“Oh?” she replied. I thought she would be thrilled to hear from us, but her flat voice didn’t return my fondness. I pictured her standing up next to the phone. “I’m happy to hear it. Say, you didn’t take my sewing scissors, did you?”
I had, accidentally. I’d found them in my quilting bag.
“Please send those back as soon as you can. Those are my best scissors.” What was I being so emotional about? her tone seemed to say.
As we said good-bye, I got the feeling that she was leaning into her next thing, as if I could almost hear the Velcro on her shoes ripping. We were eight hundred miles away, and our chance meeting clearly wasn’t the divine intervention, the wrinkle in rural time, that it was to me. It was just over.
—
Back home, I was still thinking of Ruth’s physicality. The way she jumped out of her shoes at the door and pounced on the business of dinner. The way she snapped green beans two-handed so as to get through them faster. The punishing way she drove over the corrugated field’s ruts, her four-wheeler bouncing, as if it was a race against time to poison moles. The way she methodically cut coupons and organized them in piles.
Thousands of acres of wheat or a kitchen garden a quarter mile long…whichever, she treated them the same. The act of raising food no longer seemed to me just a choice; it was just what you do. Long lines of my family had been steeped in this notion, and yet it took driving hundreds of miles north toward the Arctic Circle, and back, for it to come to rest in me. Ruth’s ambition was contagious.
We’d traveled farther north and further back in time in search of the roots of our unlikely attraction to our homestead in the woods, and we’d found them. Our place could yield as much beauty as Ruth’s if I just put my belief, and my back, into it.
Luckily, when we returned home in mid-September, the garden hadn’t yet frosted over as usual and looked to be waiting for us. The frost had come to bite, but just lightly, and all of my tomatoes were hanging ripe on the vines. We harvested two boxes of squash. And then we decided to dig out a much larger garden, carving out a fifty-foot rectangle where the hill teemed with native hazelbrush vines. Our new garden would have two entrances and terraces cut into the hill, and we’d surround it with a seven-foot-high fence that the deer couldn’t jump.
My dream of pioneer cooking renewed, I started cooking our morning oatmeal overnight in the tiny oven set into the woodstove. It was kind of a crapshoot, but if I added enough water to steel-cut oats and wild rice, the banked fire plumped them perfectly by morning. With this dish I fell in love with inexactitude, with making things that rely less on precision and more on one’s inner knack. We topped it with butter and maple syrup and toasted almonds, good ballast for working outside.
I put on my best Canadian thrift-store finds—a roomy, stiff pair of men’s leather work boots with laces that ran clear down to the toe, just like the boots Dean had worn, and a thick hooded woolen sweatshirt encircled with Inuit hunters—and buttoned my hunting-orange vest tightly over that. We had a pulaski axe and a shovel, and we took turns chopping and pulling out the hazelbrush roots. I swung the pulaski into the dirt, hooked the blade under a big one, and then, with my new boots as leverage, leaned back on the pole until the root stretched and snapped. After shaking the roots free of as much coffee-colored dirt as we could, we tossed the mangled rhizomes into a pile for burning. Unlike the rich dirt in northern Saskatchewan, our woodland topsoil only measured about four inches deep, nothing more than a thin layer of chocolate icing on a thick yellow-colored cake of sand, and the garden needed every bit of it. After a week of working in the cool fall air, we decided that if we were going to keep living in this place—and, freshly invigorated after our trip, it seemed we would—we should give it a proper homestead name. We’d call it Hazelbrush, to remind us of the effort we put into it. The nut’s hard-shelled, hard-won edibility seemed to fit.
14
CIRCUS OF THE RIDICULOUS
So began a three-year-long migratory pattern. We lived up north for the entire gardening season—May to September—and moved down to Minneapolis in the winter, where we would take jobs in order to save up three or four thousand dollars to fund our nonelectric (e.g., cheap) life during the summer. We considered ourselves snowbirds on short leashes, shuttling between the northern and southern poles of the state. This was our plan, when I believed in it.
Like a mother who doesn’t remember the pain of childbirth, I somehow forgot the agony of moving that descended on me like an absolute palsy each fall and spring. Every time we had to move—to pack and clean and organize—I collapsed into a chair and threatened never to leave it. Aaron ignored me and pushed ahead. With his charming—borderline annoying—habit of making loony ideas sound perfectly sane, he framed it in a romantic light: “If we’re going to do this, we need to be pragmatic. You have to be especially pragmatic about your dreams.” Once we were on the road, I quickly recovered and realized I’d been acting like a major pain in the ass. Eventually my constant grousing irritated even me.