The Farm and the City: Two Lives, One Marriage

The farm had been in his family for four generations and was not, in any sense he could explain quickly, something he could sell. The hospital where she worked was ninety kilometres away and was not something she wanted to leave.

They married in the third year and did not live together until the twenty second, and both of them describe the twenty two years as the good part.

The arrangement

She was at the farm from Friday evening to Monday morning, and in the city the rest of the week. He came to the city perhaps one evening a fortnight and hated it, which she found funny for the first ten years and then stopped finding funny and then found funny again.

In calving season she came less. In the winter, more.

Nobody in either family thought this was a marriage. Her mother asked for eleven consecutive years when they were going to sort themselves out.

They were not waiting for the arrangement to end. That was the part nobody else could hear.

What it cost

He was alone a great deal, which suited him and which he now says suited him less than he claimed at the time.

She missed things. A neighbour's funeral, a calf that did not survive, a week in February when the pipes froze and he dealt with it alone and did not mention it until the Friday.

That last one is the example she uses. She says the specific loss in an arrangement like theirs is not the big events but the ordinary bad days, which are over by the time you next see each other and therefore never get told.

What they did about it

The phone was no use. He is not a telephone person, and a call from a man who is not a telephone person consists of four sentences about the weather and a silence.

What worked was writing, which surprised both of them, because he left school at sixteen and had not written anything longer than a form since.

It started as a list on the kitchen table at the farm: things she should know when she arrived. Practical. Then it acquired lines that were not practical, and then it became two notebooks, one at each house, and then in the last decade a phone.

His entries are short. Hers are longer. She says the length difference bothered her for about two years and then she realised his four lines contained more than her fifteen.

The rule about arriving

The rule, made early and kept, is that the first hour after she arrived was not for catching up.

This sounds backwards and it was deliberate. They had both noticed that a weekend which began with a full report of the week turned into an administrative meeting, and that by the time it was finished it was Saturday afternoon and neither of them had actually been in the same room yet.

So the first hour was nothing. Tea, the dogs, walking round the yard. The week got told in pieces over two days, in the gaps, which is how it would have been told if they had been living together.

The twenty third year

He sold the herd and kept the land, and she retired, and they have now lived in the same house for a decade.

She says it took about eighteen months to adjust and that the adjustment was harder than the twenty two years.

The specific difficulty was that presence replaced telling. They had spent two decades in a marriage where everything had to be said, because nothing could be witnessed, and now that everything could be witnessed they stopped saying it, and both of them felt the loss before either could name it.

The writing came back after about two years. It is shorter now and it happens in the evening and neither of them would describe it as important, which she says is a lie he tells to visitors.

What they say about it

He says people think the hard part was being apart. The hard part was being together without the habit that being apart had forced on them.

She says the arrangement was not a compromise, and that she is tired of being asked which of them gave something up. Neither did. That was the point.

Names and details changed; the couple is a composite.