Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (25 page)

I leave the tiller parked in the middle of the garden, surrounded by writhing worms glinting in the sun. My sprint leaves big footprints in the new soil, headed straight for the house. Inside, I go right to my file cabinet and dig out the old survey. I was right. It shows my farmhouse and my six and one-half acres divided as three separate parcels. At the bottom is the surveyor’s name and telephone number.

Could it really be this easy? Just make a phone call to the surveyor, ask him to resurvey my property, pass the information on to my broker, and get approved for a new mortgage?

Like most questions in my life now, the answer turns out to be
yes and no. Yes, it is almost that easy to resurvey the property—for a fee, of course—and yes, once my adjacent land is resurveyed it will be free of debt and can be used as collateral on the application. But no, the mortgage broker says, it’s not enough collateral on its own to get the application approved. I’m still going to need something else too, something liquid and real that can be turned into quick cash, not something manipulated out of thin air with survey tape and a compass.

While digging through the file cabinet looking for the land survey, my fingers walked over another file folder, marked “Boys’ Stock.” It’s been down here all along, but it never occurred to me to use it as collateral. That’s because this stock doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to my sons.

A note inside the file, in the shaky handwriting of my ninety-six-year-old grandpa, reads: “I would hope that this fund would be used for education. If not, down payment on property for these kids when they grow up. But I won’t be here so you will need to make the decision.” Signed “GP,” for Grandpa.

My parents would cringe if they knew I was even thinking these thoughts. They are both educators. Nothing in life is more important to them than education. But they don’t know everything. And keeping the farm isn’t just for me, I rationalize; it’s for my sons, too. They’ll only lose their college money if I default. Which I won’t. Will. Not.

And so with sixteen days to spare, my mortgage application is approved. By sheer force of will, or desperation, or manipulation, or all three, I am approved for a mortgage on the Big Valley. And that’s not nothing.

·  ·  ·

The good-bye that puts an ache in my chest so deep it feels almost ancestral begins with, of all things, a picnic. Believe me, I’ve tried to think of something else—
anything
else. But there’s no getting around it.

It’s the last Saturday in May, three days after I’ve signed the new mortgage, and it’s sunny outside. A little chilly, a little windy, but tomorrow a thunderstorm is predicted, and so if I’m going to do this at all, it has to be today. And I have to do it.

All three boys are in the garden, subjected to their daily weeding torture. The spinach, lettuce, beets, and radishes are up, the onion sets are in, and so is the sweet corn.

I’ve got forty-five tomato seedlings on a rack on the porch, just beginning to accept the idea of going into the ground, and forty-five boy-dug holes to put them in when they do. That will probably happen tomorrow, Sunday, after the storm comes through.

We haven’t been to church in a month and there won’t be time to go this week, either. And, truth be told, I don’t miss it. There’s too much work to do here this time of year, and the boys and I need all seven days to complete it. A day of rest is out of the question. We barely have time for this lunch break, but it isn’t optional.

“Picnic lunch time!” I holler.

The boys lift their heads from their rakes, and from their dirty fingernails, and from the evil dead nettle, pokeweed, and curly dock that have become their enemy. They see me walking out the door, carrying a blanket and a Thermos of lemonade.

“Picnics are for girls,” Luke says.

“So are cookies!” I yell back, holding up four bulging brown lunch sacks. At the sight of actual food, they put down their tools, turn on the pump, wash their hands, and follow me away from the
garden, around the edge of the pasture, and toward a flat place in the grass on the back lot.

Over my shoulder I see them twenty paces behind me, boys in various stages of becoming men, stuck following a woman, and I wonder how much longer this will last. They are sixteen, thirteen, and nine now. Soon they are not going to want to follow me at all anymore, especially not Owen.

I spread the blanket out on the grass under a group of doomed elm saplings, rooted here by chance from seeds released to the wind by their slowly dying ancestor, the big tree near the house shriveled by disease and parasitic beetles. These saplings show signs of the same malady, and will probably have the energy to leaf out only one or two more summers. Perhaps a bulldozer will just take them quick.

I pour cups of lemonade while the boys unfold the wax paper on their sandwiches—Swiss cheese and hummus for Owen, the vegetarian; turkey, peanut butter, pickles, and lettuce for Luke, the epicurean adventurer; and the usual for Will, crunchy peanut butter and our homemade jam.

We chew and discuss the breaking news of the morning—the broad-winged hawk that has been circling the chicken coop again; the poisonous northern black widow spider they found in its web on a fence post, captured in a screen-sided bug cage, then drowned in a bucket; their own weeding prowess.

“The ragweed sees me coming and starts shaking in its roots!” Luke says, laughing at his own pun.

When we’re almost finished with our sandwiches and apples, I bring out the homemade snickerdoodles I’ve promised them. It’s weak, I know, thinking cinnamon sugar cookies can offset what
I’m about to tell them, but when it comes right down to it, that’s what I’ve got.

“I have some sad news,” I tell them.

All chewing stops. What, they must be wondering, is she going to lay on us now? In the past eleven months I have used this line to announce my divorce from their father, to break the news of Major’s death, to tell them I sold Pepper, to tell them Rocky’s time was up, and even to ease into my admission that they were on the free-lunch list at school. After getting approved for the mortgage, it took me about a day to realize it was a mortgage I could afford only on paper. I’m going to go broke without a big infusion of cash. News I can’t hide from my sons. I’m not getting any better at ripping off the Band-Aid, though.

“We’ve got to sell the land. It’s the only way we can afford to keep the house.”

“What land?” Luke asks, his mouth full of sandwich. His tone suggests we own large tracts in exotic places far, far away that he’s never contemplated or seen. I wish.

“This land,” I say. “The land you’re sitting on.”

Owen just shakes his head, but Will gets that frown his forehead produces when our shifting life doesn’t yet make sense to him.

“This isn’t
land
,” he says, as if my announcement were the most foolish thing he’s ever heard. “This is our yard.”

The survey simply calls this square of dirt “Parcel A,” and its neighbor “Parcel B.” The dimensions and legal description have been notarized, so they must be spot-on. Yet that document can’t begin to describe what this land means to me. To us.

Because where on that piece of paper does it record Will and me walking hand in hand on a bug safari, him sad because his
brothers left him every day to go to school? Where is the route all four of us would take on moonlit walks in the summertime, turning off the flashlight, lying on our backs in the field, and looking up at all creation? And there are no X’s for Luke’s bow-and-arrow targets, or for the boys’ tree forts, or Owen’s bike trails. Nothing identifies our award-winning zucchini patch, either.

Major’s last stand will not go down into this record, either, I guess.

And all of these things, these memories, are what I’m really selling, not just a couple acres of dirt.

But there are no real secrets in families, and so I have to tell them this. And so I bottom-line them.

“Monday a For Sale sign is going up,” I manage to choke out.

I see my own face then reflected back at me in their navy, hazel-green, and blue eyes. And I see that I’ve aged. I am a hundred years older and a hundred winters wearier now, when our six and a half acres are about to become four, than I was last summer, when the five of us became four.

I think of those displaced meadow voles and Will’s pronouncement that people wreck everything, and I have never felt so defeated. Not when I sat in the courtroom, not when I drove my children around collecting firewood, not even when I had the flu.

A year ago, selling even a blade of grass off Big Valley land was unthinkable. But every moon’s relentless shine since then has brought me, heels dragging, nearer and nearer to casting this crescent-shaped shadow over the four of us. And now, this afternoon, gripped in my very own hand, if it isn’t the devil’s scythe—and I’ve even got it raised up, poised to swing.

It’s the afternoon of the day my land is listed for sale, my realtor says her line is ringing steady, and although the sky is clear, I feel the buzzards kettling.

Most of these scavengers just peck my realtor’s brain over the phone for information on the terms I’m offering (cash only) and any special selling points of the property (water view), but a particularly aggressive buyer has the gall to swoop in personally.

I am alerted to his presence when I am inside to get a drink of
water and hear large boots walking up my front steps. I can count on less than one hand the men who have a legitimate reason to frequent the Big Valley: Mr. Wonderful, here to pick up or drop off the boys; the mailman, if I’ve received a package of seeds, tubers, or rootstock too large to fit in my mailbox; or the well driller, here to nudge me for a payment.

Occasionally Pete checks in to see if the remodel is back on (it’s not), and sometimes stays to talk awhile even though the snow is more than two months gone. I’m beginning to think he wants my company. And he does wear work boots, but I know the sound of them now, and the squeaky ones I just heard are not his.

Sneaking a look out the window, I see that this visitor is tall and ravenlike, clad in biker gear from his do-rag to his leather pants, and is sporting a limp little mustache. He runs a gloved finger over the back of one of my lavender metal chairs, then bends down and sniffs a flowerpot full of pink and green coleus. This is a brightly variegated tropical plant grown for its decorative foliage and not its flowers, which are negligible and have no smell.

So
this
is who I’m sacrificing my land to? Please, no.

But the visitor continues to sniff away for a few more useless seconds, then stands up straight as a pitchfork, takes off his gloves with a couple of quick jerks, holds them with his right hand, and slaps them against the palm of his left. This is a man not used to being kept waiting.

“When the devil is knocking on your door,” my grandma Link would say, “just yell, ‘Hey, Jesus, would you mind getting that for me?’ ”

I wish she were here. I wish I didn’t have to sell my land. But Grandma Link is five years gone, wishes aren’t going to get
me anywhere, and I’m going to have to handle this myself, which along with being necessary is also supremely annoying. I have another hour before the boys get home from school, prime work time, and I wanted to use it weeding the sweet corn, which is just starting to ear up, and re-outfitting the scarecrow, not to chasing off this joker.

So go ahead and stop me then if you’ve heard this one: a perfectly good day, interrupted by an unwelcome man. And it occurs to me that there have been more than just a few of these types intruding on me over the past year, and always at the very worst time, like a record scratch just when the song was getting to my favorite part. Can’t life just leave me alone for a little while?

“Helloooo?” my visitor calls through the screen door, right on cue. “I’m looking for the owner of that lovely lot for sale.”

I pull my face back from my spying window, take a breath, grit my teeth, and approach my front door.

“You’re lookin’ at her,” I say to him, with all the hospitality of a picker bush.

I’ve accepted the fact that I have to sell the land to keep our farmhouse. Barely. The For Sale sign is up and the listing is published. But that doesn’t mean I have to get friendly with whichever vulture is going to be pecking the flesh from my bones. That’s the realtor’s job. That’s what I’ll be paying a commission for.

“Oh, well! Hello, then!” he says, ignoring my vibe. “My mother is in assisted living around the corner and I’m looking to move somewhere’s around here. I love your purple chairs, by the way. This whole place, all your flowers, it’s just darling!”

This place
is
just darling, I think. This place rocks the living daylights out of darling. And I try to keep my hackles up just like this,
I really do, but I can feel my demeanor change, just a little. Compliment the farm the boys and I have worked so hard for and I’ll probably give you arterial blood, not to mention the time of day.

“Why don’t we talk outside,” I say, resigned now to this interruption. “Grab a seat. Would you like a glass of ice tea?”

He would. I don’t have any instant, and I’ll have to make it from scratch out of tea bags, boiling water, and ice cubes, but it’s hot and humid outside, and this man’s odd, squeaky voice and chipper manner have gotten the best of me, even if I suspect both traits might be fake.

I watch the water boil on the stove and think,
Really? This is the guy? This is my new neighbor?
I actually hadn’t given any thought to who it was going to be until now. None.