Part 11: Filling the Days (Part 1)
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Anatole France (1844 - 1924),
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
There is a difference to the days when you are working to subsist and when you are working to expand and thrive. Before Mateo came home my days were filled with mostly trying to make ends meet and making sure there would be food on the table that day … and maybe tomorrow. With Mateo’s return not only was I thinking of food for tomorrow but food for the coming winter and next spring and beyond. No longer did I have to worry about being the only one gathering enough wood to keep us warm for the day; Mateo’s longer arms and greater leverage helped to create a wood pile that would last us a month if we didn’t add to it. His goal was six months at a time but that would depend on how cold it got in the coming months.
Mateo didn’t just bring home wood when he went out. He brought home a lot of things I hadn’t even thought to salvage: door knobs and locks; door hinges, light bulbs, the motors out of ceiling fans, all of the gizmos from inside HVAC units, fancy light fixtures, cabinet knobs, mirrors, window shades, door knockers, filing cabinets, copper piping, extension cords, heavy outdoor planters, stacking plastic chairs, folding tables, pool equipment, metal shelving from storage sheds and garages, and so much more as to make my head spin. He stacked the aluminum that I had layered upstairs neatly and even matched up like pieces in case we needed to put them back together for something. At first glance it looked like the barn was turning into a junk yard but if you looked more closely you could see an inventory system actually did exist. Mateo has everything organized – nearly over organized if such a thing is possible – and I don’t even like to go into some of the stalls for fear of messing up whatever he is in the middle of.
Early one morning Mateo came running back to the house causing my heart to jump into my throat in fear. His hurried words didn’t help. “Get the children inside!” He ran for one of the large caliber rifles before rushing back down the street towards the canal. My nerves were on edge for several minutes before there was a loud shot that seemed to echo forever. It was another forty-five minutes and I was this close to going to look for him when I saw him coming back to the house out of breath and filthy.
I ran towards him bringing a canteen of fresh water. He guzzled it down and the said, “I give up.”
“Give up what?!” I asked shaking like a leaf from nerves.
“God never does anything by half measure,” was his response.
“Mateo you aren’t making a bit of sense.” In the distance I heard several loud crashes. “Who are they? What do they want?!”
“Who? Oh … oh Leah, I … Oh Dios, my poor Corazon … it isn’t a who, they are a what. And by the sound of them if I don’t figure out how to cage them, they will get away from us.”
The long and the short of it is that a boar, a couple of sows, and some piglets startled Mateo while he was out salvaging. The boar tried to gore him and ran him up a tree for a moment. He was eventually able to lock the two sows and their piglets in a house. The boar tore off in the opposite direction and in the process became bogged down on the bank of the canal with predictable results. The shot was Mateo putting the mortally wounded hog out of his misery right before a gator took him under for the final time by rolling.
It was not fun trying to wrangle the remaining hogs. I finally resorted to pacifying them with some of the garden refuse I would normally have put in the compost as well as a scoop of dried corn mixed in. That did it. They went to town and then settled down to feed their young.
Mateo and I spent the rest of the day using chain link fence that he’d brought home to build two large pens in the only place we had left which was between the pond and the barn. The barn formed one “wall” and then we built the other three walls using an oak tree as one corner and a cyclone fence post for the other. We sank the fence walls two feet into the ground using a trench and then backfilling to keep the pigs from rooting their way out and to keep anything from digging their way in.
We had to finish the upper part of the fence the next day because it took a long time that we did not have much fun in trying to move the hogs from the house to their new pens. Before we did anything else we tagged which piglet went with which sow using powdered, colored chalk. After that we roped the sows and I bribed them every couple of yards to cooperate and follow where we pulled them. The piglets were so young they were practically still attached to their mommas so it was just a matter of shooing them along and trying not to step on any of them when they would run under our feet.
In the days that followed Mateo added more space and a little chute kind of deal that the piglets could get away from the sows by going through. He realized we didn’t need to make it so tall as we had the first pen but he did wind up adding braces to the walls. I left him to it – he was devouring all the books we had on animal care and husbandry – as I had my own work cut out for me; I was adding more garden spaces. Not only did we need more food for ourselves but now I needed to provide feed for all those new hungry mouths that God was sending our way. The pigs got all of the peels and spotted or bruised pieces from the fruits and vegetables, most of the plant tops except for the alliums like onions and garlic, and the stalks of plants once I found out what they liked. I added a small scoop of our dried corn until our fresh corn started coming in, then I cut it down to every other day.
My deciduous trees gave me fruit a couple of weeks late, but they did give me fruit … peaches, nectarines, and figs were such a delicious addition to our table that it was hard to hold some back for preserving. I planted new rows of beans every few days and just about worked myself silly trying to keep up with the production’s harvest. The melons gave more than we could eat fresh though I lost several to invading raccoons until I figured out how to keep them out by fencing off each individual fruit as it matured. I had tried putting a container over the fruit but I left one on too long and the fruit eventually grew to fill the inside of the old plastic milk jug. It was a funny sight to see a milk jug shaped melon once I finally cut the container away.
Winter squash, zucchini, yellow crookneck squash … any squash I had seeds for … grew pretty well though they were a ton of work since they spread so quickly. But it was either keep them covered at night or come the morning discover that the raccoons and opossums had eaten them all. I noticed a large Himalayan cat had moved back into the neighborhood … a large, hairy male Himalayan cat … and after that there were fewer baby raccoons to have to deal with. Fewer squirrels too which had been a real pain in the corn patch. Every once in a while I would hear a cat fight so I knew there was more than one around but there was no way I was going to make friends with the thing. I’d made the mistake of thinking he was just a big fuzzball lost and looking for a new home and tried to talk to him one time when I saw him while I was helping Mateo bring in some wood. Uh uh, never again. I actually like cats but I swear this one was part mountain lion or something. It growled at me and since I’m college educated I was able to decipher from all the noise that while I could look, touching would not be the brightest idea I had ever had.
The sweet potatoes did well towards the end of June and a prayer was answered when it looked like the peanuts were also making even if they were going to be late doing it. My potted tropical fruit trees and bushes were doing OK but nothing worth taking out a full-page ad for. The strawberry quava, cherry of the rio grande, and Persian limes did the best of all of the potted exotics, but I think that is because I took so much care of them in the beginning when I still could.
As June moved into July the rain finally slacked off and the temps consistently reached the low eighties every day but that was still ten to fifteen degrees cooler than it should have been. In one respect it was pleasant but in another it was worrisome, but since it was one of the things I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I couldn’t do anything to change I did what my mother always said to do and “left it on the altar.” Strangely enough when I did that I was rewarded though it became progressively more difficult for me not to go back and pick it back up and add it to what I already carried around in my worry sack.
God continued to provide. We added some very ugly ducks to our menagerie. And when I say ugly I’m not kidding. None of them matched each other. They are a complete patchwork of other ducks. Some remind you somewhat of mallards and then others drive you crazy trying to figure how what duck species they are most similar to. They are the calicos of the duck world. The drakes are easily the oddest looking as they have very distinctive facial features. The drakes also fight with each other and it is no joke when they do it because they have claws on their toes. The drakes will also fight with other animals and people if they get in the mood so I’m always mindful when the children are out there with me. And I was out with the ducks quite a bit trying to clean up after them, gracious they are messy. Luckily we need the fertilizer, so I always have someplace to dump it.
We took over the Nelson’s backyard and even some of Mr. Houchens’ as well as we were running out of room. Three acres may sound like a lot but when you are trying to feed a family year ‘round from what you can produce it really isn’t. The first attempt at the garden expansion was almost a failure. I came out one morning to spy deer raiding the new green shoots. The deer ran off at my scream and just as quickly Mateo came running to me.
“Leah!”
“That … that monster … it was eating my corn!!”
After I calmed down and explained – actually Nydia explained because I was stomping around, ready to pop a blood vessel at the animals’ audacity – Mateo measured and left to collect more fencing. When he came back I was still livid.
“Corazon,” he said trying to soothe my temper. “It is bad, but not the end of the world.”
I nearly turned on him with a snarl but caught myself in time. “Those creatures were taking food out of our children’s mouths!”
Calmly he said, “Yes. And if I get a chance they will become food for our children’s mouths.”
His measured response caught me off guard. Stopped me cold if I’m honest, and left me silent. I thought for a moment and then realized I had only been seeing the negative and not the potential good.
“There are deer,” I said in wonder. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen deer around here.”
“I know I’ve never seen them though I heard when I first moved in that occasionally small ones would come out of the swamp during the dryer months.”
“The ones I saw just now weren’t small. They were White Tails. I know they were.”
Mateo stopped using the post hole digger for a moment and asked, “They were what?”
“White Tailed Deer. My father would hunt them when I was younger before my cousins sold their acreage in Georgia. Momma used venison the same way, and as often as, most people used beef.”
“Well,” Mateo said after thinking a while. “I suppose it only makes sense that wildlife would move into the suburbs after all this time. When I was down in south Florida even the zoo animals could be found wandering around on occasion … although most of them were killed and eaten before officials could come collect them.”
Mateo told me that as the infrastructure collapsed people released their pets to fend for themselves. The same thing happened at petting zoos and eventually large zoos also became compromised in some way, including from bombings, and animals would escape. We both wondered for a bit about Lowry Park Zoo and Busch Gardens but were unwilling to waste time away from our own concerns at home just to satisfy our curiosity. We had enough to deal with without taking on more that had no practical return for us. Any animal still locked up would be a carcass and we didn’t need to go looking for trouble in case other such exotic species were on the loose. I wondered briefly about salvaging for animal feed but soon realized my wits must be begging as at this late date animals would have already found it or likely groups like Capt. Tag’s would have already thought of it and cleaned the place out. I was briefly depressed over a hypothetically missed opportunity, but it was Mateo that said, “We have enough for now, no sense borrowing trouble. Once I’ve cleaned out the houses in a one-mile radius then we can think about a trip further afield. God has given us quite a bit to manage already.”
Mateo had changed, was changing, and sometimes it was hard for me to keep up. In the beginning he saw church as my hobby. Eventually he came to understand how important my faith was to me, how much I depended on the strength I found in it; he understood the how but not necessarily the why. He never made fun of me, never hindered me exercising my faith and eventually even participated somewhat, but always as a kind of spectator. I was used to him following my lead in that area of our lives, humoring me, going as a family because it appeared to be the right thing to do and because it kept the peace.
But something happened to him at some point to cause a change. He was always the head of our house but on many things our duties and responsibilities were sharply split into categories that were either “his” or “hers” with just a few that were “ours.” These days many more were “ours” with far fewer that could be defined strictly as “his” or “hers.” And one of those “ours” was now our family’s interaction with our faith. The differences went beyond the fact that I no longer had to ask him to say Grace before our meals. It went beyond that I no longer was the only one reminding Nydia to say her bedtime prayers; Mateo was actually teaching Neeno to do this as well and all without my prompting or bringing the idea up in the first place.
It seemed that as time and events in this life wore at me, even taking my energy to call on my faith, Mateo would stand in that gap for me, for us. He wasn’t a candidate for the Amen Pew yet, but he was seeing God’s hand in areas of our lives where my worry and fatigue was blinding me. I would laugh and joke about stuff being Providential, I would even believe it for the most part, but Mateo was really living the faith while some days I only felt like I was playacting it.
He was much less like a string that was pulled almost too taut. He seemed less afraid of his own strong emotional reactions to things and as a result he managed them better and was easier inside his own skin. It used to be that Mateo always seemed to have so much leftover energy that it wafted around him like static electricity looking for a target. Now he used both his mind and body so much that at the end of the day he could actually relax. He had concerns and still made plans, but he no longer worried at them the way he had in the past. He strove to make our lives better day by day and into the far future but he was also content with what we had in the here and now. Some days I felt like I barely made it through the day and was left unable to envision a far-flung future.
One such day came when I realized that Nydia’s treasure box was empty. I tried to provide a treat for her every once in a while just because. She helped so much even as young as she was that I tried to recognize these in tangible ways. I honestly don’t know how I would have gotten everything done in a day without her help with Neeno or with toting and carrying things for me. The treats were not anything special or of great value - a new pencil, a new rubber band for her hair, a few pretty beads for her to string and wear, an unused crayon or marker. Rarest of all were the times when I had given her a piece of candy or a safety sucker. She never asked for these things, it was just something I did because I could … only now I couldn’t. Everything was used up or gone. For some reason that fact just broke my heart.
I thought that I would make candies and wrap them like the store bought candies and refill the chest at least partially that way but as I looked over our food inventory I became concerned. I had used as little of all the sweeteners as I could but we would eventually run out no matter what I did … and sooner rather than later. Soon the lack of sugar added to my upset over no candy for Nydia. I thought all day, but nothing came to mind. I was almost resolved to use a little of the sugar anyway. I told Mateo but he said, “I may have an idea, give me an hour in the morning before you finish deciding.”
If I had hoped he had found a secret stash of food I would have been disappointed. I was putting breakfast on the table when he came in. “I have a surprise for my girls.”
Nydia and I immediately grew suspicious; the last few “surprises” Mateo brought us had entailed a lot of extra work. “Did I ever tell you how poor my Abuelo and Abuela were? And their parents before them? I did? Good. Did I ever tell you they were so poor they never had store bought candy? No? Well it’s true. In fact, my own mother didn’t have store bought candy until my father bought her some lemon drops on their first date.”
Nydia nodded and said, “That’s like us Poppy.”
I saw Mateo hide a wince. “Not quite Baby Doll,” I told her. “For us the reason we don’t have store bought things is because there are no stores around here.”