Butternut Woolens

I've been putting my affairs in order, as they say. Sorting through personal possessions, deciding what to keep and what must go, whittling as deeply as I can. It feels a bit like what I imagine the end of life is like, except my life isn't ending, only this particular story is ending.

There was another time when I took my life down to the core. I rented my house, paid off the credit card, quit my job, put my belongings into 6 Rubbermaid totes and hit the road. For about 10 months. There's a book's worth of stories in that adventure, you can read one of them in this compilation Drive: Women's True Stories of the Open Road. My story, "In the Land of the Saltbush" is the lead story in the book and is excerpted on Amazon's web site if you care to have a peek.

Two other earlier stories appeared in anthologies of western women's writing. My contribution to Woven on the Wind: Women Write About Friendship in the Sagebrush West was a piece called "Common Ground", a story about my sometimes contentious relationship with my mother and how we have found a common language in gardening. She hated it and was utterly scandalized I would air the family laundry. I thought it was a flattering piece. They say you can't please all the people all the time and I can't please my mother any of the time perhaps.

I wrote the submission "Feeding the Spirit" for Crazy Woman Creek the day it was due at the editors'. My computer was broken and the resident computer guy was uninterested in helping me, so I banged the story out on a $2 Remington typewriter I had found at a farm sale and had cleaned up and re-ribboned by a creepy guy living in his garage in Hillboro, but what the hey, I was grateful there still was someone who knew how to fix manual typewriters. A gal's gotta take help where she can find it. That story was about my experience of taking my organic apples and corn my farmer friend Corrine had grown to a women's shelter in Portland and teaching them how to freeze it so they could have a stash of good food.

I learned a lot about homelessness then and thinking back now these 5 years, it seems to me that being without a home means different things to different people at different times. I will not be without shelter, but shelter is not necessarily a home. In those months on the road I never felt homeless, the land itself was home, but now, with my farm in jeopardy, I feel the edge of panic in my chest. Where will we live? Will I be able to see both the sunrise and sunset? If I can't, will I lose my connection to God? If I have to listen to the neighbors on the other side of the wall will I lose my mental health? The feeling is almost always there now, right under the surface of my skin. The experience is like that nightmare of falling and seeing only the rocks below and knowing it's gonna hurt real bad. I hope I wake up soon.