Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Three


Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch . . .





Saturday morning I’m awakened at an absurdly early hour by Ty Cobb, our rooster, who doesn’t know from weekends. Every day is a day to get up with the sun, in Ty Cobb’s opinion.

“I think Ty Cobb would taste good for lunch, don’t you?” I ask my dad when we meet in the hallway, both of us yawning. “You can eat roosters, you know. Some people have rooster for Thanksgiving instead of turkey.”

My father heads downstairs. “We need Ty Cobb. Without him, we don’t get baby chicks. You like chicks, remember?”

I clomp down the staircase after him. “No, that’s Avery who likes baby chicks. Or at least she likes flushing them down the toilet.”

I learned very early in my farming career not to get too attached to the smaller animals. There are always predators like Avery around who will break your heart by flushing away the livestock.

“That was years ago,” my dad points out. “I can’t even think of the last time Avery put a chick in the toilet.”

“Dad, we’ve only lived here five years. It’s not ancient history.”

We arrive in the kitchen, where my mom and my eight-year-old sister, Avery, are digging into their scrambled eggs. Farm-fresh scrambled eggs, my mom would be the first person to point out.

I would be the first person to point out that we don’t actually live on a farm. It’s more like a farm-ette. A mini-farm. No, make that a wannabe farm.

I am the only person in my family who has these sorts of thoughts.

“Avery and I are going to the flea market after chores this morning,” my mom informs me at breakfast. “Do you want to come?”

“I’m going to go to Sarah’s,” I say, pouring myself some juice, my tone making it clear that even if I had no plans, my answer would be Not a chance. “We’ve got work to do on our project.”

“I need your help this afternoon, don’t forget.” My father is standing in the doorway, coffee mug in hand, about to head out back. “It’s Mr. Pritchard today.”

I sigh but make an honest effort not to roll my eyes. “Okay. But can we not stay out there all afternoon?”

“I thought you liked Mr. Pritchard.” My dad sounds vaguely hurt, like he can’t understand why I’m not doing cartwheels at the thought of spending yet another weekend afternoon helping him gather data for his latest academic adventure.

“I do, but the last time we went to see him, we were there for, like, five hours.”

“He’s a fascinating old guy.” My dad grabs his pink Al’s Garage cap from its peg and shoves it on his head. “And he won’t be around forever.”

I have to admit this is true. We’ve gone to visit Mr. Pritchard four times now, and each time he’s seemed a little bit smaller. It’s possible that one day he’ll simply disappear into thin air and never be heard from again.

After breakfast, I pull on my Official Farming Jeans, which are jeans that are never worn for anything else but outdoor chores, so I don’t worry about what kind of muck gets on them. In fact, I hardly ever wash them, because why bother? It’s true they’ve developed a distinct odor that even Avery, Miss “I’ll Take a Bath Once a Month, but Only If Absolutely Necessary,” wrinkles her nose at, but to me that’s the point. If you’re going to give me chores that result in goat poop on my pants, you’re going to pay the olfactory price.

Next, I don my Official Farming Shirt, a blue plaid flannel shirt missing the bottom two buttons, which I wear over the “Rednecks for Peace” T-shirt my dad gave me for Christmas last year. He keeps asking me why I don’t wear the T-shirt so everyone can see it, and my answer is pretty simple: I’m not a redneck. I’m not a rural person, a country girl, or just plain folks. I’m doing my best to be a normal teenage girl here, people. That I’m for peace is entirely beside the point.

In the mudroom, I pull on my work boots, which are brown and lace up to mid-shin and could not be uglier. But when you’re stomping around in the mud, pretty foot-wear isn’t exactly a priority. In fact, as I learned so well yesterday, it should be avoided at all costs.

Now it’s time to enter Farm World with my mental mixed bag of feelings. The farm is beautiful! (It smells.) It’s natural! (It makes me smell, naturally.) It’s environmentally friendly! (It’s an environment that produces teenage girls who are shunned by their peers for smelling like their environment.)

“You used to love it here,” my mom says now when I complain about living miles away from civilizing influences, such as shopping malls and best friends. “You used to say living on a farm was the best thing ever.”

“That was back when I was a kid,” I point out. “I’ve matured.”

“Isn’t there anything you still like about it?”

My mom always looks so disappointed when she asks this. In fact, “confused disappointment” seems to be my parents’ number one reaction to me these days. Sarah says it could be worse. According to Sarah, her parents’ reactions to her plans and ideas could best be described as “shocked disapproval.” And it’s true, the Lymans can be pretty strict, but at least they don’t act like everything Sarah says and does is an indictment of their chosen lifestyle.

“It’s pretty,” I admit. “And you make great bread.”

My mom is a master baker. If you’d known her before we moved out here, you’d be flabbergasted to hear this. I mean, she was almost famous for how bad her cooking was. Who could forget the elementary school PTA bake sale in third grade, when my mom sent in a batch of chocolate-chip cookies? I handed the shoebox full of cookies over to one of the PTA moms, who chirped, “Oh, chocolate chip, my favorite!” then winked at me and whispered, “I’m going to sneak one. Don’t tell!”

She snuck, she bit, she tasted, she spat. After she recovered, she put the box under the table and smiled weakly at me. “Maybe we’ll just save these for later.”

For the most part, my mom didn’t bake, and she didn’t cook. She bought, and she thawed and reheated. She did a truckload of microwaving. But once we moved to the country, she decided to take her cooking and baking seriously. “I want to live a homemade life,” she declared, and it only took her a couple of months to figure out that baking soda was not a substitute for baking powder and that following a recipe without skipping any steps, even the boring ones, was a good thing.

So that was a definite plus side to farm life—edible cooking.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t love the farm the way I used to. It’s the kind of guilt you feel when you stop hanging out with a friend you don’t have anything in common with anymore. You think she’s great, but there’s nothing to talk about. She’s into soccer, you’re into basketball. She likes partying, you’re a library girl. She’s all about crop rotation, you’re all about not being completely humiliated walking down the halls of your high school because manure’s clinging to your shoes.

When I get out to the goat pen, the girls await. Loretta Lynn trots up to greet me, rubbing her nose against my arm. She, like her boon companions Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells, is a Nubian, which means she has a very nice Roman nose and doesn’t look like a picture-book goat at all. Of all the girls, she’s the most affectionate. That’s probably because she’s at the bottom of the goat hierarchy. Loretta Lynn is sort of like Andie Rowan in eighth grade, who was nice to everyone in hopes that one day someone would actually say hi to her in the hallway.

In one hand I carry a bucket, in the other, a stool. After four years of goat milking, I’m pretty much an expert at it, but unlike when I was ten, when I could say the word “teat” without blushing, now I can’t even think the word “teat” without dying a little death. But aside from the unfortunate vocabulary aspect of it, I actually like milking the goats. It’s satisfying to fill up a bucket with milk that later will become delicious, creamy cheese.

I’ve also found that milking goats can be therapeutic. I talk to the girls to calm them, and because I need a topic to talk about, and because they don’t really care what that topic is, usually I talk about myself. Really, they seem pretty interested, which is amazing, given how truly mundane my personal life is.

“So Sarah and I already got started on our project—total shock, since it’s not even due until November—but it looks like we’re going to have to change the whole thing, since Katie Womack and Lindsey Holpe claim they signed up to do Madeleine Albright before we did. Total lie, by the way, but Ms. Morrison is so clueless, it’s pathetic. Also, she and Katie Womack’s mom went to college together or something, so Katie can do whatever she wants as far as Ms. Morrison is concerned.”

Loretta Lynn looks at me sympathetically over her shoulder, and I continue happily. It’s amazing how fun it is to just say whatever comes to your mind and not worry that everyone will think you’re a total idiot.

“Mom thinks we should do a project on Sally Ride, which would be okay, except I’m not that interested in space travel, and neither is Sarah. Wouldn’t it be sort of disrespectful to be so totally, well, unenthusiastic?”

Loretta Lynn shifts her weight around, the way you would while sitting through a really long lecture on, say, the Peruvian Bill of Rights. Is it possible she’s getting bored? Okay, so this is maybe the third time we’ve had this discussion, but still, she’s a goat. A bottom-of-the-pecking-order goat.

“Well, I’m sorry,” I tell her after a moment or two of petulant silence on my part. “But we’ve got to pick a project topic, and we need to do it this afternoon to turn in on Monday, and if I don’t come up with a totally awesome topic, you know what Sarah’s going to want to do, don’t you? You know what completely stale idea she’s going to suggest, right?”

Loretta Lynn settles. She loves it when I talk trash about Sarah.

“Let’s say it all together on the count of three—one . . . two . . . three . . . Geraldine Ferraro!”

Loretta Lynn bleats an exclamation of pure dismay. The first woman vice-presidential candidate, who ran with Walter Mondale in 1984? she seems to be asking. That Geraldine Ferraro?

“Yes,” I affirm. “That Geraldine Ferraro.”

Sarah Lyman has been my best friend since the summer before first grade, when we both moved to Victoria Lane on the exact same day, our houses directly across the street from each other. As soon as Sarah saw me sitting on my front step, she ran over to me yelling, “Are you the first-grade girl they promised me?”

“Who promised you?” I looked at the tiny girl standing in front me, her yellow braids tied with red and white polka-dot ribbons, and was sure she couldn’t possibly be going into first grade. Maybe someone was promising the preschool girls in the neighborhood a free elementary school student if they ate their peas five nights in a row.

But no. “I’m Sarah,” she said, offering me her tiny hand. “I’m in first grade too. So we should probably be best friends and share things. I have a big sister named Emma, but she won’t share anything.”

Sarah and I have shared a lot over the years—clothes, books, earrings, a love of trashy magazines, a dedicated passion for funky shoes, and an abiding belief that there exists somewhere an island of cute, smart boys who are interested in girls for their minds. We’ve yet to find this magical land, but we haven’t given up hope.

This past summer Sarah picked up a copy of the Atlantic in her dentist’s office and read a horrifying account of child slave labor in the cocoa fields of Ghana. Sarah lives for chocolate, but now she can’t bring herself to eat it. Solution? Become the U.S. ambassador to Ghana and convert cocoa production into a democratic, humane, and child-friendly industry we can all feel good about.

“I’d already been considering a career in politics,” she explained to me at the pool soon after her decision was made. “And you know how I feel about chocolate.”

In preparation for her ambassadorship, Sarah signed up for the Great Girls and Women of American History elective, and I signed up too, so we’d have at least one class together. Sarah’s hoping to pick up some helpful hints by studying famous women politicians such as Hilary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and, of course, Geraldine Ferraro, former vice-presidential candidate and onetime U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

After I finish with the milking, get the girls fed, and freshen their water, it’s off to make myself presentable for what I’ve come to think of as the Real World. When you live in Farm World—or in our case, Mini-Farm World, a land of five acres, a flock of chickens, and one small goat herd—smelly jeans and muddy boots are perfectly acceptable. But in the Real World, a little more effort is expected.

“I’m going to Sarah’s,” I yell to my dad from the back porch after I’ve showered and put on jeans that don’t stink to high heaven. He’s fixing a wheel on the chicken tractor, the mobile coop our flock lives in. “I guess you don’t have time to give me a ride, do you?”

My dad shakes his head. “Sorry. Too much work to do. Be back by one, okay?”

“Okay,” I yell, then head out back, where my trusty bike is leaning against the side of the garage. As I begin my ride down the gravel driveway, I pretend I’m actually riding a moped through the Italian countryside, and in a matter of moments I’ll be in the center of Venice, where I’ll meet my charming and fashionable friends for espresso and gossip.

By the time I’ve turned left onto Haw River Road, I’ve forgotten that Farm World even exists.