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The Good Life
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
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The Good Life The year we sold the farm, Hank bought a boat. He called it “trading the garden for the good life.” It began the year before, the morning he came in for breakfast and complained that he was having trouble hitching the sprayer to the tractor. “Gettin’ too old for this,” he said, slumping into the dinette chair closest to the door. He claimed to be losing strength in his arms, and half-humorously attributed it to age. He looked pale, even more so than usual above his hat line. When he lingered over his coffee, I called the doctor from the bedroom phone—so Hank couldn’t stop me—and scheduled him an appointment for a check-up. After his bypass, Hank began to talk more often about retiring , about selling the orchards. After all, he reminded me, he’d been farming for the better part of forty years. “It’s about time I started doing something else,” he said. “About time,” I agreed, as I always did. But I had heard such talk before. Every farmer I know imagines life without weather. Whenever there’s too much rain or not enough rain, too much sun or not enough sun, whenever In Which Brief Stories Are Told 100 ) prices go up too high or down too low for too many years in a row—farmers talk about selling. “Selling out,” they call it at the grange. For the better part of forty years, I’d heard Hank threaten to get rid of the “whole stinking mess” more times than I could count. I guess I never thought he really meant it, not even the afternoon I found him and Drew—our son—hunched over the vacation maps and brochures that were piled on the kitchen table like implement catalogs. They didn’t even look up when the screen clacked behind me. “Ginny, you gotta see this,” was all Hank said. I remember setting the bags of groceries on the counter next to the refrigerator, thinking that the milk should be put away soon, before I went over to take a look. The table was thick with advertisements, though not what I’d expected, no shiny blue tractors or the latest sprayer designs. Instead, the leaflets pictured southern mansions and pecan-lined streets and harbors thick with sailing yachts strung as though for a holiday with flags of various colors and designs. Quaint boulevards framed horsedrawn carriages; Spanish moss dripped from cypress trees. One picture showed an alligator in a water hole at a golf course. And there were dozens of blue and green maps. “Charts,” said Drew, when I asked what the maps were of. “Maps are for land; charts are for water.” “Charts of what?” “The Intracoastal Waterway,” said Hank. “D’you know it’s possible to get from Maryland to Florida in a boat and never actually go out into the ocean?” “Why would I want to?” I said. “We’d go south for the winter, and come back for summer,” Hank said. “Live on a boat.” “And the farm?” “Sell it. Do some traveling. You always complain that the farm keeps us from traveling. Now’s our chance.” [3.230.128.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:57 GMT) The Good Life ( 101 “But you’ve never been on a boat like that. Won’t it be expensive ?” “You get a sailboat, Mom,” said Drew. “Wind costs nothing. It’d be great. I’d even come see you during holidays.” Hank’s gray eyes caught mine and held them. “You’d like to see the ocean, wouldn’t you?” he said. I was chilled by the thought. Still, in spite of my spending the better part of that afternoon browsing through promotions from every city and state along the eastern seaboard—and imagining what a different and exotic life that would be—I never actually believed Hank would go through with it. There had been so many other plans that had never come to pass. The very next day, in fact, the tractor quit. We had it trucked to Buckley for repairs and Hank leased a dual-wheel John Deere from Cherryland Implements in order to get the seedlings disked. He cursed most of that week. The John Deere was more difficult to maneuver than our Ford, Hank said, and blamed the wheelbase . Then the weather turned rotten, and he couldn’t disk at all, and Cherryland wouldn’t...