When I think about how quickly my life changed, I still get disoriented.  I got into the shower a married woman, and I came out the rejected wife.  I really had no idea that there was something seriously wrong in my marriage.  Maybe there wasn’t anything seriously wrong.

Of course, I knew Court, irritated me sometimes.  I disagreed with the way he managed the farm, but he inherited the farm from his parents, so I kept my mouth shut about the importance of organic farming.  In turn, he didn’t criticize when I worked late at the library or attended the library fair in Seattle. 

I suspected that Court looked at pornography on the internet while I was at work, but lots of men do that.

Anyway, on Tuesday morning, I stepped into the shower and washed my hair.  When I came back into our bedroom from the shower, I found Court with his head in our closet stuffing my clothes in a garbage bag.

“Court, what on earth?”  I noticed another garbage bag sitting in front of my empty chest of drawers.  “Court, stop and listen to me.  What on earth are you doing?”  I raised my voice so he could hear me over his breathing and grunting.

He stood up straight, as he shoved my church shoes into the garbage bag.  “You’re leaving.”  He announced with his back to me.

I felt myself scowling over Court’s disorganized panic.  Where was the suitcase I used to visit my brother?  Why couldn’t the man simply tell me the problem and let me deal with it as I had every other problem in our married life.   I didn’t understand what he meant.  “What?  Where?  What are you talking about?  Where am I going?  Is Mom okay?  Has something happened to Dennis’s family?”  My heart began to pound as I thought I’d lost a family member.  I guess I had lost someone, but it wasn’t the one I imagined.

“No, you’re just leaving.” He said over his shoulder as he pulled a stack of sweaters from the shelf in the closet dropping two of them on the floor.

I shook my head and cast sideways glances at Court as I tried to get dressed.  It is impossible to carry on a rational discussion when stark, buck naked.  My thick, wet, curly hair still dripped on my bare shoulders and the floor.  I needed to paw through the garbage bag to find underwear. 

I watched Court out of the corner of my eye as he picked up the sweaters from the floor, tried to stuff them in the bag and dropped one again.  His behavior alarmed me.  Silently, I considered the possibilities.   Did he have a high fever?  Had he suffered a stroke? I wanted to hold him and tell him everything would be okay if he could just tell me the problem.  I grew alarmed that Court was experiencing a seizure of some sort.  As he was about to stuff a blouse in the bag I told him,  “I want to wear that today.”  I tried to sound loving and reassuring while I studied his mood and responsiveness.

Court threw the blouse over his shoulder at me and followed it with a pair of slacks, still refusing to look at me.

I stood beside the bed and tried comforting him as I grew more certain he was ill.  “Court, I’m sure everything will work out. Now, can you tell me what’s wrong?”  He had never done something this bizarre in all the years I’d known him. 

He stepped out of the closet but still refused to look at me.  He told the wall, “Nothing’s wrong.  You’re just leaving.”  My sexy husband had started to sweat a little.  The beads of water on his neck in the chilly room alarmed me more than the strange behavior.  What was wrong with him?

I thought I should try to get him talking.  “Why am I leaving?”  I wondered if I should go call my boss and tell her we had a family emergency. Thoughts and plans for a quick trip west of the mountains raced through my brain.  Was something wrong with Court or with my brother? Did I have enough money for gas?  I looked at my husband and wanted to hold and comfort him.  He looked so flushed and sweaty, and his ragged breath alarmed me.  I felt certain that he needed a doctor, soon.

Court plunged his head back into the closet and swept my garden clothes from the top shelf.  He said something from the depths of the closet as he tied the garbage bag closed and emerged.

I continued to try to be comforting and soothing, “I didn’t hear you, honey.  Why am I leaving, and where am I going?  Sweetheart, can you sit with me and talk to me.” I cooed and patted the bed beside me.  “What are you thinking?  Why am I leaving, and where am I going?” 

He shouted back.  “It’s none of your business why you’re leaving, and I don’t give a shit where you go!”  Veins bulged on his neck and his face appeared scarlet under his farmer’s tan.

I massaged the muscles I felt tightening up at my temples and stifled a surge of nausea at his angry tone.  I watched as his eyes searching the room without ever coming to rest on me. Surely, the chemicals Court used to farm could not have made him this strange so suddenly.  I sorted possibilities the same as I sorted books at work.  I tried for a firm voice to prompt him to respond rationally.  “Court, do you have any idea how strange this sounds?”  I tried not to let the fear for my deranged husband make me cry or vomit. 

He hefted both garbage bags and sidled out the door.  I trailed along behind him and stood in the front doorway to see what he was doing.  Carrying two bags to my car couldn’t have caused his heavy breathing. He came back in the house and grabbed another garbage bag, he must be sick. I nodded certain of my diagnosis.

I tried to use a firmer voice that might cut through whatever was happening in his head.  “Court, stop.  You are not making sense.  Your behavior is crazy.  Why do you think I have to leave?”  I experienced a moment of anxiety and another round of nausea at the thought that he’d discovered one, or more, of my little ways of hiding money from him. 

“I told you, it’s none of your business.” He strode down the hall to the bedroom.

I tried to slip my feet into my work shoes as I trailed and hopped along behind him to the bathroom and watched as he scooped all my toiletries into the garbage sack.  I still couldn’t believe that the man I’d married almost twenty years ago could act this strange.  The conflict between habit and this new behavior disoriented me.  Still, I pulled on every ounce of self-discipline I could muster to remain calm and keep the channels of communication open like I read about in books on having a good marriage.  Once I’d calmed myself, I again tried to make him make sense.  “Court it’s obvious that you are angry with me over something.  Tell me what it is, and we’ll see if we can work it out.  It must be some misunderstanding.”

He looked wildly around the bathroom and grabbed up my head for the electric toothbrush and shoved it in the bag.  “I’m not mad at you, and there is no misunderstanding, except that you can’t get it through your thick head that you are leaving.”

I felt like I did as a little girl following my older brother around as I followed Court from the bathroom to the coat closet in the front hall.  He stopped and pulled out my sweaters and coats.  Hangers fell clattering to the floor, tangling themselves as he pulled at my clothes.

I finally accepted that Court must be having a stroke or something.  I pushed aside my worry and grief to make one more attempt to reach his battered brain.  In my most stern librarian tones I told him. “I’m counting to three.  If you haven’t told me what is going on with you by the time I get to three, I’m calling nine-one-one. Your behavior is so weird, I think you are going to have a stroke or seizure or something. One.”

“It doesn’t concern you.” He picked up a sweater from the floor and tried to shake the hanger out of it.

“Two” I moved closer to the phone sitting on a small table in the entry hall.

“Don’t do that!” He paused while stuffing a coat into the sack and looked at my hand hovering over the phone.

“Three.”  I picked up the handset for the phone.

“All right.  All right.  It’s none of your business, but I’ll tell you anyway.  Put the phone down.” He stood up straight.

I put the phone down and stood looking at him while he licked his lips and looked out the living room window on my left, then at the wall off to my right.  He scratched the back of his head.  “This doesn’t concern you.”

I reached for the handset again.

“No. Don’t go calling anybody.  The thing is that…well,” he looked at the floor and mumbled a word or two, “pregnant.”

“What?  Is somebody pregnant?”  I must have slipped into denial at this point.  I thought he was talking about buying a new heifer.  I guess he was.

“I told her that she could come live with me today.” Court scratched the back of his sweaty neck.

I felt the blood leaving my face.

He finally glanced in my direction.  “Don’t look at me like that.  The thing is, that I always wanted a passel of kids or at least someone to leave the farm to, and you can’t have kids.”

I went from fear and loving concern to full rage in an instant.  “Wait a minute, are you telling me you got some stinking whore pregnant?” 

“She’s not a whore.  Her name’s Lupe.”

“I don’t want to know anything about the slut!”  I grabbed my coat from Court’s hand and the garbage bag from the floor and stomped out the door.  I felt evil as I made certain to slam the front door hard enough that the little glass prisms on the light in the front hall would fall off.  I listened for the tinkling of breaking glass and Court swearing before I stomped off to my car. 

When Hubby fell off the garage roof, I decided that I needed to hire some garden help.  I think Hubby just wanted to get out of garden chores, especially building the keyhole bed in the sunken garden area. 

In my article on gardening in toxic soil, I mentioned that we grow all food crops in 18” raised beds.  In addition to keeping our plants out of the toxic soil, they are much easier to maintain.  It was Hubby’s idea to build a raised bed to replace a weed-infested mess in the sunken garden.  Hubby insisted we must do this and refused to weed the existing bed.  Hubby insisted for two years that he would not weed the sunken garden because he wanted to build the raised bed.  He made no move to build the bed, but he insisted it must be done.  He refused to move the peony in the existing bed, then he fell off the roof.

Now, when it is absolutely the wrong time to move a peony, I had my garden helper move the peony and start on the keyhole bed.  It is amazing how much work a young body can do.  On the other hand, I find myself explaining things like hydraulic pressure and the effects of gravity.  Young people don’t understand gravity like old people.  I hope Hubby understands gravity better now.

The sunken garden is an interesting microclimate.  It has a strong south facing slope which gets quite warm. Trees on the north and east shelter my sunken garden so the cold north winds don’t hit this sheltered dell.  The area is the beginning of a draw that drops all the way down to the Puget Sound, so the cold air falls away from this small garden making it less susceptible to early and late frosts.  The house shelters the garden from any nastiness from the south.  This is where the daffodils bloom first in the spring and the dahlias hang on through November unless we get a long, hard freeze.

This sheltered little garden has one problem--shade.  Those trees on the east block the morning light and trees on the west block evening light in the summer.  I hope raising the bed up 18” will give the foliage on the plants a chance of catching more hours of full sunlight.

The plan is that once the bed is built, we will put a birdbath in the center of the garden to attract our feathered neighbors to come and feast on bugs in the garden.  This will be a warm place to sit and work during the colder months of the gardening season.  I can plant some early season edibles in the bed before I set dahlias into it in May.  Well, this year I missed the early veggies.  The dahlias will go in almost as soon as it is finished. 

Perhaps I can load Hubby on our lawn tractor, and he can ride down there and set out baby plants when the bed is done.  Our third or fourth reason for raising all our garden beds with concrete block is so that they are easier for older bodies to work on.  When we started this, it never occurred to me that one of us would be wheelchair confined so soon.  As it is, Hubby can still help in the garden despite the fact that he won’t be walking for another month yet. 

Old man S’TO was a curmudgeon, or at least his sons thought so.  Rue and Hau wanted to move to the city and work in the factories where they would make real money.

“And then you’ll just spend the money paying for a room to live in and food to eat.  Here you live in a house that belongs to you and to your grandfathers before you.  You have food to eat and extra to take to market.  You mark my words,” the old man would shake his finger at his sons. “Here you are rich.  The S’TO’s are important men in this valley.  In the city you will be a poor nobody.”

The sons continued to grumble.  Other young men from the valley had gone to the city to work in the factories.  They’d bragged about how rich they would be and Old Man S’TO’s sons wanted to be rich too. 

The old man took to watching his sons with narrow eyes and snarling, “And you don’t see those boys coming home with money bags full of gold do you?  They’re no better than slaves.” 

One day the boys saw their father in the yard walking a circuit around house.  He stopped to look at the house then he’d continue his circuit.  He made ten full circuits of the house before he announced to his sons. “The house don’t look right.  I want you to gather up all the sticks in the fields and build a fence around the house.”

The boys built the fence according to their father’s directions.  They agreed that planting would be easier when they wouldn’t have to clean the sticks from the field at planting time.  They could hear their father crashing around inside the house.  Occasionally he’d carry armloads of stuff out and toss it on the ground in front of the house.

By the time the fence was half finished every possession the small family owned littered the ground in front of the house.  The old man spent the next few days sorting out old animal skins from those that could be used.  He emptied jars of gain and took a particularly rancid-smelling earth pot out behind the house and buried it.

By the time the fence was finished, the young men had become certain an evil spirit had bitten their father and driven him crazy.  Now, they were afraid to try to run away to the city because they didn’t know what would happen to the old man. 

Well, next, the old man made them sweep every inch of their house inside and out then he made a mixture of water, white clay and mashed turu root and they spread this on the house, inside and out.  The turu root smelled horrible, but the house looked fresh and clean when they were done and the smell went away when the house was dry.

The next day the old man sent Rue into the fields to dig up some plants with blue flowers and put them in holes around the house while he took Hau up on the mountain to dig up the white flowers that grew there.  He dug up a small tree and carried it down to the house.  Now it was the son’s turn to look at their father with narrowed eyes and wonder what he was up to.

“You see.  Our house is beautiful.  True.  And, it is ours.  You will never be this rich anywhere else.  Now, in the morning, before light I’m leaving for the day.  I’ll be back just after dark. I want you to have dinner waiting for me, air out all the sleeping palettes and put fresh straw in the goat shed.

“We don’t have goats Papa.”

“You do what I tell you.”

Rue and Hau assumed that when Papa walked away in the early morning with a bag of beans over each shoulder that he intended to return with a goat—maybe two.  They cleaned and repaired the goat shed.  In the afternoon they went fishing then traded the fish they caught for some bean cakes baked by the widow S’PU.

As the moon rose over the mountains in the east, Rue saw three people coming up the path beside the creek.  “Hau, we have company.  Better fetch some fresh water.”

By the time Rue and Hau had set out a gourd of fresh water, they recognized their father as he led two young women up the path to their house.  He brought the women inside and announced.  “These women are to be your wives.  Treat them with gentleness and respect.  They shall have command over everything inside the fence.  You may sort it out between yourselves as to which one you want.”

The old man turned, left the hut and made his way to the goat shed leaving two giggling young women and two stunned sons to sort out who would have whom.

The following is an excerpt from my work in progress.  Janette's husband kicked her out of the house a week earlier.  She needs to pick up some of her belongings from her former home.  Four strangers agree to help her move her things as she meets her husband's new love for the first time.

***** 
Tex drawled,  “We don’t plan on going to bed soon, so we’ll help you pick up this desk.  How big is it?”

I made motions with my hands.  “But it comes apart in the middle, so it isn’t that big to handle.  I thought the top piece could go in the back seat of my car and the base should fit in the back.”

“You said you have some other things.  We can fit it all in the van easy, and you’ll need help carrying it.”

I swallowed, “I admit that I will be relieved to have someone with me when I go out there.  I don’t know if Court will be home.  If he is, I assume his pregnant girlfriend will be there too.”  I looked at the pine covered hills in the distance and almost whispered, “That would be awkward.” 

“Awkward isn’t what I’d call it.  You need someone to go with you.”  Dave shook his head.  “We’ll meet you back here in five minutes.”

Dave proved to be correct in that awkward didn’t describe the trial of getting my desk and plates.  I felt extremely thankful to have four men with me when a slender young girl I guessed to be about fifteen answered the door. 

She turned away from the door and called, “Mama, es la gringa.”

I didn’t hear the answer, but an older woman who huffed a bit came out of the kitchen and instructed a boy about ten to “Va a Senor Court, pronto.”

I wanted to laugh.  Court’s girlfriend already had at least three kids.  She was overweight, and her skin looked older than I guessed her age to be.  I shook my head wondering how much make-up she had on when Court screwed her. 

Tex distracted me with a question about where the desk might be.  “Oh, I better lock it so the front doesn’t fall open while you’re carrying it.”  I led my entourage of men to the corner of the sitting room. 

Tex and Benny easily lifted the top off its base, and Tex managed to cradle the whole top in his arms as Benny and Dave hefted the two-drawer base between them. 

Terry held up his box and said, “plates.”

He followed me to the buffet and reached down Grandma’s plates from the top shelf.  I started wrapping them in paper under the watchful glare of Court’s mistress, who stood in the middle of the disheveled living room.  She, the whore that she was, radiated disapproval.  I began to wonder if Court had been drunk when he did the deed, but quickly discarded the idea since I was experienced with Court’s sexual performance under the influence of alcohol. 

The daughter seemed to be arguing with her mother, while the mother tried to shush her.  Tex came back in time to witness this exchange. “No muchacha…”  I didn’t catch the rest of his rapid Spanish, but the girl scowled at him. 

I continued to wrap plates and try not to stare at the horror that was Court’s new love.  I wondered if she was expecting him to come back from the barn.  I knew he’d slunk out there to avoid me and saw no reason why he might present himself in an unpleasant situation. 

“Oh!  I have some library books that need to go back.”  I looked around and tried to stifle my disgust at the dirty plates sitting on the floor and on coffee table.  “The books aren’t where I left them.”  I looked up surprised when the sliding glass door opened.  “Court where are my library books?”

“Court, mi macho amour.”  The daughter flung herself at Court, and he cradled her in his arms.  My eyes must have grown to the size of the plate in my hands.  I looked at the older woman.  

She smirked at me. 
 
I felt my lip curl with disgust as I slid my eyes from the girl’s chubby cheeks to almost non-existent breasts, narrow hips and flat buttocks.  I turned my back on the child in my husband’s arms.