by Kyoko Mori
One of the sweaters Norma Jean had designed, the “Sweater Sweater,” was a pullover with five rows of miniature sweaters knitted in the intarsia method across its back and front. Shortly after I bought the five acres, I made mine with leftover yarn from the sweaters, hats, and socks I’d knitted. The miniature sweaters, which alternated arms up and arms down, reminded me of my friends in Green Bay and Door County: a gathering of people who were jumping up and down in some eccentric, out-of-sync celebration. Placed on the sleeve, above the cuff, was one more sweater each—a green arms-down crew-neck on the left and a purple arms-up turtleneck on the right. They were replicas of the sweater I’d given Chuck to replace the blue pullover and another I’d made for myself. Depending on how I held my arms, they could be closer together or farther apart than any other pair on the front or the back.
WHILE CHUCK WENT WILDERNESS CAMPING in Minnesota and Michigan, I pitched my tent behind the maples on my land. Since my lot didn’t yet have a road, I left my car in Norma Jean’s driveway and hiked to my campsite. Every few weeks, I trimmed the junipers along the path and cropped the grass under the tent. Before Door County, I had only gone camping once in college, on a week-long canoe trip in western Wisconsin. I couldn’t stand the bugs, the poison ivy, the gluey food reconstituted on the Sterno stove. Sleeping in a tent in the woods had made me feel closed in and exposed at once.
In the tent on my own land, I heard the whip-poor-wills singing through the night and the robins and the cardinals starting up at first light. One morning before dawn, I woke up to what sounded like a miniature wind storm. By the time I crawled outside, whatever was making the racket was gone, but later when I described the noise, one of my friends made a whooshing sound and said, “Did it sound like this? That’s a buck rutting. He thought your tent was a big animal trying to compete with him.” For weeks, I bragged about how my tent had held its own against a buck.
My new camping experience didn’t inspire me to join Chuck on his wilderness excursions. His favorite spot was on an island in the middle of Lake Superior. He couldn’t imagine sleeping in a tent pitched on cropped grass fifty yards from a neighbor’s driveway, anymore than I could appreciate being dropped off by a “water taxi” on some deserted shore. When I invited him to come with me, he said no. I pretended to be disappointed, but I was much happier to keep all five acres to myself. Chuck had only seen my land once, from the passenger’s seat of my car as we drove by in a rain storm. He admired it at a distance, from his side.
Still, he had understood how I was trying to turn bad money into good by helping Norma Jean. Because Wisconsin was a community property state, he had to sign a form saying he approved my decision to cosign Norma Jean’s mortgage. If the bank wasn’t satisfied with my five acres, he said, I could add our house to the collateral. Norma Jean had other friends who wanted to help her, but their husbands and wives had refused to let them cosign her loan. Chuck would never have stopped me from doing what I thought was right. That was our pact, to let each other be.
When the two of us had bought our house, I’d thought of owning property as a necessary evil. A part of me had believed that human beings violated the earth simply by existing on it. But now, sitting alone on the stone fence in the back of my lot, I surveyed the meandering paths I’d cut through the junipers and imagined where my house might someday stand. A mile down the road, a woman from Chicago had built a log house from a kit: all she had to do was hire a carpenter to assemble it. Every time I ran and cycled in front of that house, I saw how nicely it blended into its surroundings. Halfway between the maples and the stone fence would be a good spot for mine. I would cut a long curving driveway through the junipers and the rocks, leaving the maples intact. For once, I understood the thrill of having a piece of land I could landscape and reshape to suit me.
Chuck said he would visit my log house when I finally built it, but he himself preferred the north woods, the areas of central and western Wisconsin that were more remote. In Door County, you could get The New York Times from the vending machines in front of restaurants; in the small towns in the north woods, all the businesses catered to people who fished and hunted, so even the rare Chinese restaurant served no vegetarian food. Chuck didn’t hunt or fish, but he liked hearing the loons calling from the unspoiled small lakes, and he wanted to walk in the woods without running into hikers sporting the latest gear from L. L. Bean. “I wouldn’t mind having a summer cottage up north someday,” he said.
He was nearing forty, with me a few years behind. We were both becoming less judgmental with age. I no longer thought owning property was evil in and of itself, and Chuck had come to the same conclusion. Like the two panels of an intarsia sweater, I thought, we were progressing side-by-side through the same design.
“It would be great if we each had a summer place,” I said.
“Yeah,” Chuck agreed. “We should put that in our ten-year plan.”
BEFORE EITHER OF US COULD build a summer home, we had to address our current living situation. Our house, built in the 1930s, hadn’t been redecorated since the 70s. By the 90s, the wallpaper was peeling in every room; the hardwood floors buckled and the paint flaked off the ceiling and the hallways. The concrete steps leading to our front door cracked from the water seeping underneath and freezing. Finally, the mail carrier threatened to report us to the city. He left a note saying he would no longer deliver our mail to the slot on our front door unless we fixed the steps. After a week of no mail, Chuck and I went to the hardware store, bought the letters that spelled out “Mail,” and stuck them on the ancient milk delivery chute next to our garage door. We drew a chalk line from the front door, down the sidewalk, and up the driveway. The next day, our mail was in the milk chute and the carrier said nothing more. Once again, Chuck and I were acting like my high school home-ec. cooking team, who had stuffed the over-baked cream puffs through the burned-out holes and called them the “miraculous, ready-to-fill cream puffs: no cutting necessary.”
Chuck at least knew how to paint the exterior, from the many house-painting jobs of his youth. The summer after we moved in, he had propped his extension ladder against the west side of the house and started taking off the old paint. He planned to work on one side at a time so the woodwork wouldn’t sit exposed too long. If he spent two weeks scraping, sanding, and painting each side, he could do the whole house before school started, but by the time he actually finished sanding the first side, it was mid-July and too humid to start painting. He took a few weeks off, went camping, got busy with other things, and began painting on Labor Day. He couldn’t believe his luck: the week after he was done with that one side, in November, the weather turned too cold for the paint to dry properly.
From then on, he set out to tackle one side every summer. He could go around the house in four years, do the windows and the doors in the fifth year, take two years off, and start over again. Houses in our climate were supposed to be painted every seven years.
“We could hire a crew to do it all at once. I’ll pay,” I offered.
“No,” he said. “I like painting. It gives me something to do. I enjoy being outside.”
The summer after my father’s death, we had been in the house for seven years, and Chuck was just finishing the windows and the trim. The south and the north sides had each taken two summers, throwing him off the original schedule. Already, on the west side, there was water damage that might need re-touching the following year.
“I don’t want to start up again next year on the west side,” he said one Sunday in late August when I came home from Door County. “Maybe we should move to a new house.”
“Because you don’t want to paint this one again?”
“No, because I’m tired of living in Green Bay. We should move out to the country.”
“I don’t know about that. I’m a city person.”
“You just got back from Door County. Your summer house is going to have five acres of land around it. Why wouldn’t you want the same kind of space the r
est of the year?”
My land was a mile from the best restaurant on the peninsula and the auditorium where you could hear Johnny Cash, Michael Hedges, and Suzanne Vega all in one season, but I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a snob.
“Let’s just think about it,” Chuck said. “We don’t have to decide right away.”
WE STARTED LOOKING FOR A HOUSE in the country when Dean came back alone from New Mexico in the fall. He had told us on the phone that Katie was planning to join him as soon as she could find a counseling job in the area, but when we showed up at the schoolhouse a week after his return, Dean was weeding the garden with a young girl in a pink frilly dress. The girl’s mother was hanging her laundry on the line. A solidly-built woman with blond hair going grey, Jo was wearing an old T-shirt and denim cutoffs. Maybe she was offended by Chuck failing to recognize her as a high school classmate. She retreated into the house, taking her daughter with her but leaving the rest of her laundry for Dean to hang dry.
“We were just driving around,” Chuck said when Dean invited us inside for coffee.
“We’ve been talking about moving out to the country,” I added.
Chuck and I stopped at a gas station and bought a newspaper to check the real estate listings, because we didn’t know what else to do. Dean was back in the schoolhouse, but we were clearly not welcome there. Looking at property seemed as good a way as any to spend a few hours driving around the countryside. After that weekend, every Sunday when Chuck came home from a football game and I got back from Door County, we got hot-fudge sundaes at the custard stand on the edge of town and hit the county highways. Subdivisions were springing up outside every small town between our house and the schoolhouse. Dean had run into Jo at a grocery store on his third day back, because she was living in one of them. He’d had a crush on her in high school, so he considered their chance meeting to be “fate.”
“Dean always went from one relationship to the next, with no break in between,” Chuck said one afternoon in late October as we were driving through another subdivision where the houses had the same cathedral windows and rose-colored roof tiles. “It’s like he wants to duplicate the exact same life with a different woman.”
In several weeks of driving, we hadn’t come across one house we wanted to go inside and see. We were heading back home when we saw a handwritten “Lot For Sale By Owner” sign on a ledge. The lot was at the end of a dirt road with a ravine behind it. There were two other empty lots on the same road, but unlike in the subdivisions, the only house nearby was an old farm house with a barn. When we called the number we’d copied from the sign, that farmhouse turned out to be where the owners lived—a couple with one hundred head of dairy cattle, parceling off portions of their land to raise money for retirement. “I was saving that two-acre lot for my niece,” the woman said. “We got it zoned for horses, because riding is her hobby, but she got married and moved to Illinois. Why don’t you come by next Sunday after church so my husband can take you around?”
Clyde, who met us on the dirt road the following week, was a small man in his sixties with thinning white hair. He must have stopped at home after mass to change—he was dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans, and work boots caked with cow manure. Like my grandfather from years before, he moved surprisingly fast. As he led us down the rocky path toward the ravine in the back of the property, he turned around and held out his hand to me. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a bird watcher. I’m used to walking on trails.” Clyde mentioned the cardinals that came to his feeder and the great grey owls he heard in the trees at night. From behind us, Chuck said, “Kyoko volunteers at the wildlife sanctuary.” Clyde said how nice it would be to have benches and bird-watching stands next to the ravine. By the time we climbed back to the road, I’d told him that my other hobbies were knitting, spinning, and weaving, that I had seen llamas at a county fair and thought they might be fun to have around. I would clip their hair, as I did with my rabbits, and make sweaters and hats. “The horse permit we got for my niece-in-law might cover llamas, too,” Clyde said. “I’ll ask the county supervisor. He goes to our church.”
In the woods across the dirt road, the maples were shedding their last leaves. The oaks in the back, slower to change, partially hid the ravine. When all the leaves were down, Clyde said, we would get a clear view of the ravine from wherever we put our house. I remembered the first time Chuck and I had stayed at the schoolhouse with Dean and Katie. We were still living in Milwaukee then, our first spring together. Looking out their kitchen window at the muddy fields, I couldn’t believe this was the place Chuck had talked about so fondly. Back then, I’d considered bare trees, pastures with melting snow, and the big open sky to be ugly; I couldn’t wait to get back to our apartment in the city. Now I imagined myself walking across my yard to a miniature barn—the kind my spinning friends had built from kits, just like the log house—to care for my llamas. Living out in the country would complete my settling in Wisconsin. It wasn’t enough to have a summer cottage in Door County. If Chuck and I shared a house on this ledge year round, the two sides of my future life would complement each other perfectly.
“You have your writing and your Door County land,” Chuck said as we drove back to town. “I need a project, too. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll be in charge of building our new house.”
“But you don’t know anything about building a house,” I pointed out. “Maybe you should consult an architect before you start.”
“I’ll get some books,” Chuck promised. “I have to fix our house first anyway so we can sell it. That could take a couple of years, but we should buy that land before someone else does.”
The way Chuck worked, two years could stretch into four or five. That would give me plenty of time to finish another book. When the house was finally done, I could take a year off from writing to settle into it and start planning my log house in Door County. After Chuck and I bought the two acres on the ledge—splitting the cost as usual—I started reading up on llamas to prepare for the big changes we were planning, together and apart.
LLAMAS WERE BRED FROM GUANACO—the hump-less camels of the Andes—and were domesticated around 4,000 BC. The Incas used them mostly as pack animals. A 250-pound llama, standing 5 feet tall, could carry 100 pounds and travel 15 to 20 miles a day. The animals tolerated long periods of thirst at high altitudes, and their wool could be spun into yarn for clothes and rugs. Llamas were introduced to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century as guard animals on sheep ranches. Their wool, sheared every two years, was brown, cream, white, or black.
The first time I saw llamas up close was at a “llama obstacle race” at a county fair in Milwaukee a few years back. The competing animals didn’t “run” the course on their own; they were led through it, one at a time, by handlers who held their leash. The course started with a wooden gate from which hung plastic ribbons. Next came a long tippy board to walk on and a tub of water to wade through. Then the llama had to hop into and out of a horse trailer, walk over a rough patch of ground with branches strewn on it, and skip over a low stile to cross the finish line. Each llama had a particular obstacle he hated. The cream-colored one refused to walk through the gate, turning his head in distaste and backing out when the ribbons touched his cheek. The light brown animal balked before the tub of water, sat down, and had to be dragged across, and the black one insisted on walking around the stile instead of jumping over it, no matter how many times he was brought back in front of it. None of these animals went into the trailer without being pushed from behind. But the last llama, who was chocolate brown, breezed through the entire course two steps behind his handler, a portly man in a crisp white shirt, black jeans, and cowboy boots. People applauded and whistled when the pair crossed the finish line.
Later, I went over to the barn where the handlers were grooming their animals. I didn’t see the champion llama or his handler, but an older woman in a jean jacket let me touch her cream-colored llama.
<
br /> “He won’t bite?” I asked.
“Llamas only have one set of teeth so they can’t bite. You can pet him on the neck.”
When I put my hand on his neck, the llama sighed through his nose and made a humming sound.
“Hear that?” the woman said, “He’s happy.”
“He sounds like a cat,” I said.
“Llamas and cats have their own minds. Working with them isn’t like teaching tricks to dogs.”
“I have a Siamese cat who lets me brush his teeth every night.”
The woman laughed. “You might be good with llamas then,” she said. She had a pleasant plain face and grey hair pulled back into a pony tail. In thirty years, I might look like an Asian version of her. I could retire from teaching and take up llama training as a hobby. When llamas decided they’d worked hard enough for the day or the load was too heavy—the race announcer had said—they knelt down on the trail and refused to budge. If threatened, they hissed and spat to show their displeasure. Passive but stubborn, they were animals I could identify with. Their wool, originally used by the common people (the smaller, softer alpacas were raised to provide wool for the nobility), was now spun into warm luxury yarns.
THE FIRST THING CHUCK WANTED to do to prepare our house for sale was to build an atrium.
“Our house is too small,” he said. “An atrium would make it into the size more people would want. Dean says you always recoup your money from an atrium. Maybe he can build one for us.” We didn’t drive out to the schoolhouse anymore, but Dean occasionally came to town for errands and stopped for coffee. Though Katie hadn’t signed the divorce papers he’d sent her, Jo and her daughter were already living in the schoolhouse.