Me and Fuckhead and Spirit Hill Farm and Friends and Creativity and COVID-19

I had come to Spirit Hill Farm in Sebastopol, California, back in December for a week at the request of Carolyn, my friend and the owner of Spirit Hill, so I could write about what happens when a writer spends a handful of days in a place that is so connected to nature. Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Annie Dillard’s essay Living Like Weasels are two of my take-to-a-desert-island pieces of writing, and I wanted a deep taste of what they had written about: the self in relationship to nature. 

I’d been outside before. I’d gone camping as a kid. I loved walking and running and lying in the grass and watching the clouds go by. I grew up in the suburbs with grass and trees and rocks in the backyard—my mother had a garden—but I’d never lived or stayed in a place with farm in the name. 

When you drive up Mill Station Road, you first see Spirit Hill Farm as brightly colored house on top of the hill. There is a vineyard next door and an apple orchard on the property. There are olive trees. There are chickens and two and a half acres of plants and trees and gophers and a pool. The original structure was built by a couple who had traveled by wagon across the United States in the late 1800s, and there is also the (beautiful!) guest house where I live, and then there is the sugar shack, a cute little one-room house with a sheltered outdoor bathroom. 

I was here by myself for a week in December, and, when it was time for me to fly back to Boston, Carolyn told me I could stay a little longer if I wanted. 

One-way flights weren’t expensive, so I said I wanted to stay. I hadn’t written anything yet, but I was developing a daily routine. I’d begun jumping in the (very) cold pool when I got up in the morning because I was trying to break patterns, trying to change. I had come to Spirit Hill ostensibly to write, but really, as Thoreau said, because I wished to lived deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I spent the days weeding, on ladders trimming trees, having no idea what I was doing, but having so much fun pretending I was Mary in The Secret Garden, looking at what seemed dead in the winter but not cutting as I heard her voice excitedly say “It’s wick!” when, in the spring, green bits began to show themselves to her. 

Okay, that’s not true. I cut so much that looked dead. I made a pile of cuttings the size of a city bus by the chicken coop, and although I heard her voice saying the wick thing, cutting the olive trees, the hydrangeas, the tall grasses, so many plants I could not begin to name, felt amazing. I’m not sure I could have stopped even if Mary had stepped out of the pages and tried to grab my arm with her little hand.

It was like what I wanted to do in my life, cut off all the dead wood, I was getting to do with the plants and trees. It was powerful to go chop chop chop and feel satisfied, as if I were one clip away from trimming the right branch, causing my own dead wood to miraculously fall away, revealing the green shoots of the more exciting, interesting, alive me I hoped was in there but could not locate. 

 I tried not to cut too much. 

The gardener was a good sport. He’d show up once a week, look at my pile, and get on with his work. He knew I was happy, and he knew things would, eventually, grow back. 

Carolyn and Spirit Hill Farm are about experience and love and nature more than they are about perfection, and so I was like a kid at the beach on a sunny day. 

Actually, I was a little insane. A normal person might have just thrown a cushion on one of the pool chairs and relaxed, read, slept, wrote, but I had brought my inside world with me into this Garden of Eden, and my inside world said you have no idea what to do with your life so you better just work work work work, and so I worked in the yard from dawn to dusk and, at night, I was so tired and sore I couldn’t sleep well. 

If I could just weed enough, if I could just get Spirit Hill Farm under control, every wild thing trimmed and well-shaped, I’d be able to slip through some sort of magic portal and be okay. I’d be able to relax. I’d know what to do next. 

The thing is, I’d done my bucket list: I’d had a daughter. I’d been married. I’d co-written a movie and had seen it on the big screen. I’d written a book. I’d been to Europe. I hate to sound like a loser at this game called life, but a good size chunk of me was done. 

I was an arrow with no target. If you want to suck the life out of someone, take away her dreams and her goals. 

Again, I’m not being completely honest. There was something on my bucket list I hadn’t done, but after two marriages and too many dating stories for one brain to remember, when I hit 55 and menopause, my brain told me, Fold up that tent, Pocahontas. It’s not happening. You’re never going to find someone and stay. Anyway, I was a child of the 70s. I had read my mom’s Ms. Magazines as a young girl. I loved the saying A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. I had particularly liked to say it to my dad.

At Spirit Hill, as I worked, walked, cooked, ate, read, and meditated, I wondered, Is this how it’s supposed to be? Am I a fish without a bicycle? Do I need a partner or is the belief I have that people are meant to exist as couples just a story? Is the great love of my life right outside the door, right in my hands when I’m wrestling with a dandelion root? Is it nature? And if I was going to be single for the rest of my life, without “have a man” as the sole marble rolling around in my bucket list, what did I want to work for in the next year, five years, ten years, for the rest of my life? I am, after all, a Sagittarius. I am the archer. Without a target, I feel limp and purposeless. 

Wasn’t I at Spirit Hill to write about what it was like for me to be there? I was reminded of how I felt as a kid when I’d walk into a church. I wouldn’t want to talk to anyone because I felt too full and was afraid I might start crying. Spirit Hill was (and still is) a bit like that for me. I didn’t want to talk about it, or write about it much. I just kept wanting to touch the plants, watch the birds, smell the air at night. I wasn’t sure I did want to write. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I’d said so much that was personal in my first book, and I wondered if maybe I was done.

After a couple of weeks, Carolyn came to visit, and when I told her I’d be packing to go some time the next week, she asked if I wanted to stay for a year, two years, or maybe longer as a property manager. 

I panicked. I was afraid I’d be trapped, stuck in a place that looked like heaven but that could turn into a kind of prison where I would be forced by my own commitment to never leave, to spend a year or two a slave to feeding chickens, killing plants I’d meant to tend, pretending I was there to write, but really just getting my hands dirty and then making dinner, watching a show, and going to bed. Distraught, I called my best friend, and we agreed I was doing my run from commitment thing and that this was a good thing for me, an incredible opportunity, something I could make of pretty much whatever I wanted.

And so I said yes, but I told Carolyn I didn’t want to be called property manager. We came up with writer-in-residence, farmer-in-training. I would help keep an eye on the property and be around when Spirit Hill had guests who had rented the property while Carolyn lived and worked in San Jose. Mostly, Carolyn said, she wanted me to enjoy myself, to make the most of my time at Spirit Hill, to dive deep into myself, and to create whatever Spirit Hill inspired in me. Carolyn got me a used white Ford Transit so I could haul around hay for the chickens and scones for myself from Wildflour Bakery. I was not trapped. I made new friends. I started exploring the towns of Sebastopol and Graton. I joined a gym in Santa Rosa with a steam room and a sauna. 

And then COVID-19 came to town and I was told to shelter-in-place.

It was me, the chickens, and, every day around five, the masked woman who drove up in her white truck and delivered the mail. 

Finally, when I was wondering if I was going to be alright, when I was wondering if I’d get a skin condition from no hugs, a brain condition from no real-life human interaction, Fuckhead came banging on my door. 

I’d seen him hanging out with his friends, but I hadn’t thought much about it. He was just always there in the background, like the hawks circling overhead, looking for food, for trouble, for the next girl to chase. 

And then one day I was in the side yard, gardening, and I heard a loud noise coming from the front of my house. I imagined Paul Bunyan was there with his ax. I wished I had a gun as I ran around the house to the front door because if some crowd of madmen was trying to destroy my house, I wanted to take them down at the knees.

There he was, alone, beating on my door with his head. That is the moment I fell in love with him, but it was entirely one sided, for as soon as he saw me, he took off, his big body wobbly on his skinny legs.

“Hey, Fuckhead!” I yelled as he disappeared into the rows of grapevines. “Come back!”

I’d been sheltering in place for days, weeks, years? and I was thrilled at the idea of company, especially company that wouldn’t want to barge into my newfound peace and quiet and want to spend every night sitting on the couch when I wanted to do yoga or watch Master Class or do a Joe Dispenza meditation or scroll through Facebook and Instagram. 

I thought Fuckhead might be the perfect Mr. Right. 

I started posting about Fuckhead on Facebook. He had his buddies, Dickhead and Curtis, and they, as a group, would sometimes poop outside my front door. Curtis was skinnier than the other two and always struggled to keep up. Dickhead was meaner looking, harder, and he never looked me in the eye. Every time we ran into each other, he was out of there, even faster than Fuckhead. Dickhead was a sprinter. He didn’t care about anyone else. It was all about Dickhead and how mean he could look and how fast he could run from anyone, including his supposed friends. 

What I don’t talk about much, if at all, was that Fuckhead had a limp. I wrote it once in a Facebook post early on and then erased it because I didn’t want people to feel sorry for Fuckhead or imagine he wasn’t the elusive stud I was portraying him to be. 

People got excited about Fuckhead. A few wrote on Facebook that he was a highlight during this time of COVID-19, and so I went out early in the mornings, a long parka over my nightclothes, boots unzippered, clumping along like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, and hung out in the yard after feeding the chickens, singing his name, calling him to me. 

 This never worked. 

Across the street there is a gate, and behind the gate is an empty lot and an enormous tree. (I know I should tell you the type of tree, but you have to understand, I don’t really care. This is about the turkeys and friendship, not the trees.) Early in our relationship, I hadn’t understood just how amazing guys like Fuckhead were, and so I never thought to look way up in the trees for his sleeping body. But one night when I was out strolling (trolling), looking for my Mr. Trouble, I heard him call and I stopped and looked up, and good lord, I could see what looked to me without my glasses like a smudge. 

“Fucky?” I called. 

He called back in his scrapey, it’s been a tough week, need a drink kind of way. 

“Hi, Honey,” I said.

No response.

I knew who I needed: Laura Foote. We’d meet a couple of years ago, and she’d done some drawings for me as gifts. One had the two of us holding hands, our hair on fire. We were each other’s muses. Her work made me happy in a way that left me feeling as if I’d eaten a good meal, heard a great joke, and robbed a bank. Full and giggly and naughty. I called Laura down in Mississippi and asked her if she’d be interested in bringing Fuckhead to life on the page with me. 

I squeezed my own fingers when I asked her because I knew she was going to say no. Laura Foote, in her own way, was very elusive.

She said yes. 

We started talking on the phone, coming up with Fuckhead stories. We decided eventually he would fall in love with me. Laura Foote drew him staring in my window, ugly and funny. It was like Laura knew these turkey’s (I mean my) deepest, darkest thoughts, and she was bringing them to life. We made her a character in the story a young inquisitive neighbor with a red dress too tight and scratchy to let her scale the fence between her house and Spirit Hill. Laura Foote had her character take off her dress and walk up to my house in her boots and star panties, skinny girl swagger and grit. 

We talked about dreams and freedom and friendship and wild behavior and love and made up stories about two girls who were free to do whatever they wanted. 

She would send me screen shots of her drawings and I would laugh and laugh and laugh. We decided that one day Fuckhead and Dickhead and Curtis would stand at my door, watching the show Ozarks along with me. Laura Foote drew Curtis wearing a tight I Love Ruth t-shirt the girls that were us had made and thrown out the door because it was too small for us. (You have to watch the second episode of season 1 of Ozarks to know who Ruth is and why Curtis and we would love her.) I would go for bike rides and make myself laugh out loud just thinking of the funny stories we could tell. 

And as COVID-19 raged on, we went deeper into story, puzzling out the details, figuring things out one day at a time. 

Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved a turkey…