Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (2 page)

I give myself credit for picking a responsible moment to be irresponsible. For once, I do not have to set a good example for anyone. Our sons are with their grandparents at the Link family cottage, ostensibly so their mother can “get some summer cleaning done,” because it’s “summer cleaning time.”

This is what my parents tell my sons. They are country boys, but not dumb. They know this actually means that I need time alone to “simmer my shit down.” I heard the boys say this privately, to each other, when they thought I wasn’t listening.

“Mom needs to simmer her shit down,” I heard the oldest, Owen, fifteen, say to his younger brothers, Luke, twelve, and Will, eight, as they packed their pajamas and swim trunks and Gameboys and jackknives into their backpacks. As if their frothy mother were just a pot of soup carelessly heated to a rolling boil.

Well then, I wouldn’t want to disappoint. The fourth beer goes down real easy and has me thinking about all the things Mr. Wonderful left behind that
I
should be getting rid of.

Time to purge.

I head for our Quonset-hut garage and climb the ladder into the cobwebbed dark of the storage loft. I peer into boxes, lift the corner of tarps, and open drawers. For two supposedly simple people, both supposedly living simple lives, we’ve sure managed to acquire our fair share of useless crap.

“What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris?” asks my library-book Buddha.

Appropriate? Probably not for me to judge, but I pitch psychedelic concert posters, rusty saw blades, dried-up paintbrushes solid as clubs, a sour-smelling plastic picnic cooler, a woodstove pipe with an abandoned squirrel nest inside, a pair of rusty cross-country ski poles.

According to one Zen master, all phenomena are in motion all of the time. I see his point, because this phenomenon certainly is. I carry Mr. Wonderful’s warped and abandoned jazz albums outside and fling them like Frisbees into the grassy valley behind our house.

“Inner
peace
,” I grunt with each act of removal. “Inner
peace
.”

They sail through the air like baby black holes, and three nearby crows take flight. I am pleased to see that I still have one heck of an arm.

I pitch a box of his old business cards and letterhead, a scrap-book, file folders of college term papers, spiral notebooks of handwritten
angst, lyrics from summer-camp songs, and his high-school track T-shirts, rotting away in a cardboard box.

My selection of cathartic refuse is growing quickly, and I’m already thinking of my own front curb when something even better than trash day occurs to me, and a burn pile takes shape in my front yard.

Once everything is sorted, there is the gasoline gently siphoned out of the lawn mower. Then a match. Have you ever seen what a really hot bonfire does to wedding photographs?

I paw through a box of old CDs, find one by the dominatrix of disco, Donna Summer, insert it into the CD player in my minivan, open the doors, pull up a lawn chair, then sit back and enjoy. Bad girls, Donna chides. Talkin’ ’bout bad, bad girls. Between songs, I leave the fire smoldering and head to the basement for more fuel.

And that’s when I see it.

My wedding dress.

I tear through the dry-cleaner bag, slip the dress off the hanger, and press it to my body, over my tank top and raggedy jeans. It may smell like mildew, and its princess seams may be decades out of style, but it would still fit. One honeymoon, two apartments, two houses, three breast-fed babies, and an impending divorce later, and it would still fit. There’s so little for me to be proud of at the moment that I try to savor this.

The feeling passes quickly, though, and all I really want to do is burn this thing I once spent hours sewing by hand. It is not a custom-made gown anymore; it’s just faded satin now, with marshmallow sleeves perfect for roasting on a stick.

Conscience takes over—just—before it’s too late. Melting five yards of polyester in my bonfire would probably cause an environmental
incident, and so the dress will have to be disposed of properly, off the premises. Some other pie-in-the-sky woman on a budget can probably put a handmade, hand-beaded wedding dress that fastens up the back with antique glass buttons to good use.

I carry the dress upstairs and lay it on the backseat of my minivan, careful not to wrinkle it. I toss an empty juice box out of the drink holder, replace it with my beer, and drive to Goodwill, toasting the Wonderful residence as I pass.

There is a Goodwill helper wearing a bright orange jumpsuit unloading the cars, and as soon as I pull into line, he stares right through my minivan’s windshield at me and smiles—the sort of smile a shark might give to a seal. I hop out and slide my van’s side door open. Shark puts his hands on his hips, and I can feel him watching me bend over.

“Mmm,” he says too loud, sampling the seal meat.

I scoop my wedding dress into my outstretched arms as if I were bringing it out into the light for someone to try on. Time for this dress to face its new destiny.

I will not be attached. I will sever all outward signs of attachment. Like this one.

I look into Shark’s face and hold out my donation, giving him a cheerful Sunnybrook smile. He’s looking me in the eye, ignoring the dress in my arms. On his orange chest is stamped the word “INMATE” in big block letters.

Disco is blasting out of my car door and Shark grins, showing a chipped front tooth, then does a little shimmy to the music.

“You look like you could use this,” I tell him.

I place the dress in his hands, get back into my minivan, and drive for the exit like a woman on fire. Which isn’t too big a stretch, since I still reek of smoke from the smoldering trash pile.

·  ·  ·

Home from my charitable-donation errand, I return to my post on the porch. Not usually a stalker, a pre-noon boozer, or a drunk driver, I can tell you unequivocally that the way to get your money’s worth from a six-pack is to drink it on an empty stomach. Before ten.

God and Buddha should both just shake on it and agree to give me a pass on this rare lapse in judgment. Okay, so maybe sitting alone on my front porch and staring across the road at Mr. Wonderful’s trash through a pair of beer goggles is not exactly how I pictured single motherhood. I’m only a week into it, though. Give it time. Because life is sure to get a lot more interesting in the coming days.

I don’t have a fancy job, there are two mortgages on the farm, one of which was supposed to pay for a stalled remodel. My bank account is practically uninhabited, and I had to borrow money from my parents just to hire a divorce attorney. My sons are confused and angry and sad.

I crack open the last beer, hoist the bottle in Mr. Wonderful’s direction, and drink to this: I will not be attached. I will sever all outward and inward signs of attachment. I will detach right now from the houndstooth and the Naugahyde and the bong water. From the calluses on my estranged husband’s familiar hands, and the way he sometimes sings along with our favorite Neil Young songs.

I’ll detach from the sound of my name in his mouth—“Mardi
Jo
!”—in happier times when he couldn’t wait to tell me something good.

I’ll detach from how hard I once loved not only him with my
whole being, but my fantasy of forever with him and our sons, all of us working together on our little farm.

I’ll detach from the shock that a love like that can end.

I set my jaw, white-knuckle the empty bottle, and heave it.

And just for the record? I’m claiming my sons.

I’m claiming my sons, the farm, the debt, the other debt, the horses, the dogs, and the land. I’m claiming our century-old farmhouse, the garden, the woods, the pasture, the barn, and the Quonset-hut garage.

They’re all mine now, and this is how I will raise my boys: on cheerful summer days and well water and BB guns and horseback riding and dirt. Because I’m claiming our whole country life, the one I’ve been dreaming of and planning out and working for since I was a little girl.

Last night the full moon hung low and close, like a glistening teardrop on the earth’s dark eye, threatening to spill. It didn’t, though, and neither did I. A month is a bill cycle, a mortgage cycle, and may become a child-support cycle, but a month is also a moon phase and a growing phase. Our financial lives, our emotional lives, and our cosmic lives are irrevocably intertwined.

If I can follow the moon, if I can remember that both waxing and waning are only temporary, a natural cycle continually renewed and nothing to get too attached to, we’ll make it. I just have to stay solvent for thirty days at a time. And then another thirty. And another.

I may not know which God to believe in, but I know that I can believe in us. In my sons and in me.

Take my word for it, burning your wedding pictures in a bonfire in your front yard, then handing over your wedding dress to a snaggle-toothed felon, can take your mind off your man troubles. Oh, it surely can.

But the feeling of euphoria you’ll get from this, no matter how glorious, will only last a couple days, or until your kids get home, whichever comes first. And then you’re going to have to listen to
that come-to-Jesus voice in the back of your head. The one that’s been trying, ever so gently, to tell you this truth: that no matter how much bravado you’ve got, you are not the Lone Ranger, not the lone gunman, and not even the lone wolf; you are just one woman. And you are simply a-
lone
.

Sitting at my writing desk, tucked into an unused corner by the front window, I’ve got a file folder marked “Bills—Due” open on my lap when my parents bring my boys home from the cottage. Out of the corner of my eye, the ash pile lurks, now surrounded by a black circle of once-green lawn. I can think of no better visual to illustrate my finances.

“How come our yard got all burnt?” Will asks.

It is not some gentle voice from within that I should be worried about, after all; it is just my youngest son’s.

“Your mom had a little campfire while you guys were gone,” I tell him, enveloping his suntanned body in my arms.

Just eight years old, Will is still one bright spark despite his youth. He frowns at my answer, about to call me out on my obvious fib, when Luke busts inside from the door off the porch, breathing hard, binoculars swinging from around his wiry neck.

“Look at these!” he says, thrusting his arms toward Will. Gripped in each fist is an empty beer bottle. “Mom drank a whole buncha beer!”

Owen is the last to come inside, and he tucks a pair of white iPod headphones into the khaki messenger bag slung over his shoulder and then takes in the scene, unable to suppress a smirk. “Bird-watching party?” he asks.

All three boys look at me with a combination of disappointment
and shock, awaiting an explanation. In their absence I’ve been irresponsible with fire, consumed alcohol to excess, neglected to put a valuable item—the binoculars—away when I was finished using them, and, perhaps worst of all, littered.

“Busted,” I say, hanging my head, a gesture that actually seems to appease.

My theory on the savvy-beyond-their-years of my sons is this: because they spend their free time building tree forts, sleeping in tents, shooting the BB gun, catching praying mantises and snakes, going to the library, grooming the horses, and planting sweet corn, they are acutely attuned to their world, and no new detail escapes their notice. Maybe this trait will prove useful in the coming months. I hope so.

At least my own tendency to grudge-hold is not a characteristic I’ve passed to them. They are of the forgive-and-forget tribe and toss off my bad behavior as if it were just another duffel bag of swim trunks and beach towels they slide toward the washing machine.

Then they relax into home and are swarmed by our wiggling dogs. Friday, the Welsh corgi, who barks and hops up and down over Luke’s knees; and Super, the Akita, who swings her wide tail in a circle, puts her paws on Owen’s shoulders, and sneaks licks in between his waving hands.

My parents come inside, eye this canine commotion, say “Hi” and “Bye,” tell me how much fun the boys were at the cottage, how well behaved, ask if I’m okay, accept my answer, and then they are back in their car and heading for their home downstate.

I wrap my arms around all three of my sons again, force them into a group hug, kiss the tops of their heads, and they don’t try to
fend me off. Not even Owen, who, at fifteen, often acts as if he’s too old for this kind of affection.

“I missed you guys!” I choke out, and the tears well before I can blink them away.

They hug me back and I take hold of their faces, their hands, and inspect them from all angles. They’ve got sand in their hair, their cheeks have new freckles, and they smell like the beach. They are home and they are happy and there’s not a single sign that their father and I split up only weeks ago.

What fine boys they are
, I think,
in spite of their father and me
.

They are the fight in me, they are the chapped hands that plant the seeds, the caution that closes the pasture gates, the determination that primes the well-water pump. They are my pack. And I am, and will be, forever attached.

This feeling of family security is so right, so strong, that I know absolutely nothing, not even a divorce, can break it. And I’m closing my eyes and feeling the love when Will delivers a gut check.

“Does ‘divorce’ mean we can’t go to the Cherry Festival?”

Leave it to him to just come right on out with it. Because while I’m floating along in my motherhood reverie, thinking about family and resilience and love, Will is thinking more along the lines of a parade, marching bands, an ice-cream social, and wagon rides through local cherry orchards.