A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [6]
Later there were the usual problems that came with farming in what was becoming suburbia: Undisciplined dogs bolted from their owners and hours later came panting home from our chicken yard with bloodied teeth; teenagers plundered and pillaged and copulated in the outbuildings; occasionally neighbors complained about the smell of manure and the noise of machinery. Very few seemed to make the connection between the sustaining white liquid they poured on their breakfast cereal and Howard’s clattering, stinking enterprise across the way.
Despite the encroachment, Howard often felt, and I did, too, that we were living in a self-made paradise on the last dairy farm in Prairie Center. Before dawn and then at night, before supper, I frequently helped Howard with the chores. In the morning I’d leave the girls asleep in their beds and go out into the cold night. The barn blocked the subdivision lights and gave us the sense as we walked hand and hand to our work that we were the only two people awake, certainly in Prairie Center, and perhaps farther afield too: the county, the state, the face of the earth. I loved that feeling, that we were alone. The routine was much like waitressing, cleaning counters and setting tables, and serving, and then wiping up afterward. We had our supply wagon in the aisle and Howard and I went from cow to cow, first cleaning off the udders with an iodine solution and then drawing off a milk sample, and attaching the milking machine.
After chores in the summer I tried my best to be a good farm wife, to live up to Howard’s expectations. We grew an enormous garden and there were literally days, breakfast, dinner, and supper, when we could boast that everything we were putting into our mouths had come from our own land. I made butter in the food processor, the girls and I put up strawberries and apple jelly and tomatoes and sweet corn and dilly beans and watermelon pickles. In hay season, “threshing time,” Howard called it, I drove the tractor with the bailer behind it as it swept up the alfalfa and compressed it into bundles, and then of all things, expertly tied knots around the bales. I could never get over the fact that the poor old rusted 1949 McCormick baler knew exactly how to tie a knot.
From September to June, five mornings a week, I had the job of school nurse at Blackwell Elementary. It was as if I stepped into another skin when I put on my white polyester pants and my pink shirt and my stethoscope. In my school cubicle, the day always began with the dirty, smelly boy who never got breakfast and had chronic stomachaches, followed by those who had forgotten to take their Ritalin. There were seasons of head lice and influenza, chicken pox and bronchitis—the long line of wheezing children waiting to get their cough syrup. Several afternoons a week I traveled to the neighboring townships with a team of nurses, took my place behind a screen in the municipal buildings, and administered immunizations to howling babies and small children. We were widely known as “the shot ladies” and we inspired fear wherever we went. Howard and I were going to be in debt for possibly longer than we were planning to live. Shortly after we moved, almost six years before, I had cast about for a profession which I could take up after a brief and inexpensive course of study. It was my mother-in-law, Nellie, who suggested nursing at first, and then insisted I go back to school, and finally provided the funds for my degree. A nurse herself, she assured me that I would find great satisfaction in tending the sick. It took a year and some months at the technical college in Blackwell to become