Locally Laid Read online

  It’s always been less about actually pursuing all these projects and more about his being an external processor, airing out all these wacky thoughts. Giving them a little wave on his mental flagpole. I also know that upsetting me distresses Jason. I am, after all, his Bird. And usually he comes to terms with the fact that he is a grant writer. And a pretty good one. So it was inconceivable when, instead of rolling up this unpleasant topic, Jason leveled a glare at me and said slowly, “You cannot stop me from pursuing this.”

  I tasted the bitterness of adrenaline and betrayal in my constricted throat. Thoughts binged around my head in an enraged electrical storm. How dare you cast me as the pisser-on-er of dreams!

  I put up a halfhearted fight against angry tears and succumbed.

  Having done my fair share of food industry service, I can tell you that nothing, nothing unnerves waitstaff like the fighting couple with the crying woman seated in one’s station. I remember glancing up for a second and seeing our waitress do a sort of horrified back-and-forth shuffle with our meals as she looked for an opportunity to throw them on our table and bolt. But that right moment was elusive, as I wasn’t engaged in dignified weeping into one’s napkin. I rarely cry, but when I do, it’s full-on bawling with shallow, gasping breaths. The kind that can really get the snot flowing. The kind that produces honking.

  To understand my seemingly ungenerous reaction, my refusal to even entertain this man’s fervent dream to enter the commercial egg economy, one must pause the mariachi bands for just a moment to understand our past.

  I left a good life in the city.

  During my fifteen years in Minneapolis, I made the kind of friends who’d take a two a.m. phone call and who got me through the year of Jason’s homeland military deployment when Abbie was a toddler and Milo was still tucked into a sling. I also created a career. As an editor for a Reader’s Digest publication based in the Twin Cities, I wrote DIY articles teaching faucet installation, lawn maintenance, and how to build a closet organizer out of a sheet and a half of veneer plywood—in a weekend. It was functional, surprisingly lucrative work and, most importantly, made me feel useful.

  We’d also settled in our forever house. The one I called “The Beige Rambler of My Dreams,” a truly solid 1950s atomic rambler. Thick plaster walls, an open floor plan on a corner lot in an award-winning school district; it was a lovely home. Add the large windows, a couple of fireplaces, and a finished basement large enough to raise Shetland ponies, and, well, it was where we were going to raise our children and grow old. Now that we had poured two years of our lives into remodeling it and more money than I’d care to admit, it was nearly perfect.

  Nearly perfect enough to be quietly killing Jason.

  Don’t let me mislead you. He’d wanted to purchase the place, even more than I did, as we pushed ourselves right up against our financial limits to make it happen. We both yearned for a good education for the kids, a quiet neighborhood feel, and all the trappings of the middle class that we had both enjoyed growing up.

  But this first-ring suburb put Jason on the verge of a boredom aneurysm.

  That was when he got the job offer to be a grant writer for a hospital on Lake Superior. They proposed we crowbar our family from the culturally rich and economically robust Twin Cities and move to a city annually ranked among the coldest locations in America with a job climate to match.

  Duluth, Minnesota, was as much a punch line as a home to 86,000. And it couldn’t care less. Situated by the world’s largest freshwater lake, it has seven miles of white-sand beach, more urban hiking and biking trails than any metro location in the nation, and a streak of—as my friend Jake calls it—the Wild Midwest.

  There are just fewer rules here. People are drawn to the untamed aspect of this place. Especially the kind of people who wished they lived bold lives rather than, say, typed grants.

  When I agreed to move over two hours, two growing zones, and seemingly two planets north for the promise of good health insurance and a happier spouse, it wasn’t easy. It was 2008 when we naively planted the For Sale sign in front of my dreamy rambler—the very same month that economists now say the housing bubble went pop.

  It didn’t sell.

  Jason moved to Duluth without us to start the new grant-writing position at the reassuringly venerable hospital system. I was left with two small children and a big dog living in a real-estate-staged house, which isn’t really living at all. After nearly seven months and forty-three house showings that produced no offers—not even an insulting lowball one—we started brainstorming ways to reunite. We came up with the idea of renting a place in Duluth, but it would have to be on the cheap.

  After walking through many rough apartments, Jason was unexpectedly looking at a house within our rental budget. On the beach, no less. He called me while I was at PetSmart with the children, hiding from another fruitless real estate agent walk-through.

  “It’s a three-bedroom rambler! With first-floor laundry! And an attached garage!” he enthused, sounding the suburban housewife mating call. “Clothesline! Fenced-in yard! Master bath!”

  I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. The children, sensing my joyful discombobulation, started gesturing wildly for a gerbil—apparently, at this moment, I was a vulnerable adult.

  “But,” said Jason, “there’s just a couple things.”

  I stiffened, held my breath, and the children knowingly retreated.

  “It’s right next to a church,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “And there is a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary in the yard.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well … I’m down with Mary.”

  “And it’s really close to the church because, well, it’s actually the rectory.”

  “Oh,” I managed. “That’s … truly different.”

  “And the church has no running water”—this is where he started talking fast—“so … so per the lease agreement, on Sunday mornings from eight thirty to ten in the morning, parishioners can use the bathroom.”

  Which gives new weight to my thought: Holy shit. The economic downturn is driving me into a semipublic restroom situation.

  I swallowed and heard myself say “That’s okay,” and made a mental note to get the really big container of Clorox wipes.

  Within weeks, we’d rented our suburban Minneapolis home and moved into the rectory, complete with the wall-sized print of the Last Supper in the dining room. Certainly, our beautiful home would sell in a few months, and then we’d join the wild buyer’s market that had real estate agents and home seekers completely lathered.

  We lived at that rectory, with its big Virgin Mary and full-bladdered parishioners, for more than year and a half—a time during which my then five-year-old son, Milo, completely taken with our proximity to Lake Superior, listened to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on repeat.

  I tell you all this—the Beige Rambler, the rectory lifestyle, the months of single parenting—to handily prove my support for this man across the table sitting squarely in my temper’s sight lines.

  I’d moved; I’d shared my bathroom; I’d listened to Gordon Lightfoot.

  Back at the restaurant, with its battling Mexican horns and guitars, two years have passed since the housing crash and the country still has not fully recovered. And though I am still freelance writing and indeed file copy with nearly every publication in my new city, I’m hardly making anything. Somehow I fell from breadwinner to bread eater and honestly, there was significantly less of it these days.

  My dim prospects in Duluth—a place where I could not land a job interview, much less a job—finally drove me to the ultimate home for wayward professionals: graduate school. I was slated to start at the end of the summer.

  Oh, and this is where I have to set the record right on a couple of things.

  When I yelled at Jason that we are always doing things to realize his dreams and never mine? Well, that’s not completely true. He was fully supportive of my returning
to school for my master’s, which is more impressive a commitment than it may sound. You see, Duluth doesn’t have the program I’m seeking. What I want is a master of fine arts in writing—and yes, I realize that’s like saying, “You know that thing I can’t make money with anymore? More of that, please.” But looking through Duluth’s slim want ads, I’m convinced that writing is truly my only skill, as useless as it feels these days.

  But with this particular kind of degree, which is a longer program and requires a book-length thesis, I could parlay my writing résumé into teaching at the postsecondary level. Because it’s the terminal degree, the highest attainable in a given course of study, I could, one day, become tenured faculty and enjoy all the security that would provide. (My dreams were clearly less imaginative than Jason’s tilting turbines and expansive poultry endeavors.)

  The master’s program is also terminal because it’s three hundred miles round trip from Duluth, not online, and is bound to kill us all. That it’s located ten minutes from the Beige Rambler tells me that I should study literary irony.

  Lastly, that crack calling our new region a godforsaken Arctic? Well, that wasn’t really fair to Duluth. While no doubt it’s frigid, that enormous lake seems to add a needed ballast to life, slowing the pace enough so that kids get to be kids a bit longer. Or maybe we all get to be kids longer here. Back in the Twin Cities, I felt people were squarely defined by their jobs, but in Duluth employment is treated as what you do when you’re not pursuing your passions—maybe your music or a visual art form or distance kayaking. I like to joke that one can’t swing a dead seagull up here without hitting a poet.

  But at that moment, sitting in Mexico Lindo, I don’t remember how encouraging Jason was about graduate school or all the things I liked about our small city by the unsalted sea. I don’t remember eating. And I don’t even remember getting home. What I do recall was Jason sleeping on the couch and my going to bed in my clothes.

  And one clear thought: We can never, ever go back to Mexico Lindo.

  Chapter 2

  Just a day after the restaurant “farm-gument” with all its theatrical howls and hand gestures, I subsided into quiet, rational conversation. I gently walked Jason through the many, many reasons why we were not the people to undertake this egg venture. Worse than not being farmers, we were students of liberal arts, I’d explained. We lacked the skill set for such a venture (or it seemed in those days, most ventures). And it wasn’t like we could start a new business right then anyway. All our capital was currently tied up in real estate, held hostage by the great housing recession. So, I’d concluded, as fine a cause as freeing chickens was, it was just not possible for us right now (or ever).

  While it may be uncouth to assess a quarrel in such bald terms: I was winning. In my appraisal over the past twenty-four hours, I’d managed to repack a solid 89 percent of Pandora’s box, and honestly, I think we would have placed it on a high shelf had not two events, unforeseen and ruinous, toppled our tit-for-tat marriage economics.

  It started just three days after our Saturday dinner out, and unlikely as it sounds, it continued its life-changing rampage all the way through Southeast Asia and back, irrevocably changing the poultry trajectory of our life path.

  That Tuesday afternoon, our weekend quarrel more or less behind us, I was weeding our small garden when I heard the crunching of gravel in our alley.

  “Hey,” I said, walking, chives in my hand, to meet our minivan. “Nice surprise seeing you home early, honey.”

  Jason always changed at the hospital after his couple-mile walk to work, so it was rare for me to see him in his dress clothes. His sport-coat-and-loosened-tie handsomeness made me smile. It hadn’t yet registered that it was unusual for Jason to have the vehicle at all.

  Expressionless, he replied, “I wish it were,” and, as Jason said it, he swung the van door open to reveal the fish tank from his office.

  I’d furrowed my brow. Why is this here? It was like a child’s riddle with an elusive answer. I mean, this was the tank that I’d banished to his work office when we moved up north. If the fish are at home, that means …

  “Oh my God.” As I put my hand to my lips, my eyes met his.

  His crumpled look confirmed he’d rather do anything right now than tell me his position had been eliminated. Jason understood I’m his stability-craving gal and our foundation was about to be kicked out from under us. It had been this position’s stolid reliability that crowbarred us out of my beloved Minneapolis life. It was the ballast keeping us on the right side of the middle-class line.

  “I’m so sorry, Bird,” he said, his voice scuffed with emotion.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  I turned away, crunching the rocks under my feet, my brain rejecting that his grant writing position was gone. “THIS job that came looking for us. And you have great performance reviews and … and … bring in several times your salary.”

  Jason reached out for my hand, but I jerked away.

  “We MOVED here for them. And you sought their counsel before we bought this house,” I said, flinging a hand toward the modest home behind me. “And they encouraged us to buy. Said we should absolutely invest in Duluth. Did you remind them of that?”

  I suspect he answered, but the words bounced off the white static in my head. What I kept landing on was that this wasn’t just wrong; it was illogical. And if I could simply pile up enough reasonable facts, it would set everything back where it was, where it should be. The fish swimming in his office, the tie straight around his collar, Jason tucked behind his hospital-issued PC.

  “Do they understand what we’ve been through for this job? That our Minneapolis house is still unsold? That we lived in a rented rectory where parishioners used our bathroom? And”—I swallowed—“everything I gave up?”

  It was thoughts of these last two years and my inability to find real work that broke me into tears. I stopped flailing long enough for Jason to tuck in my arms and pull me into his chest. The chives fell on my sandaled feet.

  Over the next day, we oscillated between who was comforting whom, as one of us would take point, directly facing this untenable situation, while the other would draft behind, shouting out platitudes of encouragement. “It’ll all work out! Everything happens for a reason!”

  The reality was we still had an unsold house in the Cities and this new little home on Duluth’s hillside. Our friend Paul playfully called us “land barons”—which we all know is fancy talk for scared multiple-mortgage holders. It wasn’t too hard to imagine a scenario in which we lost everything. In fact, we seemed well on our way.

  As unflattering as it is to admit, I was feeling sorry for myself. But had I known what was ahead, I would have employed the oft-said maxim of my motherin-law, Mimi: “Be grateful for the problems you have.”

  The next day, we received a call that obscured all employment worries and set our lives in a slingshot pointed to Asia. Jason’s younger brother, Brian, an expat living in Cambodia, had suffered a severe drug overdose and lay in a coma in Phnom Penh—half a planet away. And it was there that a medical team, impatient to clear the bed, was eager to pull life support.

  This triggered a flurry of our own calls: to the State Department, the U.S. consulate, and two U.S. senators’ offices to expedite Jason’s lapsed passport.

  In the three hours it took Jason to drive to the Twin Cities and meet up with Mimi, I was part of an online, telephone-attached team of relatives who secured travel papers and booked their flights.

  The whole event sparkled with a breathless sort of frantic.

  As Jason hastily exited the continent, he’d left a few loose ends. Like the chicken coop. While the mostly completed structure now housed our small urban flock of five birds, there was no fenced-in run yet. No place for them to exit their shelter via a small doggy door to a penned-in area of outdoors. What this meant was that every morning, the kids and I would have to open the coop door, scoop up birds (some willing, some not), and place t
hem into a chicken tractor.

  Okay, stop. That image in your head of a bird in the cab of a John Deere? Scratch that. A chicken tractor is nothing more than a portable box; ours was five feet long, two feet tall, and three feet wide, covered with chicken wire. It has no floor, for ground access. Its name has nothing to do with the structure, but rather the tractorlike function performed by the birds themselves. Inside, as chickens forage for grasses, bugs, and seeds, they dig, weed, and fertilize the land as they go—all tasks modern tractors perform.

  While some chicken tractors are on wheels, ours got hand-lugged to different parts of our city lawn—which Jason endearingly called pasture. It was a labor-intensive way to do things.

  Peeling back the metal flap on top of our chicken box, I was reliably greeted by much worried peeping. Over the past few months of hen stewardship, I’d grown confident in just reaching in, seizing a bird, and tucking her under my arm. She’d feel safe there and I’d avoid a wing cuff to the face.

  My favorite chick was the tawny-colored Buff Orpington. She promised to one day be a bodacious plus-sized model of a chicken, wearing fluffy pantaloons under full feathery skirts and with as charming a personality as her appearance suggested. Predictably named Buffy, she didn’t mind being handled and rather seemed to enjoy the company, clucking softly with a closed beak as I picked her up and stroked her silky feathers.

  With my hand, I palmed one of her scaly feet. It looked more like a jumble of pointy sticks than an actual pedestrian appendage. In the front were three leathery toes, each tipped with a long talon, and a shorter toe rounded out the foot’s back. They betrayed her dinosaurian genetics. I read once that chickens are a third cousin to Tyrannosaurus rex, more than 100 million years removed. I’m not surprised. There’s a real ancientness to a creature that must turn its entire head to take you in with one side eye.