The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (19 page)

(OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON, JUNE 2013)

W
hen I was a girl, from time to time I’d help deliver calves on our family farm. It was always messy and sometimes sad, and always an enormous relief when it was over. We had a metal thing called “the puller” that we’d use in particularly hard deliveries. Essentially, it was a big metal chain with a couple of loop hooks on the ends and a hand ratchet in between. My dad would have my sister and me reach into the cow’s uterus to find the calf’s hooves. We’d pull those out if we could, then wrap them with a rag, and place them into the little hooks on one end of the puller. Then my dad, from what seemed to be a tidy distance, would ratchet out the calf like pulling a car out of a ditch, while my sister and I stretched apart the cow’s labia and hoped for the best. It always ended with my sister and me covered in mucus and manure,
sometimes happy with our new calf and sometimes crying as we helped our dad bury the stillborn calf. In any case, it was an enormous relief at the end.

I don’t have much memory of the farm except for the messiness of it, and of course the noise of it—the way the cow during delivery would bellow, suck in, rattling her rib cage, and bellow again. I heard that noise again last year. The sound seemed to rise all around me, bubbling out of me, pouring out my nose and mouth, ear holes, asshole, pores, pads, palms, and hair follicles. I had fallen from the sleeping loft when the ladder dropped out from under me, a crazy freak accident that I couldn’t have repeated even if I tried, and I wouldn’t. I dropped seven feet, broke my sacrum and coccyx, and chipped my last lumbar vertebra. In a single second, I had effectively busted my ass and was reduced to nothing but a bellow. Keeva and Annie found me screaming with my eyes unfocused and rolled up into their sockets, just like the birthing cows. They called the ambulance, and before the paramedics arrived, they helped steady me and tried to persuade me to stop moving around (a bit of encouragement that I ignored) as I tried to change into clean underwear, just like my mother had taught.

I didn’t go up to the sleeping loft for months, in part because I couldn’t lift my left leg high enough to reach the steps—a strange and passing limitation. I slept at Rita’s house for a week, and then once I went home, I found that I didn’t have the courage to go to the loft or to pick up my dog like I
used to; there was no bending down and hefting her up and carrying on like always.

During that time, people asked me what was next, often posing the question with the same steely tact my mother used when asking me about why I was cutting my own hair. I had no idea, really, except that I found myself sleeping on a lawn chair cushion on the floor in the living room. It was warm enough that I could sleep with the front door wide open, ten feet from my head, twelve feet from the spot where I saw a possum trying to drink water out of a glass I’d left on the porch. I slept like that for weeks, and in the morning I’d wake up to find my dog sleeping half in the house and half out, draped across the threshold like a doorstop. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that scene, or how it reminded me (like a surprise) that my house still fit me.

Still, sometimes I wonder if I’ll live here till I die, till I am old and can’t remember what my life could have been before. Will I always want to sit on the porch waiting for the sun to dry out my soggy disposition, waking me up to the reality of this place—this perfectly ordinary, exceptional life? Maybe. It turns out that the yard, the view, the rain on the roof, Hugh, Annie, and Rita are exactly what I want. Even the yuckier stuff, the gray days and long nights, are exactly what I want. Honest.

In late winter this year, I found myself staring out the window at the fir tree in the alley, leaning into my hand with my elbow on the table, exactly like a coffee commercial before the
coffee is introduced and everything shifts from black-and-white into color. This is what I do when I’m avoiding putting on my raincoat and plunging myself into the grayness of winter, when I can’t stand the idea of being cold (again) and walking around while my dog absorbs the rain like a cotton ball.

It was early February and it felt like the rain was trying to undo me, making my brain soggy and my complexion droopy, and reminding me that I live near the rain forest, where no amount of ultra-thick underwear could keep me from feeling damp because I
am
damp. I wondered if my dog was going through the same soggy-brained experience. She had recently taken to wanting to go out in the middle of the night and had even peed in the bed, something she had never done even when she was a puppy. So I’d started lugging her down the ladder at two or three in the morning. I’d open the front door and she’d hop down the steps in no particular hurry, like she didn’t really have to pee after all. Sometimes I’d follow her out, stand on the porch, and watch her track right in the drizzly moonlight and then left, toward the garden, nose to the ground, and then simply stop, curl twice, and plop herself in the middle of the dried-up strawberries.

This behavior continued for months and it seemed to branch into other odd behavior: She would hide more and more in the thickets of the yard, concealing herself in the tall cool grass along the fence. She had a particularly clever hidey-hole constructed in the corner near the mailbox. You couldn’t see her at
all, hidden in the grass and low shrub, until the mailman would arrive and she’d launch herself out of the foliage like a lion on the great Saharan plains.

One day, after whistling my lips off and looking for RooDee in all the usual hideouts, I crawled on my hands and knees under my little house through an opening the size of a footstool. This was the secret door to RooDee’s fort, the place where I’d seen her drag bones and where she’d go on hot days. So this was the basement of my house, a room I’d never entered. The area between the wheels and above the axles created a nice dry dirt floor with a fairly good expanse to crawl around, or if you were RooDee, you could stand up, stretch, chew on your butt, or do whatever else the day might involve. There was a secondary cave dug out under the front steps, a hollow that I never imagined as I’d wander up and down off the porch.

I looked around and relaxed a minute; it smelled like dirt and grass, and maybe just a little like dog spit and wet hair. I understood why RooDee had liked this secret little hidey-hole: it felt nicely contained, but also included a sneaky expansive view of the backyard past the front steps.

RooDee wasn’t there, and I backed out slowly, laughing, and still wondering where the hell my dog had gone, and that’s when I noticed her staring at me from the tall grass along the south fence. “What the heck, RooDee!”

Head tilt, tail wag: “What the what?”

It was like living with a spy. Someone who was constantly
watching you and taking expert notes, ready to present the facts on how you stayed up too late last night and didn’t wash your hands after you peed the other day. Which wasn’t all bad; it’s good to be accountable to someone.

But then everything shifted.

Rita died. It was late April, a few months after RooDee started hiding in the yard and a day after an oxygen generator was dragged into her house by a good-looking guy who probably didn’t need to work out at the gym anymore because the equipment was so fucking heavy. Rita died four days after I sat up with her one night, her feet dangling above the floor like she was a little girl, me rubbing her back like a tired mom who simultaneously wanted to help and also to roll into the blankets and fall back asleep. We chitchatted about the postcards pinned to the corkboard across from her bed, about the things that happened twenty years ago, ten years ago, and last Christmas, when her great-niece was in the desert, wearing a red bikini and a Santa hat. Rita died twelve hours after we talked by phone, and I explained how things were going in Portland, which was “great, and I’ll see ya on Sunday whether you like it or not.”

She died with Hugh (aka “Hughie Boodleheimer one-two-three,” a nickname from when he was a little boy sitting in her lap as she read to him) holding her hand and leaning into her bed, with Annie and Kellen making their way in the early-morning dew across the yard toward her house; with me
one hundred miles away, up and showered in Portland, busying myself to make a poofy spot on my hair lie flat, to look presentable, reasonable, and prepared for a day of teaching. Within a few minutes of Rita’s death, Annie had called me to tell me about it. I imagined Rita lying there with Kellen resting his teenage hand on her shoulder. In the past year, Kellen’s hands and feet, femurs, spine, and chin had grown exponentially—as if overnight, his body had shifted from the small eight-year-old boy who threw tennis balls at the garage for hours (and hours!) into that of a young man, a person capable of incredible kindness, listening when I cried at the dinner table one night, explaining that I was scared about my heart, that I was dying and I was afraid. At that moment, he had held my hand and rubbed my back (just like I had offered Rita). And now, there he was holding his dear great-aunt Rita, the matriarch who had helped raise him, who had allowed him to throw Nerf balls at her wheelchair as she rolled from the kitchen table to the living room lamp, daring her to toss the balls back as he ducked behind the couch. What was he thinking in those first few minutes? Was he safe and aware, and as shattered by reality as I was? I wondered about him as the phone static stretched the hundred-mile distance between Olympia and Portland—a thousand miles, ten thousand, the distance of the equator wrapped like a tight belt around the earth’s waist . . . and then I burst into tears.

“There’s no emergency here,” Annie whispered into the phone. “Rita will be here when you get home. We love you.”

I drove home twelve hours after Annie called, after teaching a workshop focused on tiny house building, and telling people about Rita, describing the time a few days earlier that she had wheeled into a furniture store for a new lift chair. She had dressed in her favorite skirt, a real piece of crap with the elastic totally blown out at the waist, and as she stood up from her wheelchair, and slowly turned on her heels, her skirt dropped to the floor. Without missing a beat, she casually said to Annie, “Well, there goes the skirt. But who cares? No one is around to notice.” And with that, Annie looked up from her focus on Rita to see that the furniture store was packed with people: an entire family, clerks, a delivery guy, and assorted customers quickly averting their eyes from the train wreck near the lift chairs. Rita finished her turn and then sat her diapered butt on the lift chair, and she and Annie finally burst into laughter.

The class appreciated that story, and as I thought about it later while I was driving home, I sobbed. I cried on the highway from mile marker 2 in Vancouver, Washington, to mile marker 104 in Olympia. I didn’t listen to the radio, or stop to pee, or try to play with my cell phone. Instead, I cried and wailed. At one point, perhaps out of exhaustion, I found myself surprised by the sound of my own crying; like a wounded animal—something unseen and moaning in the woods.

When I got home, I walked into Rita’s house to find Hugh
and Annie and a small tribe of close friends. They were in various stages of noshing on snacks and crying and chatting about this and that to try to normalize things, having dropped whatever they were doing on a Saturday night to come over with food, beer, and wine.

RooDee ambled in and immediately leaned into one person after the other, gathering pats and accolades; this is what she always did. She’d meet folks as they walked down the driveway; if they were dog people, they’d lean down and pet her. If they were not, she’d give them their space and simply follow behind them as they walked.

After the meet and greet, we walked back to Rita’s bedroom to see her. RooDee crouched low, like she was crawling under a fence; ears pulled back tight to her scalp, while swinging her head back and forth, sniffing the air. What did she sense that I couldn’t? The room smelled like eucalyptus, roses, and beeswax. It was a strangely comforting smell, a kind, human smell just like Rita.

It was the weirdest thing watching RooDee; seeing how she regarded Rita’s body and sniffed the floor, the bed and her body from the area near her head to her feet.

I sat down in a chair next to the body and RooDee parked herself at the foot of Rita’s bed, curling into a tight ball and closing her eyes. She slept there for the rest of the night, and the following night too.

During the next couple of days, we all lounged about, slowly
picking at our grief, including RooDee, who created a new hidey-hole just to the left of Rita’s front door stoop. She would occasionally wander up to the back door and wag her tail, imagining that Rita would show up at any minute. She’d bark once and wag her tail (her normal routine with Rita, announcing that she would like another biscuit), but Rita wasn’t there and so RooDee would slowly unwind her tail, drop it, and wander back to the front porch.

This continued for two weeks until RooDee died too.

I guessed maybe it was a broken heart, like she missed her routine with Rita even more than I did. RooDee missed how Rita would roll over to the back door to whistle, poorly (a pathetic
whoot whoot whoot
). If RooDee didn’t respond, Rita continued by tapping on the glass door like a woodpecker, at which point RooDee would unearth herself from beneath the little house and wander over for yet another cookie or a plate of leftover mac and cheese.

I fell asleep in the backyard the day we took RooDee to the vet for cremation. I was listening to the hummingbirds buzz near the purple flowering plants in front of the little house; they seemed to have just now discovered the “bushes of unknown origin,” as we called them, since we had no idea what they were. Everything was so normal and profoundly not normal at the same time; RooDee wasn’t there. She wasn’t sitting nearby, snapping at bugs who landed on her, frightening the birds, and Rita wasn’t inside her house with the screen door open so I
could hear her yell, “Rooooodaaaaeeee,” followed by her really crappy attempt to whistle.