Life is not a rough draft...

December 3, 2005

I meant to start this journal in October of 2004 when we moved here but shortly after we settled here in the mountains of Northern Nevada we were faced with 100-year record-breaking winter weather. It started with snow and lots of it, it got worse with record breaking cold that lasted well into March, and ended ever slowly with a blanket of freezing fog that the natives call “white death.” Perhaps this wouldn’t have been such a challenge if we were living in a house, but we had come here with nothing but a borrowed travel trailer. We owned a piece of land, without power, without fences, and with a well that was only drilled days before our arrival. We had sold our house and trekked our way from California with three teenage children, three dogs, and three cats. We also made four trips over Donner Pass with several horses, mostly ours, a few belonging to a client, each time pulling a thirty five foot horse trailer and feeling the teeth of old man Winter pressing in behind us. It is as though we started out on this journey running in… 

In retrospect I think I must have lost my mind. The trailer we planned to live in while we built our house was only 270 square feet. Small under any circumstance but add to this an entire family and you have the making for reality TV. We all learned quickly the difference between need and want and to appreciate those things we took for granted that we no longer had like power and privacy! With the harsh winter, survival became a basic and demanding course of every day life and writing was at the bottom of the priority list. I could never sum up this last year without a fair amount of pages. I did think ahead enough to take some notes, not that I could ever forget the details and those details will eventually be peppered throughout this journal but they will have to come in their own time. If I were a poet, I might sum up the year with a few sentences of succinct language:


The year started cold, not with one death but three,
and many more things died in their own way, like family 
and friendship.


Two weeks ago my mare foaled. November this year was much kinder with some days warming into the 60s, and no snow, a good thing for a new foal. When I bred her last December I could not have imagined I would still be living in a trailer, my house only half erected and us stalled waiting for funding. Banks are strange institutions. We were turned down more times than I can count because our property exceeds 40 acres, the basis something vague about Wall Street and the demand for cookie cutter houses in the suburbs. The second most frequent reason we have been turned down was because we were what the lenders call, “a broken priority.” I had never heard the term, but then again I had never built a house. Broken priority means you have broke ground. We being naive believed the more money of our own we dumped into this project and the further we’d taken it the more likely the bank would give us a loan to finish. The reality is the bank prefers you don’t even break the dirt with a shovel or they don’t like to loan you money on it. Lastly we were owner builders, which to a bank is like having the plague…. Foals take almost a full year to come. It’s an easy way to remember what you were doing a year ago and a good yardstick to measure against. Besides fighting the weather, we were building fences, trenching water lines, breaking frozen water troughs and frozen hoses, and fighting with the county building department for a permit. We buried one dead horse and accidentally killed our dog. It seemed like we should have planted apple trees, put up a chicken coup and built a barn but we could not seem to do things in that order. For most of the month that December it snowed so much that we ended up with closed schools for two weeks due to snow days and the State of Nevada applying for FEMA because they were as ill prepared for the 100 year storms as we were. But we still managed to breed my mare Lilly in the middle of it all and put up half a house, and get power.

December 4, 2005

“I saw through the face of a trusted friend who needs to humor me and tell me lies”
Blues Traveler

One thing about December is you know it’s ushering in another year. It’s a good time to make notes about lessons learned, and set goals for the year to come. 

Goals for 2006:

Finish the house
Plant antique apple trees
Put in a chicken coop
Take a hot bath. (Travel trailer note: a travel trailer really has no bath tub more like a bath bucket. For me this is dangerous as once I tried to sit in this bucket and almost got my A** stuck in it!)
Lose weight (see goal directly above)
Exercise more
Read one long novel
Finish the house
Dance 
Remember to be grateful for my family and friends.


Lessons Learned in 2005:

There is a rural lending trap
Trust BUT VERIFY! 
Acquaintances are a dime a dozen, true friends are few and far between
Blood is thicker than water, so be careful you can choke on it!
Never build your own house
Some people have more money than brains. Avoid these people.
I would rather learn a friend never really was a friend than lose one who truly was. 
More later……

December 9, 2005

“If you listen to the horse long enough it will tell you everything you need to know” Dave Gunter

Today we got an official “estimate” from a General Contractor to finish our partially erected house. We also have a broker lined up with loans we CAN qualify for in spite the aforementioned roadblocks we kept finding with traditional banks. The one obvious exception is the owner builder component that we had opted for to save money had to be converted to a General Contractor. This is good news and bad news. The budget is way over our original estimates, mainly because of the “panelized” home we purchased. There are so many things wrong with it that it will take weeks (and big dollars) to repair. Compared to four months ago however this is progress. We are hopeful at this point for a good outcome but life has taught us not to expect anything, for life such as it is, is never a sure thing. 

It’s kind of like setting out to buy a new horse. You are hopeful this one will be a winner in the show ring, the family horse who is bomb proof enough to put your three year old on, or the one who earns the buckle, makes a name for itself or just safely takes you down the trails for the next decade. It’s a gamble in many respects. It’s half who you are, half who the horse is and it only takes one side (in the case of horses it’s usually the human side) to destroy the balance. You have to have the balance because it’s important to know that horse well before you take it the length of the cliff trails that wind along 100-foot drops or depend on it to get you to the top of the range to push those cattle into the valley. This view of life is cowboy wisdom. You can’t argue with it. In fact if you’re smart you will apply it to people. The only difference between horses and people is horses tell you right upfront who they are, most people on the other hand take longer to figure out because they have a complex web of social masks they hide behind, but just like the horse if you listen long enough, they too will tell you everything you need to know. I could have eliminated a good portion of problems last year if I had only taken the time to practice some good old-fashioned cowboy wisdom, from business ventures to personal ties. From this point forward no more expectations and no more rushing in!

December 10, 2005

We used to always get a package of Harry and David Pears around this time every December. They came from my husband’s mother. Not just Pears, gourmet cheese, summer sausage, and Apples. Delores died last year in June. She had a herniated diaphragm, which in spite of emergency surgery ultimately killed her. I always remember her oldest daughter saying, “When my Mom dies I won’t even shed a tear.” It was true, she never did. In fact when she discovered her dying in the hospital she ran out and left her there to die alone. We moved here three and half months after she was buried, although she wasn’t really buried her ashes were spread beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. We always thought she would want a proper Christian burial but “the sisters” were making all the decisions and a chartered boat was the least expensive way to close the deal.
Crystal was a good big mare we originally had in training. Later we leased her with a purchase option. Knowing we would buy her we brought her here from California to Nevada. We hadn’t been here a month when she also died. It was sudden; she was never sick, she just fell over on her side her hoofs frantic like she was running in place. It looked something like it might have if she was having a seizure and within a few minutes she was gone. We hadn’t even been here long enough to tear down the temporary panels the horses were housed in. In contrast to David’s mother passing at least this mare didn’t die alone. My husband had her out on a lead line when she went down, and once she hit the ground he held her and tried to still her fear until she passed. Life has a funny way of surprising you as though there were some divine conductor sending messages in the sublime, leaving you to wonder the reasons, and read between the lines. The post mortem exam revealed the mare died from a herniated diaphragm the same way as David’s mother. Rare, was the only word they used to describe it. She wasn’t technically “our” horse but we buried her here under two trees near where the round pen would eventually go. The people who had leased her to us shared our grief; the kind that creates something unavoidably personal and David in a symbolic, almost eerie way got the chance to hold his mother until she died. 

December 14, 2005

“Vengeance is a greedy form of grief”
From The Interpreter

 This morning the freezing fog was settling deep into the bones of everything it touched. This fog, so rare, the natives here refer to it as a legend has arrived for the second year in a row, it’s name white death. It moves like a ghost through the walls, over the trees, and right through your skin. I don’t imagine even the thick hide of our livestock is immune to it’s bite. At 5200 feet we are kindly above it by mid morning but it leaves it’s breath everywhere, like tiny shards of glass blow across the sage brush, the juniper trees, and the goat weed. It even clings to the fence wire, leaving its fingerprints frozen in place for the rest of the day. I am usually up before the sun, running late for the school bus that winds it’s way around the dirt roads in our canyon, then back to the highway and into town. Sometimes I curse the cold, usually if I haven’t taken the extra time to warm my car before heading out, or when I am fighting with the hose to get water to the horses, or when my hair is still wet from the shower and it’s freezing in strands around my face. It’s normally chilly here, but when the fog comes it’s like giving the cold canine teeth. Sometimes I can’t believe I am a girl from California, not just California but the Bay Area where this kind of cold doesn’t exist. Yet I still quitely find myself gloating that I have surived not one harsh Winter, but going on my second one, with white death at my doorstep, snow, and still living in a tiny travel trailer. Something about survival brings you closer to God. Even when I am cursing the weather, I can’t help but slow down to admire the ten cottontails that just scattered out in the dim beam of my headlights, the brunt of the morning cold their companion; I can’t help but stop and listen to the coyotes crying 100 yards to the left and 50 yards to the right in a hunting circle, or not appreciate the warmth in the steady breath of my horses standing in our pasture. There is something to be said for this kind of life. It’s lived with no time for grief, no time for its greedy cohort, it’s harshness is like a strict teacher who knows what you need even before you do, it gives you God, and reminds you of both your humanity as well as your divinity, all in one sweet sentence.

December 18, 2005
Love, like truth and beauty is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with ones friends and enemies.
Carter Heyward

I lived in the East Bay of California my whole life; in fact my family was steeped in one county for six generations. It gets inside you, the geography of a place, the bricks of its old buildings, the bridges, the wetlands, and the trees. In California when a Winter storm is coming you hear it first, it ’s breath screaming through the tree tops, it’s belly groaning with thunder, and when the rain hits it sounds as though tap dancers have descended upon the roof. It’s like an old familiar lullaby that sometimes wakes you in the night. If the hay is covered and the horses are in the barn, the waking is brief and it lulls you back to sleep. One thing about the high deserts of Nevada is the trees are much smaller, and the winters are much colder. When December storms arrive here, their announcement is as quite as a baby’s sigh. Snow sneaks in silently and lays a blanket over you, the way death might in the middle of the night, without a single sound. Sometimes on an afternoon the wind may swing it’s way low through the sage brush and give off a faint whistle, but even this is nothing compared to the sounds of the mighty limbs of the white oaks, or the tops of Redwoods submitting to the storm and bowing toward the ground.

My great grandfathers ranch house still stands in Pleasant Hill California, the 3000-acre farmland that used to surround it now paved over, with a quilt of green lawns and track homes. This is progress I suppose and a big part of what drove us out here into the rural landscape of Northern Nevada. Even so there is still a part of me that I have left in California; a part that refuses to take refuge here in the sagebrush and pinion pines. It’s almost a cellular memory that only finds peace in the tall trees, the deep red clay that sticks to the souls of your boots, and even the old ranch house that is so out of place in its modern surroundings. The first snow of the season is the harshest reminder of what I have left behind. It never seems to come while I am cooking breakfast or feeding the animals but when I am sound asleep dreaming of something I wont remember in the morning. Cat like it tip toes out over the roof, the ground, and the barn. The first thing I notice is the quite, which wakes me quicker than noise. Snow has a way of absorbing sound, as quietly as it comes so it lays and waits. I begin to think to myself as I rub sleep from my eyes and peer out my window, I should pay closer attention to the weather reports, as this kind of winter comes without a warning. Then my mind drifts to that red clay and how it glued itself to my horse’s hair, and turned slick in the pastures rendering them useless for the winter. It isn’t long before my mind is back to the snow at hand, perhaps I don’t miss the red clay as much as I thought I did. I watch as the little white stars start to come down again and wonder, are all the trees in the ground yet? Will the heat lamps in the corral keep that foal warm enough? Will I get my car out the driveway? Is the bus going to make it around the dirt roads that never get plowed out to our place? Before long I am trudging through it down to the hay stacks, and I notice how incredible Dog Skin Mountain looks, standing out against the partial sunlight that is making it’s way across the mountain tops, its tips thick with snow and peppered with red rocks, and to my right Mount Virginia reaches 8,000 feet into the sky and a small cloud cradles its hips so the tip is all you see. The snow starts to fall silently again, sticking to my face and coat and I think half to myself, half out loud to the magpies, this place too will get inside me, it’s just a matter of time...

January 2, 2006

“Small Talk”

Talking about the weather is an old way to break the ice in a room full of strangers, it’s also a good way to break the awkward silence in a grocery store line with the checker who barely makes eye contact and keeps snapping her gum while she scans your items. It’s the king of small talk. Unlike sports scores or stock prices everyone can relate to the weather. For me I have found it creeping into my journal entries as a sort of small talk with myself. A way to ignore the deep sense of desperation I have been feeling lately, refuse to put it on paper and without a witness it will not have conviction. The truth is 2005 left me more jaded, less trusting, and disappointed in a deep cutting kind of way, the kind that makes you pull the blinds closed and stay in for the weekend. Regrets have a way of stacking up like unpaid bills until you are in over your head, and before you can catch up your drowning in them. Even now with a long harsh year behind me, and a New Year standing in front of me, I am inclined to talk about the Truckee River heaving over its banks and flooding the roadways. Ignore the real dangers standing in the shadows. My house is still a half framed nightmare on the hill. Engineers and contractors have mounted the damage like a death march. I feel like that old woman that you sometimes see on the six o’clock news whose bank account has been cleaned out by the local con artist. Standing there with the news caster shoving his microphone in her face feeling foolish for having trusted that kind of man.. We have put our entire bank account into this land, into a promise that feels at this point like a bad joke, the kind you might wake up to after drinks on Friday night. It’s like the story of Lemony Snicket and The Series of Unfortunate events but not funny.

A Series of Unfortunate Events: This story goes like this,

My sister in law served us with a lawsuit thirty days before we moved here, more precisely a les pendums (stops all activity on your real estate, including sales) for a perceived “right” to inherit property we owned. You can do this without a SHRED of evidence. It’s one of those wonderful holes in our laws. We had acquired our property from my mother in law after living in it for almost a decade. We took it as a fixer upper. Fixer upper being the kindest thing you could say about the property, and we spent the next four years and $250,000 dollars repairing thirty years of neglect. My mother in law had wanted out from under it and we were the only family members interested in doing the work to make it habitable. The sister in law was apparently angry because her mother never consulted with her on giving up her “right” to an inheritance. I think every family must have one of these mentalities. Entitlement! It wasn’t until after her mother died (ten days after she was buried and could not assert her wishes) and we had made the house into something nice that she asserted her right to half the equity in our home. In fact we were six days from the close of escrow when she filed her lawsuit. Frivolous, extraneous, legal extortion, were only a few of the terms used by our lawyer to describe it. She could not have won but our attorney said it would cost us $150,000 just to get to a summary judgment of dismissal. It would also require we stay in California and fight for a good number of months if not years. This could be coined as the first unfortunate event of 2005 but not the most significant. We lost $100,000 dollars to that “settlement.” The second unfortunate event involved a very sick son. It took us several months to get him diagnosed and treated and as a mother this was the most significant event for me that year. It ran me ragged in ways other things could not. The third unfortunate event was that we trusted a sales representative for Nelson Homes. He was older and kind like your neighbor’s grandfather, and assured us we could put up this panelized house just like a puzzle or paint by numbers. Unfortunately, he oversimplified things (an understatement) to make a sale. The fourth unfortunate event happened in Canada when Nelson Homes cut and framed the panelized house that we were to erect. Trouble is their computer had crashed days earlier and as a result they ended up cutting the framing package to the wrong (outdated) foundation plans. This is where the real trouble started with the house, one because it doesn’t fit correctly on the $64,000 dollar daylight basement and foundation and two because it will now require “experts” to fix. Say goodbye to the budget for owner builder. As it turns out this is only one of the major problems with the framing among other serious things like code problems, and structural problems. Of course we could really use that $100,000 dollars in blood money to fix it but that part of the story has already ended. The other unfortunate events are the ones named previously in this journal with banks and lending institutions. Yesterday the broker who told me six weeks ago a loan was no problem went back to the old tired story about our lot size being to big. She suggested we subdivide. This is a fine solution except in Nevada you have to have water rights, surveys and roads making it cost prohibitive.

The next and final unfortunate event of 2005 came in disguise like a sunny day that turns unexpectedly into summer flooding. In this mix of events somewhere, I am not exactly sure when, I wedded my family and myself too quickly to people we didn’t really know. Looking back it was like running head long into a rebound relationship after a bad divorce. We lost a lot of family with that lawsuit and we were probably too eager to find friends to fill the voids. Foolishly I trusted when I really did not know who I was trusting. I forfeited my best interest for someone else’s while being loyal to nothing more than a ghost. They say you should not marry until you know someone at least a year and half. I tend to think you should not jump into friendships before that either. The reality that followed cut deeper still, the kind of regret that doesn’t have a name. The problem is I really haven’t anyone to be angry with but myself. I am not naive about people; I know well enough if you really listen to them they will tell you who they are. I listened and ignored. I was told again and again that, “everything is written in sand.” Sand is a horrible foundation for anything, friendships, agreements, commitments or values. It is not the kind of life philosophy you can rely on.

This is a summary of the big events, the face cards that stand out in my ever-growing deck of regrets. My challenge is to remember to shuffle the cards, to find the God card, the health card, the family card, the hope card, and hold those close to my vest. I also need to take refuge in the fact that there is no patient card, no victim card, no divorce card. I need to let the regrets lie where they are, and remind myself that they too have a place in the game but wont be allowed to determine its outcome. Somewhere in all of this there are lessons I have yet to learn which in the end is all we can do in this life...…