Jacoby

A visitor brings center

Monday evening we crouch by the chicken coop door.

“This is Ashanti,” I say, gesturing at the tan Americana.
“Ashanti,” she repeats in her soft high voice.
“Sophie” - I point to the one white bird.
“Sophie.” - She seems to be committing each one to memory.
“Gyu-Lub”
Gyu-lup?“
“Lub - it means Chicken in Lushutseed - the native Salish dialect spoken here.”
She nods.
“Flyn Rider”
She smiles, “Flyn Rider - I approve.”
“High Rhulane.”
“High Rhulane” - No smile. She is not, then, familiar with Redwall.

“The roosters are Kokoro, Ondori, and Hahns - three words for rooster.”
“What in?”
“Greek, Japanese, and German.”
“Hahns is rooster in German? That makes so much sense!”
“Why’s that?”
“My grandmother used to swear at us in German.”
“Are you a rooster?”
“A bit.”

As we walk back to the house she thanks me again for letting her take care of my chickens while I’m away.

“No - thank you. They’d starve otherwise.”
“I need something to do. - I usually have a cat to take care of. It helps to have someone to be responsible for.”
I nod. She continues.
“I left my day planner behind. -I didn’t think I’d need it here. -I usually block out my day in fifteen-minute intervals. Otherwise I forget what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“I do that too - the forgetting and losing myself part.”

λΨϕ λΨϕ λΨϕ

I have been losing myself lately. Literally, in that my newly shaved head burned, and I am losing big flakes of my scalp, swirling like a snowstorm to cover my clothes in white, and less literally in that my world feels like a rag rubbing raw at my skin. There is more friction than I am accustomed to. Not enough sleep.

Tuesday morning is spent charming an employer. I’m catering for a Bat-Mitzvah, or directing the catering really - and we’re walking through all of the locations. The man I’m supposed to meet is talking to another employer who I do yard work for - who greets me by name, and at each church I’m greeted by name too, so that at the end he says he’s so glad he has me to help him find staff - because it seems I know everyone. It’s nice. I ask him about his Jewish roots and what he believes, and get a possible in on learning about goats. He’s a cheese maker by trade.

When he lets me out I’m tired though - I put on that kind of charm. My mind on the bus ride is a blank , and when I sit down to run a tabletop game my mind is still blank so I let them wander my world without direction. Just learning the ways of the place. It ends up being a good game and we go late, a player driving me back around midnight, and I still need to eat.

Up early Wednesday, I tell Mama about my week. How I finally got Internet after months of hassle and Papa freaked out. Angry words back and forth. Him telling me he doesn’t want me living with him anymore - because I’m such a hassle, such a pain. Me letting go how much of my life is spent trying to make him proud. The endless work, the struggling with rides, the finding people to take care of my chickens even though he’s right there. Good things to be said aloud - but friction.

Breakfast reminds me that there’s friction at Mama’s too. Her husband has decided to grow a beard and all they do is fight now, an undercurrent of stubble that can’t be kissed away. I go work, come back, eat lunch with him and listen to his side.

Underneath it all is my scratchy burned head. The heat that pinpricks at my brain. My stubble like Velcro scraping at the back of every shirt as I try and pull it off. Head banging against every low hanging branch and shelf underside. Hurting. Isn’t a shaved head supposed to be about giving up attachment? Is it that, with a life like sandpaper, you no longer want to live?

I can’t live for Papa. I know an off center line when it’s hissed through my teeth. I know that I should be living for me, and only after I’m centered can I live for others too. I can’t live for girlfriends or work or the respect of my friends. I can’t put my life on hold - not now. Not on my year off. Time to breathe and center and find what it is I stand on - apparently sandpaper.

λΨϕ λΨϕ λΨϕ

The chickens are alive when I got back on Thursday evening. I count.

“Ashanti, Sophie, Gyulub, Flyn rider, High Rhulane.”
The water is a little gunky but I didn’t ask Jacoby to do anything with it.
“Kokoro, Ondori, Hahns.”
I take a breath.
“Whitewing, Propolys, Thing one and Thing two.” All accounted for.

These chickens are one thing I did for me. I built this coop. I bought them. I’ve cared for them. This is center.

I’ve just driven Papa back from Wonder woman - and gotten to hear his lamentations on the lack of quality. I spend some time giving him a little more - showing him the hero’s journey embedded beneath. Then go try and cancel the Internet on the Internet - an hour’s wandering that finally leads me to the conclusion it has to be done during business hours on the phone. They don’t make it easy.

Internet is something I would eventually need if I settle here. I imagine having a family in this place. A multi generational family in the old way - Papa a grandfather we don’t have to go visit - giving my children the same gifts he gave me. It’s not the Internet that centers me here so much as the promise of a future in the house that I grew up in, on the land I have half the legal right to. My center is in claiming land to put down roots in. Internet is something necessary to living in the modern world.

Papa felt it as what it was a claim to my right to live here. The son displacing the father, the Internet displacing his reference library - larger than anyone else I know - A call that it’s time for him to step aside, all true, but to him that means I want him gone, dead, out of the way - and to me it’s seeing him stepping into the role of elder - of grandfather. He never expected to live this long. I don’t think he’d considered it.

I can’t let him feel like I want him dead though, so I have to backstep. After work on Friday I come back and call - stay on hold for half an hour - lose service, call again - until finally I get a human. I can barely hear him, but we manage to communicate that I want to cancel my service. Yes I am aware there’s a 400-dollar cancellation fee. Yes it’s stupid. No - it’s not the company’s fault. No there’s nothing you can do to make me change my mind.

λΨϕ λΨϕ λΨϕ

I don’t get a chance to take down the satellite because we’re having Jacoby over for dinner - and Viccarius, but he’s uncharacteristically late. She arrives early and apologizes for being late, asks if there’s anything she can do, and happily heads out to the greenhouse to get some lettuce that she arranges into a bouquet. We sit down and talk and wait for Viccarius, and it’s several hours before I finally pipe up and ask if we can eat the beautiful Greek food laid out before us.

The conversation is fascinating. I don’t talk much, preferring that others expend their stories and listen when I speak because I have something meaningful to say. Jacoby is a storyteller - with an exquisite sense of timing and the capacity to paint pictures with her words that get to the essence of things. By the end I feel like I know her and her family intimately. She’s a pastor’s daughter, a brain cancer survivor, a lesbian, an artisanal jam maker.

She spins out how she knew from age five that she didn’t like boys, but was tricked by another girl into thinking that nausea - the sense of wanting to throw up - was the same as butterflies and meant she liked someone.

“What boys do you feel butterflies with?” She was asked in middle school. All the boys smelled like spoiled milk, in the way of boys that age, and so she said all of them. It was only at 16 when a girl kissed her and she felt real butterflies for the first time that she knew - truly knew.

She tells us how she came out to her family and her church -Seventh day Adventists - and having just survived brain cancer - they were all accepting. Now a younger sister - also gay - and her girlfriend, have become the power couple of the church. How proud Jacoby is to have paved the way to a church that can accept rather than reject. To the eyes her life story has opened.

She tells about school - and how, after moving from the hard sciences where she scrabbled at B’s and C’s - into the softer edges of soil chemistry and water dynamics - she feels like she’s tricked them into thinking she’s smarter than she is. That people are always misjudging her as smarter than she is - she has a knack for getting jobs she has no right to get - and pays for it later.

Papa pauses her from time to time to ask specific questions, where I would prefer to just get enraptured in the story - but they’re often good questions and she wraps them in well. Her half Shawnee heritage weaves in with her nose rings - the short hair falls into finals week and an inability to choose shampoo. A jam crate tumbles into her head and gives her a concussion she isn’t willing to have looked at because she doesn’t have health insurance. Somehow they all flow together with a thousand minute specifics. Her father’s laugh. Her best friend who only likes three people, one of which he just goes bowling with once a month.

Viccarius finally arrives and tells his story, which isn’t really his - so he can’t really tell it. He gets the last of the food, and the ends of the conversation. Somewhere in the mix he mentions the nettle tincture I gave him in thanks for him helping me bottle it - both a tonic and an acute remedy for allergies - and how it worked miracles. Jacoby breaks in - “Do any of you know if you can eat nettles?”

Papa laughs, I’ve trained him well. “You’re sitting across from the Nettle eating king of the world.” He declares. “Pan even writes love letters to them.”

“Yes,” I say, “you can.”
“How?” She asks

“The venom is delivered in little hairs that wilt with heat. You can boil them, fry them, freeze them -Mama even makes nettle pesto by grinding them raw.”

I end up taking her out to my nettle patch - and teaching her how to pick barehanded. Giving her my knife to cut off tops. I’m amazed by the care and listening new people give to choosing the tops, so commonplace to me. Nettles are about respect - and once you have earned their respect and they have earned yours it is like an old friendship where you finish each other’s sentences. What it must be like to come to that anew?

On the way back in, we pause at the honeysuckle and I show her how to pick off the ends and suck sweetness from within.

λΨϕ λΨϕ λΨϕ

Saturday is spent teaching a ten year old boy how to sword fight. Except that he’s ten and can’t concentrate on sword fighting for very long - so soon we’re pinecone fighting and then we’re on the tire swing, and then we’re building a rope out of ivy so we can both be on the swing at once and pull. So the day flows. Soft, smooth. Last week I taught him the basics of Wiccan magic. Just the things a child should know - like always circle yourself before casting, or everything you borrow has a price, and if you get into a weird magical state take a hot shower. Things that will help him when he’s sixteen and takes drugs for the first time.

His mother has warned me off this morning though. She doesn’t mind me teaching him magic, but his fundamentalist grandparents might. “He’s going to ask you though,” she says. “I don’t know what you should say.”

When he asks, I tell him I’ll teach him plant magic and teach him to ask plants before picking. Talk to them, listen to them. I tell him how some plants, tonics, strengthen you before you’re wounded, while other herbs heal you after. Some do both. Then in the spirit of magic I show him the basic purificatory herbs - cedar, sage - maybe his grandparents won’t appreciate herb lore any more - but it seems a little safer.

Then I bus home because Viccarius is having a dance party in his yurt and he’s requested I come. On my way back, after asking him what time I should arrive - I run into Jacoby on the road. It’s a brief spiral, but enough that later when she’s not sure where she should be - she comes to my door and knocks. I’m making soup. She’s brought carrots. She asks if she can help, and I’m not in a place where I need help so I tell her to sit.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” she says. “I always feel like I’m in the way.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, “I work with stinging nettle - and if you are intruding I will let you know.”
She laughs as if delighted by this. “What kind of soup are you making?”
“This is my greatest flaw as a cook. I never know what to call my food. I can give you the ingredients: Onions, potato, nettle, lentils, pork broth . . . but what kind of soup is it?”
“Why are you making it?”
“Because I have stock I need to use up.”
“Then it is ‘stock-end’ soup.”
“So it is.”

“I always name my food for their occasions,” she explains “There are often different things in ‘end of my paycheck’ soup - but it serves the same purpose and so it has the same name.”

I eat my soup, and we arrive at Viccarius’ yurt 20 minutes later than he said. “I used to run to get to things right on time here,” I tell her “ -but now I’ve learned that they’re always late and I don’t need to run.”
“I run for myself, because I want to be on time.”
“You have to adapt to who you’re with. Never run.”

Viccarius has, it turns out, made us dinner - but he’s about 40 minutes behind schedule so we wait another 20 minutes for food. Good because it gives me time to digest my soup. We eat, I from a giant metal bowl. I notice that everyone but Papa has adopted Jacoby’s rhythm and mention it.

“Only your father’s will is strong enough to resist!” Viccarius jokes.

We begin to dance - three men, the one woman - dancing to Prince mostly. I pound out my steps on the floor, and watch as everyone steps into the inner world. Jacoby claims she can’t or doesn’t dance - a blatant lie - and I watch and imitate the way she uses her long jackalope limbs.

On the way back it’s just the two of us, and she lets me guide her through the dark, hand in hand until we reach the moon’s glow again - getting bigger despite my expectations, I must have missed the new moon

“Do you keep track of the moon?” She asks.
“I have to. I don’t have a body that does it for me.”
“I always thought I would sink up with the moon,” she tells me “-but I never did, and now I’ve stopped altogether.” A shrug. When we reach her car she asks that I stand by “I’m enjoying your company.” As she gets her things, I stand eyes closed against the light, until she apologizes for her messy car and have to peek - it’s not - and regret it. Half blind, we walk the rest of the driveway and bid goodnight, and she promises to come get me at “9:10” the next morning to give me a ride into town.

λΨϕ λΨϕ λΨϕ

I’ve only just gotten up and begun heating up leftover stock-end soup when she arrives out of breath. She left something at the yurt she explains, and so she ran to get here the twenty minutes before we have to go - the time she said she’d be. I go out to feed my chickens, and when I get back Papa’s up and giving her a tour of the house. My soup’s too hot, I sit and blow on it to try and cool it down.

They wander back into the kitchen. Someone mentions grace, and I do a little “Woo Augustine!” and then I have to explain because Jacoby didn’t know grace came from Augustine, and then Papa has to pull out the Catholic encyclopedia and read off all the entries on grace. It’s a big subject. We leave late as I finally get down the last of my soup, but I tell her there’s no rush. It’s okay to arrive late to Sunday morning dance.

We slowly back out in her old person’s car and she explains it was a peace offering because she helped take care of a cranky grandfather, and now that he can’t drive his family wanted her to have it. She explains that she tries to do as many things her grandfather would disapprove of in this car.

She probably shouldn’t be permitted to drive - brain cancer did things to her reflexes. She suspects the guy who gave her the test took pity on her when she told him about the cancer, and went easy. “People are always giving me things when they learn about my cancer, when they should really be doing the opposite, it’s odd.”

“But tell me more about grace?” She queries. Soon I’m giving her my whole belief structure. The river that interpenetrates the world, and how those awash in the river by no fault of their own are given grace. That it is through grace that I can find compassion for those less privileged than myself. That grace is not just in the gifts of the moment but in the family you were given and the tools you’ve built, that we live in grace or out of grace and there is no deserving either.

And then she is telling me about her faith, and how she isn’t a Christian because she believes that she is living a good life, and any good God would reward goodness and not belief. “And if God only rewards Christians, that is not a God I would want to serve. I would look Him in the eyes and walk backwards into hell.” Then she laughs, because she knows it sounds grand.

I tell her a story then, because it is called for - and old Jewish tale about the paradox of God promising heaven, when the most virtuous thing is to do good without any promise at all. “It would be like if I offered you fifty dollars but to get it you had to not want the fifty dollars.”

“I don’t want your fifty dollars,” she says earnestly. “I have enough money. I don’t think I can spend it any better than you can.”

λΨϕ λΨϕ λΨϕ

“Ashanti,” I say, most adventurous hen of the flock

“Sophie” - she used to be the coolest before adolescence hit.

“Gyu-Lub” - smallest of them, and youngest seeming too.

“Flyn Rider” - circler, always ready to steal a piece of food.

“High Rhulane.” - Queen of them, though Ashanti has been rising.

“Kokoro” - who’s comb flops right instead of left

“Ondori” - smaller and yellower

“Hahns” - the largest rooster of the three

“Propolys” - the only Wellsummer hen, honey colored in the sun.

“White wing” - I can only tell her apart when she flaps

“Thing one, thing two” - my Gemini twins, as yet indistinguishable. I crouch. All twelve accounted for. I breathe.

My head feels less itchy, my life less like sandpaper. Perhaps a little center has returned. As I watch my little ones peck at their grain it comes to me. That slow soothing descent into stability. This centered strength I find gifted. I’ve found a tonic in Jacoby.