Between Grass And Sky: Where I Live And Work

The Second Half of Life

••• In my forties, I was cheerful about middle age. My second husband, George, accepted both my need to write and my compulsion to stay on the ranch where I grew up. There we’d built a house adjustable to the likely demands of our aging. George worked patiently with my irascible father, and my writing was beginning to appear in print. Not long after I gave up my independent press and stopped publishing books by other writers, my first two books of nonfiction were published by separate companies, and I signed a contract for another book. I could never, I said to several people who interviewed me, live in a city. At last, I thought smugly, I’d grown up. I saw myself gliding on the smooth stream of a responsible and well-ordered life. My husband and I, separately and together, had already seen plenty of white water. We knew how to maneuver the marital canoe around big rocks and whole fleets of rapids. I pictured a placid lake somewhere ahead where we would drift together as the sun—eventually—set on our lives. For the sake of brevity, I’ll list here the biggest hidden boulders the canoe struck in that calm creek: —George died; —my father, his mind damaged by strokes he wouldn’t acknowledge, ordered me to stop writing or leave the ranch; T H E S E C O N D H A L F O F L I F E 1 4 3 Hasselstrom/113-156 6/13/02 10:51 AM Page 143 1 4 4 • b e t w e e n g r a s s a n d s k y —knocked off my bearings, I moved in with a friend in a city five hours’ drive away from the ranch I love; —with no income, I rented my ranch home to strangers; —my father died, leaving exclusively to my mother everything on the ranch where I’d worked for forty years; —connections between my mother’s body and brain parted; she entered a nursing home; —my best friend, a ranch woman with whom I talked every day, died of aids; —the job of settling my father’s estate fell to me; —I sold my father’s cattle to pay his expenses; —I sold my own cattle and borrowed money to acquire the ranch; —with no cows and no home on the ranch, I leased the land to a neighbor. When I glanced up and saw my fiftieth birthday on the horizon, I was living with an old friend in a new condition of romance, staggering from the effects of change. A week before, I’d packed up or discarded the forty-year accumulation of my packrat parents in three days so my land renter’s hired man and his wife could move into my childhood home. I was ready for a break from the routines of loss, but unsure which ritual would be appropriate . I considered adopting the old Viking custom of loading the deceased’s possessions on his ship and burning it. h I recall cavorting on a Galveston, Texas, beach at three or four years old, discovering the ocean’s thunder in a conch shell and the dangers of starfish. I think it was there, in a vendor’s stand, that I first saw a kaleidoscope, a cheap cardboard tube with bits of colored glass locked inside. When I held it to my eye, the gray ocean disappeared, and I entered fantasy. My single mother couldn’t or wouldn’t buy it. A few years later, she married my father, who didn’t waste hard-earned cash on frivolities. Each time I spent a quarter, they’d remind me I was wasting money reserved for my college education. For forty-five years, each time I saw a kaleidoscope, I snatched it to stare. In airports, I sometimes saw little plastic tubes with faceted glass eyepieces, artless diversions from my primary job of holding the wings on the airplane. Even the simplest scene, observed through a repeating pattern of, say, hexaHasselstrom /113-156 6/13/02 10:51 AM Page 144 gons like the multifaceted eyes of a fly, adopts a fresh and possibly symbolic importance. I told myself I was doing research for my poems. Heir to my parents’ philosophies and economies, I caressed kaleidoscopes, but never bought. I saved my money for...