Enough

It’s only the beginning…1000 square feet to go

“I’d like twenty-four bags of steer manure,” I said to the cashier.

The older woman at the other payment station snorted.

“Those boys in the feed lot are going to love you,” she said, her eyes above the mask wrinkling in a way that meant a smile.

“Oh yes, that’s a lot of manure,” the younger woman agreed. “Must be a big project you’re working on.”

I sigh. It is a big project. I’m covering the entire footprint of my old home in cover crop. Trying to reclaim the hardened soil, cut right down the layer of granite by the debris removal machines that cleared away the charred remains of our lives. It’s 1600 square feet of surface. The truth is, I need hundreds of bags of manure. Twenty-four is just a few hour’s work, which is all my body can handle at a time.

“It is a big project,” I reply, leaving out the explanation.

After the fire, I’d tell people about it. The last month, I’ve grown tired of mentioning it. Yes, even eight months later, pretty much everything I do is related to that loss, but the world around me has moved on. Only 800 homes burnt, that doesn’t count the illegal structures scattered all over the burn area that housed people as well. Still, that amount of folk is easily absorbed in a town like Santa Cruz, or I should say easily ignored. There are 60,000 people here, all consumed with their own lives and struggles, probably related to making rent each month. The fire is a distant memory to the lowlanders, only the mountain dwellers are reminded daily of the disaster as they prepare for yet another fire season.

“I hope you don’t have to haul these yourself,” the older woman added.

I do have to haul them myself. My husband works really, really hard at Zoom, and there’s more work on the property than he can handle on the weekends. Besides, I need him to do the work I can’t do, like deal with the downed trees strewn about the site where our tiny home will go, trees so big, they’re four feet in diameter. That is work I can’t do. But I can haul manure, rake in seed, weed gardens, move about wood chips, and cover it all with straw.

Right?

When my friends Delmar and Carin first introduced the concept of biodynamic gardening to me, I had visions of becoming a homesteading woman. Between their gorgeous, ocean view gardens and all the crafty women in my life like Andrea, who taught me to make jam and preserve food as well as make soap, or the multitude of knitters in the county, or even the local herbalists who made medicines from the land, I saw myself as setting out to be completely self-sustaining. We had this lovely, three acre property and we were going to raise goats for homemade chevre, grow olives and figs, preserve plums and peaches, and have lush flower gardens for the bees all year long. My husband quickly built me a chicken coop, then a fence to keep the guard dog in, followed by the most adorable goat barn. He also built two top bar beehives and made many garden boxes in the few sunny spots on the land.

It took us a few years to admit it, but we couldn’t even get tomatoes to grow, much less olives or figs to ripen. The apple tree gave us a few blossoms, the grafted fruit trees had lovely leaves and that was about it. When you live in a forest, you aren’t going to make enough food to feed yourselves. Hell, two different solar companies did full on analysis and told us we’d never have enough sun anywhere on the property to make solar worth it. There was too much shade. In the end, I settled on a half-homestead life—chickens, backyard beekeeping, goats that I would shear and spin their fiber, and herbs, lots of them, that I cooked with and used as medicines. Each flu season, I prepared by harvesting homegrown echinacea (until the damn gophers ate all my biodynamic plants) and tincturing it while bone broth cooked on the stove. It was the best I could do as a forest dweller and I came to know myself as a green witch.

As I haul the bags of shit out of the back of the truck down to the planting site, sweat now runs down my face. I had to buy sunscreen for the first time since I worked outside at the Waldorf school, I’d forgotten about sunburn. My friend told me the other day that she’d never seen me so tan. I considered her words.

“This is my Chicago look,” I told her. That was the last time I lived in the full sun

Now I’m lathering the stuff all over my body, for there’s no shade anywhere until four in the afternoon. Gone is the forest and of course, as I try to heal from this calamity, my mind is once again filled with visions of gardens, orchards, an apiary, vines, walls of roses, and meadows of cover crop. Tending the land has long been a dream of mine and now that dream is here. Only I’m approaching fifty and my body has been very clear that I’m not the hardy farmgirl I thought I was. I begin to sow the seeds and have to use my left hand because the right one is in a wrist splint, tendonitis being the first gift bestowed upon me via my endeavors.

I hate that only nine hours of gardening rendered my arm so useless, I haven’t even been able to walk the dogs. I try to save myself for the land because I have to work it. My husband can’t do it all for me. It’s funny, while I love him, I’ve only ever been afraid of him dying once before—right after the children were born. During those tender, young baby days, I often woke afraid of him dying and leaving me alone with the overwhelming job of parenting a toddler and infant. With time, as I grew more confident in my mothering skills and the boys proved more resilient than I’d originally thought, the fear of Walt’s death left me.

Until now.

We’ve long joked that he would die by tree. That I’d come home one day and find him impaled under a two hundred foot tower he’d decided to cut down by himself. Looking around our graveyard at the standing dead, I see those trees everywhere. He has to deal with them, and what was once a joke is no longer funny. Healing this land is our calling, both he and I, but I can’t do it without him. If he dies, the land will remain in this state. Sure, I could hire other men to do the work, but it’s taken eight months to get water on the land. Another two before power will come on. There aren’t enough men to do this work. Too many of us are in need.

I shield my eyes from the sun and gaze up at the forest, the dead leaves singing in the gentle breeze, and think of my friend Lydia, a gardener who literally has a fan club. I’d met her at work, she was the gardening teacher at the school. The gardens at the Santa Cruz Waldorf School are a magical place, decades of families have been nourished there as the various gardening teachers have come and gone. It was Lydia who came to my home one day to teach me how to spray the biodynamic preps, once at sunrise and once at sunset. She’s now a local permaculture star. I bet Lydia could do this alone. Lydia is the homesteader I’ve always wanted to be. Hell, she’d probably already have a cob house built along with a chicken coop. I imagined chickens clucking in a verdant meadow, smoke rising from the chimney in her tiny, brown house, laundry hanging in the breeze next to the washtub. Yes, if Lydia’s land burned, she’d be ready. I, not so much.

Rubbing my sore arms, I spread the straw out over the tiny seeds. You can see where I’ve been, the manure is dark against the harder, pale brown land I’m trying remediate. There will be a garden here in the future, but right now I have to call in the beings of the underworld to start their work. To create soil that will absorb water and moisture. To encourage roots that will nourish the bacteria and fungi needed to do this. I’m not Lydia, I’m not even a tenth of the homesteader I fancy myself. Off-grid living has been forced upon me and yet what I really long for is a shower and to be able to wear nice clothes here again. I want garden parties where my shoes don’t get covered in dust. The forest floor is healing nicely, but the places where machines have been, whether to remove the toxic debris, slaughter the trees without our permission, or cut trenches so we can have water and electricity, have hardened the soils and the land now has scars that resemble the stretch marks across my stomach. The soil in those scars is dusty, dry, and in need.

At five o’clock, the biodynamic calendar signals that moon is now moving from an earth constellation into a fire one. This means my root day is ending. According to biodynamic agriculture, it’s best to sow cover crop seeds on a root day. I finish my work and power up the generator to water the new seeds. I admire the small green shoots that have come up already, so full of promise and hope. I step back and listen to the sprinkler, reminding me of a humid day in my childhood, running through on the slippery Midwestern grass to cool down after dinner. I’ve worked at least twenty hours and I have hundreds more to go. My arm is screaming in pain, my hands hurt, and I feel betrayed by my body. I should be stronger than this. Everywhere I turn, there is so much work to be done. I see what I can do myself and what my husband alone can do and it frustrates me. He is the one who is needed. Yet again, my calling requires him for success.

Jackson’s virtual covid-safe college graduation is today. The fact I can’t be there shreds my heart, and as I log on to watch it live on YouTube the tears yet again form in my eyes, but he managed to finish a physics degree on time, in-spite of a global pandemic and losing his childhood home to wildfire as his senior year began. I’m proud of him. Our other son, Michael, is in Philly, working in a game design company, his lifelong dream. I needed Walt to raise them. I need him now to raise this land. To plant the seeds that one day will bring beauty and life.

That’s good enough.