My Ideal, Idyllic, Far-Fetched Future (and a novel excerpt)

My husband says that I am a hopeless romantic who dreams of an unrealistic world where towns stay small, children are allowed to get dirty but always have a sweet mommy to make sure they get a warm bath before bed, and everybody has a little garden, whether it's 50 acres or a pot of plants on the balcony. It's a world where I get to kiss my horse's soft muzzle every day.

Wouldn't that be wonderful? Crazy I know. But he also claims to love my colourful world.

I am seriously trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of town, never lose touch with my amazingly excellent neighbour-friends, and make some money out of the farm I intend to buy. It's looking discouragingly difficult.

Have you heard the one about how to make a million dollars in farming? You have to start with two million.

Or the one about keep on farming til the money's gone?

Jethro feels like a farmer sometimes in the recording studio business. Think about it, and the similarities are stunning:
-You need to buy/own/rent/lease a large amount of very expensive equipment
-Your work is mercilessly dependent on the climate (either culturally or the actual weather)
-It costs almost as much to make the product as what you're likely to sell it for
-the consumer takes your product for granted, and in fact, usually complain about the price
-You produce a lot of shit.

I'll tell you what I really want to do.

I want to teach kids how to ride horses. Kids are so eager and adaptable. And rewarding! When you get it though to the kid what it is they need to do in order to communicate the request to the horse, and the kid does it...WOW. It's a huge buzz for everybody!

I want to start up a group of at-home mothers who never get out, and I want to set up a nice clean room beside the arena and hire an babysitter to watch the little-uns so that the mothers can ride.

I want to teach riding lessons to teenagers who have nothing else to live for.

I want to be well and deservedly paid for this.

I want to keep a couple of beefers, and name them all Steak, and make sure that they have good lives full of fresh air and sunshine and rain, and green grass, and good hay. Then I'm going to send all the little Steaks off the butcher and when they come back to me they'll go in my freezer. I can handle this. I can deal with it. I was a farm kid. It's part of life.

I want to be able to raise critters for food without some nasty organization telling me that I can't.

I want to have my man home for two days in a row in the middle of the week. I can cope with him being in the city working for a few days straight...but then he's got to come home, and be home, and stay home.

I want my kids to get on the bus and go to school, then at the end of the day, be dropped off at home by the bus, with no distractions or dangers in between.

I want a great big garden where I can grow things and not be concerned that somebody else's lawn poison will get on my veggies.

I want a room in my farmhouse where I can look out the window at my small empire and write, write, write.

So, as promised, here it is, and just so you know, it's fiction. It's not about me. Or more correctly, this character is me and about five of my high school friends. This is one of the cleanest, most innocent non-offensive parts of the whole novel. Okay it's one of two non-offensive bits. Hope you like...







For a time, her eyes closed. It felt like she was swaying back and forth a little, but she checked, and her muscles weren’t keeping her upright, so she knew she wasn’t in danger of being blown over or anything, it only felt like she was swaying. It was kind of cool. Anybody could walk up to her and she’d have the crap scared out of her.
Where the hell was MacFarlane? Well, did it matter? Did he have to call her every time he didn’t show up for school? She could call his house; she had his number memorized. Somehow, that nice warm rock held her there a little longer. Eventually Tom would come back down that road and then what? They’d talk. He was so easy to talk to, and so easy on the eyes. It wouldn’t be good to still be here when he got back. It just wouldn’t be good. She didn’t have to check her watch to know that it was time to move.
Misha had said she was bagging off but Jenny couldn’t be bothered to go find her. She wandered around to the other side of the school, over by the English wing, across from the soccer field, and tried the door into the corridor. Locked. Other kids were starting to fill that wing, but she didn’t feel like seeing anybody. She ambled over to the agriculture classroom, but that door was locked too. Sighing, she walked as slowly as she could around the parking lot, as far away from the caf windows as possible, and into the back entrance. There was only one way to her locker from here: straight down the main corridor. That would be pretty ballsy for someone who planned to bag off right after lunch. She floated down the wide hall like a ghost. No expression, imagining that her feet barely touched the floor, she headed for her locker. She passed through the thin crowd like a wraith, a wisp of steam, a tiny string of molecules dressed in black jeans and a big faded red sweater.
She got to her locker, got her bag full of lunch, some cash, and a book, and slipped away. Just as she disappeared around the corner to the ag wing, she noticed Tom coming around the corner from the main entrance. But she made her getaway. This time, she didn’t walk around the parking lot. She headed straight for the back of the school property. There was a paved tennis court back there, just before the fence for the farmer’s field. She’d never been back there. Seemed like a good enough place to waste some precious time.
It was a good place, especially to shut off her brain. Thoughtfully, slowly, she ate her lunch, listening to the birds. She really needed to get away from everybody and everything and shake it all off. Let go of the boyfriend who wasn’t there. It didn’t matter. Let go of the guy she lusted over for at least a year, maybe longer, yes definitely longer, and who only started to notice her when it was too late, let him go. Let go of Kimberley, who had no idea where she was. Let go of those two classes she didn’t feel like going to. She’d catch up. It was History and Geography. Let it go. She leaned her head back on her duffel bag, letting the sun soak into her eyelids. This was good; this is what she learned when she was in counseling after Kevin died. It seemed strange that the youth pastor taught her this. She didn’t want to go to him. It was bad enough that there was a prayer circle for her, it was just embarrassing. But Harv went to her parents and said he’d like to help her. He didn’t God-talk her the whole time. He told her none of us know why. And we can’t know why. And she had every right to feel how she felt. And he taught her how to relax because her parents wanted to dope her up on sleeping pills. So she gave good old Harv a long thought, wondered how his new church was doing, and let him go.
She rolled over on her side and snoozed for some time. Sun filtered dreams moved slowly through her light sleep; she ignored them.