"Bozos on The Bus"

When a boxer goes down, he has two choices: stay down or get back up and keep on fighting. Life knocked me down a year ago January, when I lost Annie. Back the truck up-I did not lose Annie; Annie passed away of renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer). I could never have “lost Annie.”

I did, however, recognize that I had the same two choices any living person has: I could repair to my lair and blaze away without care, or I could claw my way back to my feet and move forward. I chose the latter and hit the ground running. Rather artfully I managed to combine the two, marching forth while blazing away. 

The reason I could do this is simple. I got to spend almost forty years with the most beautiful woman I ever met. To be salty because our time together was not longer, is an affront to the cosmos. I have a vast array of memories of Annie, but instead of being saddened by these memories, I am uplifted by them. They serve as rays of light in the darkest of moments.

Also serving as a beacon of light for me is and has been Ollie Mac, my grandson who is almost three. I am unconditionally available, so he visits me most days for a couple of hours or so. Nothing in my life gives me greater joy or satisfaction than interacting with this child. Nothing.

In constructing a quilt of this past year's activities, I would need many squares. Through chance or otherwise, I have assembled a quilt crowded with a tale of farm life on a mountain. That I required many squares is mute testimony that I was trying to live up to the quilt-making standards of herself. As the year unfolded, I plunged into the following endeavors:

In early February, two weeks after Annie slipped away, I began construction on the deck alongside the kitchen, to replace the one demolished by cascading snow off of the roof. I worked to get the multi-leveled deck done as quickly as I could, weather and a cranky left shoulder permitting. 

In late April I began cooking lunch for the HappyDayFarms staff, Monday through Friday, with a dozen Saturdays tossed in there. I cooked for between five and seven farm personnel almost until Thanksgiving Day. I had a streak of more than a hundred consecutive weekday lunches prepared, when forced evacuation from deadly summer wildfires interrupted that run.

Last May, my sister JT gifted me with a set of watercolor paints, a wide assortment of brushes and a thick pad of watercolor paper, with which to experiment (and experience). She also included a set of acrylic paints which remain unopened. 

I have never been able to draw or sketch in my life, always having considered myself a stick-figure kind of artist. Upon receiving the paint set, I corresponded with JT because she has been painting for as long as I can remember. In gleaning valuable nuggets of information, none was more telling than her statement about talent versus hard work. 

JT told me that no one is born with the ability to sketch accurately; it is an acquired skill. Some people are able to draw easier than others but if you want to create realistic images, you need to practice the same drawing until it looks the way you want. 

And she was right. I never thought I could draw because every time I tried, my drawings looked like those of a second grader. Then I tried drawing the same object fifty times-or whatever it took, working on specific elements of the sketch each time. I proved JT correct early on by painting a portrait of Casey that was clearly recognizable as Casey. 

In my own mind, I continue to exceed my highest expectations. This is not to say that what I create has any resemblance to true art; it is to say I am pleased with most of what I paint. I would have liked Annie to see this side of me emerge, but who knows? I may only have started painting in the first place, as a means of coping with her loss. 

I did my first painting, one of a heart, on what would have been Annie’s 64th birthday.

As for that running game, at some point last spring, I began baking gluten-free, oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies for the HappyDayFarms farm-stand. We are located five miles up Bell Springs Road and opened in April, at pretty much the same time that I started cooking for the staff. I baked cookies twice a week until I got organized enough to knock out a double/double batch, or four single batches simultaneously. That way I only had to marathon-bake once a week.

Beginning in mid-summer I processed around forty cases of zucchini relish, tomatoes and apples, not finishing up until December. I did pints and quarts of cold- pack tomatoes; pints and quarts of oven-roasted, hot-pack tomatoes, including Ace, cordon bleu and German-striped, heirloom tomatoes; half-pints and pints of tomato/jalapeño salsa; half-pints and pints of jalapeño/tomato hot sauce; quarts and pints of marinara sauce; half-pints and pints of catsup; and half-pints of pizza sauce.

I canned about two cases of applesauce from our orchard-grown Fuji apples, and a case of pints of chopped up black Arkansas apples, ready-made for pies and cakes. Almost all the applesauce is gone because Ollie Mac loves it, as he does apples.

As if I did not have enough on my plate, in late July I began working on an enclosed front porch. It runs the sixteen feet across the front of my kitchen and has an upstairs, screened-in-porch room, for sleeping at night during those dog days of August. 

As the weather warms up this spring, should we so choose, the farm staff could comfortably eat lunch in this porch. Regardless, right now when it is twenty-five degrees outside, the porch provides excellent insulation. It will be the same this summer, when it is ninety degrees outside, with the porch serving as a buffer from the heat. 

I also constructed a hand railing around the aforementioned deck, along with a bench and steps leading down from the side of the deck. This is the part of the project that I enjoyed the most, primarily because there was no timeframe attached.

Topping off my list of hitting the ground running, despite the worldwide pandemic, I renewed what had been a casual friendship with Denise, a resilient and delightful woman who walked across the same high school graduation stage that I did. Our friendship has blossomed into closeness and though she lives six hundred miles away, she makes our relationship happen by journeying back and forth from Westminster, in Orange County.

One difference between Denise and me, is that I choose to complicate my life to the extent that I have multiple responsibilities connected to others. In-season I cook for farm staff with a rigid time frame, and I clean up afterwards. On an almost daily basis, I get to interact with Ollie Mac. I process fruit and veggies from the farm, coordinating on times with Casey, and I bake for the farm-stand as needed, communicating with Casey or Amber. 

I also paint, write, clean house, work on my building project, haul firewood for the wood stoves, tend Annie’s chickens, care for my dogs and struggle to get six hours of sleep out of every twenty-four.

Do I drive myself because Annie passed? Or do I drive myself in spite of it? Or am I just one of Firesign Theater’s Bozos, plopped on this bus of life, making my rounds, doing my thing, while waiting until I get to the end of the line?