Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (27 page)

The pigs didn’t much interest any of us, and Dani seemed a bit taken aback by the cows. It was getting late in the day, but we had promised Willie that we’d check out the tractor display. Dani thought they were just giant versions of Willie’s little red jeep, and every time Willie got behind the wheel of one, she clambered up on the passenger side and waited for him to go. “Go!” she commanded. She couldn’t understand why Willie wouldn’t go and was getting frustrated, so I told Bernie I’d take her to the restroom one more time, then we’d leave. He told me that he and Willie would walk over to the entrance where we had come in and would wait for us.

Dani was dragging, and I had to pick her up to carry her, which was not easy because she was close to seventy pounds. It was like lugging a huge sack of feed. When she saw Bernie and Willie and the strange thing they were holding—a huge cone of blue cotton candy and a similar one of pink cotton candy—she wiggled down and ran to them. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew right away which one was for her. She thrust both hands into the middle of the pink cloud before Bernie could react. When she pulled her hand out, it was covered in the spun sugar, and she put all four fingers into her mouth. Bernie, Willie, and I couldn’t help it, we laughed out loud, thinking that she was going to get stuck in there. Then she reached the hand still swathed in cotton candy up to brush hair off her face, with the expected results. She wiped her hands on her shirt, then stuck them back into the cone of pink fluff.

Dani’s first cotton candy.

 

She was covered head to toe in cotton candy and loving it, especially the part she managed to get into her mouth. There wasn’t any point in cleaning her up until it was gone, but when it was, we found the nearest spigot and hosed her down.

Despite the sugar overload, both of the kids crashed in the backseat. It had really been a perfect day, and for the first time I was feeling optimistic about being back in Tennessee. I mentally calculated how many goats our backyard would accommodate and how to block off their side of the garage from Bernie’s side.

At home I peeled off Dani’s sticky, greasy, mustard-stained, dusty shirt and shorts, turned on the water, and steered her under the showerhead, where she stood in a daze, the bottom of the tub turning pale brown from the grime that washed off her legs and arms. I handed her the towel, and she made some half-hearted swipes before I realized that she was just too tired to do it herself. I wrapped the towel around her, along with a tight squeeze, then took her to her room. I helped her on with her pajamas and tucked her Hello Kitty comforter around her. I found Lullaby Gloworm on the floor under her bed, but Dani was already asleep by the time I laid it in her arms.

In her bedroom in Tennessee, the first house on Gilbert Valley Road.

 

Chapter 25

Home

During the long school break that started the week before Christmas and didn’t end until an eternity later, the first week of January, I was reminded of why I had hated winters so much in Tennessee. They were relentlessly, interminably dreary—cold, wet, and gray. We didn’t get the beautiful snowstorms that I had grown up with in Michigan that laid a fluffy white blanket over our world, making everything still and quiet and primed for sledding, snowball fights from behind snow forts, snow men, and snow angels.

Winter precipitation in the Cumberland Valley region where we lived was drizzle, rain, sleet, or ice. And because we were in a valley, all of that nastiness lingered on and on. It rarely snowed, and when it did, it was barely enough for a snowman or sledding but just enough to send everyone racing to the grocery store in a panic. If there was an ice storm—which was more frequent—you could count on schools to be closed until the last patch of asphalt in Wilson County was clear. Skies were clouded over for days on end. The cold was a damp cold, and once it got in your bones it settled there, no matter how hot a bath you drew. But it never got cold enough to freeze over a pond for ice-skating. I had spent many winter days skating when I was a kid, gliding free around the outdoor rink until my toes were close to frozen and my mother sent my dad looking for me to come home for dinner.

Most of the time, from November through February, the dismal weather kept everyone inside. After more than five years of living in Florida, we were used to being outdoors all of the time, so being cooped up in the small house on Gilbert Valley Road made us a little cranky and stir crazy.

I had gotten my goats, though—boys Salem and Derby and girls Precious and Peaches. They gave us a reason to get out and stomp around; feeding, grooming, and chasing them around the yard was entertainment for us. When Bernie was working on something in his workshop—which was all of the time—he turned on the big industrial heater, and we all went out to keep him and the goats company. Willie helped Bernie, just as Bernie had done with his dad. I think it made Bernie feel better as he grieved for his father, who had passed away in November. Dani pestered the goats, especially Peaches, her favorite. We got a Pyrenees puppy we named Chances—as in second chances—which gave Dani another warm and fuzzy animal to love and Willie a project. One of the twice-weekly 4-H meetings he went to was a dog obedience class that he and Chances were enrolled in together. I considered sending Dani along for some obedience training, but I didn’t think they would get the joke.

She was on the waiting list for an opening with the therapeutic horseback-riding farm that was nearby. On Wednesdays after school, she had private speech and occupational therapy. We had a busy schedule, but we were still getting on one another’s nerves. I was looking forward to when the frost danger passed, and we could plant a garden. That would give all of us something else to do together outside.

Our real estate agent continued to send us listings of farm properties, but nothing was in our price range, which was pretty limited after our last year in Florida. On February 14, we got an e-mail from the agent with the subject line “Happy Valentine’s Day!” I thought that was sweet, but when I opened it, she continued with a note saying she thought she had found “a place you will LOVE!” What she left out was the word “only”: a place that only you two crazy people will love!

So on that dreary, damp, cold, gray Tennessee winter day in February, the four of us were in Bernie’s truck following her car down a winding road to the very farthest edge of Wilson County. I knew we had told her we wanted to be out in the country, but we had already gone nearly four miles from the interstate, and all we had seen along the side of this narrow winding road was a little house or a mobile home every tenth or so of a mile, two churches, one cemetery, several barns, many cows, a few horses, and one home business that doubled as a beauty parlor and a tanning salon. I was getting a little nauseated from going up and down the hills, and Dani was starting to rock in the backseat.

Finally, the real estate agent slowed down. On the left was a beautiful white wooden antebellum home with wide porches that ran the length of the first and second floors, tall windows framed by green shutters on both levels, and graceful supporting columns and brick chimneys jutting out of the roof. I could see a small yellow clapboard guesthouse behind the main house and a sizable herd of goats in a large wood-fenced pen. Even on the gloom of this ugly winter day, it was heavenly. I felt like Scarlett O’Hara coming home, and if it had been a movie, the soundtrack to
Gone with the Wind
would have magically swelled from the car radio.

To my dismay, the real estate agent didn’t turn into that drive but continued another twenty-five feet down the road before coming to a stop at a metal gate on the right. I hoped that we were turning around and going back to Tara, but instead she got out of the car to open the gate, then yelled back for us to shut it behind us.

The rutted gravel path went down a slight incline, then back up, and there, just beyond the shoulder-high grass on what had been the front lawn was the house, though not so much a house as a ruin. I reluctantly got out of the car, thinking she must have mistaken us for certifiably crazy people, rather than just run-of-the-mill crazy people. Bernie, on the other hand, was out and bounding up the crumbling stairs.

The agent chattered away, telling us that the “charming Arts and Crafts bungalow was built in 1923.” It looked like it hadn’t had any maintenance since about 1923. In some parts the roof was caving in, except for over the porch, where it just sagged. The chimneys were missing large portions of their bricks, several of the eaves that ran from the sides of the house to under the roof were rotting, most of the glass in the windows was broken, and the front door hung crookedly. The stone steps leading up to the porch were cracked and separating from the landing. There was no color anywhere—the sky was gray, the grass was brown, the house was a dingy white, and even the two large barns that we could see in the field behind the house, once painted green, had completely faded and were in a similar state of disrepair.

The realtor tugged hard on the listing front door and cheerfully called for us to come inside. I was sure that a veritable terrarium of spiders, snakes, and rodents awaited us.

The power had long since been shut off, so it was freezing inside and we couldn’t turn on any lights, but even in the gloomy natural light we could see that it had once been a beautiful home. The front room had the artisan built-in cabinetry that Arts and Crafts homes are known for, and I could see Bernie looking it over with a gleam in his eye. Against one wall was a huge stone fireplace, and on the wall next to that, French doors leading to what I supposed was once the dining room. A long hall led down one side of the house, past three large rooms on the left, and then a wide staircase rose to the second floor. The wood floors were a disaster, as were the plaster walls. There had obviously been many leaks from the roof, and water stains discolored the high ceilings. There was trash and debris all over the place, as well as pigeon droppings from where the birds had flown through broken windows.

We went cautiously up the stairs and found more of the same mess. While I stood aghast at the doorway of the so-called bathroom, which had no tub or shower and a sorry-looking commode and sink, Bernie had gone to the room at the far end of the hall. Dani was sitting on his shoulders, and they were looking out the four windows on the front of the house. I stepped gingerly across the floor strewn with piles of dried leaves, sticks, and what looked like animal bones to see what had captured their attention.

Spread before us, as far as the eye could see, were rolling hills of pasture dotted with red barns, tall old trees with gigantic trunks and massive gnarled limbs, fallow fields awaiting spring planting, and little white dots of farmhouses. It was winter-drab, but within a month or so the pastures would be washed in pale green; oaks and hackberries would pop buds; Bradford pear and dogwood trees would erupt in pretty white blossoms; red buds would be in the pink; and tiny seedlings would push through the dirt in the fields. In that moment, I was reminded of all that I loved about spring in Tennessee and how much I had missed the changing of the seasons when we lived in Florida. These tired old windows with their dirty, broken glass panes would frame a glorious landscape of resurrection and renewal, of life bursting forth from a place that had seemed barren and dead. I could see it in my mind’s eye as surely as if it was right in front of me.

Willie came in to join the party, a big “Wow!” his succinct reaction to the panoramic view of bucolic bounty before us. Bernie took my hand and squeezed it. “Diane.” Oh, I knew Bernie, and I knew what was coming. He was about to turn my words about Dani from that very first photo of her—lost, empty, and hopeless—right around on me.

“Diane. This house needs us. This land needs us. And Willie and Dani need this place. Our family needs this place.”

And so, because the bank that owned it and wanted it off their hands offered us a price that seemed to verify that it was meant to be, we bought it. Twenty-six acres, five outbuildings, and one very needy 1923 Arts and Crafts bungalow. With no kitchen.

Because certain jobs were outside our area of expertise, we had to hire contractors to rewire the whole house, install central heat and air, and put on a new roof. While they were doing that and the kids were in school, Bernie and I hauled out trash, filling an endless caravan of dumpsters that were dropped off empty in our yard, then hauled away. The man across the road offered to bush-hog the yard, which we gratefully accepted. I told him that as soon as I had a kitchen, I would bake him a cake.

When the weather began to warm, and the house was safe for the kids to be in it, we brought the big enclosed trampoline and the wooden play set over from the Gilbert Valley house. We put the play set behind the back side of the house and the trampoline out front so that we could keep an eye on Dani from whichever part of the house we were working on. Willie looked at the new place as twenty-six acres of unexplored territory and happily roamed the property with his metal detector and a canvas sack for storing the treasures he unearthed. Some afternoons we let him go off on his own so he could have some Willie time, and other times he took Dani along as his “helper.”

Precious and Peaches had babies, and we kept them in the garage at the old house because we didn’t have a secured field for them yet, but we brought Salem and Derby over to one of the barns. Because the kids would be zoned for a new school once we moved, we stayed in the Gilbert Valley house until the end of the term, and while we made the farmhouse livable.

A small life insurance policy from Bernie’s dad helped out a lot with what we had to purchase, but we did all of the work ourselves: all of the walls were dry-walled and painted; all of the floors refinished; the bathrooms tiled and the sinks, the tubs, the showers, and the new commodes installed; the windows replaced; and the steps repaired.

As the “charming” Arts and Crafts bungalow emerged like a butterfly from its cocoon, so did both of our children begin to metamorphose into the next phases of their lives. Willie was becoming more self-confident and independent, while at the same time assuming more responsibility for Dani, especially as Bernie and I had been so consumed with the work on the house.

Willie’s baby face was beginning to shed its round softness, and I could see the young man who would walk into my kitchen fully grown some morning soon. He even asked that we stop calling him Willie, because “it sounds like a little boy’s name.” He wanted to be called William, and although I said, “Sure,” I turned my head so that he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I was proud of him but felt a pang of wistfulness for my baby boy who was disappearing day by day.

Dani was settling happily into our new home, and I think maybe it was because she had been a part of it since the start. She had picked out her room the very first day we were there as if her name was painted over the door. When we finally moved the furniture over from Gilbert Valley, we placed her bed so that when she woke up and opened her eyes, she would be looking out those windows, now repaired and sparkly clean.

We eventually brought all of the animals over—Precious and Peaches and their babies, the annoying talking, biting parrot, the Pomeranians, and Chances. A neighbor’s Pyrenees had puppies she couldn’t keep, so we took in all three of them—all girls—to give Chances some playmates.

The day we finished the kitchen, we celebrated with the first home-cooked meal we had eaten in months. Even cleaning up didn’t feel like a chore when I looked out the window over the sink and saw Chances loping through the greening pasture, trailed by Shy-Anne, Dori, and Spicy, her adoring little sisters.

Dani helped me plant a kitchen garden out back, and when it needed watering, she could hold the hose, although she was easily distracted by any of the animals that roamed around the yard and the fenced fields. Our quartet of goats had expanded to a full-blown choir of more than two dozen, and it seemed like half of them were expecting as well.