The Exact Same Moon Read online

  Praise for Jeanne Marie Laskas and

  THE EXACT SAME MOON

  Winner of the Elle magazine

  “Elle’s Lettres” Readers’ Prize November 2003

  “Laskas details her search for motherhood with evocative writing.… Her descriptions are strong enough to make even readers unfamiliar with her situation feel moved.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Hilarious and heartwarming … Jeanne Marie exemplifies in her writing and in her life … empathy, generosity of spirit, a warm and optimistic point of view, keen powers of observation and insight, the ability to laugh at life’s curveballs even while distilling their lessons, and honoring deep connections to family.”

  —Ladies’ Home Journal

  “An engaging mix of humor and reflection … This is a book about the fierceness of love, about belonging, about the bonds within families and communities, between past and present, and the sometimes seemingly haphazard ways that connections are created or uncovered. Laskas finds a larger connection that amounts to faith.… Funny, moving, honest, and hopeful.”

  —Adoptive Families Magazine

  “Laskas paints a self-portrait of an intelligent and insightful woman.”

  —Elle

  “Delightful … The assortment of eccentric friends and neighbors who drop in and out at Sweetwater Farm adds vibrancy to this humorous account of one woman’s quest for emotional and spiritual fulfillment in contemporary rural America.”

  —Booklist

  “Lighthearted [and] fascinating.”

  —Washington Post

  “[An] appealing return to the turf of Fifty Acres and a Poodle

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A long, strong hug; a love letter to love itself; an exploration of everything that is important, and why it’s important, and why it’s worth remembering that it is. Jeanne Marie writes with a directness, and a grace, and a keen honesty that few writers, even in their best moments, approach. This is not a book to read because of its broad implications or its tremendous political import; it is a book to read because it is a joy to read it, and in the process, purely by accident, you just might learn to see your own small world in a slightly brighter shade.”

  —Wil Hylton, GQ columnist

  “Laskas tells the twin stories of her mother’s sudden paralysis and her own quest to adopt a baby from China. Serious domestic issues both, they’re nonetheless treated with Laskas’ sparkling sense of humor.”

  —Pittsburgh Magazine

  “Very enjoyable … I found the writing wonderful. I loved getting inside the author’s head—[Laskas] writes just like an intelligent, caring, funny person thinks.”

  —Will Shortz, New York Times crossword puzzle editor

  FIFTY ACRES AND A POODLE

  “Anyone who’s toyed with the idea of moving to the country should read Fifty Acres. It’s stunning, witty, sly—a wonderful surprise.”

  —Katherine Russell Rich, author of The Red Devil

  “Jeanne Marie Laskas is a formidable reporter and one damn fine writer.”

  —Esquire

  “Truly happy endings are rare, and to read about two extremely likable people making their dreams come (mostly) true means a pleasurable read indeed.”

  —Newsday

  “Humorous … This true-life tale charts a big-city girl’s transformation to farm gal.”

  —People

  “The thinking woman’s Erma Bombeck … Even the most entrenched urbanite will be charmed by this book.”

  —Andrea Sachs, Time.com

  “[Laskas] writes with verve and wit about finding your true self on a farm.… There hasn’t been such a colorful account of city people living on a farm since The Egg and I.”

  —Deseret News

  “When your fantasy becomes reality, then what’s left to dream about? Laskas finds this, and plenty of other things, out along the way to uprooting her life and building a new one.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “An amusing and emotional tale, told in loving detail … with heartfelt honesty … offering many fresh pleasures for any city dweller who has ever dreamed of buying a farm.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A winning journey of the heart and psyche … There are laughs aplenty. Laskas creates an intimacy with readers.”

  —Philadelphia Weekly

  “[A] refreshing and funny account of a move to the country … The touching story of a woman finding herself and trusting love.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “Engaging, engrossing, fun to read … sprinkled with unforgettable characters.”

  —Delaware County Daily Times

  “This beautiful memoir is more than a love story. It is a story of discovery, of change, of finding oneself. It is about fear and loss and grief, of finding what is truly important in life. It is tender, poignant, wise.”

  —Huntsville Times

  “For anyone who’d like to chuck it all and move to the country.”

  —Washington Post

  “Marriage, menageries, and musings on love and friendship, dreams and death weave seamlessly and come to a satisfying climax with a summary count of the pets she has accumulated.”

  —Harrisburg Sunday Patriot-News

  “Laskas exudes a sincerity about her rural innocence that commands respect for her both as a person and as a writer.”

  —The Observer-Reporter

  THE EXACT SAME MOON: FIFTY ACRES AND A FAMILY

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published November 2003

  Bantam trade paperback edition / September 2004

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2003 by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003041795

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48446-8

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I: Here and Now Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  II: Eggs Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  III: Hugging the Wind Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  IV: Uncommon Love Chapter Fifteen

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  The names and other identifying details

  of some characters have been changed to

  protect individual privacy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Okay, you go in first,” I say to Alex, the husband.

  He looks at me.

  “I’m too shy,” I say.

  He lowers his head, glares at me through eyes that say, “As if.”

  Ahem. I remind him that I wet my pants nearly every day in kindergarten, so terrified was I of joining the new society of little kids.

  “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago,” he says.

 
“Yeah, well, no one would let me go down the sliding board,” I say. I’m reaching up, trying to help tame his hair, which has suffered some severe style damage underneath the wool cap he just took off. “You have hat hair, honey,” I say.

  “Oh?”

  “Just kind of all over the place.”

  “Oh.” He does some smoothing. “Well, I imagine this is a pretty forgiving crowd.”

  We’re at our local Ramada Inn, stalled here at the entrance to Conference Room A, where the third annual Equine Clinic, sponsored by Agway, our feed and seed store, is about to begin. We’ve never been to one of these seminars before. There must be three hundred people crammed into Conference Room A. That’s more people than your mind might automatically conjure when you imagine a talk about “Pasture Management” and “Understanding Worms.”

  I’m not sure I’m up for this. I was really in the mood for something low-key, like an intimate little poetry reading—except with horse talk, instead of poems.

  “I’m sort of missing Sears,” I say to Alex.

  “You’re missing Sears?”

  “In a way …”

  Sears is right down the road. We were just in there looking at refrigerators. And the thing is, I had an epiphany, right there in Sears. Yes, I suppose you could call it an epiphany. In my mind I am still trying to process what happened.

  Nothing really happened. Alex was busy flirting with Vicki, the sales associate, trying to get her to throw in some freebies with the Amana we were considering. And I was leaning on a Maytag. I was leaning back tapping the cold enamel surface, clickety clack, clickety clack, with my fingernails. And I got to thinking. I got to thinking how blank a mind can become in the home appliance department at Sears.

  Yup.

  Clickety clack. Clickety clack.

  And so naturally I got to wondering if there was anything at all rattling around in my big, loose brain.

  And all I could think of was this: I am happy.

  I am really happy.

  How could such a small thought seem so huge? And—who knew? Who knew you could find yourself feeling utterly satisfied, suddenly and infinitely at peace with every promise the love gods ever promised and broke and re-promised and rebroke—that whole rocky journey to love, none of it mattered now, in that instant, in that burst of awareness that really should have been happening on a beautiful mountaintop, or at least on a tropical island, no, it was happening in the home appliance department of Sears.

  Is this it? That’s what I wondered. Hey, this might be it. This right here might be happily-ever-after. It might be as simple as this.

  Clickety clack, clickety clack. The discovery settled a lot of doubt for me.

  Because, and as you probably know, there is considerable evidence to support the notion that happily-ever-after doesn’t exist at all. Oh, plenty of people will tell you all about this. They’ll tell you that just because you happened to go into your bride stage—as I did two years ago, when I married Alex—just because you went waltzing through that garden in your satin ball gown, surrounded by swirling perfume, surrounded by your family and your friends and even Christine, your devoted hairdresser standing there armed with extra bobby pins in case of hair droops, no, it doesn’t portend anything. In fact, just because the love of your life was waiting there, in his tux, in that gazebo waiting to promise your same promise, just because that whole day went perfectly, just perfectly, right down to the clippity clop, clippity clop of the mule you got for your love as a wedding present—I got him a mule, but a small one—just because all that happiness actually happened, don’t be thinking the happiness thing will necessarily stick.

  Happily-ever-after, it’s sweet. Sweet in the way a flying saucer is sweet and sweet in the way an optical illusion is sweet. It’s hope rising, then disappearing into the mist. This is the way anybody who ever tasted sour has learned to think.

  It isn’t a bad way to think, but it really is only one way to think. Anyone can fall into the habit. Anyone can look at the bloom of a Shasta daisy and say, “Well, that’s not going to last.”

  Why get so far ahead of the story? Why not just: Be in the story? That’s what I was thinking. I was thinking that the key to the whole thing is living in the moment, which is where happily-ever-after is, if only for the moment.

  The here-and-now. I was thinking: This is the answer to everything.

  So here I am now, at a Ramada Inn—I am standing here longing for the here-and-now of an hour ago at Sears.

  Which would be there-and-then.

  See, that’s not good.

  Damn.

  This is not as easy as it sounds.

  Alex is still trying to mat down his poor hair. Quite a gymnastic feat, the way that hair keeps bouncing back. It’s more salt than pepper these days. It looks good on him. I mean, when it’s fixed right. Pushed back, full on the sides, curling up in the back. It’s a look befitting his character as a psychologist with wisdom and distance. Plus, he got new glasses, kind of square, fashionably hip numbers that suggest sophistication. I don’t think he looks a full fifteen years older than me. I really don’t. I’m thirty-nine. In my mind I still look like a basketball player, right guard, with a blond pony-tail swishing across the number 25 on my back, and smooth skin and calves that say “athlete.” But I do have some evidence to suggest that I look different now. For one thing, it costs me eighty-eight dollars every few months to keep this hair this blond, and now it’s all layered and short, a cut designed to lift that face, yes, to draw attention to that youthful arch of those youthful eyebrows.

  But I don’t mind getting old. There are plenty of things about youth that I’m glad to be done with.

  “You know, I just have one comment about your whole kindergarten problem,” Alex is saying to me. (Speaking of which.) We’re still outside Conference Room A. I don’t know why he won’t go in first. Sometimes we get into these little stand-offs, which are based on nothing more than a mutually stubborn urge to win. “Did it ever occur to you that your pants-wetting thing had nothing to do with shyness,” he says, “that it was just about manipulating your poor mother?”

  Inhale. Exhale. See, this right here is the problem with being married to a shrink. Number one, you get sidetracked a lot. And number two, for some reason he’s always defending your mother.

  “What, because she had to drive up and bring me dry underwear all the time?”

  “Exactly. You had her at your command.”

  Inhale. Exhale. “Honey, it was about survival,” I tell him. “It was about needing someone to rescue me from that awful, miserable place where, first of all, the teacher smelled like mothballs, and second of all, the one time I finally got the nerve to go into the bathroom, Judy Hampton tricked me into going into the boys’ room and all the kids were waiting outside laughing.”

  Inhale. Exhale. Why are we even talking about this?

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Well, I’ll remind you that my mom started sending me to school with dry underwear in my lunchbox—so that sort of blows your theory.”

  “You know what, I’m sorry I brought this up,” he says, adding: “Did I bring this up?”

  Inhale. Exhale. “What in the name of potty training do you suppose she was thinking? I mean—my lunchbox?”

  Inhale, exhale, inhale.

  “You know what, let’s just drop it,” Alex says.

  And then he turns to go in first, which you have to admit is a gesture of something.

  Conference Room A is packed, steamy. Whew, lots of body heat in here. White and green Agway balloons float optimistically above people tucked nice and tight at long tables set with Agway mugs and pencils and notepads. The walls are done up science-fair style, with display after display intending to educate on such matters as hay and sweet feed and mineral supplements and horse hair conditioners.

  Alex and I don’t know a soul, as expected. The truth is, we’ve come to Equine Clinic only incidentally to learn about pasture management and worms. We’
re here to participate in something, to become a part of something. This has become a sort of new campaign for us. We have been cooped up together for two happily-ever-after years. Recently we noted that we were beginning to finish each other’s sentences. Pretty soon we may start speaking our own language, like kids raised by wolves.

  Cooped up together is a hazard of any happily-ever-after, I suppose, but people whose happily-ever-after happens to be set in the country, in the middle of nowhere, well, we are especially at risk.

  Two years. It’s been two years since we left Pittsburgh, the familiar land of taxis and traffic lights and espresso bars and steam vents, to come to these gentle hills, about forty miles south. Hills dotted with sheep, hills that seem to roll toward Heaven itself. It was a countryside that beckoned us unexpectedly. It was a countryside that shouted: “This is it! This is your dream come true! This is the setting where your own personal happily-ever-after will take place!” Of course, this is the sort of stuff you are apt to hear when you are in a certain stage of life. When we stumbled into this area, we were just getting on with the business of being in love, we were getting married, and so of course we were getting all swept up by the adventure, by the thrill of the gamble. Somehow, when the dust from all that sweeping finally settled, we found ourselves the proud and uneasy owners of a fifty-acre farm in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania.

  We knew nothing about farming, or country living. (I grew up in the suburbs, Alex in the city.) But that didn’t matter. “How hard could it be?” That was our motto. Our new home has a lily pond, a chestnut grove, an Amish-built barn, and a funky old farmhouse with some fairly apparent self-esteem issues. We named the place Sweetwater Farm and settled in with our city dogs: Betty (mine), a happy mutt more or less in touch with her inner dog. And Marley (his), a huge, black, dazed and confused poodle. (“I am married to a man with a poodle. I am married to a shrink with a dazed and confused poodle”—sometimes it helps to practice just saying that.) Shortly after arriving here, we got a third dog that might act out the more rugged farm dog role, a boxy Lab we named Wilma. Then we got the wedding mule, Sassy, and her horse companion, Cricket. It mattered little that we knew nothing about mules or horses. It mattered so little, we ended up getting another horse, Maggie, and another mule, Skippy. We were in expansion mode, at least when it came to acreage and animals and our connection and commitment to each other. As for other actual human beings—well, we haven’t moved too far on that front. We have our city friends who like to come down, and Alex has his two grown children, Amy and Peter, who live and work in New York and who visit. Alex’s psychology practice is in Pittsburgh, and so he has those humans to interact with. As for me, I stay at home writing, so most of my days are just me and the animals. The risk of bonkers-going is, I’ll admit, high.