One of the things that pulls us up short about our five year plan is moving three older horses more than halfway across the country to a completely different environment. Another one is leaving the underground horses. I’m quite sure they won’t mind, but we will.

We’ve been looking pretty hard at houses in Colorado for the past couple of years. Last year we even found a farm where the horses could live since it’s unlikely we will buy a place there with enough land for horses. Leaving got pretty real after that, which put me into two panics, one about leaving here, and one about having to empty out the house and the barn of all our stuff, which sent me straight to “Let’s rent a dumpster and throw everything we own in it and have someone haul it away and oh my god we have to find the perfect house in Colorado right now.”

We’ve both been vacillating between wanting to stay and wanting to go for a few years. Last month we finally made one decison: to put the search on hold for now. We have enough uncertainty in our lives right now without keeping ourselves on the will we/won’t we fence, trying to decide which way to jump. We’ll spend the rest of this year enjoying our trees, and communing with all eight of our horses. Maybe then we will know what comes next.

But I bet we will keep reading the real estate ads.