calling up from the valley of strangeness

It rests in the valley of strangeness. I am tossing brightly colored bell peppers stuffed in a thin plastic bag into the cart and he asks, "Is that for your house or mine?" I pause caught off guard.
It's not only our new reality bursting through that throws me, it's also the oddity of us shopping together at all. If I can help it I don't shop. When it became clear that BC's job was happening I had 3 worries, #2 "shit! who's going to do the shopping?!".

I would dare say the grocery store is the one place I show the most lasting of the damage. The last place I think to take back control of my life. I can't cover the emotions and/or impulses that arise as the last of the ceiling of my old life breaks off exposing blue sky above me.
Like the day I suddenly realized I could buy jello if I wanted to and there was nothing he do about it anymore. It was later at home placing 15 boxes of lime jello in my cupboard that I thought to ask the most obvious of questions, do I even like jello?

I understand it is not normal for a grown woman to walk into a store and have to remind herself she can buy whatever she wants as long as she can afford it. At first the thought makes me smile, then I see the stupidity in it and the guilt and embarrassment creep in.

If I can recover form that we have food, if not I turn around and leave the store empty handed. So for years BC has been our shopper. He doesn't ask why and he doesn't question my sporadic contributions to the household or the way I cling to buying food from alternative sources like the co-op and the farmer's markets.    

But BC asked if I would come along shopping and knowing he was leaving again I agreed. In fact I agreed twice. But I should never be allowed in Costco. I am completely useless among the giant isles. There is just too much there to make any sense of any one thing. I follow him and stand looking lost as he asks me questions: do you need bread? cheese? chicken?

I don't know, do I?

It's the same muteness produced by the damn of words lodging in my mind when I am asked a question I can't answer.

BC asks me to get laundry detergent. I stand in front of the row of boxes looking for something I recognize. Then I watch the other customers picking theirs and I look in their carts and wonder about their life based on packages of pre cooked chicken and frozen ready make potatoes. BC circles back for me, picks out the detergent he asked me to get, and we more on.

I watch him watching me. I know he wants to say something to me about all this but he doesn't know what. Honestly neither do I.

When we are done he lets me surf on the back of the charts while he runs dragging it full sprint through the parking lots. People younger than us stop to give us dirty looks.

And after I had spent most of the morning in bed with a horrible headache, and I shopped with him twice, he took me up the canyon. We hiked in the shadows. Across ice. Over mud. Up through the scrub oaks until we broke out onto the ridge. There we could see straight into the twisted valley below us. He stood. I sat. And separately together, listened to the calls of the search and rescue teams combing the mountain for the lost man they were sent to search for.

me? I believe I know exactly where they should be looking...

running on the ground

I’m stumped on what I can say about reuniting with BC in Moab,  About how it felt to see his new life with my own eyes.  Walking through it as if I was wearing a visitors' badge trying not to tread too heavily where I don't belong.

Between pushing hard to leave the farm in good enough condition for the in-laws to watch, all  the money stress, travel details, big and little kids, and the drive, I pulled into Moab sicker than I had been in days. My condition seemed to unnerve BC but he appeared to be a little unsure about how to behave either.

Did we really unravel 12 years in a few months apart? 

Well, no, not completely...

It took a couple of hours to get Beach to stop looking at me as if I was the interrupter of her dad's new life. By then she had already scribbled her name in the dirt all over the job site and jumped on every bed in the camper trailer where he is staying.

 To me it felt somewhere between a custody hand off and a first date.  But slowly in the landscape of Arches we began to find common ground again.  Which is sort of funny because the common ground we share is the appreciation for just how opposite we are from one-another. 

 There in the vastness of Arches I watched my child fall back in love with her father. 

 And I watched BC and I meet again as the people we are today.

 As the distance faded I could feel myself watching the horizon, wondering if this was our new life together-apart.  He really loves Moab and there is a ton of work there but not enough skilled contractors to do it all....

 Her gym, her world is in SLC and that is not changing.

The way it stands now his job is on track to wrap up in June. 

 But I suspect when the time comes it will be more of a new beginning than an ending to this way of life for us. 

Once I told BC I would follow him anywhere. At the time I meant Alaska. I had no idea that "anywhere" would include living separately-together. He never has been one for predictability or convention.  And although I have always claimed my perfect relationship would include being on the receiving end of a phone call home from camp 2 on Everest we all know I wouldn't hear the phone ring...

But from here I see my life very differently than I did before.  

In fact I think I have the best view of it I have ever had. 

 A lot of things that haven't been making sense I now understand.  We stayed the night in Moab in his trailer on the job site. We hiked through Arches, swam at the local pool, and ate Mexican food in town. Then I took us to stay in a 5 star resort in Colorado Springs.  Where we sat out on the balcony drinking PBR and laughing about the contrast. 

 For the first time in my life I think I truly see who I am, what I want, and where I am going.

Somewhere in the space and time of the drive home with Beach sound asleep as the miles rolled by, I reminded myself to tell BC to make sure whatever new car he was buying to replace little red has to have a full size spare and jack because where I am planning on going it requires the comfort of knowing you have a good spare tire just in case.

 It feels really good to finally be standing on my own two feet on solid ground.

the blue line: may contain strong or offensive language ie pinkeye.

Beach's gym is hosting a gym meet this upcoming weekend. Fun. I work, Beach competes, I work some more, and Beach has a birthday party to get to, I work some more, and Fisher's mom is in town to visit with him. More than likely that will include a fight about a motorcycle. A motorcycle 3/4 of his parents agreed on but she said no to, then yes, then no, then prayed about it and said god said no. I'm not sure if god signed off on her keeping all of his hard earned summer job funds from him over it, that is a grey area.

I should ask her since god and I don't talk... 

Feeling a bit scattered the kids and I decided we should make a giant calendar on the wipe board detailing the events of the next few days just to keep the farm running smoothly. Things are going to be a little crazy and I can tell you it is the dogs who are getting the shit end of the stick. Oh wait the chickens, I totally forgot about the chickens!

In blue marker I have 3 days listed: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Thursday almost looks normal. Just a few items like: Fish to school, Beach to gym, Misty to work... 7:30 Sarah-Mom pick up from gym drop Beach to"?", Misty 8PM pick up Sarah-Mom & go to gym set-up Lehi. 

Okay that question mark at where exactly Beach is going might be something I need to work out- I have options. But still pretty normal-ish.

Friday looks a little stranger. It has lots of times and arrows, a few stars, extra names like Alexis: dogs, added tasks like hijack Sophie early from school, carpool gym rats to Lehi for pre-meet practice, work/gym in Lehi, and Fisher's mom pick Fisher for weekend from school or home (?). 

Maybe it is the kids who are getting the shit end of the stick...anyway... 

Saturday is the craziest. It starts early and ends late. This is the madness and fun (no sarcasm) of meet season & putting on a gym meet. Doing it without BC running backup sucks. I think I have people I have never met helping me out. I might ask the animals to buddy up and take care of each other, although the lower on the food chain they are the trickier it gets to find a good buddy. Plus you can't ever trust the cats with anything.

And in a twist I have Sophie's dad getting both of the girls ready for a meet by himself. There are also a few task still with openings; apply within.

 Before I could finish this post Wednesday got added to the board.
Get trash cans out, lend Alexis the big red van (omg! look out slc!), drop Alexis's car off to mechanic but pick up it backup by 5PM, Beach to my mom's, go to the doctors (maybe), run paper work for Conner to Layton (if needed), pick up Beach & Sophie from gym 7:30PM, keep Soph overnight because the little kids at her mom's house have pinkeye. 

Which caused me to return a call to Sarah-Mom that started with "Fuck you, they have pinkeye?!" Trust me, there will be a part B to this post. I can feel it.
Until then: Go team! And we totally got this <3 
 

wish you were here, postcards from the farm

This is Beach. Around her all hell is breaking loose. Her uncle and her brother and even her mother are trying to trouble shot an electrical problem in the mudroom. 

Turns out I didn't just blow a fuse, mine or the house's. 

The house around her has an end of the world vibe as the boys pull fuses and shut down power to sections of the house. Electronics powered down and candles lit.

She is completely unaffected by it all.

The total disaster with the eye doctor most of which went down in front of her via the phone. The end result was a set of mismatched not completely correct contacts costing twice what we were told, a 2nd unprocessed refund hopelessly pending, lots of finger pointing between the front office, one f bomb, one phone call asking my parents for a short term loan, and a transfer of all Beach's records back to the expensive clinic.

The washer with frozen pipe at day 4. Where I got desperate, or more accurately got pressure from a 15 yr kid who had just spent a week in Moab and would like clean clothes sooner rather than later. So then I broke something overloading an outlet or a circuit or just an old house in my attempt to speed up the defrosting of the washer.

The one thing I haven't mentioned is I know from past experiences that when the washer freezes sometimes, roughly about half the time, things break somewhere inside. That makes it hard to hold out much hope for an easy solution. 

So it's winter in this old farm house. The mudroom is hardly beautiful and not exactly an inside or outside space; it is a room you always wear shoes in. And there are always complications with spaces such as these.  

Around here you put on big boots and a farm coat and walk over the crusty snow to the coop get eggs. You carry clean water from here to there in metal buckets and feed the chickens from old coffee cans both of which stick to your skin in the cold. You break up ice chunks and secure bedding. 

There is a rabbit and dogs and a few cats. Its all the same. 

The greenhouse has its own requirements, heaters and fans that need switching on and off. But late at night you can slip on the same big boots and cross the yard to the glow of the string of lights hanging inside the thin billowy frame. That is where the hot tub waits.

I don't have a way to make all this tie neatly back in. Yesterday just wasn't neat. There are other storms brewing. Meet season hanging heavy on the horizon (and the pocket book). Even the bench at gym was lacking luster. 

The day and the night sort ran like slow moving lava. Those of us able to make it to higher ground did pretty damn well and those of us who didn't quite get there just keep passing the phone off to those who did because the last thing BC needed to hear me say was what I was thinking and feeling about the whole thing. Instead he got to hear about who said what at gym and about India and about India's dog...

And this is Beach. She is an island. She doesn't care that the only vegetable left in the house is one lonely napa cabbage. 

Pro Se

BC's next return date to Utah [sic] has been pushed out to at least the end of the weekend and now hoovers suspended in fog of We Will See Land. I say his return to Utah because on Monday he called and kept saying "when I get back to Utah" I had to remind him the western states were not like the eastern ones; when you are in Utah you are generally in it for a very long time. Needless to say he was overly tired and possibly over whiskey-ed as well. 

I talked to his mom, assured her he would be here for Christmas because no one else will be willing to work. That was the only reason he came home for Thanksgiving. 

Overall things are going well even without him. The 3 parents legally tied to the 15 yr old all agreed that he is doing the best he has ever done for the longest sustained period of time. And yet they managed to say that he and I together is in fact working without giving me any of the credit for it; you are welcome. 

I however am giving credit to me and to the boy. We are doing better than okay. Family life is fun and wild, as it should be. The house is mostly clean, the animals cared for, dinners are late but they are good, and the school isn't calling me. 

I've gotten him hooked on This American Life and he keeps busy fixing the things I keep breaking- like the van door.

We did have a break-in. It was my mother-in-law dropping off a case of cake mixes. In the name of security all I'm going to say is she went to great lengths to get in the house. (she scares me)

Yes, overall the daily is going fine.

It is the nights that are long. They lack definition or perhaps boundaries. On my own I find I don't have the sense to go to bed when I should and I can't stay asleep even when I do. 

BC calls me with the construction reports, when I close my eyes I can see the walls rising. When this is all over, months from now, spring I am guessing, I want us to drive out beyond the sand dunes, down the long dirt roads of the west desert to slopes of Desert Mountain so I can catch up on all the dreaming I am missing.