by Pam Houston
By the time my mother died in 1993, the drug Prozac had been taken by more than ten million people. And yet I don’t believe the word “depression” had ever been uttered in my childhood home until once, during fall break of my junior year of college, I told my mother I had started taking advantage of Denison’s free psychological services.
A boy I had befriended from my geology classes was showing strong self-destructive tendencies—he had just left a severed pig’s head in the ice machine in one of the all-female dorms—and I’d made the appointment hoping to get advice on how I might help him. After giving me advice, the therapist, a kind, smart and soft-spoken man by the name of Jeff Pollard, asked simply, “And how are you feeling these days?”
I felt my body go utterly still for the count of one, two, three . . . and then I burst into sobs that lasted upward of ten minutes. I can still feel that office around me as if it were yesterday, the leather books, tall ceilings and high windows, through which I could see all the trees on the quad ablaze in fall color. I can still feel my dawning understanding that therapy was a thing that had been invented to, among other applications, help people who had suffered exactly the sorts of things I had suffered at the hands of my father. Even then it had taken many sessions for Dr. P to convince me that it was okay to accept that help.
My mother and I were driving back from an unsuccessful trip to the mall. I had arrived at my parents’ house wearing a peasant blouse and a long colorful hand-painted skirt I’d bought for more than I could afford at an art fair. She said the skirt made me look fat and we’d go buy something she could stand to look at me in. I had fended off several pencil skirts and dart-heavy blouses, as well as several items designed by Liz Claiborne.
We hadn’t exactly stopped speaking to each other, so after ten minutes of car silence I decided to tell her about Dr. P. “He says I suffer from PTSD, which manifests in bouts of depression and low-level anxiety, but the good news is, he doesn’t think I’ll need drugs. He thinks the talking will work.”
My mother kept her eyes on the road, but I saw the corner of her mouth twitch slightly.
“I wasn’t sure about it at first,” I said, “but now each week I find myself looking forward to the hour I spend in his office.” I fiddled with my seat belt. “Dr. P says I’m learning to hear the sound of my own voice.”
“Depression, huh?” my mother said, louder than I expected. I’d been hoping she’d ask me what the letters PTSD stood for. “You know what we did for depression when I was your age?”
Drank? I managed not to say.
“Drank!” she said, her eyes shooting to the car clock confirming that we were, in fact, at least thirty minutes past cocktail hour.
Back at the ranch after our hike, I give a couple of hours to one of the larger fall projects: coating the exterior logs with UV protector. At 9,000 feet, at this latitude, the UV eats through everything over the course of a summer: paint, plastic, enamel and, if I don’t reprotect them every fall, the logs themselves. The instructions on the giant can warn it takes the coating twenty-four hours to seal correctly and during that twenty-four hours it must not encounter rain, dew or temperatures below 40 degrees. It almost always gets below 40 degrees at the ranch at night, except sometimes in July, during the monsoon. However bad cold is for the sealant, I feel certain half an inch of rain in forty-five minutes would be far worse. If we are not in a drought year, it dews heavily every night until everything freezes solid. Given the impossibility of following the instructions on the can, I slap some coating on the logs in the heat of every afternoon, and hope to get the whole house covered before the snow flies.
The air at the ranch is thin, dry and cold, and the snowstorms get stuck in the dip and swirl of the basin, turning back, and back again on themselves, sometimes dropping as much as four inches an hour. On any given morning from the first of October on out, I might wake to frozen ground and flurries. By dinnertime the split-rail fences may have all gone under, and I might not see the tops of them again until March.
That will be the day that launches four solid months of worry. For my elderly geldings, Deseo and Roany, who get so stiff standing on that frozen moonscape with their achy old-man legs they sometimes won’t eat, won’t even take the short walk to the water trough. For the mini-donkeys, Simon and Isaac, who are far younger than the horses but no taller than the split-rail fences. In the biggest blizzards they have to power through the pasture like Tonka trucks, leaving their belly marks in the fresh powder. I spend too many hours imagining them high centered in a drift some howling night, their little legs spinning and spinning but gaining no purchase at all.
I worry about my Icelandic sheep, especially Jordan, my best ewe, who has a healthy lamb of her own each year and is always willing to nurse the orphans. She is prone to respiratory illness brought on by sudden cold snaps. I worry about my chickens, who tend to attack (and sometimes kill) one another in extreme weather of any kind.
What edges out the worry, of course, is the wonder. Because what could be better than 48 inches in twenty-four hours (76 inches is the local record), than a couple of Irish wolfhounds leaping though bottomless powder with giant smiles on their faces, than a herd of two hundred elk making their stately way chest-deep in the snowbound pasture toward the river? Best of all, what accompanies each snowstorm is the knowledge that the aquifer is getting replenished, that summer wildfire fear is assuaged, if not abated, that the rivers will be full of trout and the pastures full of flowers come July.
The autumn I was twenty-five, I flew from graduate school in Utah to my parents’ house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, something I did with relative consistency up until my mother died. Downstairs in the TV room, my father and I were watching the Phillies get beat up by the Mets, when the phone rang and my mother answered it upstairs. A few minutes later we heard her banging around with some fervor. My father leaned toward me, said, “Go see what your mother is up to, will you?”
In her bedroom she was packing a small suitcase.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“That was Jean,” my mother said, without looking at me.
“Jean, as in your sister?” I asked.
In the quarter century I had been on the planet, I had maybe heard my mother say her sister’s name five times.
“Yes,” she said. “My father is dying in a hospital in Florida, and he says he wants to shake my hand.”
I looked at my mother for signs of fracture, but as she gathered her makeup into a little cloth case with red foxes printed on it, she seemed exactly as she had been before. If my mother had mentioned Jean five times in my life, it was five more times than she had talked about her father.
The story I’d been told (who had told me, I wondered in that moment—my father? Martha Washington?) was that on the very same day my mother’s mother died in childbirth, her father abandoned the girls.
Aunt Ermie and Uncle Marion, who had never wanted anything to do with children, agreed to raise them. Less than a year after my mother ran away to Broadway, Jean joined her as a way to get out of their sad and angry house. They had a sister act, at first, and eventually went abroad with USO.
Even though Jean was older, my mother had always been the wilder sister. When showbiz got too unruly for Jean, she returned to Spiceland, Indiana, found religion and married her high school sweetheart. My mother had told me, but only once, that Jean never forgave my mother for corrupting her, for luring her to the big city, tarnishing her reputation and ruining her life. The sisters stopped speaking when Jean returned to Indiana, and as far as my father or I knew, this was the first time Jean had made contact in more than forty years.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked, though the suitcase was making the answer apparent.
“I’m going down there,” she said. “I’ve never laid eyes on the man, and this is apparently my last chance.”
“Do you want me to go with you? Or drive you to the airport?” I offered, something about her matter-of-fac
t tone scaring me a little.
“No, no, stay here. Get your father to take you out to dinner. I won’t be gone that long.”
The next day, at nearly the same hour, the Mets taking it to the Phillies once again, my father and I heard the garage door open. My mother climbed the stairs without glancing in our direction, and my father indicated with his head.
By the time I got to her room she was already unpacking.
“How did it go?” I asked her. “What happened?”
She looked at me as if I were crazy. “What do you think happened?” she said. “I shook his hand.”
And with that she turned back to her suitcase.
I went downstairs to watch the ninth inning. A few minutes later we heard her in the kitchen, starting dinner, humming one of her old torch songs, mixing herself a drink.
I finish coating nearly the entire west side of the house with an hour to go before sunset. If I extend my ladder fully, and stand on the second step from the top I can reach all but the four logs closest to the peak, and those logs are protected from the worst of the sun’s rays by the roof’s eaves anyway. Because I have not successfully taught William to dial 911, I leave it, each year, at that.
Tomorrow I will get on to the roof with a coarse-bristled round brush and the series of screw-in poles that allow me to sweep my chimney. I will force that brush from the top of the chimney all the way down into the basement and scrub for all I am worth for a good twenty minutes. Then I will climb down from the roof with my face and arms blackened by soot, relatively secure in the knowledge that if this turns out to be the winter that ends all winters, at least we have begun it clean and creosote free.
About six months and four cords of wood from now there will be an April night so warm it will seem like overkill to build a fire. The next morning I will open the windows to air out my bedroom and closet. I will hear the hum and whir of the automatic pump in the basement as it gets to work on the water that has inevitably seeped inside as 120 acres of snow turns to liquid and then tries to displace itself. I will trade my snowshoes for my XtraTufs because almost overnight the pasture will have turned from mostly snow to mostly muck. As I zigzag across it, trying to stay out of the deepest mud, I will spot a flash of blue so simultaneously bright and deep it won’t quite make sense in this late winter color scheme of bare branches, dusky clouds and dirty ice. The Rocky Mountain bluebirds will have arrived, only the males at first scouting my pasture for a nesting place.
I’ll return to the house, and load the sled with the four new bird boxes I ordered from Audubon, an electric drill and some screws. I lose two boxes a year, on average. Sometimes a martin pries the lid off, sometimes a horse uses one for a scratching post, and sometimes the wood turns to dust when the high-altitude sun works on it for a decade, so mounting four boxes a year on trees and fence posts keeps me ahead of the game.
I’ll watch the bluebirds flit along the fence line, hear the warble, high and clear, and I’ll know the 35 below zero nights are over, that there will be one more big dump of snow so heavy the horses will go on a water strike rather than slog through it to the trough, but it will melt in a matter of days. And before too long, there will be tiny buds on the aspen trees, the ice-choked river will run free again, and a green so subtle I think I might be imagining it will tint first the yard, then the pasture.
The horses’ spines will relax all the way to their tails, the chickens will venture out of the coop and even the coyotes’ barks will seem lazier, a little less hungry, a little less lonely. The wild iris will push up through the soil, and the roan, whose winter coat is burgundy wine, will shed out to a bright, barely speckled gray. In a matter of weeks, the paint-by-number landscape will have filled in around that first flash of blue: pale green aspen leaf, crimson paintbrush, purple lupine, red-tailed hawk.
A few days after we talked about depression, my mother came into my room while I was sleeping, took the hand-painted skirt out of my closet, washed it in hot water, took the waistband in, and then returned it without a word. When I went to put it on for my return flight all of the beautiful colors were muted and it was a length that had never been and would never be in style. I put my jeans back on and stuck my head in her bedroom with the skirt in my hand.
“Why can’t you like me the way I am?” I leaned against the doorjamb, trying to look calm. There were rules against such questions in my household and I knew it.
“Is that the kind of thing they teach you to say in therapy?” she said.
“I guess maybe it is,” I said. Her eyes were focused, as usual, on herself in her makeup mirror.
“I gave up everything I loved for you,” she said, for maybe the five hundred millionth time.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was.
There were so many things that made my mother sad: the weather, my wardrobe, the choices she made, most notably, it turned out, having me. I want to write here that I understand, that I know she did her best, that there was no one in her early life to teach her how to love, how to take responsibility, how to be something other than a victim of the circumstances life had dealt her. And as I write the words I can see that they are true. But the other thing I need to say is this:
For all of my childhood and throughout my teens, I prayed to have myself sucked right back up into the aether, because I thought it might give my mother back her hopes and dreams and joy. But the universe wouldn’t make that trade with me, and so my mother died, drunk and unhappy, and I found my way to this ranch, this place where I protect and am protected by animals, this place where nature controls how I spend my days and how I spend my life, this place where I can love every season.
When the sun sets tonight, the temperature will drop in thirty minutes from 55 to 38. They are calling for a cold front to move through the valley and if they are right, tonight we’ll get our first truly hard frost. I’ve got a pot of green chili stew on simmer, and the dogs are snoring by the woodstove. There’s nothing I would trade this for. Now, let it snow.
Ranch Almanac: Leonids
I read a headline the other day that said 80 percent of Americans live in a place where they can’t see the Milky Way, which is why, in mid-November, I set my alarm for 3:00 a.m., pull on fleece pants, upper body layers and my arctic hat and mittens. I grab a thick-walled sleeping bag and go out into a night cold enough to lay a thick layer of ice down on the wooden walkway, lie on the frozen grounds, and look up at the sky.
The first one is on the southern horizon, nowhere near Leo, closer to the place where Scorpio sets, burning itself out in a thin flame over the silhouette of Red Mountain. Next are a couple of fainter travelers, right overhead, ones I will begin to see better as my eyes adjust to the black. Then a big one, running all the way from north of Cassiopeia, across both Dippers, and into the Gemini twins. A real bright burner . . . gold with a hint of red.
This is the annual Leonid meteor shower, a performance the sky puts on for us here in the high country each fall. There is another, less chilly show in mid-August called the Perseids, but sometimes our monsoon clouds us in so much we miss the peak of that one.
Tonight the meteors are beautiful, plentiful (they were predicting four times as many as normal this year) and thrilling. I’m enjoying, just as much, the gorgeous cloudscape of the Milky Way itself, that thick river of light rising up from beyond Bristol Head and flowing right over the ranch before it disappears behind Copper Ridge to the south.
I snuggle down in my sleeping bag and stare into the thickest part of the china plate that is our galaxy and catch meteors out of the corner of my eye. The resident coyotes sense my presence, wonder what I am doing out here at their time of night and start singing to one another about it, which activates the sheep who begin to discuss it too, until everybody gets used to the idea and the quiet returns. I contemplate stardust, try to get my mind around light-years and reach for ways to describe the subtle differences between the colors of the stars. At first light I wake, more heavily frosted than the yard
stubble, stand and, without shedding the sleeping bag, walk/hop back into the kitchen to make coffee and avocado eggs.
Mother’s Day Storm
In 2014 I lost Fenton Johnson the wolfhound—Mother’s Day weekend was his last—which, I know from experience, will make all the Mays from now on a little sadder.
Eleven years is a big number for an Irish wolfhound, and Fenton had made excellent use of every one. I named him after my dear friend the novelist and essayist Fenton Johnson, and as Fenton the dog grew up, he revealed more and more ways the name was apt. Like Fenton the human, he was wise and reticent, the best kind of grandfather even when he was only middle-aged. He wasn’t big on asking for affection, wouldn’t wiggle up to you like a black Lab or a Bernese mountain dog, wouldn’t even very often bump his head up under your resting arm for a pet. He preferred to sit nearby, keeping a loving and watchful and ever so slightly skeptical eye, as if the humans were always potentially on the verge of making a really bad decision, and he would be ready, in that case, to quietly intervene.
When Fenton was a young dog, he would bound through deep snow with an expression of such pure joy on his face it could make even a non-dog person laugh out loud. He’d only drink water out of the very edge of a bowl, and only then with his top teeth pressing firmly against the metal rim. When he wanted something he would come over and scratch on the chair or the couch I was sitting on, as if it were the wrong side of a door. When he was happy—for instance, if I rose from a chair with a leash in my hand—he would wag his tail heartily, but when he was ecstatic, like when I came home after a week of working on the road, his tail would make huge happy circles, the scope of his happiness too big to be contained in a movement that only went from side to side.