Watermelon Summer (3 page)

 

    "Actually, we're almost there," Jacob
replied.  "Which is a good thing because you don't want to be
walking down the hill to the house at night if you aren't familiar
with the lay of the land.  You do know I can't drive you to the
door, right?  This place gives a whole new meaning to the word
'remote'."

 

    Since Jacob had warned me several minutes before
to call my mom before cell-phone reception disappeared ("In case
your mother is overprotective like my grandmother is," he added), but he hadn't
mentioned the r-word then, I figured his definition of "remote" must
be pretty extreme.  I wasn't ready to throw in the towel,
though.  "That's okay," I reassured him (or maybe
myself).  "I'm ready for anything."

 

    "You know, you could stay at my mamaw's place
tonight and go to Greensun tomorrow if you want," Jacob said after a
pause.  "I didn't really mean it about her not inviting you to
dinner because of the hippie thing.  She'd probably wring my
neck if she knew I dropped you off there alone at this time of day,
and we live just down the road."

 

    Ah, so there was a bit of mountain man in Jacob
after all.  Instead of being creepy the way Mom had portrayed
it, though, at the moment the trait struck me as sweet...and
tempting.

 

    Still, I wanted an adventure, right?  And
what's an adventure without a little uncertainty and danger?

 

    "Well, we're here," Jacob said, motioning for me to
pull into a hayfield with no structures in sight.  "There's a
path over there."  He pointed toward the trees at the edge of
the field.  "And about half a mile down is the house.  So
what do you think?  Now or later?"

 

    "Now," I replied, hauling my huge backpack out of
the car, then waving Jacob out of sight.  As his taillights
disappeared in the distance, I realized I was completely alone with
no company except the the quiet sounds of birds settling in for the night.

 

 

 

    The trail was really an eroded and rutted road,
quite easy to follow even by flashlight as long as I minded my
feet.  Together, the ruts and I wound down the road, under
trees that I could just make out against the darkening sky above
me.  I felt encircled and protected by the forest...and then I
stepped out past the edge of the trees and looked down into
paradise.

 

    The farmhouse was still clearly visible in the
gloom, a white clapboard building that gleamed in the approaching
night.  The hill I walked down ended with a broad creek, currently invisible but singing to me gently.  And then
there was the welcoming party.

 

     At first, all I noticed was a sprinkle of
lightning bug flashes here and there in the valley, beautiful enough
to someone raised primarily in the suburbs who had seldom seen their
glow.  But that was just the cacophonous-tuning phase of the
visual symphony.  Within minutes, every lightning bug went
dark...then they flashed all at once in a blinding show of
welcome.  Above, the Milky Way shone back with a more steady,
but equally soul-wrenching light.  For the record, this was the
moment when I fell in love with Greensun.

 

 

 

    I'm not so sure I believe in love at first sight,
but the truth of the matter is that Greensun had been an odd kind of
pen pal for most of my childhood.  The pump of my affection was
primed by years of stories my mother told about her Greensun
days, stories in which every character was larger than life. 
Take Kat, for instance—a girl who lived at Greensun at the same
time my mother did, who was a frequent character in Mom's tales, and
who (at least when I was five or six) I wished with all my heart I
could be.

 

    "Kat was stout," Mom liked to begin her
stories.  In Appalachianese, "stout" meant strong and intrepid,
and I always had a mixed reaction on the rare occasions when Mom
dubbed me with that adjective.  What teenage girl, worried
she's not as slender as the actresses on TV, wants to be called
stout?  And yet, the way Mom said the word made me feel proud
and embarrassed at the same time.

 

    But back to the Stout-Kat tale.  As my
mother would tell the story, this second-grade-age (but
homeschooled, of course) member of the Greensun community was Mom's
frequent co-conspirator on the farm.  One summer afternoon, the
rest of the community was at the top of the hill haying, but Mom had stayed
home, resting her pregnant belly between bouts of canning huge,
steamy loads of applesauce.  Kat was helping by eating cut
apples nearly as quickly as they left my mother's knife. 
Between apple morsels, Mom's charge happened to glance out the
screen door...and saw Ornery in the corn patch.

 

    No cow was ever better named.  Ornery had
been purchased by the community as a milk cow, but nary a soul
actually knew how to extract milk from an animal.  The low
price they'd paid for the cow should have tipped off the would-be
milkers that there was something unusual about her behavior, but
they figured they'd shower their new cow with kindness and reap the
creamy rewards.  To cut a long story short, Ornery ended up
keeping her milk for her calves (who were at least able to be sold
for an annual dose of hard cash), and my mom continued buying milk
at the grocery store.

 

    Unfortunately, Ornery wasn't just ornery about
her milk production.  She also had a bad tendency to break
through fences and eat up the vegetable garden...just like she was
doing three weeks before my zeroth birthday.  Luckily, Mom
had Kat to help her, and Kat was stout.

 

    If you've only seen idyllic pictures of cattle
happily grazing through tall meadow grasses, you probably have no
idea how big and scary a cow can be.  My mother liked to tell me
that Ornery's feet were as large as dinner plates and that she could
take off a child's fingertip if you tried to feed her the wrong way,
with your hand curled up instead of down.  While I now
suspect that Mom was exaggerating, I remember looking down at my own
feet and knowing that Kat could have been crushed by that monstrous
cow.  Nevertheless, Mom needed help if she was going to get
Ornery out of the corn patch and into the barn, and Kat was game.

 

    "We closed up the back door of the barn, opened
up the front door, and then Kat and I herded her in," Mom told me
over and over.  (Not that I minded—this was one of my
favorite Stout-Kat stories.)  "At first, hooting and hollering
was enough to get Ornery moving in the right direction, but at the
door of the barn, that dratted cow balked.  I walked around
the front to grab her halter, but our cow was ten times as strong as I
was, and no way could I pull her in.

 

    "So I told Kat to march right up behind Ornery
and twist her tail, and that brave girl did just like I asked. 
One minute, Ornery was rooted on the doorstep...the next, she was
running into the barn and we were slamming the door behind her."

 

    Mom put her hand on her now-flat stomach as she
ended the story, and the five-year-old me plucked a piece of cut
apple out of the bowl Mom was holding in her lap.  "Kat was
stout!" we exclaimed together, ending the tale just as it had begun.

 

    Mom's story was over, but mine was just
beginning.  As I looked out our kitchen window at tame
suburbia, I remember wondering how I could get to be as stout as Kat
when the scariest thing in our neighborhood was a friendly but
overbearing St. Bernard.

 

 

 

    While I'd like to say I was as stout as Kat, the
truth is that a few minutes after falling in love with Greensun, I
nearly fell in the creek.  I hadn't been able to resist
lingering and watching the synchronous lightning bugs, so by the
time I reached the watery moat in front of the house, the night was
fully dark.  There seemed to be stepping stones in the water,
but when I gingerly placed my foot on the first one, the algal slime
slid me right off again.  Fifty pounds of gear on my back made
me top-heavy, and there was quite a bit of cartoonish arm-waving
before I managed to leap back to the shore.  In the end, I took
off my boots and waded across the water (remarkably cold for June),
then timidly walked barefoot up to the large dog standing in front
of the house.

 

    "Lucy does not bite," read the homemade tag
around her neck, as I discovered after warily skirting the dog,
stumbling into the house and finding a light switch on the wall by
the door.  While I appreciated the sentiment of letting me know
Greensun's current full-time resident's name and personality, the
irony wasn't lost on me—who was likely to be able to read the
tag unless they'd already made friends with the dog?  At which
point, of course, the biting issue was null and void.

 

    Luckily, making friends with Lucy was no
problem.  After a solid night's rest in my sleeping bag,
unrolled atop the couch right inside the door, Lucy and I set out to
explore the farm.  And what we found was notes.  Lots and
lots of notes.

 

    "Hens like to lay in straw hat on porch," one
note read, then went on to include information on where
omelet-friendly herbs were growing.  Sure enough, I found an
egg just where the note had predicted, and even though the shell was
green, the contents jump-started my jet-lagged appetite.

 

    "One scoop of sawdust down the hole after each
use," chided the scrap of paper tucked behind the mouse-gnawed
toilet-paper roll in the outhouse.  I hadn't noticed amid the
cobwebs, but there was indeed a bucket of sawdust inside the little
wooden room, with a quart-sized plastic container stuck inside for a
scoop.  And after deciding the view of the creek, while
beautiful, would also give anyone walking onto the farm a view of me
with my pants down, I closed the door and found a much longer note
about composting-toilet ecology tacked to the inside.

 

    Newly educated on composting toilets and why they
were vastly superior to outhouses (sorry about the improper
terminology earlier), I stopped by the log barn on my way back to
the house.  There, I learned that peacocks roosted in the
rafters, hens lower down, and that I was expected to feed
both.  Back in the house, I was informed that "Flo the cat eats
dry food" and that everything in the kitchen was there for my
use.  The note-writer, while odd, appeared to have my best
interests at heart, having provided most of the basic
non-perishables I would need for my pre-meeting month.

 

    I wandered up the rickety stairs, ducking my head
so I wouldn't hit it on the slanted ceiling as I entered the upper
level.  An ancient set of encyclopedias and National
Geographics lined the walls, along with hundreds of dusty books with
topics ranging from cooking and gardening to poetry and
fiction.  On a whim, I pulled down
Stocking Up
and flipped to the page on apple
sauce...only to send another note spiraling to the ground. 
"June apples should be ripe on the tree down the holler," this note
read.  "Bring a half-bushel basket from the woodshed, then can
apples in jars from the root cellar.  Fresh lids on top of the
fridge."