My Million-Dollar Donkey (14 page)

I sat there in the field for over an hour wondering how I could possibly describe the poignancy of this moment to my husband. The astounding resonance of this quiet adventure would unfortunately end with me, because some things cannot be shared secondhand despite our desire to try. I felt sad for all Mark was missing, sadder still for what I myself was missing as I witnessed the beauty all around me, alone.

Friends from our former life often asked, “How are the kids coping with the move?”

“Our kids have never been happier,” I’d say, only to receive a condescending smile, as if I were lying.

We no longer had access to expensive gymnastic or karate schools promising to develop a young person’s grace or self-discipline. There were no afterschool computer labs or SAT crash courses to enhance a child’s learning capacity, either. We didn’t even have competitive cheerleading squads promising a perfect cartwheel, the key to popularity and a lifetime of success in some circles. As such, friends were convinced our previously popular pop culture kids could never be happy. How could hip people like us live in a backward town without malls, movie theaters, or designer clothing outlets?

They didn’t get it. Our life had become a great experiment, and collectively, we saw promise and beauty in the simple things that forged togetherness. We dived into family adventure like a starving person would dive into a buffet table.

We laughed at ourselves as we stumbled through daily country experiences, partially because we didn’t fit in, and partially because we did. There really was very little to do in the country, and because of this, we just hung out. We sat around a fire ring at night and shared dreams, embarrassing moments, and jokes. We went apple picking and tubing down the river. We picked beans from the garden, had snowball fights with the dogs, and dared each other to eat homegrown guinea eggs. When we had no place to go, we brought entertainment home, not a rented video, but things to do, such as making baskets, cartoon drawings, or homemade Christmas ornaments of clay. We ate meals together for the first time in years, and sometimes hopped into the car for a late night treat at the Dairy Queen, a venture made all the more appealing because nothing else was open past six o’clock.

Our theater of choice was the local drive-in, the trunk of our car packed with thermoses and treats. Our favorite dinner out was a picnic in the park on Thursdays when local bluegrass musicians gave free concerts. We went to festivals, craft fairs, and meandered through the local flea market to pick up antique bottles, socks, and books. We swam in the lake, hiked to see waterfalls, and picked blackberries. Our time together was leisurely and casual, with meaningful conversation cementing our feelings of togetherness. No single event was cause for great enthusiasm, yet the general attitude was that life was good. The lack of constant suburban stimuli forced us to look within ourselves for fulfillment, and the mass-produced products and experiences so carefully designed to make people feel fulfilled seemed anything but fulfilling from this distance.

“Life here feels like a vacation,” my son once said. Indeed. But as the novelty of family time spent together wore off, my kids chose to spend their free time with new friends. My husband, wanting desperately to be embraced by the local crowd, preferred laughing about country antics with Ronnie rather than talking about the day with me. My new confidant became Kathy. As each member of the family struggled to fit in and become ‘naturalized’ in our new environment, the desire for companionship became a personal challenge each of us chose to solve independently.

Mark and I worried that our suburb-raised kids wouldn’t be able to relate to their new peers. Here, youngsters were learning to drive a tractor at the same age their former friends were learning to maneuver a skateboard. But the Internet makes the world a smaller place, and even the most countrified kids had a respectable handle on pop culture trends and styles. Some kids were indeed cowboys or farmers in the making, but they knew what bands were popular, what clothing was cool, and they spent enough time on YouTube to keep current with the fast paced culture of the world at large. The kids in Blue Ridge were as comfortable in a barn as at a GameStop, a combination of MTV and Huck Finn influences balancing their lives. They didn’t hang out at the mall. Instead, they went camping, whitewater rafting, and swimming in the lake, all healthy activities that I thrilled to witness my kids trying.

I suppose the fact that we moved just before my son entered high school made the peer issue less threatening. Kent had had his fill of pop cultural influences and his personality was set. He was definitely going to college and had a broad view of the world. Moving to the country simply gave him a reprieve from the endlessly competitive environment of the rat race, time to redefine his moral and emotional center. He would charge back into the “real world” within four short years, and when he did, he’d be fortified with good memories of family togetherness.

Denver was an adult, taking a year reprieve from her life path to rebalance and get her bearings. Her time with us wasn’t unlike a college kid taking a year off to backpack Europe before getting that first job, and thereafter taking on a lifetime of mortgages and responsibilities. I trusted she would be fine.

Our daughter Neva, however, was more of a cause for concern. She was younger; still in her formative years and more apt to be influenced by local attitudes and influences. I loved that she constantly had a chicken under her arm rather than being a slave to fashion and the latest iPod accessories. Neva was a budding environmentalist and animal rights advocate, an avid reader and deep thinker. She was smart, self-reliant, and happy. The problem was the wholesome environment of the country came hand in hand with constant exposure to a narrow mindset, a darker side of the country where ignorance ruled behavior.

Kids didn’t talk much about religion on Florida’s suburban coastline, but in Blue Ridge, a family was defined by what church they attended. On the first day of school, my kids came home baffled because every student they met opened the conversation with the same question.
“What church do you belong to?”

Kids just didn’t ask that kind of thing in Florida, at least not before asking someone their name or where they got their cool shoes.

When Kent and Neva innocently commented that our family didn’t belong to a church, they were barraged with hard-sell tactics to attend this church or that one, as if the locals got a commission for each soul they saved.

“Why didn’t you just tell the kids at school that we don’t go to church?” Mark said.

“I did. They started calling me a Jew,” Kent said.

“Did you tell them you aren’t Jewish?”

“Of course, but they still said things like, ‘Hey Jew, give me a pencil. They aren’t doing it in a mean way. They’re joking...I think.”

“Is everyone who doesn’t go to church a Jew?” Neva asked innocently.

Mark and I exchanged a look of chagrin. We may not be big church people, but we obviously were remiss if we hadn’t instilled a basic understanding of religion in child number three. Shame on us.

“No matter what I say or do, they keep bothering me about what church we’re going to join,” Kent said. “It makes me feel weird.”

“Me, too. I told everyone we haven’t decided which church to join because we liked our old church in Florida so much. Lying is easier. I don’t want everybody here to hate me because I’m a wicked sinner,” Neva said.

“You are not a wicked sinner, and you shouldn’t lie to avoid confrontation. A family doesn’t have to be involved in organized religion to be decent and spiritual.”

“Why don’t we just join a church so they don’t keep bothering us? We don’t have to actually go,” my son suggested.

“We’re not the sort of people who do things we don’t believe in just to fit in,” I said with enough emphasis to remind everyone that comment applied to much more than just our choice of worship.

“Easy for you to say,” Kent mumbled. “Once they tag you as godless here, you’re doomed.”

For a month, we tried to come up with a comfortable way for our children to thwart the awkward religious grilling they received at school. How could we explain to our offspring that being called a Jew wasn’t an insult, even though in this case the name-calling was clearly meant to be one? How could we explain that a good Christian doesn’t hate gays and blacks and Catholics and anyone else who isn’t a Baptist? How could we convince them that people who drank or cussed or didn’t choose to sit in a steepled building on Sundays were not doomed to hell?

Finally, Mark came up with a solution. “Next time the kids ask you what church you attend, tell them you’re home-churched.”

Kent lifted one eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

“You know how kids are home-schooled around here because the parents don’t trust school to educate them with strong-enough Christian values? Well, tell everyone you are home-churched because your parents believe that is the only way you’ll be taught our family’s deep faith and wisdom. That’ll shut them up.”

And it did. Our kids became known as the home-churched Hendrys.

One day Kent mentioned he was going home to Florida to visit relatives. A kid at lunch asked, “Are you taking a gun?”

Kent laughed. “Why would I take a gun?”

“To shoot the niggers. You can’t walk the streets down there without niggers jumping you.”

Kent relayed the conversation, thinking I’d find it funny since the kid had said the stupid comment with absolute seriousness.

“What did you say to that?” I asked, trying not to grind my teeth to dust.

“Nothing. That kid’s a stupid redneck. I wasn’t about to tell him some of our friends are black. I’m not stupid!”

“Do all the kids at school talk like bigots?” I asked, giving Mark one of those
we simply can’t raise our kids here if prejudice and ignorance is gonna be the norm
kind of looks.

“Not all. But lots do. Face it, Mom, there are rednecks here.
Lots
of them. Don’t worry; I hang with the right crowd.”

The right crowd
. That comment alone made me uncomfortable. Obviously raising kids in a place where you have to step around a

minefield of ignorance was going to take work. A country upbringing was all well and good when living here provided us the time and inclination to sit around the campfire to enjoy nature’s stillness and the inspiration of changing seasons, but exposing my children to an endless stream of drugs, teen weddings, and ignorant attitudes was more than a little threatening.

The country was genteel and charming, but the more I came face to face with life under the surface, the more I questioned the integrity of our life choice. Ninety percent of the girls in the area wanted nothing more than to get married and have kids on or before their eighteenth birthday. Thirty percent of the girls in our area were married by the time they were 16! Would one of these empty-headed Daisy Dukes date my son and get pregnant, expecting him to step up to the plate and spend the rest of his life in this nowhere town? (How quickly “quaint” turns into “unacceptable” when it involves your child’s future.)

Worse yet, would my youngest daughter decide to get married and pregnant on or before her eighteenth birthday, influenced by peers who enthusiastically claimed it was
the
thing to do if you were really in love? How would Neva know marriage at the age of 15 was not a normal part of the adolescent dating experience in America today? She may grow up one of the sexually responsible few, but still, I wanted my daughter to become a female of substance and purpose, not one of the country belles whose primary concern was her looks, her popularity, and forging a family based on the traditional dynamic of the fifties.

Complex and important life issues would continue to rear their ugly heads as long as we stayed in the country, forcing us to throw sticky subjects out on the table to reaffirm our family mindset. If we were going to stay in Blue Ridge we really would have to home church our children.

In the end, I came to the conclusion that the great task of raising conscientious, responsible kids wasn’t easier or harder due to geographical location. Just different. I loved that our kids were growing up less consumer reliant and with less stress, but
diligent
and mindful effort would be needed to hardwire their minds to be less prejudiced, less close-minded, and less likely to pass judgment on others here, too.

The problem is, no matter how mindful parents may be, it takes a village to raise a child.

Old friends continued to ask me, “What are you doing with your life now?”

I explained we were taking a few years off to live in the mountains so we could focus on family.

They inevitably said, “Wow, you two are living a dream.”

It took all my self-control not to blow a big raspberry right into their faces.

I don’t want to kill anyone’s idealism. We all want to imagine contentment is waiting for us if we just turn our back on worldly pursuits and remember what counts. Everyone agrees money can’t buy happiness, but deep down we all believe money can, at least a little. But be careful, lest your dream become a nightmare, too.

On any given day, I’d drive all over the county, shuttling the kids to school, feeding the animals, tutoring Kathy, taking a pump class at the closest gym, 40 minutes away. On this particular day, as I was driving to pick up my kids from school, the family’s new puppy began whining and circling as if he had to go to the bathroom. My new car had already been ravaged by rustic living fallout. Hay was between the back seats and two fifty-pound bags of grain had leaked into the trunk. That week, Mark put a tree stump in the trunk, and though he eventually reclaimed his prize, he didn’t bother to remove the bark and moss residue left behind. All things considered, a puppy accident, while unpleasant, would hardly be noticed in this car. I tossed a towel on the floor, hoping that the puppy would find this more inviting than my coat, which happened to be resting on the seat next to him. Of course, my coat proved a more appealing toilet, probably because the coat smelled like a donkey.

I was trying to simultaneously steer and take care of the puppy when my husband called to share the day’s slew of frustration and conflict regarding his log home project. He ended with yet another explanation about why we wouldn’t be moving into the dream house on schedule.

He also told me that even though he had spent the entire day at the house site, he ran out for some more materials before bothering to feed the livestock, as he had offered to do that morning. I now had to drive over myself to do the task or let the horses go hungry. I picked my kids up from school and took them to the land, grumbling about wasted gas and time. They argued the entire way about who should hold the new puppy. I tuned them out and turned up the music on my CD player. The CD skipped.

Rain fell nonstop all day. Our pasture, formerly a rolling valley of green grass, had turned into a mud pit with no hope of repair anytime soon. Having never encountered this kind of problem in suburban Florida, I was exhausted from lying awake nights listening to the rain, watching the temperature drop, and feeling increasingly bad about the conditions my animals had to endure. My still-injured horse, Peppy, deserved a safe, dry place to heal, and since there wasn’t an ounce of grass left in our pasture, he needed dry hay too. I didn’t know where a person could buy a full load of hay, nor did I have a place to store a bunch of bales if I did. So I kept buying one bale a day at the feed store for three times what hay cost in bulk and toted it home in my car’s back seat because my husband’s truck bed was reserved for the things he felt were important, like new tools or grapevine for wreaths he might someday make. I felt guilty about the cost, frustrated by the inconvenience, and dismayed by my quickly deteriorating car.

I parked my mud-encrusted, puppy pee-and-hay-filled car in the grass, and went trudging into the pasture, ankle deep in mud and horse dung. This wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that I was wearing my best pair of high-tech sporty workout shoes, which I had donned because I was assured I wouldn’t have to make this trip today.

I checked the injury on Peppy’s leg, dreading the fact that I’d have to spray the putrid homemade medicine on the wound and fling baking powder over the area myself. The leg was covered in a hard, wrinkly brown shell and I couldn’t tell if this was a scab or hardened mud collected in the wound. If the shell was mud, I’d have to remove the mess to get the medicine into the wound. If I started pulling scabs off a horse’s hurt leg, he might kick my brains out. There was no plumbing on our land yet, so the only water source was the creek.

I batted my eyelashes at my son. “Help your old mom out, will you?”

Kent grudgingly slopped through the muddy pasture to bring me the first of several buckets of creek water, his new Reeboks instantly ruined.

I poured the freezing water down the horse’s leg and pulled at the gross, compacted wound. A leaf came loose. Fairly confident the hard shell was just dirt now, I spent 20 minutes picking and rubbing the wound with a towel while dodging four annoyed, stamping feet. The rain came down with more force. My fingers were frozen.

The mud that had been up to my ankles now reached my thigh. It splashed up onto my t-shirt, which didn’t exactly make me look like a contender for a wet t-shirt contest, but more like some out-of-shape, middle-aged hillbilly wearing a soaked camouflage potato sack with a hundred dollar pair of brown Nikes oozing goo. Not cute.

With the wound cleaned up at last, I asked Neva to get out of the car to help her brother. Kent’s designated role was to catch the goat and drag him by the horns to a tree so we could tie him up. Otherwise Freckles would make himself a nuisance and get between the horses and their feed.

The goat ran this way and that in an excited frenzy, my son hanging on and slipping and sliding behind him like a surfer dude riding waves of mud. Watching the drama of the badly behaved goat, I couldn’t help but wonder if goatburgers were a delicacy we might one day consider trying after all. I turned my attention back to the injured horse.

Meanwhile, Kent was so intent on keeping a handle on the goat’s horns, he’d forgotten to shut the gate. The other two horses and the donkey came charging out. Loose now, the big animals started running every which way, their eyeballs rolling back in their heads as they snorted and whinnied.

So, there we were: three crazy huge animals running loose, two city-bred kids running for their lives, and me, anchored in place with the wounded Peppy, shouting for the kids to calm down and help me corral the animals. My brave offspring were sure they’d get trampled, so they ignored me, screaming in such a panicked way the animals grew more agitated. Neva high-tailed her butt back into the car. Kent released the goat and dived behind a tree, shouting in bloodcurdling fear that we were doomed. Of course this meant the goat could now join in the rampage as well. Thanks, son.

Goliath, the largest and most spirited of our horses, was behaving like a loco stallion from an old John Wayne movie. I tried to cut him off, but he headed the other direction, snorting and bucking. I wasn’t so much nervous as I was pissed, imagining I could develop a taste for horseburgers, too, at this point.

After about ten minutes of this fruitless equestrian chase, it occurred to me that hungry horses would come for food. Oh.

I poured some feed into the bucket and Goliath trotted up. I stared him in the eye and plunked the bucket down. He stared back at me, leery. I held his halter over the bowl, an obvious sign that the fun was soon to end. He lowered his head to nibble, his nose neatly fitting into place. I tied the lead, whereupon he instantly became the docile and sweet horse I needed. Just like a man to put up a fight and then turn into a big baby the moment he realizes the girl has control.

The horses were finally situated and eating. My fingers were frozen. My ears were frozen. I was mourning my shoes. My daughter was waving, humming happily because she got to stay in the warm car with the puppy during most of the ordeal. Meanwhile, my son was flailing his arms dramatically.

“Did you see that? Goliath was charging at me but I dodged just in time! I’m lucky to be alive.”

I lifted one eyebrow. “Yeah, thanks for the help, cowboy.”

Peppy hobbled forward. He hadn’t eaten much and his leg looked even more swollen than yesterday. I petted his nose and apologized for the fact that I didn’t have a dry, clean barn for his convalescence. He ignored me, except to look for apples in my pocket. The rain made his hair sleek against his skin, revealing his now-protruding ribs, so I gave him all three apples.

Donkey looked on with gentle eyes, as if to say,
“This wouldn’t happen if it were just the two of us.”
He leaned into my side, the only creature in my world that seemed to understand I could use a tender nuzzle once in a while. I gave him some extra feed and a cookie.

Before driving home, I stopped by the chicken house. No eggs still. Damn birds.

I would describe my car after that episode, but I do not possess the required eloquence to paint a picture of the filth and unbelievable mess our mud-laden shoes made. Ah, well. I loved my car. I loved my land. I just had to be resolved to loving one inside the other.

I came home to the find the construction crew had disconnected my washer again which now sat on the porch, rusting. That morning they’d promised my laundry facilities would be up and running by that afternoon, but clearly, cleaning clothes at home would not be an option for days, if not weeks. I wanted to kick the machine, but thought better since mud was oozing through my socks.

We all undressed in the cold at the front door and left our muddy clothes in a pile. The kids showered while I cooked dinner. As the stove heated up, I tried to clean my shoes, now looking like they’d been worn on a trek through Mongolia. I would have thrown them out except for the fact that, gross as they were, they looked better than my other six pairs.

We’d been living without a TV for eight months, so after cleaning up the dishes, there was not much to do but go to bed with a magazine. I read an article about how easy teaching horses perfect manners could be. Obviously, this author hadn’t met my horses.

I fell asleep and dreamed. My dream was not of Paris and Porsches, nor of the peaceful life I thought would be ours without question once we unloaded our business, but was instead filled with visions of mud and loneliness and fitful worry about money.

I awoke to another day. And more rain.