Fear and Anger

Originally Posted 9/9/09 to Save the Farm blog:

Long ago, I was a community organizer working with mothers on public assistance. The plight of these women and their children was dire. Everywhere they turned, the circumstances of their lives conspired to hold them down. Their only hope was to rise up against the system and demand what was rightfully their due under the law. They were terrified of doing that. They understood that, if they did fight for themselves, they could end up worse off than they already were.


My job was to find potential leaders among those women and guide them toward becoming more angry than they were afraid. My job was to stand by them as they guided other mothers to do the same, to become more angry than they were afraid. In the process of all of that becoming, those women discovered their personal and collective power, and I discovered some of that for myself also.

But, like all of us tend to do sometimes, after a while I forgot what I had learned. Consequently, six weeks ago, when my husband Jonathan lost his job and we knew that without his income we would not be able to afford our high monthly mortgage payment, I was afraid. I prayed. I grappled for scraps of hope. I grew more desperate every day. I concluded that we would have to sell our home.

Nine years ago, we bought this house and five acres on Vashon Island in the middle of Washington State’s Puget Sound and moved here from New York City. The transition was difficult, and it has taken me just about all of this time to think of myself as living here instead of back there in the city I loved more than any place I had ever been in my life, except maybe Paris.

I valued our island farm and life so little that I even gave it up once to move to Seattle on the mainland. Eight months later, we admitted what a mistake that was and moved back. The people we had sold the farm to disliked island life so much that they sold the place back to us. Unfortunately, the bank wasn’t quite as cooperative. Our new mortgage payment would be twice what it had been before we left the island.

Two months after our return, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The next year and a half was consumed by my struggle to survive that diagnosis. Thirteen surgical procedures, three of those on the same day, but no chemotherapy or radiation, so I actually felt rather lucky. Especially because, through all of it, I was in our yellow house on Pink Tractor Farm, a blessed sanctuary if there ever was one.

I was still healing from the final surgical procedure and still exhausted when Jonathan was laid off from the job he had devoted himself to and loved for our entire nine years in the Pacific Northwest. Then, suddenly, the farm was for sale in the worst housing market anyone around here can remember, and we were camped out at our son and daughter in law’s house on the mainland while strangers tramped through the rooms where we had lived our life.

All of that time, I was afraid. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house for enough to give us even a remote chance of buying another someday. I was also afraid of how it would feel if we did sell the house and those tramping strangers took up residence where I now understood that we belong.

I was afraid, but I had not yet become angry. That happened three days ago.

We were back in the yellow house for a few days with our grandchildren doing our best to behave as if this were a normal Labor Day weekend on the farm. My granddaughter and I were preparing to make applesauce out of fruit from the trees in our front pasture while my grandson played with the toys he was rediscovering after our month-long absence from what both kids think of and love as their second home.

“Grandma, somebody’s in the back yard,” my granddaughter said, sounding anxious.

I opened the door to discover a man I had never seen before headed down our driveway from the truck he’d parked in front of our garage. He looked startled to see me and took a step backward toward his vehicle. “Didn’t the realtor call you?” he asked.

No one had called. No one had told me that this guy, who turned out to be a roofer, would be coming to climb up onto our house looking for a reason to drive our already rock bottom selling price even further downward.

I began to tremble inside, but I would not recognize until sometime later that this trembling was the deep down seismic beginning of an eruption. In the meantime, my granddaughter and I milled apples into sauce that she decided should be tarter than my usual recipe. My grandson constructed one of his wonderful concoctions out of a building set he had forgotten he owned.

Jonathan would not come home till hours later from the job where he works now as a carpenter among men a third his age. He would take aspirin for his aching knees while I told the story of the guy with the truck who obviously believed we would not be home while he trespassed across our roof.

Somewhere between the beginning and the end of that telling, I knew that we were not ready to give our home to people who had no respect, much less reverence, for the sorrow we were suffering or the loss we faced. Somewhere in there, I recognized that we had inside us what it would take for at least one more battle to save the farm. Somewhere in there, I became more angry than I was afraid.