Return to the Soil, Part 3

It wasn’t my intention to get into ranching when I came home to California. I think I was the least likely candidate by anyone’s estimation. Between my sister and I, I was definitely more engaged in animal husbandry as a child. However, it was just another hobby squeezed in between piano lessons, softball practice, and weekends on the lake. In fact, there was great dispute between my parents, who were interested in seeing where my profound love for animals would lead, and my grandmother, who wanted me to take dance lessons and become a concert pianist. Nothing pleased her more than sitting in the living room on a hot summer afternoon, listening to me play a Beethoven Sonata or singing her favorite church hymn. However, my love for animals and the great outdoors was a passion infused in me by my father. I use to love going with him on any given day, just to tag along, because chances were that he would make a spontaneous random detour along the way (for which he would inevitably get in trouble by the time we made it home). He would sneak me away to visit an ostrich farm, Codding’s Natural History Museum, or Jack London’s ranch where we‘d stand in admiration of the ingenuity behind the efficient circular design of the pig palace. Weekends were spent hunting, fishing, or diving for abalone. He taught me about the domestic and the wild, rearing and hunting, reaping and conserving. I loved it all, and like most kids, wanted it all. But my grandmother, being the matriarch that she was, won most every battle, one way or another, sooner or later. So, I grew up to be the “artsy” one while my sister was the “business-minded” one. With neither of us assigned any expectation for carrying on the ranching tradition, my grandmother’s most adamant demand was achieved.

 

For her, the further away we were from the realities of ranching, the more hope she had that we’d have a better life. The only thing she associated the ranch with was years of backbreaking, unrelenting, dirty, isolating, thankless labor. Having never gradated high school, she loathed the negative stigmatism associated with “country folk.” In her mind, the social perception, however true or false, would always remain that county folk were uneducated and simple. She was not going to be having any of that for her children, and certainly not her grandchildren, regardless of where their interests may lie. She was a classy lady, a member of the St. Teresa Church Guild, religiously wore rouge and lipstick every time she went into town, kept her shoes and her car as clean as her house and her language, cooked three square meals a day, and indulged only in the occasional Bailey’s Irish Crème in her coffee with dessert.

 

I couldn’t blame her. After all, even as a child I recognized that the Carnation condensed milk in her Folgers instant coffee wasn’t so much a sign of a deficient palate as it was a residual habit; a permanent scar resulting from living through the Great Depression, two world wars, and an America wrought with uncertainty. She was one of nine children born on a small little plot on the west side of Petaluma. Her father died when she was nine and the youngest, my dear uncle Freddie (everybody’s favorite uncle), was only two. My great-grandmother, Grace Fenk, was left with nine children, no husband, and only the strength of her namesake to see them through. From as early as my grandmother could remember, her brothers milked cows as she and her sisters went door-to-door selling the milk. The bounty of Christmas consisted of the hinged kitchen door swinging open (at the hands of the bearded man himself, no doubt) as walnuts and oranges scattered across the living room floor. In high school, my grandmother was sent to live with a prominent Petaluma family, cooking their meals and cleaning their house. All the while, she and all her siblings would bring their earnings home to their mother who made sure they had Sunday dresses, good working shoes, and a good hot meal come supper time. Known as one of the bells of Petaluma, my grandmother’s betrothal to one of the Gleason clan, kin to the Furlong’s, Fitzpatrick’s, and O’Farrel’s, was proof of the fine rearing my great-grandmother had single-handedly managed in spite of circumstances.  

 

My grandmother had come from that industrial American history we studied in school. Consequently, her grandchildren were to live the American dream, not shovelin’ manure. My sister and I went to Catholic school for our entire elementary career. We were classmates with the children of the most prominent families of Sonoma County. While our friends would get picked up in the latest in auto fashion, we would wake my father, (who inevitable had fallen asleep in the parking lot with his head cupped in his hand, hanging out the driver’s side window, and covered in concrete dust), and climb into the cab of his dirty, beat up Ford work truck. While the other children bored of their “Lunchable’s” and PB&J’s with the crusts cut off, my sister and I quietly savored our beef-tongue sandwiches and saltines with butter and homemade quince jelly. We sat through our friends’ “What I Did for Summer” reports, which consisted of pictures of the Eifel Tower, pool side splashing at the Golf and Country Club, and tennis tournaments at Wimbledon. Meanwhile, my sister and I were helping to haul cords of wood, cut from the fallen oak trees on the side hill, shooting endless rounds of 22’s at iron targets while our parents napped in between the morning and evening hunts, or were shucking abalone after a successful dive off the coast of Gualala. While the other children were covered in Nike and Esprit, we were covered in grit, gunpowder, and fish guts. Still, my grandmother, who lived on the ranch but also kept her own private room at our house in Santa Rosa, pressed our pleated uniform skirts, reinforced buttons on brand new blouses, and put our hair in soft curlers, as if to declare, “My granddaughters are not of the overall wearin’, manure-treadin’, or sweat-smellin’ kind! There will be no wrinkles, there will be no holes, and there will be no straggly hair!”

 

One of my earliest and fondest childhood memories is bolting out of the station wagon to the swinging gate that led to the back yard, undoing the wire latch, and flying down the descending concrete walkway that led to the back porch of the ranch house. Usually, my grandmother would have already heard us coming up the road and would greet me at the screen door, arms open wide, ready to catch my propelled body in motion. Sometimes she wasn’t there, but the wafting smells of creamy polenta and hot venison stew that billowed out from the kitchen, and the pre-set dinner table that gave evidence to the anticipation of my arrival, gave her immunity for not holding her post. Either way, my grand entrances always had the sensation of a willful and glorious freefall, landing in the comfort of her embrace, my cheek pressed against her apron.  

 

As I cascaded down the Sierra Mountains in my little white jeep, this was the exact sensation, the precise memory that revisited me. Stretches of I80 and the sequence of passing towns became as increasingly familiar as the cracks in the concrete that led to her back door. There returned the familiar longing to hurry up, just so as to close the physical gap that separated us. I found myself quietly murmuring words I had hollered as a child, “I’m here, grandma…. I’m here!” Drinking two quarts of oil a day, I had already pushed that poor little Jeep harder than it should have ever been pushed. Under the hood laid a thick blanket of black from the engine blow-over, but like a seasoned racehorse, it could feel my palpable need to reach the finish line.

 

I drove around the block so I could easily park my little rig in front of my folk’s house. The last time I had called home was the night before, from Utah, so my arrival was expected to be in the early evening. I had made real good time. I walked through the front door as I had done a million times before. It was like any other day. It was as if I hadn’t been gone for the past seven years or just drove up after five solid days of driving the open road by myself. There was no grand “welcome home,” no special meal prepared. The house was actually messier than ever before. There was clearly too much happening on a daily basis to make any big to-do about my return.

 

The strain put on my mother, having to balance full-time elder care, a full-time private business, and a part-time day-care for my sister’s three small children, all under one roof, had made itself evident in every room, on every surface, behind every door. The T.V. was blaring, the heater was on, and my grandmother sat weak and frail in the lazy-boy, under a feather-down blanket in the middle of July. A reduced version of her former self, she stared blankly in the direction of the television, listening more so than watching to the Wayne Brady Show. Her sight was gone, her hearing was faint, yet her presence was still dominating. She sat in that worn and stained canvas chair as though it was a throne. Her cane, the same one that had propped up my grandfather 40 years prior, was like a thyrsus. To this day, her great-grandchildren who were mere toddlers at the time remember it as an indisputable extension of her greatness, equally used to roll a ball across the room for them to chase, as it was to dole out lashings for bad behavior. Her days consisted of migrating from the living room, which had been transformed into a bedroom since climbing stairs was no longer an option, to the kitchen, to the family room, and back again. One trip was enough to exhaust her. Yet still, she prepared her own toast and coffee, made her own bed, loaded the dishwasher, folded the laundry, and would even tend to the baby. Her faculties may have been failing, but there was seemingly nothing that could minimize her sense of independence, self-reliance, and control.

 

We visited and caught up. We talked about the latest news, politics, and family gossip in between her frequent naps and the usual household distractions. Among the daily rhetoric, she would routinely try to convince me that I should go on the Wayne Brady Show.

 

“Sing a little something. He always has talented people on his show. You just write in and he puts you on his show!”