Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (7 page)

“Dinner,” I say instead.

Wordlessly, the young soldiers follow me in. An army, even one noticeably short in stature and including only two troops, still marches on its stomach.

“Even Napoleon Bonaparte had to eat,” I yell to them over my shoulder.

The boys will just have to declare a temporary cease-fire. Tonight for dinner we’re having squash-crusted pizza out of
The Moosewood Cookbook
. Tomorrow morning for breakfast, eggs Benedict with fried squash medallions in place of the Canadian bacon, and for lunch, some kind of vegetable soup I’ll think up, and squash bread with jam. Luke might be having visions of a full ham running around our friends’ pigpen, but I’m seeing the dollars on our grocery bill ratcheting down.

“Who is Napoleon Blown Apart?” Will asks, sitting at the kitchen counter watching me cook.

The next morning, Sunday, Owen asks if his rock band can practice in the Quonset hut. All that corrugated metal has got to have some great acoustics, he says. I make a mental note to buy extra bread today on my weekly trip to the bakery. This bakery opens at 9 a.m. on Sundays and everything is half price on this day only. They stay open until they’ve sold all their wares, which means they almost always close before noon.

For the past month I’ve been coming here almost every Sunday morning. Their bread is twice as good as store-bought and less than half the price. Although I grew up on my mother’s homemade bread, and I know how to bake it, that’s a luxury I can’t afford. It’s actually cheaper to buy this half-price bread than it is to purchase all of the ingredients for my mother’s and make it myself.

Even small savings like this one become exponentially more important when you are making enough sandwiches for three hungry boys, yourself, and now extras to fuel the creation of heavy-metal music, too. To quote my bass-guitar-playing son,
metal burns a lot more carbs than classic rock or country. And don’t even get him started on rap.

With his bass solo jamming its way through the open windows of my minivan, I drive to the bakery. On this particular visit I see a new sign on the counter next to the cash register. In dark-green marker it reads:

For the first time I wonder what the breed or species or ilk or genome the squash bombs in my pasture belong to. Are they, could they be, just maybe, a member of the oft-derided zucchini family?

I try to picture the mystery squash clearly in my mind, without the trappings of combat. I see one, resting under its leafy canopy. It is the shape and texture of zucchini but not the color. Pale green fading almost to white, with darker-green speckles. I wonder how specific the head baker will be in his definition of the word “zucchini.”

I see him in the back, kneading some dough. He is average-sized, with a little paunch around the middle, coarse black hair with salt-and-pepper trimmings. White pants, white T-shirt, white
apron, hairnet. His hairless forearms look like Popeye’s without the tattoo, veined and bulging, and he is focused in on his work. All business.

What, I wonder, will this man think of my squashes?

“Excuse me,” I say to the woman behind the counter with the cat-eye glasses, “could you tell me the rules for your zucchini contest?”

Birdlike, she cocks her head at me. “Rules? What do you mean, rules?”

“Oh, you know,” I answer innocently. “How many can I enter, when should I bring them in, what do you do with them after, stuff like that.”

She waves a bony claw in the air. “As many as you want! We make zucchini bread to sell! Friday, okay? You bring them in Friday.”

“And I can really win a hundred dollars?”

“Yes. We put one hundred dollars on a card for you here.”

“Oh. You mean it’s not cash, but bread and rolls and stuff.”

“Yes! Yes! Or cakes! Or cookies! Lucky, lucky winner!”

I think about it. I would prefer the cash, but she is right. Someone, or rather three someones, are going to be lucky winners indeed. At eighty cents a loaf for their day-old homemade bread, first place would pay for a whole year’s worth for me and for the boys. That’s sandwiches for school lunches, or French toast on weekends, or breadcrumbs for meat loaf, and enough store credit left over for a dozen cookies or even a coffee cake.

Since my regular paycheck doesn’t cover us, maybe this is how we’re going to make it—by assigning odd little tasks to all our individual needs. Rocky the pig for protein, the garden for vegetables, the SMILE handbook for mental health, the Zen lit for
spiritual health, and a crop of volunteer squashes to win our daily bread. I have no idea how I’m going to find the money to finish the remodeling project, but weirder things have happened, I’m sure, even if right now I can’t think what they might be.

A bag of sliced seven-grain in each hand, I exit through the automatic door and practically run to the car. I must speak with my troops ASAP and order up some peacetime cooperation.

Once home, I try to explain the maneuver. Owen waves me off, as a carload of boys all dressed in black unloads amplifiers, a drum set, and microphone stands from the trunk of a rusty sedan parked in our driveway.

“Band practice, remember?” he says, laying down a labyrinth of extension cords. I have got to be kidding if I think he has time for
vegetables
.

But I am not kidding, I am totally serious, and Will and Luke take one look at my face and agree to each select the most worthy squash they can find to enter into the contest. From now until Friday morning they’ll water their squashes daily, or more often if necessary; they’ll pick off any bugs and scare away the crows. They will not, I repeat
not
, use their prize specimens for bombs.

“We’re on it,” Luke says, saluting sarcastically but still committed to the contest. If he can’t outwar his little brother, he’ll just outgrow him.

“All right, guys, these squashes are depending on you,” I tell them, like the drill sergeant I’ve become. I
need
that $100 bakery card. “They’re like your babies now.”

Luke nods his agreement. Will is still thinking about it.

“How about they’re like our
prisoners
?” he finally asks.

“Sure, okay, your prisoners. Just treat ’em good.”

“They’re prisoners, Mom, duh,” Will says, as if I were an idiot
in the ways of war or he were recalling his treatment at the hands of his brother. Maybe both. “You don’t treat prisoners good.”

From Napoleon to the Geneva Convention: who knew summer squash came with so many opportunities for edification?

“What about the Geneva Convention?” I ask.

They have never heard of it. Will gets a pass, as I didn’t really expect this to be a chapter in his third-grade history book. But Luke just started eighth grade. I would have expected him to know about this important piece of world history and international law by now. Note to self: start attending those school curriculum meetings.

I tell the boys that the Geneva Convention is a worldwide law that countries at war have to obey. We open the big atlas and find the city of Geneva, where the treaties were negotiated and signed. I explain that victors of war still have to care for the wounded and the sick, that they have to treat the imprisoned with respect. They listen intently, as if they’re really getting it; then Luke lobs a zinger.

“What about Abu Ghraib? Where was the whole Convention thingy on that?”

Even with restrictive TV privileges, even living on our little farm miles outside of town, even with this exchange occurring when Luke is so busy with school and chores that he has little time to spend with his friends where our country’s involvement in Iraq might be discussed, he’s got it. And I feel a tenderness toward him, my boy considering war.

Don’t forget
, I remind myself,
he is also the same boy who aimed an eight-pound squash directly at his little brother’s head
.

“That was a war crime,” I say. “Those soldiers are going to jail, did you know that? What they did was wrong. Even your enemies
deserve your respect. Not your surrender—never, ever that. But your respect.”

“Right,” comes a brand-new voice on this topic. “Like you do with Dad?”

The band has come inside for a sandwich break, and so Owen has an audience of his peers for this bit of family theater. Throughout my whole zucchini-crop repurposing—from war to (hopefully) wealth building, Owen has been noticeably absent from our efforts. He didn’t play war with his brothers, because he was off practicing his cello or his bass guitar. He isn’t usually around on most Sunday mornings when I go to the bakery, because he has slept over at some friend’s house where they’ve stayed up late to play and write music. He didn’t want to hear my plan for winning the contest, because it is, in his fifteen-year-old world, “so über lame.”

War crimes must be a lot more interesting to him than summer-squash contests, because Owen is present with us now. Hands on hips, head cocked to the side, he is all in.

And I want to tell him to mind his own damn business. Even in front of his friends. I want to tell him that his brothers and I are having an important political discussion and that he is off topic. And I would, except that this
is
his business, and this
is
the topic.

The divorce, as much as I’ve been trying to pretend otherwise, is five people’s business—mine, Mr. Wonderful’s, and the boys’, too. It has stretched beyond what I wanted or expected, out into the world around us. It isn’t just happening to me, it is happening to all five of us.
We
are getting divorced.

And amid the anger, the disappointment, the current events, the squash bombs, the grocery bill, and the grief, we are going to have to find a way to live with it.

·  ·  ·

Later that day I settle back into my flowered chair in front of the window. Not for good this time, just for a few quiet minutes. The band has gone home and the boys are in bed. I’m raising three opinionated young men, and discussing life with them wears me out. When they were little, I had all the answers—or if I didn’t, I could at least buffalo my way through. Now I sometimes feel like I don’t even know the questions.

I bought a Zen book from the library’s used-book sale, and when times get tough the author suggests this two-step solution: be aware of your surroundings, and inventory your immediate blessings. This advice from
A Deeper Beauty
sounds easy and harmless enough; I might as well give it a try.

My little farm is almost within sight of the 45th parallel, and this far north the September light late in the day has a golden cast to it. I watch the last of this light drench the slope from the house to the pasture and color my life’s present fortunes. A solidly built house. Land I’ve come to make fertile. Sons who love me and love each other, war games and verbal sparring and gaps of historical knowledge aside.

I take a deep, cleansing breath and ask Someone to
please let us win the contest
, and then I relax back into the safety of my chair. Movement outside in the near dark catches my eye. Tiptoeing past the window in their pajamas are two figures: Will and Luke. They each carry what looks like a rectangular piece of cloth in their hands. What are they up to now?

I walk out onto the front porch and close the screen door very, very quietly. I have no idea where they are going or what they are doing, but I do know that mothers often see the best stuff when
our children don’t know we’re watching them. My two younger boys head for the pasture and slip, like the slim and shaggy-haired shadows of coyotes, behind the barn. In just a few minutes, they retrace their steps and run back toward the house. I press myself flat against the wall by the front door and watch as they run through the mudroom door and then back inside.

I’m not sure if they’ve seen me here or not, but I wait a few more minutes and hear them both run upstairs and jump back into their beds. Their bedside lights click off, and there is giggling, then whispering, then quiet, then crickets. Right now, two of my immediate blessings are pretty darn obvious.

Full dark comes on quickly, I grab a flashlight and walk out to the pasture. There are lightning bugs twinkling above the vines like low-lying stars, and in two spots on the ground the leaves are disturbed and flattened. I find Will’s adopted squash and, nearby, Luke’s, too. Each one is still connected to its vine like a beating heart to a vein, but underneath them are two plaid flannel pillowcases, folded in half. The prisoners, I see, are not only completely safe, but warm and comfy, too.

It’s this small kindness that finally cracks me open. “You’ve
changed
,” Mr. Wonderful observed the last time he dropped off the boys.

I am alone now, so I let myself cry, really cry, for the first time since my husband moved out. It’s one thing to inventory your blessings; it’s another to care for, love, and nurture them in all of the ways they deserve. Money, time, energy, and resolve all feel so finite. So much depends on me now, and I wonder if I am tough enough to shoulder all of it alone. I wonder if I can keep my promise to give them everything by myself.

Last week while Owen was driving with his new learner’s permit,
a wild turkey flew right into our windshield. We were on a busy four-lane throughway, and I made Owen pull over—not to check for damage to the car but to check for damage to the bird. If the encounter was fatal, maybe we could eat the thing.

There was no carcass in sight, but still, looking at possible roadkill as food is something I never would have done in the early, middle, or even declining years of my marriage. Make a pet of it? Yes. Tape its wing and nurse it back to health with an eyedropper of sugar water? Yes. Pluck it and eat it? Eww.

“If it runs, a Bean will shoot it. If it falls, a Bean will eat it,” wrote Carolyn Chute, about her fictional backwoods family. This isn’t fiction, though. This is our actual life now. And if it flies into their green minivan’s windshield, a Link will pluck it.

I guess Mr. Wonderful is right: I
have
changed. I’m no longer the tree-hugging, agnostic nature lover he married. Now I look at nature in a brand-new way—as something to eat.