My Father’s Dream
Doris von Tettenborn
Published in The Globe and Mail
July 2, 2014
My parents bought their farm in 1958. In 2013, they held the farm auction that sold the dream.
My father worked hard. If farming was rewarded by the hard work put in, my father would have been rewarded with millions in riches, instead of calloused callouses and bent over bones crippled with arthritic joints
In the dreams of my father, one or both of his sons would follow him into the family business; farming is in his blood as deeply as his German heritage.
It was not to be.
The preferred alternative was that my father would never retire. He would rather, expire, just drop dead, as his father before him, of a massive heart attack while on a tractor; he would land face first in his beloved earth and become one with his land.
Alas, this also was not to be, his health was to have the last word. Now, my father had to sell everything.
It was mostly an exercise in clearing the yard. Many of the pieces were themselves acquired at auction, the auctioneer’s patter being “music to my parents’ ears”. My father made his money in farming by buying cheaper pieces of machinery and fixing them.
This auction was planned for months. The call went out to relatives, far and wide, relatives that had nothing to do with farming, relatives that hadn’t been to the farm in many years. Not one had any interest in anything that was for sale on this auction bill.
Everyone understood that this was about supporting my parents and especially my father as he unloaded his shop and his shed and his tool box and his garage and gently laid down his dreams.
The night before the auction, we greeted each other with cries and hugs as if we were long lost relatives. My mother had put on a gigantic spread, turkey, ham, and potato casserole, coleslaw, pickles and fresh vegetables, cookies, and cakes, enough food to drown out the conversation for a few minutes while we placed each other over the years and the miles and generations.
Evening brings darkness and a lively bonfire which brings laughter and stories and a bit of anonymity around the dark night, the fire crackling in its brightness
The next day, the day of the auction, threatens rain, which is not a good thing, as the auction will be held outside, in a giant theatre the size of the yard. The auctioneer truck will slowly traipse over the yard making its way past each item, the crowd shuffling slowly in its wake. If it rains, the crowd thins. The diehards stay, but there is less bidding.
Instead the day is hot, dry and windy and nobody leaves. The sky opens up and spits at us for a few minutes, but then shines brightly the rest of the day.
Most of the relatives have no idea, other than supporting my father, what we are supposed to do this day, the day of the auction.
But we find ourselves following along with the auction truck with the auctioneer’s patter; “one dollar bid, now two, now two, who will give me two, now two, now two”. There is a mawkish curiosity in our day as we, almost to a person, follow along in the wake of the truck, along with the tire kickers, the people who just want to see the yard and what’s in it, the people who genuinely wish to buy some item that was on the auction bill, and my father.
My father who is exhausted from the preparation for the auction; from ensuring in the weeks before, every item had to be in running condition, parts had to be purchased, new batteries installed, bits scrounged up, fields mowed, machinery moved. He felt he had to follow the auction from start to finish and had to start every item that had an engine in front of the audience, or he would tell the story of the transmission that had to be jiggled when it is in ‘drive’ gear and so on – he is scrupulously honest,
The day is thankfully over and everything is sold and the pieces are starting to move off the lot. We slowly move off the auction field back to the house as the buyers grab their new purchases and drive off.
Again, a feast awaits us, and we fall on it as if we haven’t eaten for days. We compare each other’s burned faces as a point of pride, taking the hot sun as some sort of penance for the purchases going on around us as we are powerless to stop this onslaught of my father’s decades of dreams.
Again we sit around the crackling fire. Nobody wants to be the first to leave, we all know the next morning we are going to scatter and we know we won’t see each other for another many years.
Finally, someone is tired enough to admit it and we get up. It is a hugging circle. A giant hugging circle where everyone hugs everyone else, even if they weren’t the ones leaving, even if they aren’t the ones they haven’t seen in decades. We hug people we haven’t hugged in years. When the circle gets around to the second cycle, people laugh, but keep hugging anyway. It feels very good. It feels very good and very sad.
My father’s dream of passing the land and the lifestyle to his sons did not come to fruition. He lived his life the way he had wanted and it was a good life.
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Bloom by Bloom, Step by Step
Doris von Tettenborn
Won Off Topic Publishing September 2023
Creative Non-Fiction contest
Published in Off Topic Publishing,
Inspired 55+Lifestyle Magazine
Recipes and Roots
The ruins of my garden were visible from the deck for some time, but I had not yet ventured outside. It was time to get a good look, see the extent of the damage, cry my tears and come up with a rebuilding plan.
The flower gardens had been my project for years. My husband managed the lawn, he had the best lawn in the neighborhood, lush, dark green and weed less. He took great pride in his lawn, it was immaculately groomed.
But he wasn’t a gardener.
When I got sick, the gardens languished. First I was too sick to notice, then I noticed but was too sick to care. Then I cared but was too weak to get out there. By then, they had languished to death.
Now it was time to scope out the extent of the damage and formulate a rebuilding plan. I had 30 feet of flower gardens and as much again of vegetable gardens. I started on the flowers.
I stepped into our backyard for the first time in many months, years really. The day was warm and sunny. Memories, pictures of previous blossoms floated in front of my eyes, tears blurred the real view, the neglect, the destruction. I walked over to the flower garden with a bird bath imbedded in the centre. I knelt in the grass and leaned into the dirt. How I loved my dirt. I loved the smell of it and the feel of it running through my fingers.
Some remnants of perennials had managed to hang on by the tip of their roots, tiny bits of green poked up among mounds of brown and yellow dead foliage. Tiny red roses had died, as if on purpose, resembling dried flower bouquets. The beauty of the dead and dying plants struck me. Some flowers had grown past their usual life span, no one had pruned them, or yanked them out by their roots, leaving wild, spindly, shaggy bits, gone to seed. Wild shapes and colors swirled around each other, roped together by errant vines.
What had looked like a mat of various greens, yellows, and browns was a beautiful montage of nature taking care of itself, seeding, dying, going dormant, germinating again, against all odds, in the spring, fighting each other for sun, rain and soil nutrients, climbing around each other. In the end, sharing the resources and dying together.
Was there any beauty left in my body and soul, matted down by years of chronic fatigue, pain, fighting for breath, struggling to stay alive? Just as surgery had saved my life, surgery was now going to save my gardens.
I grabbed gloves, pruning shears, trowel, shovel and a trash bin. I debated pruning around surviving remnants, but I didn’t know how much chance of survival those plants had after 3 years without extra food and water, on top of what the soil and rain had provided in my absence.
Deep breath, I ripped out plants by the roots and tossed them in the bin. Ripped and ripped, tears dripped.
I didn’t know how much I loved this garden and the act of gardening until I lost it and had to start over.
I didn’t appreciate my health until I lost it and had to start over.
I ripped out the first flower garden. I had several, with themes. A birding garden, fairy and butterfly garden, and the farmyard, complete with a big red barn.
My energy and psyche could take only so much destruction, so I cleaned my tools, and put them away for another day. Later my heart jumped at the view from the deck, the clean, empty black dirt of the just cleared garden, a blank canvas. I grinned and planned a trip to the greenhouse.
The next morning my husband drove me to the Garden Scents, just out of town on a narrow gravel road. I jumped out of our black SUV and grabbed a large cart. He raised his eyebrows but didn’t say a word. Kid in a candy store, I zoomed up one aisle and down the next.
“Do you know what you are looking for?” he asked.
“I’ll know it when I see it.” I grinned, barely looking his way. “I want to see everything before I decide.”
I breathed deeply, the perfume of thousands of flowers and their dirt snaking up my nose, into my brain for instant dopamine surge. I grew up on a farm, planting and weeding were in my blood. As a teenager I had resented time spent in the gardens and fields. I wanted to read or write, be by myself. 40 years later, I could hardly wait to get back to the dirt.
My stomach was pinched, like first love. Pansies, little purple faces smiling, petunias, pink petunias, white bacopa, purple lobelias, curvy ivy, my cart was overflowing.
Again with the raised eyebrow. I stopped, embarrassed by the many plants, the riches of color and texture overflowing the cart. He smiled and nodded, and I, tears threatening, leaned in for more.
I bought more than I needed for the small space that I had cleared the previous day. Certainly more than I would have the energy to plant.
“I can help you.” My husband said on the drive home. “I just wanted to make sure you really wanted to do it this time.” He glanced over at me, eyes immediately back on the gravel road. “You’ve gone out there a couple times over the years but came back in almost immediately.”
It wasn’t the first time he had told me something I had no memory of. As if I had been in a walking coma the previous years, bits and pieces of memory floating by, difficult to grasp.
“I didn’t want us to start and then let it die again. I don’t love your gardens enough to do it on my own.”
I laughed. Never a more obvious statement uttered.
Later, I placed flowers, still in their pots in various arrangements in the birding garden with its wrought iron bird bath, swinging old wooden cabin bird feeder, single white bird family dwelling and the large, turquoise condo bird house. I heard the sounds of my husband ripping out weeds and detritus of plants in the fairy garden. I winced but didn’t look up. He had been nervous until I told him, “don’t worry about identifying anything, just dig it all up.” We both knew he didn’t know petunia from clover, a rose from thistle. Dandelions, he knew dandelions, and ruthlessly stripped them from his lawns.
When I was satisfied with the arrangement, I left the pots in the exact spot I wanted the plants to live, my husband came over to dig the holes. He would dig, and leave the rest to me as I sat down on the ground, next to my plants, settling them in with food and water, patting dirt in, and soothing the plant.
“I’m going to take you out of your pot, give you a beautiful place to live, lots of food and water.”
Many years earlier, my sister had said, “Did you know your wife talks to her plants?”
“As long as they don’t talk back,” my husband had replied.
“Oh, but they do,” I said, pretending to ignore the glances between my sister and husband.
Over the spring and summer we were out there almost every day. The bird garden was glowing with soft pinks and purples, dotted with white. The fairy garden twinkled with pink and soft blues, purple cornflower for the butterflies, an occasional blaze of red. The farm with its big red barn, a rock path to the fields, one side green thyme ground cover, for the hay field, yellow ground cover on the other side for canola. Joy and exhaustion in my eyes, fingers and bones.
Next we tackled the vegetable garden. My husband turned the soil over with a shovel, a few days grunting with that task, he bought a battery powered hand held roto tiller. I hid my jubilation, didn’t want him to stop.
By summer’s end, the flowers were spectacular, hanging purple fuchsias dripping into climbing pink roses, purple lobelias creeping into lawn territory, risking their necks to the lawn edger. My stamina increased over the days and weeks, digging in the dirt, pruning, humming, weeding, until once again, the gardens were almost completely my domain.
I bought a pork loin and we roasted it, served it with fresh steamed baby potatoes, the first sweet carrots, crisp green beans and fresh sliced tomatoes. I savored the first taste of baby potatoes smothered in butter.
Sweet moment. Nothing ever tasted as sweet as vegetables grown in our rebuilt gardens.
Nothing ever tasted as sweet as recovered strength and stamina in my rebuilt body.
I breathed new life into the garden. The garden answered me back, breathed new life into me.
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Wake up and Smell the Paints
Doris von Tettenborn
Honorable Mention Off Topic Publishing
June 2024 CNF Contest
Published Off Topic Publishing
Inspired 55+Magazine
I turned 60 last year. I still have not recovered. I spent the previous year trying to get used to the concept by changing my computer password frequently. CRAZY60, LOVELY60, NOWAY60, STUPID60, HAPPY60, CRAPPY60, FRICKIN60.
It didn’t work.
Why does this milestone feel so painful? I hate to admit it, but after digging through my heart and soul, I didn’t find anything amazing or unique about my angst. I am not afraid of dying – that still feels like it could be many years away. It’s more like “Really? I’m 60? Where did all that time go? I’ve been alive for 60 years and I have nothing to show for it.”
Oh, my dreams! I had Multicolor, Feature length, Cineplex worthy dreams. I was going to be a missionary, whacking my way through the green, steaming jungles of Borneo with a huge machete, shooing annoying flies away from my disgusting jungle grub. Sleeping in a tent and peeing in a bucket.
I was going to live on an acreage with a cute white English style cottage; pink roses in a row inside the low stone fence. There would be a carefully tended vegetable garden and a loosely tended, wild flower garden; tall fragrant lilacs, more roses, pink potentilla, bunches of purple alyssum. Kitties would scamper around the honeysuckle bushes.
I was going to be a writer, but not just a writer. I was going to write beautiful, poetic, lyrical inspirational pieces that would magically inspire people, make them laugh and cry and get off the couch to change their lives. I would write for a living and majestically help out struggling writers who wanted to know where I got all my ideas.
Many years ago, I started down that path, wrote a few things, and even submitted a few pieces. I started a blog, joined Twitter. I read Julia Cameron’s “Artist’s Way” and faithfully did all the exercises and months of Morning Pages. To my surprise, the message I got was “you need to paint”.
I thought the message was from the Universe. I thought the Universe would never send me that message without the prerequisite talent. I enrolled in a drawing course at Alberta College of Art and Design. I sucked. I enrolled in a water color painting class at Mt Royal College. I sucked. I enrolled in an acrylics course at Mt Royal. I sucked.
I had such fun though. I loved having charcoal grit under my fingernails, paint splotches on my face, the smell of the paint, and the thinners, the joy of buying brushes. But the paintings were awful, so I quit all the classes, and hid my paintings under the stairs behind the Christmas decorations. I simply could not translate the beautiful, joyous pictures in my head down onto the paper or the canvas or even my butt.
My butt doesn’t even look like I imagined it would. I was going to run (or walk) in marathons. I started the training and three months later I did the 5k CIBC “Run for the Cure”. It was wonderful, even though it was lightly snowing. I was pumped, ecstatic to be a part of that crowd, pink bras, pink hair, and pink shoes. It was more like a party than exercise. Then I got sick for several months. I gave up marathons too.
I have dozens (probably hundreds, but I’m not going to admit that) of books on writing, painting, diet, spirituality. I read them; I don’t “do” them. It’s as if I think if I put the books under my pillow at night, I will eventually wake up thin, rich and beautiful, a bestselling author, accomplished painter and a Zen master to boot.
My youngest son moved to Germany the spring before I turned 60 so I was dealing with the empty nest syndrome as well. He is an energetic, boisterous, and affectionate young man, so I wasn’t surprised that I missed his talks and his hugs. I was, however, shocked at the emptiness of the empty nest. I thought it was going to be easy peasy. It caused me to question who or what I am. Really. Am I a mother, a sister, a gardener, a wife, a friend, a retired pharmacist? Who am I if it is not in relation to another human being?
Temper tantrums raged in my head. If I can’t be the best, I won’t do anything at all. I put away the blog, the journals, the brushes, the paints, the shoes, and the pedometer. I wanted to make a living as a writer since I was about eight years old, voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on, including our old World Book Encyclopedia. But I’m not good enough, so I won’t do anything at all. Things slowed down, turned gray, my heart rate decreased, my smile faded. Nobody read my writing, nobody saw my paintings, and nobody caught my smile.
Occasionally the pesky Artist Mind pops up – while driving it says “look at what a wonderful painting that dilapidated, crumbling, graying shed slowly sliding into the banks of the brackish pond, wild flowers profuse…”. I slap it back to sleep. Or a fully formed character pops into my head for coffee and a chat, and I push her down the imaginary stairs in my mind.
Months later, my youngest son flew back for a quick visit over Christmas. He seemed distressed at how boring and empty I had let my life become. After another night out with his friends, he bounded into the living room where I was surfing the net on my iPad.
“Mom,” he says as he swoops down for a hug. “That’s the same place I found you yesterday. What are your plans for today? You need a hobby.” He heads to the kitchen to make himself breakfast, pulling out eggs and bacon from the fridge. “Isn’t there anything you like to do?”
I try explaining because everything makes so much damn sense in my head. “I used to think I would be a writer or a painter.”
“Didn’t you take some courses on painting and writing before?”
“Yes,” I tell him, almost embarrassed to continue. “But I’m terrible. All my paintings were terrible so I hid them. And I’ve never been able to show anybody anything I’ve written.”
“So what?” he says. “So what if you aren’t good enough to get rich or even sell anything, or even to show anyone your work. Can’t you write and paint just because you love to write and paint?”
I sat there looking at him, stunned. His words struck me full in the face, electricity jolting my heart. Can I really reconcile myself to doing something I love that I’ll never be great at? Is it better to have painted and sucked or never to have painted at all? Over the next few days his words haunt me.
I wondered how my paintings from years past had held up in the space time continuum under the stairs. I dug past the surplus Christmas decorations, past the abandoned lilac knitted baby blanket, with enough extra yarn to knit a queen size coverlet, past the decades old box of ancient diaries, love letters, school term papers. Why did I keep that box? Someday I would go through it. But not today. Today I found the stashed but not trashed paintings. There were more than I remembered, maybe 10 or 12. I spread them out in the media room. They weren’t half bad and a couple were even kind of good. Not good enough to show anybody, but good enough to appreciate.
I opened my abandoned social media posts, Twitter, Facebook. I found my old blog. It would take time to figure out how to access the dashboard, to edit and publish pieces, but I figured it out once, I can do it again. Enough time had passed making the blog pieces seem like they were written by a stranger. Like the paintings, she wasn’t half bad either. A couple essays made me laugh, one brought tears. I sat back on my barely used computer chair in front of the beautiful cherry desk my husband had bought for me to write on, the desk that was so beautiful it intimidated me into silence.
I don’t know why I’m so hard on myself. It’s time to put down the tough childhood expectations of teachers and parents and pick up the pieces of life for sheer enjoyment.
My son was right. I could do these things for an audience of one. I could write, I could paint, I could dance by myself if it made me happy.
My oldest son is artistic but he hasn’t picked up a pencil or brush in years. I decided to buy him a grab bag of art supplies for Christmas as a “gentle hint”. In the art supply store, my pulse quickened, my eyes were brighter, and colors sparkled, as I picked out paints, brushes, canvases, pencils, pastels, paper. I’m not sure what medium he would prefer, so I buy it all. It’s so much fun; I keep putting more things in my basket.
At home, I wrapped the art supplies, lovingly fondling them. I caressed a fan brush, picturing on the blank canvas in my mind, where I always seem to be able to imagine beautiful, haunting paintings, a crisp fall setting, orange and red trees emblazoned around a calm pond. I sat back on my heels, surprised by the waves of joy washing over me just from fondling the brushes.
Ah, who needs the “gentle hint” here? I realized I may still be FRICKIN60, but I also want to be ALIVE60.
I unwrapped the art supplies for my son. Eyes closed, deeply sighing, I admit I bought them for myself.
Now I just need to figure out the WordPress dashboard and post this essay even if nobody reads it.
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