Three Hours West

For weeks after we arrived in Lexington, I frequently mistook the locals for people I knew back home. I saw Pam O’Brien, a science teacher I worked with in Modesto, pushing a cart outside the Kroger’s market in Versailles. I looked up at a promotional poster for perfume in Macy’s and recognized Angie Bohn, a friend from Ripon. I would see a face in a church choir or a man walking his dog and suppress the urge to walk up to the familiar face and start talking. I compared my unheard-of side effect to the phantom sensations experienced by an amputee. My brain, overloaded by masses of new information, was attempting to process more efficiently by recognizing similarities, trying to make familiar patterns out of the unfamiliar.

After about six weeks in Lexington, the flashes of false recognition went away, and I was instead overwhelmed with how different everything seemed. I was meeting new people and trying to build a new life. I don’t suppose I make friends easily, and the overwhelming hours that went to a new job and a new house didn’t make it easy to form new relationships. Even now I realize that after a six month investment in my new life my new connections aren’t fully formed. Instead, my consciousness is crowded by loads of information I’ll probably never need again: how to get a Kentucky driver’s license, what number to call for utilities, and what exactly goes in those blue recycling cans that are picked up every week. I console myself: these things take time; I can’t expect twenty years of connections to be reformed overnight.

Last Thursday our old life intruded on our new one when Craig and I boarded a plane in Lexington at 7:30 p.m. and stepped off another one at 11:30p.m. in Sacramento. The journey to California will always seem shorter than the journey back home because of the backwards jump across three time zones. A few afternoon naps and I was fully acclimated to pacific standard time again, which left me wondering if twenty-two years of living in one time zone fixed my internal clock like magnetic north, leaving me stuck “three hours off” for the rest of my life in Kentucky.

I don’t envy the job of the FAA luggage search team, who evidently spent hours going through our four bags. They must see everything in their line of work, but imagine having to unpack and inspect an entire suitcase of individually bubble wrapped bottles of Ale 8-1, a Kentucky ginger ale beverage my Mom developed a taste for when she visited in November. Our other gifts-only suitcase was jammed with sundry Christmas gifts, including a James Archambeault’s Kentucky calendar, a box of Bourbon cherries, and a brick. Craig wanted to present his mom with a brick taken from the run down family home in North Dakota, which we visited this summer shortly after arriving in Lexington. We cushioned it with layers of paper and fabric so it wouldn’t pulverize the Mint Blue Mondays, traditional local candies we bought to hand out to the relatives. The soft candy was unharmed, but we opened our suitcase in Modesto to find the brick wrapped in plastic coating and sealed with official tape marked THIS ITEM INSPECTED AND CLEARED BY THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION. Not wanting to put asunder what the feds had so painstakingly joined together, I wrapped the brick as it came with the other presents. Craig’s mom will, I am sure, be touched that one of her gifts received such special attention.

Looking over aspects of the place I spent most of my life, I notice the strangest things. I am strangely disconcerted by the wall texture at my parents’ house, and keep glancing out the corner of my eye at the river-bottom-pebbly surfaces that are a staple in California. Our old house in Ripon had even more texture, whorls and peaks like meringue cookies, and I can’t imagine how strange it would seem to me now. Coupled with the acoustic “popcorn ceilings” and the overall lack of windows typical of the 70’s-style energy efficient track home, we didn’t have a true corner or a really flat surface in the whole house. The walls of our new house are as smooth as fondant cake, a flat, pleasing surface but not very forgiving. Every nail hole, paint drip, and sticky cat hair becomes archived on our walls. Even though I am still not used to it, my home in Kentucky has reset my standard of what is normal.

My overwhelming first impression of California after six months away was “it’s still here.” The home prices are still plummeting, making us glad that we were able to sell our house last summer. Ten dollars at the pump still won’t buy enough gas to make it to Turlock and back. The neighbors overwater their winter lawns until the excess overflows over the sidewalk and runs down the gutters. When the wasted water reaches the storm drains, they are still so small and constantly plugged that an eighth of an inch of rain floods the streets with puddles large enough to stomp around in. The Costco still hands out food samples, and I still never get any because large families still swoop in and grab all the samples off the tray just as I am quietly and patiently reaching for one. Everything is just like I remember it, right down to the new housing development going in a street over from my parents’ house (unrestrained growth being the norm).

Not all that I remember is bad, though. I spent a pleasant two hours catching up with coworkers from my old school and left thinking how my new job hasn’t yet made me feel a tenth so accepted and connected. I celebrated my nephew's birthday at McDonalds, and rejoiced to find the paper seat guards that all California stores have in their public restrooms. I hadn't seen the words "provided for your protection" since we crossed the Rocky Mountains. I am taking daily walks in the above-freezing evenings, admiring the additions that the neighbors have made to their light arrangements this year. My brother Tim and I sat across from his laptop searching for funny recordings on YouTube. We hit our old favorites videos (like the Burger King employee singing “ding, fries are done” to the tune of Carol of the Bells) and found some new ones: Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager, and the house whose Christmas lights blink on and off to the music of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Last night we spent our traditional half-hour in the hot tub before bed, prompting my dad to tell the story of how I once accidentally locked them out of the house on Christmas morning, leaving them to broil in the spa for an extra fifteen minutes while I obliviously took a shower.

Craig and I knew when we moved that we were signing up for years of vacations to be taken “back home” instead of seeing new places. Looking on orbitz.com for plane rates in September, packing suitcases just as Craig is submitting his final projects and I am tabulating semester grades, and sleeping off jet-lag on Christmas Eve are all aspects of the path we have chosen. I will be forever comparing here to there, like when I look down at my bowl of peppermint stick ice cream and wish that it had sticky candy pieces in it like the Kentucky brand does. I’ve had a few months for old and new to rearrange themselves to fit into this new version of myself, and I suppose there are more new connections to make.

Pass the Shovel?

With only three days left until we board the plane to spend Christmas in California, it happened just in time. We awoke this morning to see a powdered-sugar dusting of snow covering our front yard. We ate breakfast and drank coffee, watching the two neighbor cats make tracks in the thickening blanket covering our back deck. I walked out to get the mail and watched white flakes swirl around me. It didn’t amount to much, but it was better than nothing.

I must admit I was becoming increasingly piqued by the lack of “real weather.” Craig spent last week in San Diego, attending a conference in forty-degree weather, while I sat on the couch with the windows open and let a pleasant, seventy-five degree breeze air our house. I drove to work in the mornings through a low fog that burned off around nine a.m. and endured gray days of constant showers. If I didn’t look outside to see the brick houses, I wouldn’t know I’d ever left California.

I was born in South Dakota, so snow was a part of my very early childhood. My mom fondly tells a story of bundling baby me into the back seat of the car, a blanket over my carrier so I wouldn't catch cold. When the blanket was removed upon arrival by someone I didn't know, I screamed shrilly at the stranger invading my cozy privacy. I remember playing outside in the snow, and my mom bringing tubs of snow inside in severe weather so my brother and I could stand on a chair at the sink and make castles and log cabins out of the cold droplets. I am sure that school closures and snow days were in my past even though I don't remember them. We moved to Modesto when I was six years old. With us came our huge, flat-bottomed snow shovel, and if it had only been kept for twenty-two more years I am sure it would have been presented to Craig and me before we moved. As it was, it lingered unused in the garage for five years before being given away.

“Well, if you don’t like the weather in Kentucky, just wait a day and it’ll be different,” says one of my coworkers. The long- time residents, the hardened veterans of some really scary winters, tell me I should be glad that this winter has been mild so far. They tell me stories, half-shuddering and half-boasting over the winters they’ve seen. Most stories I hear are about the dreaded ice storm of 2002.

“It basically closed down the whole town for eight days,” says a co-worker. “We had no power, and no means of getting power because the ice had snapped the power cables to most people's houses. Before the city could restore electricity, they had to check street by street to make sure everyone had fixed their cables.”

“I came down with the flu on the first day of the storm,” says another. “All I could do was lie in bed with seventeen blankets on top of me and watch the tree outside my window. A branch the size of a pencil would have three inches of ice around it. The branches broke, making a sound like the house was falling down. Many older, familiar trees had to be cut down after the storm.”

“The city sold out of kerosene heaters, bacon, and eggs on the first day. A friend who just moved to Lexington from Los Angeles kept calling me because she was afraid of being alone in her freezing apartment. One night she said it was forty degrees inside and she wanted to know if she would die if she fell asleep,” pipes in another, overhearing us.

“Okay, I know I don’t want THAT much weather, just enough to make me feel like I’m really a Lexingtonian,” I reply.

My first Kentucky snow two weeks ago didn’t exactly have the air of romance I’d been expecting. I looked outside my window at work one Tuesday morning at 11 a.m. to count twelve flakes, none of which I caught on my tongue because I was indoors. Rushing out the door to twirl in circles on the concrete walk probably would’ve been frowned upon, even though everyone knows that I am from California and should therefore be expected to do strange things.

This morning Craig and I took turns standing outside in the falling snow, snapping pictures to take with us for our families in California. I had expected to come home for Christmas armed with “weather stories” to tell our friends. I checked the level of antifreeze in our car to make sure we were prepared for plummeting temperatures. We made sure all of our outside faucets had safety features to keep them from freezing. Our winter clothes are organized in bins in the front closet, but instead I can still get by on the morning drive without a coat. After mentally preparing for Kentucky weather, I feel a bit cheated, but at least I haven't had to buy a snow shovel.

Take Three and Call Me in the Morning

I make fun of people who buy health insurance for their pets. I mean, pets are great, but they’re animals. Nothing supports an impending communist overthrow in America more than the idea that there are two classes of people in our society: one that can’t afford health care, and another that insures themselves and their dogs and cats. Besides, I think Ally would like to remain in the ranks of the uninsured. She hates the vet so much; any insurance that would result in more frequent trips would be odious to her.

I still remember the first time I took her to the vet. She had been mine for a month, and I was looking around for a way to save the $200 new cat checkup fee that the local vet charged. I found a shot clinic that would do a short exam and the complement of tests and shots for a fourth of the cost. One Saturday I borrowed a cardboard carrier from my mother-in-law, and at noon unceremoniously placed Ally in the box and loaded her in the front seat of the Mustang. She disliked the carrier immediately, but I’ll never forget the frenzy that came over her the moment I started the car. As I pulled out of the driveway, she let out a primal yell. The carrier started rocking back and forth, and I caught glimpses of her through the air holes: one round eye, a splayed paw with claws fully extended, a lip curled to reveal her long, predatory incisors. I rolled my eyes. “Sorry, kitty, but this is for your own good. It’s a raw deal, but you need to be healthy,” I crooned in a soothing voice.

Ally was not about to take my word for it. As I drove down Main Street, her upper and lower jaw emerged from two of the air holes and ripped away the cardboard between them. A pointed face poked out and glared at me, and then disappeared. A rigid, sinewy arm snaked out, grabbed the cardboard corner, and there was a great ripping sound as she tore off the top of the carrier. Just as I was about to take the freeway entrance, she leapt indignantly out of the carrier and sank her claws into my lap.

I hold the controversial opinion that animals should be confined during car travel. They enjoy the trip more if they can roam around, but an animal cannot be trusted to act responsibly in a difficult situation. It seems more humane to let them free, but if you slam on the brakes and they dive under the pedal for shelter, both owner and cat are at risk. I don’t think that humane behavior risks the lives of cat and owner. This notion was confirmed by Ally, who immediately started running laps around the seats of the car like a jungle warrior. As her tail whipped past my face for the third time, I pulled away from the freeway entrance, parked at the curb, and tried to subdue my frantic cat.

Try as I might, she would not sit back in the carrier long enough for us to go home. My efforts must have looked like I was beating her senseless, with my arms flailing out and writhing to catch her claws before they raked me to shreds. I was afraid someone would see and report me for animal cruelty. Finally, we compromised; she cowered on my lap, growling as I drove the five blocks home.

When Craig came home an hour later, he didn’t know what to think. Wife and cat were gone, and on the floor splayed a shredded cat carrier, wound around with layers of duct tape. Ally had resisted all efforts to modify the carrier, and so I called my mother-in-law. She drove us to the clinic while I held Ally motionless, a blanket wrapped tightly around her body so that only her outraged head was visible.

Three years later, I contemplated driving 2500 miles in the same fashion as we drove those first few blocks: me distracted, Ally wailing and struggling. It wasn’t a pleasant idea. Craig and I exhausted all forms of inquiry regarding alternate forms of transport for Ally. Flying her to Lexington was out; airlines didn’t transport animals when the hot summer weather could steam them like clams in the compartments. There were no train accommodations or pet transport services that we could locate. We had no choice but to drive her ourselves.

For weeks before our departure I scoured magazines and the internet for tips for safe cat travel. I noted suggestions to buy catnip toys, train the cat to walk on a leash, and put one of the owner’s garments in the carrier to make the cat feel secure. The only thing Craig wanted to know was how many drugs we could pump into the small, furry body so she would make the trip senseless and be revived when we reached our destination. About three days before we left, we began confining Ally so she wouldn’t go on a roam and miss our departure. The first two nights were disconcerting. Ally’s continuous, strident meows told me that she was not happy about being confined. “Not a problem—she’ll get tired after a few minutes and fall asleep,” I told Craig. She didn’t. “Oh, well. She’ll get hoarse and have to stop. It’s too bad, but it is for her own good,” I sermonized. She continued mewling all night, only stopping periodically to change her pitch and frequency. In the morning, I admitted defeat and told Craig that he was right. Ally wasn’t going to make the trip without some form of tranquilizer. Furthermore, Craig and I couldn’t listen to her syncopated wailings for 2500 miles with our ears and good natured personalities intact. I admitted defeat and made a 2 p.m. appointment for her to see the local vet.

After that first unforgettable vet experience three years ago, I had invested in a rubber carrier that provided the dual advantages of keeping Ally in and letting her see out. Once she could perceive large dogs in line at the shot clinic, she usually wised up and behaved perfectly, demurring to strangers while curled up delicately on her paws. I thought spending fifty bucks on a carrier that Ally would use for an hour a year was tantamount to her joining the ranks of the pampered pet. I wasn’t one of those barbaric miscreants who would expect my kitty to be shipped in cardboard like a UPS package. Oh, no. I grabbed Ally’s paws securely and forced her into the carrier. She turned around and glared at me through the front grate. Well, I would’ve stepped in myself if you had only asked me nicely, she sniffed.

Yeah, right.

It takes a special kind of person to be a vet. My cat’s childhood vet was a gangly, comical man who joked around with us while he conducted his examinations. He would tell my brother and me an anecdote about a dog he saw last week while deftly jamming the needle in the other side of Mittens’s body. We noticed the way that Mittens’s eyes would bulge comically every once in a while, but otherwise we weren’t traumatized at the thought of our kitty getting poked with needles. I assumed that all vets were tactful, sympathetic, and affable. I imagined that Ally and I would engender much sympathy as we walked in, me sleepless and casted, dragging Ally’s carrier in a halting circular motion because of my uneven gait.


As soon as our name was called, two large-knuckled hands snatched the carrier. I murmured gratefulness while a strong, husky woman peered in at my kitty and frowned disapprovingly.

“Why don’t we see her regularly?” barked a deep voice accusingly.

“She gets seen elsewhere, usually,” I muttered vaguely. Your rates. She gets the same shots for half the price, without the added indignity of you jamming a thermometer up her…

“Well, then why aren’t you taking her there now?” she raised an eyebrow, palpating Ally’s stomach with her meaty hands.

“Um, they’re not open.”

“And you are driving her WHERE in this thing?” she asked, indicating her carrier.

“Kentucky. I…”

The vet gave a snort of derision. “Those Southern states have a lot of soil parasites. She should be seen IMMEDIATELY upon arrival so the vet can suggest a proper treatment course.”

“Okay,” I replied meekly. I’m not going to the moon with her. Lexington is still in America, you know. I am sure that there are plenty of cats there that haven’t succumbed to the evils of giant parasites. What are you going to tell me next? Don’t give her any mint julep?

“And that,” she snorted at the carrier, “is totally out of the question. How would you like to be confined for fifteen hours a day in a space so small you can’t stand up?” she looked up from wielding the dreaded thermometer to narrow her eyes at me.

“Hmmm…” I mused. You mean like the cabin of a car? At this point, the lack of sleep and the forlorn look on Ally’s face was too much for me. I knew exactly what I was going to put both of us through, and I had to do it. The only alternative was to leave her here, destroying Ally’s faith in humanity and reducing me to the level of her previous owner who abandoned her when a move got too stressful.

The vet, who I could easily imagine tramping down the lines of cattle feed lots administering shots of bovine growth hormone, looked up at me and softened. “I’ll prescribe something to keep her calm. Just fill the prescription, get her a bigger carrier, and the trip should go all right,” she said, handing me a script.

“Xanax. Isn’t that…”

“Yes, it’s an anti-anxiety medication most commonly given to people, but it’s recently been cleared for animal consumption. Give her a pill morning and night and it will give her a much more phlegmatic perspective on this whole thing.” From the look in the vet’s eyes, she thought the cat wasn’t the only one who could use a tranquilizer. I clumped out of the vet’s office, Ally’s mood in no way improved by the encounter.

“One prescription for Ally, please,” I told the local pharmacist. The cat’s name was printed on a pill bottle, along with our last name. “Hah, hah, the cat’s got travel anxiety, poor thing. Needs a little something to help her through,” I said, my voice flippantly cheerful. I certainly didn’t want him to think I was the one taking happy drugs! I went home, crushed a tablet into a spoonful of tuna, and offered it to Ally, who dutifully licked it up.

“We don’t have room for a flat of tuna cans in the car, kitty. Tomorrow, you’re doing it the normal way,” I hinted darkly.

That night, in my parents’ house, I listened to Ally’s shrieks, trying to detect a hint of calmness in her manner. Maybe a few doses really increases the effect, I thought.

The next morning, I held her securely between my knees, used one hand to wedge her jaws open, and dropped the pill into the back of her throat, closing her mouth and massaging her neck like I was told to. That wasn’t so hard, was it, kitty? I remonstrated, although I would be livid if anyone did the same to me. I didn’t swallow pills well until I was fifteen, and my mom plied me sweetly with pills in applesauce, never hogtying me down and forcing a finger down my throat. After I let Ally hop away,I looked down to see a familiar, circular white object stuck to my left knee. I sighed and went to find her. She ran away from me so assiduously that she skittered across my parents’ tile floor and hit the wall. We fastened her, finally properly dosed, into the new, larger carrier I had bought the day before.

I’m not sure that Ally took a breath in the first 206 miles of the trip. She warmed up with scales until we reached the highway, and then ran through her entire repertoire of sounds that convey negative emotions. We were past Fresno before she started taking ten minute breaks, and almost out of California when she finally fell asleep.

“Maybe the medicine is finally working,” I told Craig. Hearing this, she sat up and started another yowl.

Feeling frazzled, we pulled into Flagstaff, Arizona after 10 p.m. and searched for our pet-friendly hotel. In the elevator, a nice old man commented on how tired we all looked.

“The cat’s never been more than ten miles away from home before,” I said, and then told him where home was going to be. He whistled.

Inside the hotel room, Ally was definitely acting like she was under the influence. When I opened the door of her carrier, she levitated straight out of it, turning four somersaults across the bed, leaping to a chair, rolling off and trying to take refuge under the bed. She bounced off the guard and was still, panting like she had just run a marathon. She shook her head as if startled, and then jumped up on Craig’s lap, sliding off his knee and landing confusedly on the floor on the other side of him. She pulled herself onto the bed again, and then immediately started batting the roses on the printed bedspread like they were jumping up to hit her.

I flopped down on the cigarette-burned sheets. “I’m beat!” I announced. “Thank goodness she got all of that aggression out of her system. She should be really quiet tonight! I’ll just put her back in the carrier so she’ll feel more secure.”

Set up in the bathroom with her litter box and food, Ally’s wail increased to a frenzy that I thought the neighbors could surely hear. I passed the first night in terror, waiting for a knock on the door asking us to quiet down. We couldn’t help it; we had no control over our pitiable animal traveling companion.

At three in the morning, I dressed, gathered Ally’s carrier, and woke up Craig. “Ally and I are going for a drive,” I whispered.

“What?” Craig was incredulous.

“We are going out for a drive. Parents often do this to settle their hysterical children, and I am sick of hearing her howl at me. Every time I move a muscle in bed, she gets louder,” I burbled inchoately.

Craig eyed me warily. I was wearing the crumpled jeans that I had taken off the night before, and a tank top that was inside out. “You are not leaving with the cat!” he mandated. “We are in a strange city in a questionable area of town, and you are not driving around with the cat in the middle of the night singing Rock-a-bye Baby! Just stick her back in the bathroom and go to sleep.” He ordered. I sniffed and placed her carrier back in the bathroom, draping a towel over the top like it was a parrot’s cage. Amazingly, she stopped. I went to sleep fully dressed, my arm around my husband.

“Do you think I could just take the anxiety meds tomorrow and let Ally do without?” I wondered aloud.

Third Time's a Charm?

They’ve found us again.

One week ago I was sitting on the couch contemplating the peacefulness of our recent home life when the phone rang. I answered it to hear a three second pause and a familiar click. As I hung up, I decided that one of the perks of moving is a six- month vacation from telemarketers.

I know that there is an immunity list that I am supposed to join if I don’t want to receive calls, but my skeptical self doubts that it actually works. I accept telemarketing as an inevitable aspect of life, and I honestly think it is better that way. Craig sees it differently, though. He swears that I keep myself available to telemarketers so that I can treat them nastily if I feel like it. Maybe it’s true. If so, I am definitely justified. Dr. Pilkey, my college literature teacher, said that in a state of war, whether public or personal, normal rules of decency and honesty need not apply.

“Christians lied to protect Jews during the Holocaust, even though dishonesty goes against their faith. They were in a state of war with people who were contrary to their ideals, and so they had no obligation to tell the truth. Likewise, if a burglar stands at your door demanding money, you have no obligation to be especially decent or honest to him. If he demands to know if there are people in your household, you need not endanger your family by telling him the truth,” he said. I think that this reasoning should apply with telemarketers. They are at war with my ideals: I want to relax in my peaceful house and be unmolested by outsiders, and they are trying to take that away from me. Especially on days when I am already mad about something, I don’t feel like social standards of politeness and courtesy apply to them. When I lived in California, the purchase of our first house started a steady stream of calls that didn’t abate until we sold it two years later.

“Hello, this is ADT security! How are you on this fine day?”

“First of all, the fifth straight day of rain is not often referred to as ‘fine’. Second, I am irritated because this is the sixth time I’ve been solicited by your firm in the past month. I haven’t changed my mind since the fifth time you called me, and don’t you think that logic would dictate that I won’t at all?” I replied bitingly before hanging up. I admit that I handled the call cuttingly, but did she really have to CALL ME BACK only to call me an unprintable name that invoked my gender but mistook my species?

This is why I can’t stand telemarketers. I think they only act nice because they want something. If they wanted to be really nice, they could just not call me at all. I thought there were no exception to this rule, so imagine my surprise when I received a cold call last week that didn’t immediately turn my stomach. I picked up the phone to hear an older man wishing me a good day in a golden honey Southern accent.

“How are y’all doing on this fine day,” purred a rich voice, evoking images of antebellum mansions where steaming cups of coffee are served on verandas. Something in me softened. I could tell this man didn’t know me and in just a moment would ask me for something, but I couldn’t feel a shred of my usual outrage.

“Well, I’m just fine,” I said brightly. I couldn’t believe it. That peach pie voice would not let me act my mean self. He went on to say that he was from the Lexington Canine Police Partners and was calling to earn support for in-school programs that keep kids from using drugs.

“The kids just love to see the dogs, and we make such a difference to them. Can the kids count on your support, ma’am?” he ended with the rhetoric of a Southern senator.

This was my cue to tell him off. Years of research have proven that these programs are a total waste of government funding. Furthermore, I taught for years in the tender age where those kinds of choices are made, and I know that petting a German shepherd is not going to keep a kid from using drugs if they already intend to. I wish it would, but it’s naïve to think so.

To my astonishment, I didn’t have the heart to turn him down. I’ll give you twenty dollars just to talk some more in that wonderful accent of yours, I thought. Instead, I asked for his website and promised to check it out. It was the first time I had ever let a cold caller go without some form of reproach. Craig listened to this conversation with growing incredulity, knowing how I usually am.

“Well, he was just such a nice old man. It wouldn’t be right to be mean to him. Maybe telemarketers are just nicer here, too,” I reasoned. He stared at me like I had just undergone a severe personality shift, and I guess I had.

People are generally nicer here. In our favorite bookstore, a man walked up to us and asked if we were finding everything we needed. We were a few minutes into a conversation when we realized he wasn’t wearing the polo shirt and nametag of a store clerk. He must have noticed, because he laughed and said “No, I don’t work here, I’m just a really nice guy!” We waited to be helped at the Verizon store and their Fed-Ex delivery man rattled off a list of places we had to see when he learned we were from out of state. Two clerks that caught me looking at the six foot ladders at Lowe’s convinced me that it would fit into my Malibu. They proved it by wiggling it into my car themselves. I find myself engaged in conversation with strangers in almost every line I stand in. I don’t know if it’s weird to tell the grandmotherly figure behind me about my four nephews or hear about her recent surgery, but I like it. Everybody here seems so connected.

The isolated case of rudeness I experienced here is that people tended to cut in front of me in line. The third time this happened, I had to stop and analyze the situations to figure out why I was being so ignored. I realized that I would queue the California way, where courtesy demands at least five feet of private space between me and the person in front of me. Then, so as not to appear nosy or rude, I would stare off into space and fail to make eye contact in a Californian show of well-mannered aloofness. I realized that Lexingtonians thought I was just a strange person dawdling in the middle of the aisle, not a person in line. Now I stride boldly up to a conversational distance and start chatting about UK basketball to the person in front of me. Nobody cuts and my turn comes, but much more slowly than it did in California, mainly because the cashiers chat with you while lovingly packing each grocery item in its very own bag. Yep, I’m definitely not in California anymore, and it’s not just that the storm drains are big enough to swallow my cat.

I really thought I moved into an area of unmitigated politeness, where even phone solicitors treat people with courtesy and respect. This one-sided view was shattered yesterday when I received another phone call.

“Hello, is Craig there?” said a disappointingly not-so-Southern voice.

“Who’s calling?” I purred back. I’m not calling Craig to the phone from upstairs to refuse a cold call and hang up.

“Lexington Canine Police Partners, but we’re calling for Craig, so please put him on,” he clipped.

I let an accustomed trace of ice creep back into my tone. “We don’t donate to organizations that solicit only over the phone,” I stated bluntly. I mean, really. It’s just a waste of time for them at this point.

“Well, it’s too bad that you don’t want to help us out, but Craig supported us last year, lady. Why don’t you just give him the phone?”

“Last year we lived out of state, and neither of us had ever heard of you. I know he didn’t give money to you because we share all accounts. You want our money and you lie to us,” I fired back.

“Fine. I’ll just call back then,” he snapped.

“And find me in the mood for prevaricating telemarketers? I don’t think so,” I snapped back, and then saved him the trouble of hanging up on me.

I don’t know whether to be sad or pleased. On one hand, my paradigm is restored. Not everyone in Kentucky is ready to sit me down and offer me sweet tea. There are jerks here, too. I should have asked him if he recently moved here from California.

It's 3 a.m. (She Must Be Lonely)

I type more slowly these days, and it’s not the chill in the fall Kentucky air stiffening my fingers. Ally, our brown tabby cat, sits on my lap while I type. A few minutes after I open my Blog files, I’ll see a flicker of movement in the corner of my left eye. My eyes focus on a tail, pertly bobbing across the room until it dips sharply, and Ally alights soundlessly in the space between my body and the back of the computer chair. She’ll balance lightly on one armrest and peer around my shoulder with her small, pointed face. If I haven’t scooted back a bit to make room for her, she will retreat to the cove created by the small of my back, but her favorite thing is to wedge herself into the crook of my elbow and snooze on my lap, emitting periodic reedy snores. I didn’t think cats snored before I had Ally. Her warm, nine pound body changes the position of my left arm, making it harder to type, and her senseless head wags up and down as my arms change position to strike the keys. It’s a small price to pay for the blissful warmth that radiates from my lap to my entire body. How did I ever do without you, kitty? I wonder.

In July of 2004 Craig and I signed the papers on our first mortgage and moved into a little house just off Main Street in Ripon. I was three weeks into my third year of teaching, and the move took every last bit of my non-working hours for six weeks. I was sweeping off the front step and throwing down our doormat when I noticed a small cat threading its way between the rosebushes and sidling up to watch me. I put out my hand, and it condescended to be scratched before stepping back to regard me suspiciously. Clearwater eyes in a young but not kittenish face appraised me introspectively. She was mostly the color of coffee creamer, but tabby striped brown, and there was a hint of Siamese in her slightly darker face, ears, paws, and tail. She pivoted on little back legs, and as she hopped out of our yard I thought it would be nice to have a friendly cat in the neighborhood.

Craig and I were able to get a pet if we wanted, but I didn’t know if we would. Craig had both cats and dogs as a child, but he and my childhood pet, Chiquita, didn’t exactly have a warm relationship. Craig came to see me one night early in our dating years. He was sitting on the couch, chatting with my parents, and Chiquita curled up on his lap and went to sleep. I, of course, was charmed by what seemed like an intimate bonding experience for man and cat. Suddenly, Craig gestured to my parents in conversation and Chiquita levitated out of her sound sleep and attacked Craig’s hand with the ferocity and speed of a cheetah, grabbing it with her paws and biting it. From then on, Craig and Chiquita regarded each other suspiciously from opposite sides of the room. It was clear when we married that Chiquita would continue to live with my parents. Our first house was leased and pet-free. Now that we had become homeowners, I expected to settle into our house for a year or so, and then maybe look around for a kitten to adopt on one of my months off.

I expected the next few weeks to give me insight on the owners of the mysterious tabby, but I continued to see her catching mice in the orchard behind our house and sleeping in the browned grass of late California summer. I felt sorry for the serious, industrious little animal. One afternoon I caught her balancing on our glass-topped patio table, bolting down half a cup of milky coffee I had left there from breakfast. I couldn’t help but notice her grow a bit wispier, although she seemed to keep herself in meat while ridding the neighborhood of unsightly pests. The previous occupant of our house had a constant mice problem, and we were grateful that we never saw a rodent run across our kitchen linoleum. One morning I opened the back blinds to see a huge dead rat on our doorstep. It was clear who was responsible for this.

One night Craig and I spread a blanket on our back lawn and sat down, tilting our heads back to see the night sky. Suddenly, there were three of us on the blanket. Craig started up in surprise, and the tabby bounded away, clearing our six-foot back fence in two bounds.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Just a cat. I’ve been noticing her around lately. She’s really tame, but she doesn’t seem to have a home,” I replied. “You scared her off!”

“No, I didn’t. I just eagerly jumped towards her to welcome her, and she bolted. It’s not my fault that she misunderstood my gesture,” Craig retorted, and I rolled my eyes.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” I asked.

“No,” was Craig’s reply, but the timing was unfortunate. At that moment a white streak across our lawn became a furry body trying to arrange herself comfortably on the folds of our blanket.

By this time, the cat and I were not exactly strangers. I had taken to checking on her after school each afternoon, just to make sure she was all right. I’d put down my school bag and throw on some flip flops, then head out the back door to walk along the fence, staring through the orchard in search of her. The second time I did this, she bounded up to our chain-link fence, climbed it nimbly and took a flying leap, landing in the middle of our yard. Careful not to startle her, I sat down on the grass and she sidled up to me, settling down for a nap in my lap like it was a routine. The next day, she was waiting in our back yard, and the day after that she was pressing her nose to the glass of our back door, waiting for me to come out and see her.

My afternoons in the sun with a cat on my lap were a guilty pleasure. I enjoyed the companionship, but I needed to take responsibility. I would have to take her to the shelter or adopt her myself. I thought she was tame enough to be adopted, but in the meantime she would be caged in a small room with other animals. She was clean, sweet, and healthy, but not at the cute kitten age most people want when they adopt a shelter animal. If I took her to the shelter, would she be passed over?

I had a million reasons why adopting a stray was a bad idea. She’ll be feral. She won’t be housebroken. She won’t adjust well to having daily contact with humans. She may be sick. I wanted a kitten, and I thought it was better if an animal bonded with its owner in the first few months of life. Somehow, I just couldn’t reconcile those beliefs with the warm S-curve of the body on my lap.

I think my long slide towards adoption started with giving her a name. She became my Ally about six weeks after we moved. An independent fighter like her needed a strong name, not a cutesy moniker like Fluffy, Snookums, or Puss. I liked the veiled allusion to her strayness—she was an alley cat. I rejected the more feminine Allie in favor of A-L-L-Y because she was also my ally, my friend and comrade, and I was already used to having her around. I tentatively used her name in casual conversation that night. Craig raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. We had talked about adopting her by now, and I think he realized the power this furry little creature had over me already.

I asked around, and learned that Ally had belonged to our next door neighbors, who moved out a week after we moved in. I asked if there were any plans to collect their cat, and there were none. Ally was abandoned. Well, that explained her comfort level with humans, or did it? I wondered how she could acquire such a loving and gentle nature living with people who would take off and leave their pets to fend for themselves. I’d heard of feral cats, but feral humans? I obtained the new number for her former owners, and dialed, mentally rehearsing what I would say…

I just thought I’d let you know that your cat is fine. You know, the one you left to starve when you took off for a new city. I’m adopting her, and though I can’t say I’ll be the world’s greatest pet caretaker, you certainly haven’t given me much competition. I hope you sleep better at night knowing that she is being cared for…

It was easy to rant about the unfairness of Ally’s situation, but manners overcame the diatribe I was preparing as soon as a wary, middle aged female voice was on the other end of the line. I introduced myself and detailed finding the cat and learning it had belonged to her.

“Oh, yes, that’s our Kit!” she said brightly. I bristled. This woman did not have a right to name MY cat. Not your Kit, lady. My Ally.

“So, then, you have plans to come and get her?” Please, no.

“Well, when it was time to go, we called and called for her, but she just wouldn’t come and get in the car with us.”

Wow. That’s the greatest excuse I’ve ever heard. It’s not your fault; it’s the cat’s fault. If only she had approached an unfamiliar, belching metal monster and hopped right in, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If your kids refused to get in the car, would you have left them, too?

The woman sighed apologetically, “You see, we have this tiny apartment in San Jose, and no room for a pet. We had to get rid of the dog, and we only took the one cat, Kit’s mother. Last week she was hit by a car. We just don’t think we have room…” her voice trailed off, and I took a deep breath. If this woman wasn’t going to feel a sense of personal responsibility, I certainly could. She brightened at my suggestion that I adopt, er, Kit, and was able to tell me some useful information. She was a year and a half old, and had never been seen by a veterinarian or given shots. She was spayed, however, probably because her own mother produced two prolific litters in the same summer. I pleasantly thanked her for the information and ended the conversation. Taking long, deep breaths, I walked to the backyard, where Ally waited on the grass by our lawn chair. Although I know cats hate to be squeezed, I picked her up and gave her a small hug. Ally had been orphaned earlier this week, and if she had gone with these people, she may be dead as well. I was lucky to have her.

Three years later, I thought back to the conversation I had with Ally’s previous owner. Although I still didn’t condone the woman’s decision to abandon an animal, this time I could identify a bit more. We, too, were planning a move, and I agonized over what to do with Ally. She had grown to be a very important part of our life in Ripon. I would still spend afternoons with her on my lap, and when I let her in she would rub ecstatically around the edges of the living room coffee table, massaging her face against the corners in a comical motion I called lip- grinding. She was the only cat I knew that could tolerate sleeping under a blanket. In the winter, when she was cold, she would nose the edge of a blanket over herself, and I would pull it over her, face and all.

Although she enjoyed her afternoons in the house with us, she thrived in the orchard. Even though we fed her well, she continued to catch mice for sport. She would run to us when we called for her, scaling the fence and hopping daintily along the top towards us. Besides the dreaded yearly trip to the vet, she had never been away from this neighborhood. How dare we take her so far away? If we gave her up so we could move, would we be any better than her first owners?

Surprisingly, Craig put his foot down when I mentioned the possibility of letting Ally go. “We’re a family. The cat comes with us!” I was touched that he would respect the bond Ally and I had enough for her to make sacrifices so she could come with us. Believe me, it was a sacrifice. We traveled 2500 miles with her, and she clearly thought the journey was a week-long trip to the vet. It was like having a one-year-old opera star in the backseat of the car, subjecting us to panicked arias and leaving us wondering if she needed to eat, drink, or go to the bathroom. At night, when we reached our pet friendly hotel, she would wake me up at three a.m. and yowl piteously, redoubling her efforts if I acknowledged her vocal performance by moving a muscle in bed. When we finally reached Lexington and unloaded our furniture, she retreated to a tiny space under the dresser, where she spent six weeks punishing us for putting her through the ordeal.

I described her vow of silence to my dad over the phone, as well as the three nervous days she spent in our new garage when we first arrived. I had the idea that she would feel better if she could see her new house with all of its familiar furniture: her favorite low coffee table, the couch where she loved to nap on a blanket, and the black ceramic cat statue that makes her hiss because she thinks it is real.

“Don’t worry too much about familiar things. All she really needs are familiar people,” said my dad, and he was right. Ally recovered, and after several weeks forgave me, at least enough to enjoy the comfort of my lap. Our second Lexington move didn’t make her miss a beat. The next day she was racing up and down the basement stairs and staring curiously out the window at a groundhog that wandered into our backyard. I could never imagine her out of the context of our old Ripon house, but she is thriving here, as Craig and I are, more every day.

Three Forks, Three Links, Three Stakes....

One of the things I like best about Lexington is the name. I love the way the syllables roll off my tongue, and haven’t adopted the way locals shorten it to Lex or the trendier Lextown. There’s nothing like a good name.

Kentucky has an abundance of strange and interesting place names. Some remind me that I am in the South: Cobbler's Knob, Salt Lick, Turkey Foot, Stamping Ground, Cowcreek, Paw Paw, and Do Stop. Is that Do Stop as in “Do stop by and see us, y’hear”? I think it is. Other names defy all explanation: Krypton, Rightangle, Big Windy, Goforth, Hell’s Halfacre, Hi Hat, Tyewhoppety. I’ve heard New Jersey called “the armpit of New York”, but only Kentucky has a place named Shoulderblade.

Do people in Nada, Kentucky have inferiority complexes? What about those in Nonesuch? I wonder if those in Oddville live up to its name? It could be worse, though. They could hail from Broad Bottom.

Headline news this week told of a London woman who died after a snake-handling episode in her local church. I shook my head, imagining the restrained English passing poisonous snakes around over their tea and biscuits. Something didn’t jibe. I looked back at the article and realized they were talking about London, Kentucky. Many place names in Kentucky have a foreign ring. Without leaving the state, I could visit London, Paris, Baghdad, Cairo, Mexico, Lebanon, Egypt, Canada, Warsaw, and Moscow. There’s even a Versailles, but don’t dare say it the French way. That’s Ver-SAILS, thank you very much.

Some pairs of names made me look twice as I flipped through a state map booklet. There’s a Ford, Kentucky and a Chevrolet, Kentucky. Edward R. Murrow might be interested to know that there is a Goodnight and a Goodluck. I wonder why there’s a Democrat, Kentucky but not a Republican. Ernie Fletcher, the lame duck governor, is probably wondering, too.

With so many interesting places to go, I could travel for years and never leave the state. My entomologist husband may want to visit Bug, Beetle, and Butterfly sometime. I suppose if we ever get homesick, we can visit California, Kentucky. It’s about ninety miles north of us.

You Never Forget a First Love

Soon after we were married, Craig was casually approached by a perfect stranger who offered to buy his Ford Mustang. It shocked me that someone would want the car enough to ask for it when it wasn’t for sale. Craig answered the offer with a casual negative and a prideful gleam in his eye, and I wasn’t surprised. Craig loved every aspect of the car, from the way the small back seat folded down to extend the hatchback cargo area to the written record of service visits that he meticulously updated and kept in the glove compartment.

It gradually became clear that the Mustang was a young man’s car in the eyes of many, who assumed that we should sell it. I was often asked when we “were planning on selling the two-seater,” often with the spoken or implied add-on in order to buy a family car. I would ignore the wistful glance at my abdomen that always accompanied these conversations and give my prepared answer: “Craig and his Mustang go further back than Craig and I do. What if I told him he needed to sell the Mustang, only to find out that its hold on him was greater than mine?”

The 1993 dark blue Mustang LX definitely caught my attention when we were seeing each other. I could spot the Mustang easily in a parking lot full of gold sedans and white minivans. Craig would be waiting for me by the bookstore coffee counter, ready to start contemplating our order. Ours was a long distance relationship, and in that year of long separations I would eagerly anticipate seeing the dark-blue Mustang that brought Craig for weekend visits. My full load of upper-division literature classes often filled my schedule so completely that monthly outings in the Mustang were my only social activities. Sitting in the passenger seat felt like a warm embrace; I would look inquisitively at the galloping horse dashboard emblem trying to memorize it, saving the memory for a long Sunday night of studying.

I didn’t marvel at the hatchback or the 5.0 engine, but I was impressed that the car ran dependably. I was driving a muddy brown-colored four cylinder Mazda that racked up thousands of dollars in repair bills while stranding me nine times by the side of the road in the three years I owned it. Once, I was on Highway 99 South, driving seventy in the slow lane with a car that wanted to go eighty on my tail. Suddenly, my electrical system went haywire like a scene in a 1980’s alien abduction movie. My air conditioner spat short bursts of air, my radio crackled and was silent, and my engine revved and ran low. The car bucked so ominously that I took the exit that conveniently appeared to my right. As soon as I came to a stop at a gas station, my power system went so dead that turning the key got no response at all. Twenty-four hours and six hundred dollars later, I headed south again with a new alternator. This one lasted a scant six weeks, only to die in the same fashion two miles from my Southern California apartment. To take advantage of the warranty, I had to carry the defective alternator around in my trunk for three weeks until a trip home for Thanksgiving allowed me to drive it back to Chowchilla where I had so frighteningly broken down before. Turning fast corners to get to class would send the heavy part thumping from one side of my trunk to the other, causing my classmates to inquire about the health of my car. “It’s fine, it’s just the alternator!” I would smile glibly.

The last page of our wedding album shows Craig helping me into the passenger seat of the Mustang. We were still dressed in ceremony attire, and the volume of my skirt billowed up like an extra passenger sitting on my lap. We were able to remove the window paint, but the black leather car bra never recovered from the liberal use of silly string.

Soon after, as Craig’s on-call hours increased and his employer gave him control of a company pickup, I became the primary driver of the Mustang. Immediately, while idling the car at the Exxon station, I noticed a sonorous, brassy sound coming from the hood of the car. The Ford dealership charged us two hundred dollars to tell us what I told them when I gave them the keys: the alternator was going out! Instead of paying seven hundred more to replace it, we picked up the car and took it to a garage belonging to a friend of a friend. We got the same Ford alternator for five hundred less than the dealership, and there was no charge for labor when it quit six weeks later and was replaced under warranty. Despite the single bout of electrical trouble, the Mustang ran great and rarely needed work. For the first time, I was the primary driver of a reliable vehicle.

I had never imagined driving a sporty car, and sometimes felt that I didn’t quite deserve it. Parked at stoplights, I would attract longing gazes from pimply adolescents and balding, middle aged men alike. At least I was sure they were salivating over the car and not me. As a middle school English teacher, my geek factor was greatly diminished in the eyes of my students when they discovered that I drove such a cool car. One afternoon I walked out to my car after holding after school detention and found four boys on skateboards begging for “a tow.” I sat in my car for ten minutes until they were finally convinced I had no intention of pulling away from the curb with them hanging on to the spoiler.

Picking the car up from the mechanic was a different experience. He would lecture me on the proper way to shift without damaging the clutch, all the while running his hand back and forth across the hood in a gesture that seemed a little possessive. “You know, these 5.0 engines are the best around. They put them in stock cars!” he would muse, and then suddenly shake his head out of a daydream and take my credit card. Yes, I know, because you told me that last time I was in here. As I activated my left turn signal and pulled out of the parking lot, I wondered if he ever watched me leave at the responsible posted speed limit of 25 mph, wishing he could take the car away from me and give it to someone who could truly appreciate its performance. “Sorry, ma’am, but a car like this deserves someone who can truly handle it. I know you love the car, but you just don’t accelerate like it was made to. I’ll show you some four-cylinder sedans of comparable value that would be more fitting for your style of driving.” Admittedly, I was an unlikely driver for such a powerful, responsive engine.

I don’t like to recall the only time I accelerated fast enough to leave rubber marks, especially because I was just learning to drive the car. It took me weeks to get used to “a stick,” and the tricky double movement of accelerating gradually while releasing the clutch had me stalling jerkily four or five times in a row. I gathered my courage in preparation for another attempt, and shocked Craig and myself by pealing out of Craig’s parents’ garage, going in reverse! The tire marks persisted for months, and my embarrassment lasted even longer when I recalled the squeal I made.

As we gratefully said goodbye to Craig’s job, the pickup left, too. I had a strange relationship with that white truck. On one hand, hearing it maneuver into our driveway meant that Craig was finally home. Something inside me unclenched knowing he had made it through another day (or night, or day and night) of work and could be home and rest. Unfortunately, the truck was also a symbol of Craig’s job; he was always available ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Even now, I view white trucks on the road with a twinge of dismay. We will most likely buy a truck at some time in the future, but it will be any color but white.

I think Craig enjoyed driving the Mustang again in the weeks after his farm job. It was our only car for a few months, and the cooperation it took to make that work was good for us. It was good for the Mustang, too. The inside and outside took on a cleanliness it never had when it was solely my car. I’ve heard that women keep clean houses but messy cars, while men keep their cars spotless and let their houses get messy. The back of the Mustang had definitely accumulated a layer of female clutter it was unaccustomed to. The outside, too, got a new coat of wax, which I had never figured out how to apply.

Nine months before we moved, we bought a practically new silver Malibu that took us back to two-car status. It wasn’t exactly the “family car” that so many were longing for us to buy, but it had a bigger cabin and front-wheel drive for snowy weather. I drove the Malibu, and finally the single man’s Mustang had a man driving it, but we were looking ahead to our move and wondering what to do about transportation. Always the practical (heartless) one, I admit that I thought it best to sell it right before we moved. It didn’t help that it was starting to have a few problems. The battery light brought us back to the mechanic, and the news should not have surprised me: the Mustang needed an alternator again! I think Craig changed his mind weekly from September to May, but June saw us putting a sign in the window and advertising the car in the newspaper. Yes, we loved the car, but it seemed the right time to part with it.

A week after we started parking it on Main Street to be noticed, a now recognizable low drum roll noise announced the failure of our fifth alternator. “Six alternators in seven years!” I mused to the mechanic, who looked up the warranty and called in for the part. “I think you need to give me a punch card for these. I think if I buy nine, I should get the tenth one free!” As he took the keys and filled out the paperwork, he noticed the sign in the window and (I swear) his eyes misted over.

“Wow, you’re finally selling the Mustang! I remember the car I bought when I got my first job, a 19— Camaro that I loved with an intensity I’ve never given to any woman. We had fifteen good years together, and when I sold it my wife had to hand over the keys, I was crying so hard!” He was standing on the garage floor with his hands covered in a layer of black grease, but sniffling like a kid. I wondered if I should hand him a tissue so he wouldn’t have to dry his eyes on the rolled up sleeve of his shirt, one of those garage regulars with “Mike” stitched on to a monogrammed patch.

My first Mazda was sold with a sense of relief, although it may just be that signing the back of the title meant that I would never have to write another twelve hundred dollar check for transmission work. Still, I think that there must be an emotional connection to one’s first vehicle that is attached to the Y chromosome. Mike the mechanic wasn’t the only man I know who turned on the waterworks when a first car was involved. My brother was sitting at a stoplight in his red Ford Ranger when an SUV hit him and pushed the truck into the car in front of him. Insurance totaled the car and paid enough for him to get something with better gas mileage, but I couldn’t mistake the emotion in his voice when he described his last few moments with the truck before he gave the keys to the adjustor and watch it wheel away.

Calls started coming in about our Mustang for sale, but there was always some reason that the interested party wasn’t the right one for the car. This one lived too far to come see it, this one was too young and probably couldn’t afford the insurance, this one didn’t know anything about Mustangs. I wondered if we would cave and keep the car and each drive the 2,500 miles to Lexington in a separate vehicle.

Finally, on the afternoon after the movers loaded our furniture, we accepted an offer. It was lower than we originally wanted, but isn’t it always? The owner always perceives more value because they see the car in terms of what they’ve put into it, and it always seems like a lot. The man knew what it was worth, and was going to drive it as it was for a year and then totally redo it with a kit that would make it look like a classic Cobra. He knew a good engine when he heard one.

“If you have any trouble with the alternator, it’s on warranty,” I said bravely as we made arrangements for him to collect the car from my Dad when he had the cash. Was there something in my eye, or was this starting to get to me as well? We parked the car in front of my parents’ house, and I thought again of the past that this car represented. I was sitting in this passenger seat when Craig first told me that he loved me. We took this car to the park where we shared our first kiss.

Before we locked the car for the last time, Craig took out his pocketknife and removed a frayed piece or curling ribbon from around the exhaust pipe. It was left there from when our wedding party attached cans to our getaway car. All at once, I felt guilty. Craig owned the car for twelve years. He was making monthly payments on it when I was taking high school driver’s education. I had strongly encouraged him to sell it: it was older, it wouldn’t be practical, it had to happen sometime. Had I done the right thing? He had used the car to impress me, to court me, to transport me to our first home as his wife, and now he was giving it up for me.

I hope I’m worth it.

Three Thousand Pounds of Stuff

Registering for wedding gifts was, I suppose, my first induction into the American cult of stuff. We were getting married in three months, and there would be people who wanted to give us gifts. Thus, we began the incredibly self-centered process of picking out gifts that others would pay for, piece by piece. I remember walking through the aisles of Target with a Star-Trek scanner, pointing and clicking possess anything in the store. Did we want a turkey deep fryer? An electric towel warmer? How about a silver-plated crumb sweeper set? We wandered up and down in an ecstasy of investigation, searching for items that we would use for the next fifty years. Our choices tended towards the mundane—sheet sets, coffeepot, and Tupperware—leaving the more exotic choices for trendier couples. Craig and I are both the pragmatic sort, and only disagreed when our ideas of usefulness differed.

“No, I don’t want to register for it! What is it?” puzzled Craig, holding up what looked like a large, flat duffel bag.

“It’s a casserole dish warmer. You zip the covered dish up into the insulated liner, and it stays warm if you need to take it somewhere,” I explained brightly, raising my eyebrows and nodding genially to model my approval of this useful household staple. My laser scanner was poised and ready to add this handy item to our growing list.

“When do we ever go places with hot food?” he reasoned.

“We don’t, now, but it will be different when we are married, silly. We’ll have dinners to attend, I guess,” I bravely justified, but could tell I was losing.

“My mother never had one,” Craig boasted, and it was like wind coming back into my sails. No matter what either set of our ancestors had to struggle without, I wanted my own life, conveniently appointed with my own stuff that I picked out. We registered for the insulated casserole dish warmer, and today it graces the bottom shelf of my kitchen cabinets, recovering from the one time in our married life it was trotted out to transport a pan of steaming Hawaiian rice six blocks.

Packing box after box in my kitchen in early June, pausing occasionally to adjust positions and give my broken foot a rest, I questioned a few zaps of that scanner. We have many things that are useful but unused. We have a countertop rice cooker that Craig swears we need to use someday, but I roll my eyes and say it’s easier to make a pot of rice on the stove. Our Foreman Grill, so popular among the lean, mean grilling set, started gathering dust when high cholesterol made us stop eating beef. Nevertheless, these and many other things we don’t really use were packed up to accompany us to our new life.

It’s great to have stuff, but the soon to be moving see their stuff differently. Every piece of furniture became useful according to the probability that we would use it in the future. Our townhouse rental had one living room, so one of our couches would have to go. Moving our twenty-year-old refrigerator 2,500 miles would cost way more than it was worth, so we planned to leave it behind. What others could use went to a charity (thankfully one that had free removal), but our garbage can was full for weeks. As I prepared to leave my job, I went through my accumulation of work related things and realized that I didn’t want to take any of it with me. I started giving things out like an April Santa Claus, hoping that others could benefit. For a year before we moved, I found it hard to accept gifts that were not consumable, imagining the growing mountain of our possessions that already needed to be packed. Even browsing the spring clearance sales seemed foolish; nothing was cheap if it had to be packed in a new box and shipped.

When the cross-country movers came, our jaws dropped as we saw a full-size semi truck back its way through our small side street. This was where all our stuff was going. A crew of three loaded everything like a jigsaw puzzle into the front fourth of the truck, fitting large pieces on the bottom to make a foundation for boxes in the middle and bicycles on top. Even though we had mercilessly pared our furniture down to the essentials, we still had plenty of stuff to move.

As the crew hefted our massive oak dresser down the narrow hall, one grunted “You know, pine is a nice, light wood, and you can stain it to look like oak. People can’t tell the difference.”

“Yes, I know,” I giggled back. Sitting in a fifty-year-old chair that once belonged to Craig’s grandfather, I pretended not to close my eyes in hope that the walls would be left intact. One of our first married acquisitions was a solid oak bedroom set. I think my five-years-ago self needed a symbol of permanence and stability in the wake of so many changes. Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage bed was carved from a giant stump still rooted to the ground. I wanted something almost as solid to testify to us putting down roots. Now we had chosen a different path, but solid oak bedroom sets can be uprooted, too.

When the movers were done, I stared at our accumulation of things, which now resembled a giant sugar cube. Stranger still, this room-sized distillation of our life would be driven to Utah to share truck space with another couple’s granite tabletops and crated curio cabinets. Together our separate lives would make the journey to Kentucky, or so we hoped.

“So, which level of protection do you want to add to your moving order?” I was asked as I signed the bill of loading. It turns out that moving companies make quite a bit of their money insuring people’s stuff. If something happens to an item, or even the entire truckload of one’s worldly goods, the companies limit their liability by making people sign consent to accept sixty cents per pound in return for a botched move. I paused, imagining a supermarket scale and a bulk price value. I didn’t like the thought of treating everything I’ve ever owned like broccoli. To avoid this fate, I was expected to pay a few more hundred dollars to upgrade to a high deductible replacement plan, or even more money for the company to replace anything damaged. For good measure, the head of the moving crew told stories about moving mishaps. One poor family’s crate was dropped 200 feet off a barge, reducing their furniture to matchsticks and infusing their clothes with jagged splinters. Another woman drove to her new home. Glancing back at the truck in her rearview mirror, she was just in time to see the hydraulic lifts on the moving truck fail, leaving it stranded on the railroad tracks in the path of an oncoming train. Her stuff was blown high into the air and spread evenly over thousands of square feet.

“I’ll take my chances with the sixty cents per pound,” I said uncertainly. It seemed a little shady to pay a large company extra NOT to damage my stuff, and our homeowner’s insurance protected goods in transit. I was much happier with the idea of paying someone ELSE to insure my stuff, who would then have recourse against the company if anything happened.

One of my favorite moving pictures was of me perched on the front seat of the moving semi, balancing my boot brace on the doorframe and reaching up to pull the whistle. After the camera clicked, I was perfectly happy to climb down and let the crew manage to drive the monstrous vehicle. Our Chevy Malibu was packed full, but at least it could turn sharp corners.

The truck made the drive in nine days, pulling up in front of our Lexington townhouse on a Monday morning. We were waiting and ready to watch them unload, but the first thing they did was spend two hours on the phone. Since neither of our employers wanted to foot the bill for our move, we paid by check, which is apparently not often done. Our movers would not unload until they received confirmation that our check had cleared, which is hard to do at nine a.m. eastern time when everyone on the west coast is still in bed.

I felt immense relief as I watched the movers wheel familiar things into our new dwelling. It was almost like receiving everything all over again. Every lamp, table, bookcase, and box was recognized and rejoiced over as we placed furniture and stacked boxes on the floor. I harbored a secret fear that we would be the one in a million whose truck would be pushed over a guardrail by pieces of a falling satellite, scattering debris over a desolate canyon, never to be seen again. My mom remembered this feeling as she reflected on the interstate move that brought our family to California when I was six years old. “After all, it’s just stuff. It’s important to hold it loosely,” she rightly said.

The best thing about moving to a new house is the rebirth of every item into a new life. We have a small oak cabinet that has been a microwave center, a media stand, and a bookcase, but is now a nightstand. The shelving that organized sweaters in our master bedroom closet now holds Craig’s books in his basement study. Now that we’ve bought a house and moved again in Lexington, we’ve experienced that renewal twice in four months. The Winnie the Pooh print that Craig bought me at Disneyland on our first anniversary went from the spare bedroom to the kitchen to the master bedroom as we moved houses. Even the small recorder that taped missed lectures when I was in college now records Craig’s field notes when he gathers information for his research. Finding it years after I thought I’d thrown it away was like receiving it new. I wonder if that would work with other things lying around our house. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go hide the rice cooker.

Serves Me Right (cont.)

On the fifth morning after I broke my foot, I got up, dressed in twice the amount of time it usually took, and donned my brace for my first day back at work. After easing myself into the driver’s seat of our Chevy Malibu and maneuvering my brace to the inside near the center console, I looked down at my left foot and experimentally rested it on the accelerator. Not bad. I pivoted to the brake pedal and back, wondering if my left foot would respond in an emergency. I shuddered at the thought of my right foot pumping inside the brace as my left foot dangled ineffectively and I helplessly smashed into the back end of a car that had stopped short in front of me. Thankfully, driving with my left foot proved easier than I expected.

My resignation, effective in two more days, made going to work seem anticlimactic. Still, I was happy to be back, and grateful that my classroom was just a short walk from the parking lot. I thought that my students would call me a chicken for missing the graduation trip to Six Flags, but they had more interesting things to talk about.

“What did you do to yourself?” asked my fourth period TA.

“Nothing! I just decided I am not enough of a fashion victim. I’m taking it to the next level. This is my half-gothic beach cripple look,” I said, lifting first my one black orthopedic boot and then my platform flip-flop. She raised one artificially chiseled black eyebrow and gave me a piercing look.

“So, did you get mad and kick a wall?”

“No, it was a freak accident. That kitchen linoleum is more dangerous than it looks!” I retorted in mock horror.

“Um, that’s pretty pathetic, Mrs. K.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I’ll miss my bow-staff class this summer. I may lose my black belt.”

Missing half of my last week of school was less than ideal, but it could not be helped. I was extremely immobile at first. I read six books in four days, reclining on the couch with my foot on ice for fifteen minutes out of every two hours. Every time I got up I would have to ease my leg into the brace, close the Velcro on the fleece that surrounded my ankle, and secure four wide Velcro straps that pinned my leg firmly to the back. My cat was afraid of the noise I made, as well as the sight of me crab-walking unevenly around the house like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

On Tuesday my mom came by with two large bags of shoes, all with lifts high enough to match the orthopedic boot. I chose a flip flop and a leather sandal, each with a three-inch heel. The right shoes went back in the box and straight into my closet. I won’t need a right shoe for six more weeks, I thought. I’m gonna miss the simple pleasure of picking out my shoes to wear every morning. Like my red Crocs, even though Uncle Dale says they look like Tupperware. Just thinking about my brand-new off-white beaded slides lying new in the box all summer makes me sick! All of my normal shoes were way too flat to wear, since I think that tall people don’t need to wear shoes that make them even taller. When I did get off the couch, I would sidle casually up to Craig and eye the top of his head, trying to see if my new platforms made me taller than he is. Apparently not, although I still check the vacation photos to see if there are any pictures in which I loom large and lopsided.

My students weren’t the only ones who loved to comment on my foot. “Auntie Krista is part robot!” my nephews screamed as I walked toward them in my new footwear ensemble. I did look a little artificial, in a Darth Vader sort of way. I wasn’t sure at first if the boot was an object of fear or admiration. Clomping around the grounds of the condos the family rented for summer vacation, I sounded like something out of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Step scraaaatch. Step scraaaatch.

“What is wrong with that lady?” children would point and wonder loudly before being shushed by horrified parents who would explain sotto voce that I was hurt and it wasn’t nice to draw attention to other people’s malformations. Actually, a neon sign saying LOOK EVERYONE, I HAVE AN OWIE! couldn’t have attracted any more attention than I was already getting. People of all ages couldn’t help bringing up the subject of my injury, even if they said nothing else to me. I discussed my case with the cat’s veterinarian, the bank teller, the librarian, and the bagger at the supermarket. My favorite comment was “Did you hurt your foot?” What does one say to this? Is it possible that I didn’t hurt my foot but put the brace on this morning in a state of sleepy confusion? “No, I just wasn’t sure if it would snow today or not and thought I should wear ONE ski boot just in case,” I would reply brightly.

I had more conversations with perfect strangers in my six-week convalescence than perhaps my entire adult life. In Grand Canyon National Park I rested on a bench while Craig took a ten-minute walk to a lookout. A nice older gentleman approached me, asked how my foot was healing, and then kept me company as he told me the story of his wife’s rafting accident in Something-Hole-Wyoming. “Three days into our tour she was climbing down the metal stairs to the dock, but they were tilted and she slipped off. Her shin scraped the step hard enough to expose six inches of bone. It took one hundred and forty-eight stitches to close the wound. They have excellent health care in Wyoming. The doctor told the nurse to do a basket-stitch to close the muscles back together, but she didn’t know how to do it and so the doctor did it himself. Her boot looks just like yours. She feels much better now, but she can’t get off the tour bus and we have a week of our vacation left!”

I was stopped in Best Buy by a woman my age who pulled off her sandal to show me a blue, swollen foot similar to mine. “I have a brace like yours in the car, but I stopped wearing it after three weeks. It was so hot I couldn’t stand it!” I could definitely agree with that statement. The black boot was like a greenhouse, trapping my leg in a bath of its own sweat. A week into my convalescence Craig started giving my leg warm baths, and I was moved to tears by his considerate pampering of my poor foot. Two days later the stench reached my own nose and I realized that I stunk so badly he couldn’t stand to sit next to me. During the drive to Kentucky I would take off the boot and scrub my leg with antibacterial wipes to keep the odor from overwhelming the cabin of the car.

Approaching weeks in the brace, I was definitely tired of other aspects as well. The cushy, shock absorbing foam that had allowed me to walk on my foot in those first tender days was mashed down and lumpy. Now it felt like walking on gravel, and I was tired of carrying around a visual advertisement of my recent medical history. While hobbling across the Lexington Mall, I noticed a salesman sailing confidently towards Craig and me. Suddenly, he stopped, his eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and he beat a hasty retreat, hiding behind his kiosk until we were safely past. I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I turned around and realized that he had decided it was a bad idea to sell a pair of roller-skate shoes to a cripple.

“Craig,” I mused over a latte at the Starbucks on Reynolds Road, “what if wearing the brace is a big medical conspiracy?”

“Hmm?” he stared back at me, probably thinking that the rocking motion of my walk had shaken my brain into a state of psychiatric confusion.

“What if this brace doesn’t help your foot to heal, but is just a punishment for being careless enough to break a limb in the first place? If it is, it’s working. I know I will seriously reevaluate the way I walk across the kitchen from now on.”

“If it is a punishment, wouldn’t it just be simpler to make you wear a sign or something?”

“Yeah, or a temporary tattoo that says I NEED TO BE MORE CAREFUL across my forehead.”

“Krista, you look so normal!” Craig remarked admiringly when I walked tentatively sans brace around the house three days later. He sure knows how to give a girl a compliment. I figured that if the woman from Best Buy could go cold turkey after three weeks, I could ditch the brace after just under five. I had a berry-red sunburn on my right knee from rafting down the Deschutes River, but the rest of both legs glowed winter white. My legs burned with the exertion of getting back on my bicycle, and when I got down off the bike my leg muscles wobbled with disuse. It wasn't the best way to introduce myself to the rolling hills of Lexington after avidly riding in the flat plain of the Central Valley. Truthfully, it would take weeks more for me to feel normal, but a whole new world of shoe choices opened up to me right away, and it felt great!

Serves Me Right

On a Friday night three weeks before the big move, Craig and I were having one of those picky little disagreements that mean the participants feel stressed and refuse to back down and be nice. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I remember that the skin above my eyebrows felt tight and I didn’t feel inclined to see things his way. I was planning to get up in a huff, stalk across the kitchen floor, and fling a bag of chips into a cupboard, closing the door not with a slam, but with just enough emphasis to communicate my lingering irritation.

I failed to notice that my right leg was asleep, and the signals that were telling it to move weren’t getting through. When I put my foot down for another theatrically emphatic step, I didn’t notice that I was walking on the top part of my foot, not on the bottom as people normally do. My foot twisted under me, and just before I was able to catch myself on my other leg I heard an ominous crack.

Well, the argument lost steam for me right there. I left the bag of chips on the kitchen floor where they had fallen and hobbled to the couch, noticing with dismay that my still deadened foot was making more little crackles with each normal step. No, I said to myself. It isn’t hurt. My feet pop all of the time; it’s just the way they are. I reached the couch, sitting and turning my foot so I could examine it. My skin was still so numb that it felt like touching someone else’s foot. Besides, I can’t be injured; I have too much to do! The eighth grade trip is on Tuesday! All week I’ve been promising my students that Mrs. Dean and I are going on all of the roller coasters with them! If I can’t go, they’ll think I am an old, motion-sick loser! My foot does (OW!) not hurt! Mind over matter: if I do not acknowledge an injury, I’m still all right.

The next morning, my mind had to acknowledge that I couldn’t walk to the bathroom without help. The first step off the bed was so painful it sucked the breath out of my lungs.

“Craig, I’m really worried,” I said tearfully. So much for mind over matter.

“Don’t be,” he reassured, “cats are really easy to litter train. She’ll be using the box before the day is out. You’ll see.” He thought I was worried about one of the mountain of small tasks that I had yet to start on.

“No, it’s my foot. It hurts really bad!” I trilled hopelessly. Craig walked over to the couch and sat down opposite me, fingering my streaky purple foot like a stack of index cards.

“Does it hurt when I press here?” he asked, as showers of white sparks clouded my vision and I gasped in shock. “It’s probably just fine, but let’s drive down to urgent care and have them make sure,” he said cheerfully.

He told me later that he knew from his examination that my foot was broken. He barely touched my joint and I grimaced like a torture victim, but he didn’t want to worry me so he maintained his air of casual calmness as I got ready.

I sometimes joke that Craig can judge how busy my workweek has been by whether or not I’ve made time to shave my legs. It had been a pretty long week, if you know what I mean. Though in pain, I couldn’t stand the idea of throwing on some sweats and having a highly educated stranger touch my unwashed, unshaven extremities. Getting into the tub meant putting all of my weight on my right foot for a few seconds. It hurt so much it made me dizzy, but I had no choice. I couldn’t hide the telltale signs of an incomplete beauty regimen by wearing pants. What if they had to cast me and I couldn’t get my jeans off afterward? Or would I have to take them off and wear a hospital gown home?

My limp up to the counter at urgent care was so piteous that they actually asked me if I wanted a wheelchair. I was immediately admitted to the room with the reclining bed and all of the operating equipment in it, the one I assume they save for the seriously hurt people.

Try as I might, I couldn’t make “walking across the kitchen” a worthy enough explanation for why my foot hurt so badly. The x-ray technician took it upon himself to further clarify the situation.

“Did you have a little drink before, huh?” he asked with a knowing smile and a conspiratorial wink. I hadn’t, but it didn’t surprise me that he asked. I had often listened to lame stories of other people’s injuries and assumed that a few too many beers had been left out of the story.

“No.”

“Were you mad?” he asked again.

“That I wasn’t drinking?”

“No. When it happened, were you mad about something?” The question was direct, but so kind that it disarmed me completely.

“Yeah.”

Still smiling, he shook his head understandingly. “Bad things happen when you are mad about something. A while ago my nephew left his Legos on the floor and I stepped on one.”

“Ouch, that must have really hurt!” I said.

“Yes, but then I got mad. I had told my nephew to pick up his Legos and he didn’t. I was so angry that I stomped my foot as hard as I could. My heel caught the corner of another Lego and drove it pretty deep into my foot. That REALLY hurt, and I had to get stitches. Sometimes bad things happen, but getting mad makes it worse.”
When I saw the doctor look up from my x-rays and frown at me, I knew it was going to be bad news. “It’s a hairline fracture.” He handed me a piece of paper.

“You have a hairline fracture of the proximal head of the fifth metatarsal,” I read silently.

I let out a long, slow breath. Great.
“We will give you an orthopedic brace.”

Score! No cast!
“You will have to wear it for six weeks.”

Six weeks! Are you kidding me? That would be…. the middle of July! I pictured introducing myself around Lexington in an orthopedic brace. “Hi, I’m Krista, your new neighbor/coworker/client/tenant/friend. I’m such a total idiot that I can’t cross a kitchen floor without committing grievous bodily harm, but it’s nice to meet you, too!”

“Sitting too long can pinch off your nerves. You need to move around more.”

“Yes. Definitely.” It’s all my fault. Go ahead and rub it in.

If you start tingling, change positions and don’t get up until full feeling returns.”

“Good idea.” Oh, I don’t think I can do that. I enjoy walking around on perfectly dead legs. Wasn’t the point that I didn’t feel any tingling? If I could FEEL that I had no FEELING, wouldn’t that mean that I COULD feel something?

“Would you like crutches?”

No. I would not LIKE a broken foot. I would not LIKE an orthopedic boot brace. What kind of a question is that? “Do I need crutches?”

“Well, some people get them if they need to walk a lot. It keeps the brace from dragging on the ground. How about pain meds?”

“No crutches, no drugs.” That’s all my students need. To see their English teacher hopped up on Vicodin. Hellllooooo, class! I feel goooooooood today, don’t you feel good, too?”

“Your injury is in a weight bearing area, so in six weeks you need to return for an x-ray to make sure proper healing has taken place.”

Not likely. In six weeks I’ll be three time zones away. I have PacifiCare insurance. As in The Pacific Ocean. They’ll refuse to cover anything short of an appendectomy out of the area, and I’ll be stuck writing a check for it. “Sure.” The doctor left the room, and I kept my face stretched in a rictus of cheerfulness until the door shut behind him.

“Wear this for six weeks,” said the nurse, strapping up what the staff called a “moon boot” for obvious reasons.

“I’m moving in three weeks,” I said numbly.

“Of course you are! Nobody ever breaks a bone when they don’t have something better to be doing. It’ll all still work out. Now, take a few steps and see if that feels all right!” said my nurse-cum-psychologist.

The boot worked by transferring my weight to my shin, keeping my ankle completely immobile while I took rocking steps forward. It was awkward, like a five-pound barbell was draped across my instep, but it beat the duck waddle I did to get into the clinic. “It feels pretty good. How many weeks until I can Thriller dance?”

As I shuffle-stepped past the checkout counter, I handed Craig one red sandal and smiled ruefully as I explained my injury dismissively. “Just a little crack in the bone, nothing serious, really. I’m fine!” I said brightly, waving to the nurse and insisting again that I didn’t need the offered wheelchair. I really did feel fine, up to the moment Craig shut the car door after me and I dissolved into self-pitying tears. “I broke my foot!” I wailed, with tears dropping off my nose and landing on my shirt.

We decided to drown my sorrow in a downtown Modesto coffee shop. Even carrying a latte across the café to our table was tiring and painful. Yesterday I walked miles without a problem. What a difference a day makes. “Sometimes bad things happen, but getting mad makes it worse,” the x-ray technician said. Boy, did I feel stupid. What bad things were happening to me? The long months of waiting were over, and we were leaving so soon. If I was so far behind on my work, why couldn’t I work harder instead of wasting time arguing like it was an Olympic sport?

I smiled tentatively at Craig, and he smiled reassuringly back. We had never really resolved our previous argument, but it was gone anyway. We were working as a team again, even though one member of the team would spend the next thirty-three days on the injured list.

Three Degrees Below Zero

For many, California epitomizes the American dream. “Go west, young man,” said Horace Greely’s famous 1851 editorial, and California is as west as one can go. “California, here we come,” trills the song. They make songs about leaving Las Vegas, but never about leaving California. In fact, I bet the person who left Las Vegas in the song went to California.

Those who wonder why Craig and I left California point out that California has it all: gorgeous state parks, mild winters, and fruit fresh from the orchard. Salaries are among the highest in the nation, and if houses cost more—well, that just means they appreciate more in value too. The beach is never more than a few hours away. Roller-bladers glide beneath the palm trees, and beautiful sunbathers lie in the warm sand. A radio plays the Beach Boys who “wish they all could be California girls.”

I once asked my then-boyfriend what slogan he would put on a bumper sticker, and he said “I LOVE CALIFORNIA.” And he did. We took rambling drives to enjoy the countryside, with or without a destination. Our first dates were to grand places like Yosemite, but also to small, out of the way streams and hiking spots. I remember one March morning in particular. We climbed the winding road to the summit of Mount Diablo. We spread a blanket, munched on sandwiches, and enjoyed a spectacular view of the Bay Area on one side and the Central Valley on the other. Craig proposed on an April afternoon at Half Moon Bay. Rays of sunshine pierced the clouds that had just dropped two hours of rain on us, and we were finally able to leave Craig’s car for a walk along the bluffs.

Craig loved California so much that I marveled he had ever left. He spent three years in Kentucky getting a master’s degree, and was a hair’s breadth from staying for a doctorate when something brought him home. I’m glad he came back, because we met six months later. A native of Modesto, California since the age of six, I ran into Craig at a church group meeting and was immediately interested. We dated long distance while I finished college. When he came to visit me in Southern California, the entomology degree never failed to come up in conversation. Craig was unique among the dates and loves of my friends, few of whom were in college, much less in possession of advanced degrees. My roommates called him “Bug Boy,” and amused themselves with composing corny love poetry from him to me:

Your eyes, they glisten like June bugs as they run,
Your lips are red like ladybeetles in the sun,
I can sense your pheromones from far away,
So fly to me, and let us buzz away today.

Craig made a few periodic inquiries about doctoral programs in the following years, but nothing ever came of them. When we got married, the subject of moving never came up. Like all young lovers, we were impervious to anything the world could throw at us. No matter what challenges we faced, all we needed was each other. We would live in California, in the Central Valley, the place you touch if you point to the center of a state map. Our parents would be close, work would be predictable. Kids would come, eventually, and we would have a good life.

Craig took a job managing crop protection on a thousand-acre farm outside Modesto. While not a perfect match for his degree, it was a chance to gain practical experience and make connections in the business. Walking through acres of healthy, green vegetables sounds restful, but keeping them green and healthy proved to be an enormous challenge. California summers, so long and romantic for schoolchildren, made for a brutal schedule from March to November. There was always a threat that needed vigilance—pests in the summer, diseases in the winter—and overseeing application of chemicals meant supervising the night shift. A year into the job, he received a cell phone, and it started ringing immediately. Some nights Craig came home at eight, took two or three calls before bedtime, and woke up to the phone at one. Then he would get up and dress for a trip to the farm to solve a crisis—shredded sprayer belts, oil leaking from tractors, or ruptured irrigation lines. It’s a schedule not many could take, and indeed three of Craig’s coworkers quit in his third year of work.

What kept Craig from quitting? He had a strong work ethic and a positive attitude. He remained grateful for the job and the opportunities it provided, except for the occasional two o’clock confession that he hated his job. But he always went out the door anyway. Admittedly, I was nowhere near so noble. I knew about overwork, but I had never seen hours like this. We would both jump awake in the middle of the night at the sound of the phone. Craig changed his ring tone three times that third summer, but it only took a month for each new one to raise my blood pressure and make me sick to my stomach. Craig would leave in the dark for yet another night, and I would lay with my eyes wide open, unable to fall asleep. This was not an office job; there was heavy machinery, and dangerous chemicals were involved. Craig is the most careful person I know, but how do you remain safe after working twenty-one of the past twenty-four hours? I lived in worry that Craig would be hurt, and indeed the signs of stress-related illness told me that the job was injuring him, slowly but surely.

On these mornings, I would wake up tired with the alarm, dress sluggishly, and head to school. Sometimes Craig would be back for a morning nap before heading back to work, sometimes not. My first period class and I would wake up together, and the poster on the wall of my classroom would haunt me:

Hold fast to dreams,

Easy for you to say, Langston Hughes. I just wished I knew what my dreams were. It’s hard to hold on to dreams without a good night’s sleep.

For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

What about Craig’s dreams? Was getting a doctorate his dream? Did he give up that dream to marry me? I would stare vacantly at the mauve walls of my classroom, sucking down coffee in a show of hypocrisy (my students weren’t allowed to drink in class), and wonder if our dreams were dead. A teacher’s job is to help students find answers, and the irony of the situation never escaped me. I spent my days dealing out answers like playing cards, and had no right answers for myself.

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams go….

Three years into Craig’s job, we faced reality. California agriculture turned out to be a profitable but shrinking industry. In an economy whose main crop is new houses, farmers retire and sell off land for development. In the fall, the orchards were ripped out, and in the spring a new crop of square stucco houses with red tiled roofs would take their place. There were no better jobs, only similar jobs. Occasionally, there would be talk of improvements to Craig’s current position, none of which included a reduction in hours on call.

Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

California’s fertile fields seemed barren. They were devoid of opportunities, time, and sleep. Snow is a symbol of desolation in the poem on my wall, but the thought of snow seemed welcome and refreshing to my mental state. Winter is a time of death, but also a time of renewal.

In December, my students always dramatized “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and, while it never failed to touch me, that fourth winter’s reading moved me to tears. In the penultimate scene of the play, as the Franks and Van Daans say their goodbyes while Nazi soldiers kick down the door to their hiding place, Mr. Frank says to Anne, “For the last two years we have lived in fear; now we will live in hope.” I was trying to help my students connect to a powerful piece of literature, but this time the words on the page seemed written with a message just for me.

Deep inside, I knew that Craig would have to leave this job, and I dreaded what would follow. Months of unemployment? Terrifying uncertainty? Whatever came, could it be any worse than keeping this job? I glanced again at the poster on my wall, and in my mauve classroom with thirty-eight sleepy eighth-graders, I had a moment of clarity.

Hold fast to dreams…

Looking back on the weeks after Craig resigned, I most remember a feeling of complete and utter invulnerability. Craig lingered over coffee in the morning as if to make up for four years of throwing on his boots and rushing out of the house. We put a map of the United States on our den wall and started marking opportunities as they came: Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Canada, and finally Lexington, Kentucky. I didn’t see it as hitting bottom, but rather as giving up a scant hold on something we didn’t really want. It was better to free fall into icy water and begin the long swim to shore. What was there to fear? My fears had already happened, and they really weren’t that scary. In a way, we had lost everything—health, financial security, and our plans for the future—but it brought us simplicity and peace of mind. It reminded me of the starry-eyed optimism of our newlywed days. All we needed was each other.

A month before we left on our new adventure, we ascended Freemont Peak, the highest point overlooking Monterey Bay. We sat on a rock beside the flagpole, looking past the trees, and down over the rolling green hills. It was as if I was being shown all I was giving up. The fertile Salinas Valley is a center of California agriculture. We had given it a try, but the lifestyle was not a good fit for us. We were giving up California and all the pleasures and familiar places it had to offer. There would be no more trips to Apple Hill in October or San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square at Christmastime. California had been my home since childhood, but now we were ready to move on.

It is autumn in Kentucky, and around me I see the beginnings of the fall colors for which the state is famous. After that will come winter, and if I get my wish I will see Kentucky frozen with snow. I imagine us sitting indoors on an evening, reflecting on the past year and planning for the future. We glance out the window and see the first puffy flakes of snow drifting in the wind. We go outside and catch a few icy crystals on our tongues, glad that winter’s finally come.