Skill Set Apocalypse

Another excerpt from the book I’m writing about our farm. If you’re new to these essays, they can stand alone but also, they will make much more sense if you go back through the archives and have yourself a good, long read.

*

I know I haven’t said much about astrology yet. This is not a book about astrology but it is a book about my life and astrology is one of the great obsessions of my lifetime. It feels like lying to you if I subtly leave it out. You wouldn’t know the difference. You would never wonder why my memoir didn’t include something about astrology. But I would know it. I would know it like ignoring an ingrown toenail on my left, big toe.

I mostly want to talk about the sign of Virgo and how she is the lost sign of the zodiac. More importantly, she is my sign. She is the sign of my Sun and Moon and Mars and Mercury. And you might be thinking that that is a lot of Virgo for one girl to have and you would be very right about all of that.

Let’s look to Geraldine Thorsten for a moment. She wrote a book called, God Herself: The Feminine Roots of Astrology (1980). About Virgo, she writes this:

A Virgin, originally, meant a person who was her own woman: free, independent, the property of no one, with full control over her own life and full responsibility for it. Virgo endows you with a strong independent spirit that acts as a powerful shield against social pressures.

How are we to be autonomous and free without knowing how to feed ourselves, how to care for the land, how to milk an udder all the way out? How are we to confidently refer to ourselves as sovereign women if we do not understand how to do god’s greatest magical act — turn seeds into something we can eat.

If you will allow me a brief astrological moment, I want to say this:

We have cheapened Virgo to a sign that loves to color code her bookshelf and organize her day-planner (I love and do both). We understand her as uptight, neurotic, controlling, and anxious. If our Virgo is not cleaning, we are not sure what to do with her.

Usually, and most often, whenever the Romans are mentioned, I stop listening entirely. Roman mythology is not something I turn to in order to understand astrology, I don’t want you to get that impression about me. But, I can get behind the great goddess that the Romans have assigned Virgo to — the goddess of fertility, motherhood, and the fall harvest: Ceres.

Ceres is most often pictured holding a fluffy bushel of wheat in one arm and in the other, a curved, silver sickle she uses to chop the heads off of crops as she walks through fields of ready wheat. She is also usually shown with a cornucopia at her feet, overflowing with fruits and vegetables that she has grown in fertile, rich soil. She knows the earth, walks the land, understands cycles and seasons, recognizes that land needs to soar and then lay fallow — learning to be still.

How is a modern woman supposed to relate to this? Are we to water our house plants in our LuLu Lemon yoga pants and think about the great renewal of spring? Are we to walk through Whole Foods, plucking up bananas and avocados in mid-January, and reflect on the fallow season of the land? Are we to step outside our concrete condos, onto the congested New York City streets, and wave our sickle in the air? I’m sure someone has done this, but not for the reason of harvesting wheat.

The myth of Ceres lives mostly as just that — a myth. She no longer walks the dusty rows of wheat with us as a wise voice in our ear. Not because she wound’t be great at the job, but because almost none of us have any dusty rows of wheat to walk. She has become a ghost that we no longer remember the name of. There are no more photos of her in anyone’s house. She is waiting to be asked to come back, to be remembered, but that means more than just telling a story. It means doing the work she has for us to do. It means walking out of the cities, walking far away until your feet hit dirt. Until you start to remember the swaying motion of the sickle. It’s in there, somewhere in the hips. Like learning how to make love for the first time.

*

My grandmother was the first person to say the word Virgo to me but it wasn’t like you would think. It really wasn’t on purpose at all. It fell out of her mouth — something she had forgotten to tell me, like adding ketchup to the grocery list at the last moment.

I was on my way to becoming a teenager when she said it and I tolerated listening to things my grandmother said in order to get to the Virgo part, the part that had to do with me. She told me that being a Virgo was something we both were and for that reason, I kept paying attention. I was intrigued by the possibility of being recognized, by anyone, but particularly by her. I wanted to grab on tightly to the thing — the Virgoness — that made it impossible for my grandmother and I to be separated.

My grandmother opened up the hatch to the esoteric world and left it propped open for my thin body. That was all I needed to slip though, calves and all. She would not remember that she had done that, nor would she ever take credit for it — like accidentally introducing me to a woman at her church that I ended up falling in love with.

My grandmother was not an outwardly mystical woman. On her coffee table was a copy of the Methodist hymnal, red and hard-backed, like the crusty shell of an armadillo in the desert — along with a deck of traditional playing cards for her Saturday night bridge tournaments. My grandmother never spoke of magic or fate, synchronicity, or the stars. She spoke a lot about her trouble with her constipation, how she needed to eat more fiber, and complained about the thinness of her lips.

This might not mean much to you, but my grandmother and I are not only Virgos — we have three other planets in the sign of Virgo and they are the exact same planets — the Moon, Mars and Mercury. Along with my grandmother’s constipation, I inherited this astrological lineage from her.

It’s true. I have seen many charts like this in my time studying astrology. Astrological genetics. Inherited patterns. It’s real. One constellation, one grouping of planets, passed down to the next generation in a hopeful prayer that someone might make something good out of it all.

*

While my grandmother was alive, I did not feel all that connected to her. In fact, she was someone I usually preferred not be around. When I would visit her at her home outside of Los Angeles, her biggest excitement was taking me to the Methodist church on Sunday.

She couldn’t wait to introduce me to her friends after the service as:

HER GRANDDAUGHTER, JENNIFER

I felt like what a groomed dog in a competitive show must feel like — exhausted from being pranced around the perimeter of a ring in hopes of a blue ribbon. All trotting and tip toes. Shaking hands with elderly women in matching tweed jackets and skirts — a bright pink, a yellow, an orange. It being southern California and all, everything was fluorescent. My grandmother told me she was a fall which I also felt was something I should pay attention to. Meaning, her colors were autumn colors — dark browns, oranges, rusted blues. She mentioned I might want to pay attention to this and I pocketed it away, along with the whole Virgo idea.

It wasn’t just the church thing though that made it challenging to be with my grandmother — that was tolerable. Sometimes even enjoyable if the snacks were good. It was more that there was never any room for me to get to my grandmother. She was always closing herself off with useless chatter and information. It was nothing I ever cared about. A neighbor’s house who had caught fire. Someone’s cat who was sick. Another friend at church whose grandson had Autism. There were so many other things we could have talked about.

So, I waited.

I waited for a pause in the conversation, a place where I might insert myself like a useful bookmark. But it never came.

*

My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s when I was twenty-six.

I was camping in the Adirondacks with my wife (we had only been dating a year then) when it happened. I drove into town to call her. I thought maybe I had already missed her great passage but the nurse picked up and held the phone to the side of my grandmother’s face. My grandmother was talking, quickly, just like she always did but in what was now a mixture of consonants and clicking, sounding more like music with one crescendo before her final silence.

The hospice nurse took the phone from my grandmother and put it up to her own ear,
“I think she just took her last breath”.

I wondered if I needed to ask the hospice nurse to check, so that we could be sure. Should we check for a pulse? A ripple of breath? Are you certain she had gone out singing?

My grandmother was a terrible harmonizer.
My mother and I always let her take the melody.

I hung up the phone feeling as though I had stolen my grandmother’s last moment. Surely she hadn’t meant to be on the phone with me when she died. Surely, she needed someone else who could translate her music into her final poetry. Surely, there was someone closer to her who would have been a better witness to her last breath.

I often looked behind me to see if someone else was standing there and at any moment, they would push me out of the way and say, Excuse me, you’re in my spot.

As I drove back to our campground in the Adirondacks, I felt the four planets in Virgo restructure themselves into my spine, like small stones settling back into the dirt after an earthquake. One stone at the base of my neck, one in my lumbar spine and two in my mid-back, just where the curve of my scoliosis starts to take a left turn.

These planets were now solely my planets, feeling more mine after she was officially gone. I wanted time to read over my astrological will, pouring over the symbols by a thin flame. I wanted time to understand what it would mean to become the steward of this Virgo lineage that my grandmother had left behind, apparently, all to me. How would I steward this land?

*

For my grandmother’s second marriage, she chose a farmer whose name was Leo. Leo came from a dairy farm in Iowa. I have a black and white photo of his farm stored on my computer. The land is flat. Flat like a blank sheet of paper — anything would be possible on it and in that way, one might feel overwhelmed by the blank canvas of it all.

When they married, Leo wasn’t a farmer anymore. He understood that there was no real money in farming and after all, living in southern California meant you wanted something better for your life. Something more glamourous. Something more Hollywood. And glamorous, as we all know, meant no more manual labor.

Leo wasn’t my biological grandfather but I didn’t know the difference. Not for a long time. He was the only real shot I had at a grandfather. My paternal grandfather had died before I was born and my maternal grandfather died of liver failure when I was only eleven. So Leo was it for me. And he made up for both of those g randfathers. It’s funny how family comes, who ends up actually showing up, making a difference, being the people that change your life. For me, it was Leo. We would write each other letters when I was little — his print in all capitals. Mine in loose, tiled cursive that ran up the page like it was trying to get somewhere fast.

The thing about Leo, was that he loved money — in an obsessive way. His goal in life was to make one million dollars, in cash. This meant that he did not buy a new washer or dryer when they broke. He simply replaced parts. They lived with an electric stove and an old couch in the den with springs so hard when you laid on it you thought you were sleeping on a set of hot rollers. He didn’t have nice things, but he was on his way to a million dollars in cash and he owned his home outright.

Oh what a long way he had come from the flat fields in Iowa — where the cows had no protection from the wind.

So when Leo died — a few years after my grandmother — everything he had, went to my mother, my brother and me. Like I said, we were his family.

Before Leo died, my wife and I were poor. Very, very poor. We were the kind of poor where I would frequently drive from Phoenix (where my father lived) to Santa Fe (where we lived) and run out of gas somewhere in Gallop. I would have to call my father, too proud to have asked him for money at the outset of my journey, and have him wire me money to the nearest Walmart so I could fuel up my car for the rest of the trip home. It wasn’t that my wife and I didn’t work. We did. But we worked jobs as massage therapists, servers at restaurants, cleaning houses, personal assistants for lawyers in Santa Fe. We made no real money.

When Leo died, things changed. It wasn’t that he left us millions of dollars, but he left us enough money so that we could make our car payment and fill up our car with gas. Most importantly, he left us enough money so that we could buy a farm.

We could not buy the farm for cash. We still needed a mortgage. And we needed a co-signer because my wife and I were both self-employed and the banks make you sign over most of your internal organs if you are self-employed and foolish enough to ask for a loan. But we did ask. And we bought our farm using three women, and one dead grandfather. I thought Leo would have been very proud to know I was continuing on his dairy lineage in a much less flat place, where the cows had a shot at standing under a tree in a strong wind.

I felt the four Virgo planets settle deeper inside my body, this time, finding their way into the structures of my cells, making them more sturdy, grounded, of the earth. They seemed eager to find a place to start their work.

*

There was a question I kept circling back to in myself as I observed the world, the way cities worked, America — it felt Virgoan in nature:

Who will make sure we stay alive?

I felt like we were living through a kind of skill set apocalypse that was leading to the end of people knowing how to butcher hogs, take gallbladders out of chickens, keep apple orchards alive at 7,000 feet.

How would any of us be okay?

My grandmother had not taken up farming. She did, however, grow beautiful, vibrant daisy’s in her front yard. They smelled musty and damp, like finding an old spot of cat urine on the carpet you never got around to cleaning up properly.

I liked the feeling of the Virgo weight being passed to me. I liked the responsibility for carrying something heavy. It felt purposeful, directed. It felt like what I was doing meant something and maybe it even meant something to a whole line of ghosts.

I didn’t exactly have clear instructions upon my grandmother’s death. It was more of a garbled verse to some lost poem or an old song. Maybe both. I knew this much — we were Irish. We were poets and musicians, and most of all, farmers.