For about six months now, I’ve been working on producing various events that bring author Pam Houston to town. I’ve been a huge fan of hers since I first laid hands on the iconic Cowboys Are My Weakness, and most recently I devoured her memoir Deep Creek.  Pam comes to town in under a week now, so I’ve been consumed with her work, her Facebook page, her books, her schedule. She’ll give a talk called “How We Become Who We Are in the World,”  which is about her 26 years on the high meadow ranch she owns, and how it shaped her into the woman she is today. Pam will also give a writing workshop on the physical stuff of our world, how it shapes us and how we write about it.

All this perfectly explains why I’ve been preoccupied by the memory of my green clogs. They were Dansko, deep green lush leather, with the perfect heel.  I loved them like pets, saddle soaping and polishing them with a shoe brush. The memory that pops in vividly is when I first bought the clogs and showed them to Jack. We’d just started dating. He lived here at what is now the farm, but what was then a dilapidated line shack with few amenities.  I lived with the Quakers in a converted industrial garage. I’d painted its interior walls a dusty green and a smokey pink, alternating colors with each wall.  I still remember how incongruous it was to wake up and see my rugged mountain man’s naked back in my bed, framed by a swathe of hot pink.

One day he came over and I proudly handed him one of my new Dansko deep green leather clogs. I remember how delicate it looked in his worker-man hands. He took the clog slowly, turned it round a few times and studied it as if it were an object from another planet. After a moment he returned it to me, wordless, polite, clearly puzzled. We never spoke of the green clogs. Jack owned snow boots and a variety of work boots and hiking boots, ski boots of course, and Tevas for summer. I do remember speaking often of those kinds of footwear, and eventually, gradually, I accumulated pairs complementary to his.

Seven years passed. We married and I moved up to what was by then this burgeoning farm. I have no memory of the clogs here at the farm, and I don’t remember when I gave them away. I do remember those early days here, when I was reading Kristen Kimball’s The Dirty Life.  I had my work pants and my work boots at the foot of my bed, and I’d slide into them when I first got up–one fluid motion from bed to boots. I’d leave my bedroom (Jack and I had separate bedrooms once we lived together) and not even stop walking until I was out with my basil and tomatoes and arugula, helping the bees keep them company. Jack would either be out there already or would bring me my coffee, and we’d each be in our work pants and work boots.

Red Rubin Basil

Now that the words “How We Become Who We Are in the World” are a part of my daily ruminations, these vivid scenes’ appearances in my imagination take on a deeper meaning. Jack shaped who I became, of course. I was immediately drawn into his world with an all-consuming fascination. It was the most interesting place I’d ever seen. Then the farm shaped me, got me down into this earth instead of perched several feet away, peering at it with detached curiosity and the perfect clogs.

Winter Head Gear: Interior and Exterior

I live alone here now. I’ve gotten used to it and some days I like it. I start my winter mornings curled up by my primitive propane heater, reading Jim Harrison or Terry Tempest Williams or Rick Bass or Alice Walker. Lined up in front of my heater are my snow boots, my work boots, and an ancient pair of black Uggs a friend gave me when she moved to Hawaii ten years ago. I tend to the animals and write in my journal, practice some Qi Gong in the utter quiet before I enter the cyber world of work. I learn to use the singular first person. I appreciate when I see Jack, like the “adorable ghost” in the Steely Dan song, out of the corner of my eye. Love–and the farm– continue to shape me, continue to make me who I am and will be in this beautiful world.

My “adorable ghost”.

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Please join me for Pam’s talk on February 1 in Grass Valley. Ticket link on the home page or here.