He said, “Yes. It comes on automatically every night.” Noting my excitement, he added, “There’s a light at the barn that comes on automatically every night, too.”
“Wow.”
On the farm at the time lived two men and the sister of one of the men. She lived in the studio. According to her brother, she was a psychic and had owned a metaphysical shop in nearby Clendenin. After I’d been out to the farm a few times, he told me a story. This beautiful farm had been available for two years. During that time, they’d had many takers. Every time they had an offer, the sister said, “They are not the one.” And every time, as she predicted, the deal fell through.
After the first time I visited the farm, the brother told his sister about me, and she said, “She is the one.”
That farm had waited for me for two years so that it would be there when I needed it. It was the only farm I went to see, and as soon as I laid eyes on it, I knew I would move heaven and earth to make it mine. It looked like it had fallen off the pages of a children’s storybook, and it was everything I’d ever dreamed a farm would be.
Moving heaven and earth mostly involved moving money. I had a retirement account that had been awarded to me in my divorce. Early withdrawal came with huge penalties, which was why I’d never broken into it before. I cleaned it out and made the farm mine.
Planning the move was a huge undertaking. I didn’t just have to move my furniture and other things, but animals, too. I called the old farmer, Lonnie, who was a friend of Georgia’s. He raised cattle and I knew he had livestock trailers. I planned to move the animals the weekend before I moved my furniture and other things, to get them settled in. Lonnie was up in years. He told me, “I’ll be there Saturday if I’m still alive.”
I asked him how he was feeling. He said he felt okay. He was still alive that Saturday, and longer after that because he helped me move some hay, too. Life with 52 was uneasy in that month between the time I told him I was moving out and the weekend I started moving the animals. I worried about whether or not he would fight me over the animals, though I felt they were all mine. All the animals that had been purchased had been paid for by me from my personal account or had been given to me as birthday gifts other than some of the chickens. He’d bought chicks at the feed store a few times. The animals that had been free had come through readers from my website who had given them to me. He was moving back to the city and would have no place for the animals anyway, even chickens.
He was at turns sad and angry, but he helped load the animals on the trailer, and he even helped me when I started trying to catch the chickens. There were a few stubborn chickens I never could catch. I asked the Ornery Angel if she wanted to come up to the house with her three kids and take home whatever they could capture. She’d become a good neighbor, if not a friend, and I was sad to leave her and all the neighbors in the ’hood, though I don’t think she ever cared one way or another about me, which was how it should have been, of course. Approximately 99.9 percent of our relationship had been in my head.
For the first time, we’d raised a couple dozen meat chickens that year, and our last “farm adventure” at Stringtown Rising was to butcher them. Skip came to help with his homemade plucker. It was also 52’s birthday, which made it a strange way to spend the day, but he had chosen the slaughter date. The kitchen was already mostly packed up and I didn’t make him a cake, but I did buy him a chocolate cheesecake at the grocery store bakery. I think he just wanted the day to be busy. Or maybe killing chickens as the last new thing we did was some kind of fitting punctuation to our life together.
Before I’d started packing up in earnest, I showed the new farm to Morgan, who didn’t yet know that we were moving. I picked her up from the bus after school and told her I was taking her somewhere for a surprise. She bugged me with “What is it? What is it?” for a few minutes, then I asked her if she still wanted a horse. Of course she still wanted a horse. She’d wanted a horse all her life, and for many years she’d taken riding lessons. She started complaining about how she couldn’t have a horse because we didn’t have enough pasture or fencing or a barn.
I said, “What kind of horse would you have if you could?”
She chattered about different breeds of horses and which were her favorites and why for a few minutes. Then I reminded her that we didn’t have enough pasture or fencing or a barn. She told me that I was mean to get her talking about a horse when she couldn’t have one.
I suggested that she could put our two miniature donkeys, Jack and Poky, together and they’d add up to a horse!
Then I got her talking about what kind of horse she wanted again, and as soon as she got going good I reminded her that she couldn’t have a horse because we didn’t have enough pasture or fencing or a barn.
We arrived at the farm, and I pulled over to the side of the road and said, “Look at that! This road is such a nice road, isn’t it? It doesn’t even have potholes! And look at that! Is that horse fencing? And look, there is a mailbox. And do you know what else they have here? A school bus. And isn’t that house cute?”
Then I told her to get out of the car and I walked her up the (short and not steep!) driveway. I said, “Look at that! That’s a nice barn, isn’t it?”
She said, “Yes. Why are we here? Why couldn’t you buy a farm like this one?”
She was completely exasperated. I think she wanted to smack me.
I said, “Look at that house again, Morgan. That is your new house.”
She stared at me and said, “What?”
I told her again. “That is your new house. This is your new farm. We are moving here.”
She flipped around and looked at the barn again, then she screamed. And she kept screaming and then she was screaming and running—to the barn. Her shoes flew off her feet, and she ended up at the barn door in her socks, and she shouted, “This is my barn!”
She looked inside every stall (after she put her shoes back on). She ran upstairs to the hayloft, then back down to the stalls, examining and inspecting every stall all over again, chattering away about what she would need to clean out the stalls and prepare for a horse. Then she ran out to the fields and up to the hay meadow and just everywhere, running and running and screaming.
One night not long before I finished moving out, 52 and I sat at the fire pit at Stringtown Rising. He was helping me burn some things that I didn’t want to pack and weren’t suitable to give away.
He put his arm around me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I didn’t treat you right.” He told me that he loved me.
I couldn’t tell him that he was wrong about how he’d treated me, but at that point, it felt cruel to tell him that he was right. I said, “I love you, too,” because it was true. “We did something amazing here, you know? We made this place a farm.”
I knew that he meant his apology, and I also knew he would behave badly all over again if we stayed together. If our relationship had been a romance novel, I could have dug into his past, unearthed his motivations, and even transformed him. That was how I always ended my books. But life isn’t a romance novel, and real people are much more complex than fictional characters.
We put our arms around each other and for a long, slow beat, just cried together for a dream we’d shared and lost, and for the best of what we’d had. He was headed back to life in the city, and I was headed for a new farm and a new dream. Though we saw each other a number of times after that, that moment was to me our true good-bye. Before I moved out, he left my ring—and his—beside my laptop one day when I wasn’t looking. I took them down to the Pocatalico River and threw them in, pieces of my heart left in Stringtown forever.
We were moved in at the new farm by Thanksgiving, along with Beulah Petunia, Clover, and the whole gang down to the chickens. Georgia sat in the middle of the bustle of friends carrying furniture and boxes into my “new” old house. She still loved an outing, even if she couldn’t participate in the activity, so of course she had to be there. I told her that as soon as I
could I’d break in the new house by canning some jam and I’d bring her a jar. She said, “Well,” which in Georgia-speak that day meant she’d get her spoon ready.
Stringtown would always be rising in my heart, but I knew I had finally become a real farmer since I’d found myself capable of such a difficult decision to make myself an independent woman. I had finally passed the only test that mattered—my own—and I would never have to choose again between my happiness and my farm.
I named my new farm Sassafras Farm. First, the word was just fun to say and made me feel happy. Second, there was sassafras on the hill. Third, I was feeling sassy with a farm all my own.
Stringtown Rising had been a great adventure. It had shaped me, changed me, birthed me as a farmer in fire. It was over, but a new adventure was just beginning.
I put on my chore boots and jumped in.
Epilogue
I came “home” to the hills of West Virginia in search of my own strength. I fell hard for the farm, my own piece of those hills, but Stringtown Rising was just a conflict to drive the story, not an ending, as 52 was an antagonist to push me, not a hero. He had his own story, and I was only passing through it.
A friend asked me when I realized that I didn’t need a man to take care of me.
I said, “When he stopped taking care of me.”
The farm taught me in the same way, providing obstacles that forced me to grow.
I had been a novelist, but I was unused to playing the protagonist in my own story. You never think of your own life that way. We see our lives only a page at a time, as we live day by day. When I came to West Virginia, I didn’t realize I was living a coming-of-age story of a woman in her forties, and that the woman was me. I was oblivious to most of my story while it was being written in sweat, tears, and even a little blood. It was nearly over before the plot made sense.
In my first year at Sassafras Farm, I got a horse for Morgan, then I got one for me, a little mare named Shortcake, and I learned to ride her. I remodeled the studio behind the house into a health-department-approved kitchen and began holding workshops. I sent Glory Bee and Beulah Petunia to spend a few months at a friend’s farm, and Glory Bee came home bred. I let Beulah Petunia retire. I found a hired man to help fix all the fences, install new gates, recoat the old barn’s roof, build a chicken house, and transform one of the barn stalls into the nicest milking parlor I’d ever had—weatherproof with lights and access to water. I planted a new garden of ramps.
Ross gave me his old pickup truck when he bought a new one, and I started driving a stick shift and hauling my own hay. At the hardware store, I learned to buy tools, and at home, I learned to drive the tractor. I had all the plumbing in the house replaced when the pipes froze, and I repainted and decorated the entire house. I met new neighbors and found a new community. I incorporated Chickens in the Road, establishing it as a full-fledged business, and I wrote a book about my adventures at Stringtown Rising.
During that year, Faye’s husband passed away. She handled it with her usual tough aplomb. I told her one day, for the first time, how much I had always admired her self-reliance, how she had been one of those courageous, capable women I wanted to be more like.
She said, “You’re one of those women now.”
I know that I’m writing the next story in my life each day, but I only see it by the page—which is the way life should be lived. It makes us better characters if we don’t know where our story is headed.
I rise up on the big pasture from the back of a horse, the farm spread out below and around me, animals dotting the fields. Fences stretch out in neat lines. The automatic light on the barn is just barely beaming bright in the deepening dusk. Supper simmers on the stove in my little house. I hear the bleat of a baby goat and the low moo of my cow. In my heart, I feel peace.
And in my hands, I hold the reins.
Acknowledgments
With my most heartfelt gratitude:
To my agent, Jenny Bent, for believing in this book before it was written, and my editor, Jeanette Perez, for helping me uncover the vision to complete it.
To Mark, Sheryl, and Georgia Sergent, without whom this story could never have happened. Thank you for letting me live in the Slanted Little House and for always being there for me, and especially to Georgia for being my first and most important inspiration of the self-sufficient country woman I wanted to become.
To my moderators on the Chickens in the Road forum—Pete, Deb, Cindy, Dede, and Astrid—for keeping things running smoothly when I was too busy and who are always there with a listening ear. Extra thanks to Cindy Pierce for teaching me to make soap, making me laugh, and for so many other things, and to Dede Kelly for her wisdom about all types of home preserving and her generosity in sharing it. To Debbie Monroe, for not just being a cleaning lady but becoming a friend. And to “my last five friends,” Kat, Kacey, Margery, Michelle, and Vicki, for being there for me for so long.
To all my readers, old and new, for reading—this book is for you.
To all my neighbors, old and new, for still speaking to me after I write about them. Unless they don’t know. Then let’s not mention it.
To Jerry Waters, for driving that huge truck through the rising waters of the river ford in the rain, without which I couldn’t have moved from Stringtown Rising, and for his generosity in taking photos of me and some of my recipes for this book.
To my ex-husband, Gerald, for helping me move from Stringtown Rising and for paving the way on short notice for me to buy Sassafras Farm. To my three children, Ross, Weston, and Morgan, for putting up with me as their mother—for all the times they had to walk miles in the snow because I was too scared to drive, all the times they had to carry wood up to the house for the woodstove, all the times dinner was late because I was photographing it, and for moving to West Virginia with me. To my parents, for loving me when they didn’t understand me.
Last but not least, to 52, for teaching me to make fire and milk a cow, and for many other things, including loving me the best he could.
Recipes
Grandmother Bread
Pepperoni Rolls
Fried Bologna Sandwiches
Iron Skillet Upside-Down Pizza
Beans and Corn Bread
Making Flour Tortillas
Fried Stuffed Squash Blossoms
Summer Vegetable Pie
Country-Style Green Beans
Popping Popcorn
Quick Mix
Biscuits and Gravy
Making Lard
Making Butter
Canning in a Boiling Water Bath
Whiskey-Raisin Apple Butter
Corncob Jelly
Flower and Herb Jellies
Banana Split in a Jar
Homemade Vanilla Extract
Cracker Candy
Molasses Cookies
Drunken Rum Cookie Logs
Sweet Potato Pie
Coconut-Oatmeal Rum Pie (with Walnuts)
Homemade “Pop-Tarts”
Apple Dumplings
Strawberries and Cream Coffee Cake
Pumpkin Bread
Nut Cake
Burnt Sugar Cake
Mrs. Randolph’s Strawberry Cake
GRANDMOTHER BREAD
My grandmother lived on a farm in Stringtown. When she was a little girl, it was her job to make bread every day. She learned to make bread from her mother, and her mother learned it from her mother before her, and so on. She taught her daughters to make bread, and when my mother came to West Virginia as a young bride, my grandmother taught my mother to make that bread, too. And then she taught me. When I taught it to Morgan, she dubbed it “Grandmother Bread” because I’d told her that her grandmother had taught me the recipe, and it’s been known as Grandmother Bread ever since.
This kind of simple yeast-risen bread is what used to be called “light bread” in the old days. It requires nothing more than water, yeast, sugar, flour, and a dash of salt. And, oh yeah, a great, big pat of rea
l butter when it’s sliced.
1½ cups warm water
1 teaspoon yeast
2 tablespoons sugar
Dash of salt
3½ cups all-purpose flour
In a large bowl, combine the water, yeast, and sugar. Let sit 5 minutes. Add a dash of salt and stir in the first 2 cups of flour with a heavy spoon. (You can also use a stand mixer.) Continue adding flour a little at a time, stirring until the dough becomes too stiff to stir easily. Begin kneading, continuing to add flour. The exact amount of flour is approximate—your mileage may vary. Continue adding flour and kneading until the dough is smooth and elastic. Let the dough rise in a greased, covered bowl until doubled (usually 30 minutes to an hour).
Uncover the bowl, sprinkle in a little additional flour, and punch down, lightly kneading the dough again. With floured hands, shape the dough and place in a greased loaf pan. The loaf pans I use are 1½ quarts, 4½ inches by 8½ inches. Cover and let rise another 30 to 60 minutes. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in a preheated 350°F oven.
PEPPERONI ROLLS
The pepperoni roll, a.k.a. the State Food of West Virginia, is one of those simple things that makes life good. I’d never even heard of a pepperoni roll before moving here, but the testament to the pepperoni roll’s popularity in the Mountain State is found in every grocery store, bakery, and even gas station convenience store because the pepperoni roll is sold everywhere as if people might not be able to get down the road without one. As the story goes, pepperoni rolls originated with Italian immigrants who came to West Virginia to work in the coal mines. Rolls filled with pepperoni were easy meals to carry with them into the mines. I experimented for months to come up with a recipe of my own, and it fast became a family favorite in my house.
For the dough:
1½ cups warm water
1 teaspoon yeast
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
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