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Quiet

/ Tessa Pagones / 8 Comments

I woke up this morning to the sound of gunshots, or possibly firecrackers – I’m not much of a weapons expert. My limited experience using guns is target shooting with a .22 rifle at camp, using air rifles at the arcade, and once shooting a shotgun towards a sick fox that was hanging around the barn where I worked and I believe he died of surprise. There was a lot wrong with him, I could see when I went to dispose of the body, but I couldn’t swear that shot pellets were on the list. While I took the dogs out this morning before breakfast, the rapid fire that woke me up changed to what I think of as my neighbor’s cannon, though it’s probably a standard hunting gun and it’s probably some kind of hunting season here now that fall has arrived. I heard a weird gronking noise and thought “Goose? No. Maybe something injured?” and then looked down towards the misty reservoir in time to see a disgruntled great blue heron flying off to look for a quieter spot for his morning fishing.

Life in the country is only quiet compared to life in the city. There’s a lot less human-made noise here, but between a large year round population of Canada geese on the reservoir next door and the rotating seasonal chorus of mockingbirds and crows, crickets and cicadas, peepers and tree frogs, migrating swans, barking foxes – well, it’s rarely what I would call quiet. It’s the human sounds that tend to irk me the most, although I admit to days I want to yell back at the geese. I count my neighbor’s dog, who I also want to yell back at, among the human sounds. We don’t live in sight of any roads, but we can hear when someone is driving too fast on our road, and if there’s a loud vehicle on one of the bigger, farther away roads, we can hear it. We can also hear a steady background hum of traffic on the bigger roads during what passes for rush hour here.

There’s something notable about the kind of quiet that happens when one of the regular human sounds lessens or stops. Last year during the height of the covid restrictions, the absence of traffic sounds was noticeable, and it was something of a novelty to be able to walk down the driveway and across the road to get our mail without ever seeing a car. We moved here in 2001, and I didn’t realize how quickly we had acclimated to the planes flying in and out of the local airport until they stopped completely that September. That local airport is now regional, and there are a few more planes than there used to be, but I mostly only notice them when they are particularly loud, either because they are flying lower than usual or more directly over our property than usual; particularly unusual, as happens each October when there’s an airshow that I forget about every year until a B17 bomber flies over my house; or when they go suddenly quiet in mid-air, which I hope only happens during lessons when someone is learning to come out of a stall.

Having grown up in the city, I hardly notice sirens unless they are close or many, but certain sirens make our dogs start up their chorus, with Scout holding the steady melody in either a tenor or soprano range, depending on his mood, Boo chiming in with the baritone harmony, and Quinn doing some kind of coloratura soprano jazz scat that only he understands. The dogs respond similarly to certain trains, though not all trains. I usually don’t hear the trains unless I have the windows open – the nearest track is over a mile away – but there are some evening trains that do not inspire the dogs, and a 5:15 a.m. train that always does (though it does not always go through on time, so I can’t use that particular song as an alarm clock).

It’s an unusual kind of quiet inside the house these days because Rose is in Colorado, visiting our oldest and youngest children and getting some much needed Colorado time, and probably also some much needed away time. When we first moved here, we were both working jobs in actual offices away from the house. A few years later, we both started working from home, but in jobs or consulting positions that had us traveling a week at a time multiple times a year. My last work trip was a two week stint in the second half of February 2020, and since then of course we have both been home. Rose went out to visit the kids (and Colorado) last summer also, but aside from a few days where I did the same this past May, and a couple of short trips Rose has taken with one of her sisters, we’ve both just been here. All the time. Right now it’s just me, and this weekend I’ve noticed how much more quiet the quiet gets when you know the person that’s gone can’t even try to communicate with you because Rose is camping in the cell-signal-free mountains. It’s odd, because it’s not as if we talk every day when we are not in the same place, but we probably do communicate daily in some way – text, facebook comments, instagram messages – or maybe it’s just knowing that we can. This quiet is different.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my father, and my brother-in-law, and my friend Elaine’s husband Mark, each in their resoundingly quiet homes after their spouse died. One of the very few conversations I can remember having with my father in my lifetime that had any emotional content was when he told me that he still talked to my mother – out loud – after she died, and that he felt it was just as real a conversation as when she had been physically present. Of course, having known both of my parents, I can take that cynically or I can take it with empathy. In this case, I choose empathy. The quiet that falls after someone who has been sharing your life and home for decades is suddenly gone forever must be deafening.

None of my beloved people who have died were living in the same house as me when they died, so their absence for me is a different kind of silence – the kind when there’s no longer anyone there to answer the phone. My animals, though – I’m sure that’s one of the reasons their deaths hit as hard as they do. They are a daily presence, and they leave a gaping hole. And I do talk to them, though not necessarily out loud. I especially still talk to the horses. We have buried five horses here, and I find reason to talk to each of them sometimes as I make my daily rounds. As with my living horses, I’m learning to be quieter in my conversations. The living horses let me know when I’m making improvements. The are reminding me now that when I don’t have anyone who responds with speech when I talk to them (except Quinn, but only when it involves putting his dinner bowl down, or going out to play), I’m quieter in general, and they prefer that. I’m sure Rose will be grateful if I can keep it up when she returns; quiet is not an adjective anyone would use to describe me. I haven’t even been listening to music, so I’m in a fairly constant state of listening to nothing but the sounds of what – and who – is here right now, and the quiet of what – and who – is not.

Home

/ Tessa Pagones / 4 Comments

I’m back from my first trip in a year and a half. It was nice enough to be out and about again that even the plane rides seemed nice. My fellow travelers may have felt the same since everyone was pleasant, which is not the first word I would have used for people in airports and planes the last time I flew.

I started to say that I’m home from my trip, but I was home where I was, too. Partly because I was staying in my own house, but also because I got to see two of my kids, and because I got to see good friends, and because I was in a place that has always felt like home to me, even the first time I went.

My family was not big on refrigerator magnets, but a few funny ones given as gifts accumulated over the years, mostly about wine, cats, or grammar. I think that one of them was the Robert Frost quote “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” which may have been something my sister gave my parents, but my whole memory of this may be off. Regardless, it’s how I would describe my parents’ home after I left to go to college. I moved back there for a few weeks after I left school and before I found a job with housing, but aside from a couple of holidays during college (after my first year I lived in apartments, not dorm rooms, so I didn’t have to move out during winter and summer breaks), and staying there sometimes when my father was sick and then dying, I didn’t go back to stay. I lived close enough to visit for a meal, but far enough to make that inconvenient to do often.

I would also, as I just did, describe it as “my parents’ home.” Partly because where they lived by the time I moved back to the general area where I grew up was not a place I ever lived with them, and partly because, well, it wasn’t my home. At that time in my life, in my early twenties, I lived in a house on the farm where I worked, and had parents and a sister who lived in houses in the city where I grew up less than two hours away, but I didn’t have a heart home. My high school friends were mostly no longer living in the area. I had just left college, and my friends there. I pretty well ran away from that place and those people in an effort to get away from the inside of my head, which inconveniently came along with me. An excellent idea for me then would have been therapy, but that wasn’t even on my radar. A few years later I would find it was much less difficult to tell my mother that I had a girlfriend than to tell her I had a therapist.

Where I live now is very much home. Though it is a place that was once also home for my kids, I know they all have their own places they call home now, and this house is that awkward combination of “mom’s house” and “that place where I lived through everything I had to live through as a teenager” and whatever else our dwellings from the past come to mean to us. It’s hard to go back to a place where the very smells and sounds seem to suck you back into playing a role that never really fit and that you don’t have to play in your adult life. I love it when my kids visit, but I think even more I love to go see them in their current lives where they are their current selves.

It’s thirty years later than when I had a homeless heart, and now I have a heart home made up of a lot of parts. Rose, our kids. Dogs, horses, cats. Places that I love. Myself. That’s probably the biggest change from my early twenties: whevever I go, there I am has a whole different meaning now. If I don’t carry my home on my back, I carry it in my heart, and I can make the shelter I need out of the tools I have available wherever I am.

Terra Firma

/ Tessa Pagones / 10 Comments

Rose doesn’t love it when people ask how we chose our farm name and I say it was bestowed upon us by a drunk man at a party, but it’s true, and I do kind of love the way it came about.

The barn we were running at the time of the party was our first farm together and our only boarding barn. Our then dressage instructor had been leasing the farm for several years, boarding horses and teaching lessons, but she had bought her own place. Rose and I decided to go into business together – this was before we were together together – and lease the farm ourselves.

The name of the farm under our dressage instructor was Centerline, and while fitting for a dressage barn, it was also her business name and was traveling to her new home with her. Not to mention that, inherited boarders aside, we were not all that interested in running a dressage barn. The farm was on the border of two counties, and there was a lot about it that was held together with duct tape and baling twine – or in the case of the fences, multiflora rose bushes and wishful thinking. We settled on the name Borderline Farm, which I thought brought just the right amount of snark to the dressage clientele, and which exactly none of them found at all funny.

Things only got more dressagey after that, as not only did we have the dressage instructor who used to lease the barn coming back weekly to teach lessons to her clients who were now our boarders, we brought in another dressage instructor and several of his clients to board as well. He was a well thought of rider from a well known local dressage program, and also young and very handsome, and he had quite a following of older women with expensive horses that mostly he, not they, rode. Let’s just say if I had set out to attract boarders who I will loosely call “my people,” these would not have been they, but there were stalls to be filled and bills to be paid.

The young dressage instructor threw a Christmas party for his clients, and Rose and I were invited and attended. We were by then together together, and not just running the business together. We all took the excuse of being away from the barn for once to wear something other than our barn clothes. I had on an actual dress and, as I recall, eye make-up. Near the start of the party another woman and I started to introduce ourselves before we realized that a) she was one of our boarders and b) we had known each other longer than probably anyone else in the room. Horse people in party clothes are often unrecognizable.

There were people there that we truly did not know, however, in the cases where a boarder had brought her husband along. It was one of these husbands who had been talking to me and Rose for some time, when suddenly he pointed to me and said, I thought, “Tara.” I sighed and pointed to myself and said “Tessa,” because the two most common names people confuse my name with are Tara and Teresa. He shook his head harder than I thought wise for so drunk a person and pointed again, saying “No, Terra. You’re Terra — ” and then, pointing to Rose, “and she’s Firma.” I still don’t know where that came from – it was a complete non sequitur even by drunk party talk standards – but it had something to do with that talking to us was a very different experience than he had found talking to anyone else in the room. Whatever his level of drunkenness or his skill at observation, he had hit on something we instantly recognized as true for us.

We moved on from that farm to lease another farm, and changed our business name to Terra Firma Farm. It has remained so through several other moves until we landed here, at the property we bought and which has become our true terra firma. The drunk dressage husband at the party was right, though – the two of us together are our own, and each other’s, terra firma.

Nothing has reminded me of that so much as the past year when it’s been just us and the animals here. I got to thinking over the weekend about an intention word – I’m not a big fan of resolutions, but I like the idea of picking a word as an intention for the year. Unfortunately last year my word was “pause,” something I would like to learn to do more, but then the so-called normal world came screeching to halt and I got a little nervous about the power of manifesting intent.

The word that popped into my head for this year was “faith,” and I still think it’s a good one – not like religious faith, but more like faith in the workings of the world, faith in other people, and – particularly challenging for me sometimes – faith in myself. But the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a terra firma kind of year. Or maybe it’s a combination of the two. As Anne Lamott, and probably many others, said, the opposite of doubt isn’t certainty, it’s faith. Last year was a year filled with doubt, and a distinct lack of solid ground. May this year be filled with faith in my own terra firma, faith in my ability to be terra firma for my loved ones, faith in my ability to manifest more terra firma in the world. Not such a bad thing to reach for in the new year.

Reluctant Traveler Stays Home (Reluctantly)

/ Tessa Pagones / Leave a comment

When I first signed up for the job I’ve now had for five years, a colleague from my last job said “Wow, are you going to get to travel to lots of places you’ve never been to that you’ve always wanted to go?” and I said “Well, I will get to travel to lots of places I’ve never been to.” While I’ve heard of almost all of the countries we work in, I do sometimes have to get out a map to see exactly (or even approximately) where they are. Few of them are on the top of most people’s tourism lists, though I have learned that those lists vary a lot depending on what your originating country is. Anyway, I did not have a life goal to see all the countries I’m unfamiliar with. I’m not a huge fan of airplanes and the very closest place I’ve been for this job is eight hours if you can get a direct flight, but there are almost no direct flights to any of these places. Mostly, though, I don’t like being away from home. I miss my people, I miss my animals. I have a vague fear that I will be forgotten in the week or so that I am away (note to adults minding children: if you accidentally walk away from a five year old at the zoo and they look up to find they are surrounded only by hippos and strangers, they may in fact remember it for life).

But for the last five years, I have been traveling. I have done the bare minimum of travel and have still managed to go to six countries, three of them twice, in that time. For the last two weeks of February this year I was in two different countries. I came home a week before the US started limiting flights from Europe and about two weeks before everything shut down. After two weeks away, I was ready to stay at home. In fact, before two weeks away, I was ready to stay at home. Over nine months later, I’m still ready to stay at home. And yet.

Today is the start of a two week vacation. It is the ideal kind of vacation – the whole office is closed so I won’t even have a backlog of work to come back to in two weeks. I love the idea of a staycation, but I’ve been doing an awful lot of staying already this year. If I were to go anywhere right now, it would be to Colorado to see my two kids who live there, and my friends, and just Colorado in general. I haven’t been there since January and like many things this year, it seems like years ago. I know that technically I could go, but I have zero interest in getting on a plane right now, and I don’t want to spend that much of my time driving. I also know that I will continue to stay at home until it’s less of a health risk to travel. All this time to think about traveling without having to travel has got me thinking about the travel I think I want to do and the travel I actually want to do.

In my mind I’m a much more adventurous traveler than I actually am. I want to go to more exotic places, and I want to do more things while I am there, and I want to travel for long periods of time – in my mind. In reality, when I travel I alternate between bursts of wanting to do things and bursts of wanting to curl up in my hotel room in the fetal position. I want to spend time getting to know the people I’m working with, but I also can’t wait to get away from them and be by myself at the end of the work day. Most of the time when I go somewhere I’ve never been, I try to do and see some things I will otherwise never have the chance to do and see, but I have about a day of that in me and then I’m done. I’m never going to be a person who tries to fit in a lot of activities in the end of the day after work. I do like to walk around anywhere I can, and my last trip before lockdown that is mostly what I did, usually in the mornings before the work day started. I really did enjoy both people-watching and nature-watching on my last trip – it’s nice to be in a city with big parks so it’s easy to do both.

Because I’m at home now, I get to dream about traveling. Because I don’t have to actually travel, I can look at the dreams against what I really like to do. I’m missing my people – my actual people, not my work people. I’m probably going to become one of those RV people, because I love the idea of traveling with Rose and the dogs, taking as long as we want to get places, and staying wherever and for however long we want. Part of me still wants to want to be the person who wants to get on the plane for the 20 hours or whatever it takes to fly to New Zealand. Part of me is still the person who thought peace corps sounded like a good idea, though I think that version of me also wanted to be a bull rider or a steeplechase jockey. I have an adventurous soul and a homebody heart and I’m learning to accept this.

One of the things I really do love about the work travel I have done is that it has given me perspectives I would never have been exposed to. I’ve encountered some eye-opening attitudes and questions about Americans. I’ve learned about history of countries I would have never learned about. I’ve heard personal stories of people who lived through things I’ve only read about in newspapers. I pay attention to world news in a different way because I know people who are living in the places the news is about, and that makes me hear and feel it differently.

I’ve decided to focus on other perspectives during my staycation, in particular the perspectives of the other inhabitants of my home, whether human, canine, feline, equine, or avian. Two weeks of listening and traveling in someone else’s shoes (or feet, or paws) seems like a good place to start my next travel adventure.

Home Comforts

/ Tessa Pagones / 5 Comments

Fans and contestants of the Great British Bake Off seemed equally horrified by this week’s technical challenge, Sussex Pond Pudding, but I was delighted. I’ve never eaten it and there’s a good chance I never will, but I will always remember my introduction to it via the late, great, Laurie Colwin in her wonderful book Home Cooking.

Laurie includes Sussex Pond Pudding (as Suffolk Pond Pudding) in her chapter called Kitchen Horrors. It has very few ingredients – a suet pastry crust, a whole lemon, sugar, and butter. She uses this particular recipe to show that a kitchen horror can be in the eye of the beholder. She was thrilled with it – she described the interior as “lemon-scented buttery toffee,” but the friends she was visiting for dinner were less thrilled. Her host said “This tastes like lemon-flavored bacon fat,” while her hostess said “I’m sure it tastes wonderful. I mean, in England.” Judging from the Bake Off constestants and viewers, I’m not sure the English would agree.

My mother introduced me to Laurie Colwin, first with Home Cooking and later with her novels and short stories, as she introduced me to so many authors and books. Reading was our main family activity all through my childhood, and my mother gave us books for just about every gift-giving occasion. When we were kids, she always seemed to know the kind of books we would each like. She would never have given me Ballet Shoes, or given Darcy All Creatures Great and Small, but we had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls in the living room of the house we grew up in, and plenty of books if we wanted to branch out of our regular interests.

We moved to a different house when I was sixteen and both my sisters had gone off to college. It was a house my father had owned and rented out for many years: a townhouse converted into seven efficiency apartments, so it was me and my parents and two cats rattling around on four floors with seven kitchens and seven bathrooms. The apartment we used as the living room also had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – as did the apartment my parents moved to after that, as does the house Rose and I live in now, come to think of it. Even after having to dispose of dozens of boxes of books after my father’s death, I am still horrified when I hear people suggest downsizing their book collections.

At some point my mother’s book gifts changed from books she thought I would like in a general way to her using books like I used mix tapes. Books that told me she saw something about me that I hadn’t found the words to tell her. Books that told me things about her that she didn’t have the words to say. Books that told me she understood me, or that helped me understand her. I can only remember one time where the message went completely awry – a book about a woman whose son came out to her, and her journey from all the very wrong things she said at first to becoming an activist. It was hard for me to hear past the son’s pain to realize that she was probably trying to tell me the mother’s side of the story. It wouldn’t be till my own child came out to me that I realized all the completely wrong things to say come out of fear for your child, and out of wanting your child’s life to be easier.

The last two years I lived in my parents’ house, my senior year in high school and the year I took off before college, I wasn’t home very much. When I came home late in the evening, usually my father was in the living room, watching TV, reading, listening to music, falling asleep in his chair, or once, memorably, doing a midnight dance with an invisible partner, clad in his ratty old brown terry bathrobe, as light on his feet as Gene Kelly. My mother was usually in bed reading, and as I climbed up to the apartment on the top floor that served as my bedroom, I would look in to say goodnight to each of them.

Sometimes I would sit on the edge of the bed and my mother would read to me from whatever book she was reading at the time. I still hear whole chapters from Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year in my mother’s voice. I think it was a book that really touched something in her, and it would become the same for me a few years later when I left college feeling like the wheels were coming off my mind. Two books from my mother, A Country Year and Mary Morris’ Nothing to Declare, helped me put the puzzle pieces back together in something resembling order.

It was also in this post-college time that my mother began giving me cookbooks. Some classics from her own kitchen: The Joy of Cooking, Fannie Farmer, The Silver Palate. Some funny and useful: The I Hate to Cook Book, good for the days I just didn’t feel like it but still needed to eat. And some that are wonderful books for reading about food, and that also contain some good (and some odd) recipes: Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and John Thorne’s Simple Things.

I have always both cooked and read for comfort. I don’t really understand people who just read a book once, and I have many books that I have read the covers off of. Home Cooking and Simple Things have stood up to my many readings, though both are a bit food-splattered from being too close to the mixing bowl while I made something from their pages. I will always draw comfort from rereading certain favorite childhood books – A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Red Sky at Morning, Dandelion Wine. But nothing will ever quite soothe me like reading Laurie Colwin’s words about the good (curried broccoli soup, lemon rice pudding), the bad (starry gazy pie made with squid, scrambled eggs with mace), and the weird (Sussex pond pudding), hearing my mother’s voice repeating the words, with the soft sounds of music and my father’s dancing feet drifting up from the floor below.