From One Winter to the Next
By: Tiffany Trent
Tags: Memoir, Winter Solstice

The barn of the farmhouse I rented in 2010. An old Appalachian-style chicken coop/pig sty can be seen on the left.

I’ve been thinking a lot in decades recently. It dawned on me today that I am exactly in the same place I was a decade ago — out of work in the traditional sense, injured, and unsure of where to turn next. That time on the Outer Banks, I let fear rule me. I ran home because I didn’t know where else to go. I moved alone into an old farmhouse that while it thankfully had neither roaches nor bedbugs, had no heat upstairs and a few rodents. (The latter were easily taken care of by my feline companions; I remember finding said vermin once daintily placed at the edge of the dining room rug).

But two decades ago, I was entering one of the worst periods of my life which would transmogrify into one of the best. If I think about 1999 moving into 2000, I can hardly believe it all happened in one year.

My husband Andrew and I had left Virginia after I’d finished my first Master’s degree, after I’d worked a year or two as a Curator of Live Animals. I applied to many programs and was accepted without funding into the MFA program at the University of Montana in Missoula. I visited there when I was accepted into the Teller Wildlife Refuge Writing Fellowship, and decided that I would in fact attend. I’ll save Montana for another essay, I think — it deserves its own tale.

Tonight, I am thinking about when we left. I’m thinking here, on the eve of a winter storm, about another winter storm 20 years ago barreling out of Hells’ Canyon with a -10 degree windchill and blinding snow. It was under those conditions that we finished packing up our truck, stuffed our three cats and two mice into the cab, and took off for my grandmother’s farm in Wisconsin. We had already sent everything else ahead in an Allied truck, using the last of our meager savings to pay for the move.

I had just finished 22 credits of graduate coursework in one semester to get to this point, had defended my MFA thesis, and was still all but thesis on the second Master’s program I’d entered once I’d arrived — an M.S. in Environmental Studies. But we were ready to leave Montana; there were no job prospects and my husband hadn’t gotten into the M.S. program in wildlife there as he’d hoped. My grandmother had written me a letter, telling me that she was lonely and in need of care. I had always loved the farm; it held a magical place in my childhood, fostered by my mother’s readings of Thornton W. Burgess’s Mother West Wind stories. For much of my childhood, I believed that those stories were set on my grandparents’ farm and that I could see the Merry Little Breezes dancing in their green meadow. I whiled away many a summer day in the hayloft or the barn, whispering softly to my animal friends in their stalls.

It occurred to me that fall of 1999 that I wanted to know my grandmother better, more than just the brief summer vacations or holidays we’d spent with her. I thought we could live with her for a time, helping her around the farm (which by then was mostly hired out to other cattlemen and farmers — my grandfather had died when I was 12) until we could get our own place. I had talked my way into a job interview at the International Crane Foundation just down the road from her and hoped I’d be successful.

I should pause here to say that I can’t imagine now what my life would be like if all I’d sought then had gone right. I can’t even imagine. But back then, it felt like the puzzle pieces were fitting together, and I had so many gentle, naïve, and utterly foolish dreams of living in service to a lonely woman without whom I would surely not exist and whose name I shared.

And so in a terrible blizzard, we started out across Montana for Wisconsin. We intended to drive all night, but the roads were so terrible that by 2 am, we were forced to pull over and take shelter in a hotel. We tried sneaking our cats in by stuffing them in a blanket-covered litterbox, but of course our intrepid and aptly-named male cat Loki jumped out of the box just as the clerk opened the doors to let us in. He shook his head and waved us by, and thank goodness for that, because I don’t know what we would have done otherwise. I recall the mice fighting all night in their cage in the bathroom while our three cats prowled around the unfamiliar bed.

We drove through the night the next day and made it to Wisconsin by 5 am. I remember how the sunrise lay pink and gold over the deep snow. I remember pulling up to the farm, flooded with childhood memories of Christmases of yore, and very nearly expecting my grandmother to have made homemade cinnamon rolls as she had once done whenever I’d visited as a kid.

There were no cinnamon rolls.

We were ensconced upstairs to give the cats a bit more room and to keep them away from my grandmother, who didn’t approve of pets being in the house. That didn’t seem to matter to Loki, of course; he quickly figured out how to open the door to the downstairs and more often than not, I’d hear the door pop open and my grandmother yell in horror at the black cat stalking deliberately toward her across the living room.

Montana had not immured me to Wisconsin winters. There was ice on the inside of the glass in our bedroom; the sheets were stiff with cold. There was no heat upstairs at all. We tried using a space heater and promptly blew a fuse, and then discovered that pretty much all of the wiring came from a single socket that was weirdly jury rigged into a plug that went through a hole into another socket downstairs.

I had my interview for an educator position at the International Crane Foundation. It went really well, and I was hopeful. The semi arrived with the remainder of our furniture and we put it in storage.

We had Christmas with my grandmother. I don’t remember much about it, except that she wasn’t fond of our Christmas music — Loreena McKennitt’s winter albums. We bought her groceries; we paid her money on fuel oil. Andrew did all of her handyman jobs — changing lightbulbs or pullchains that didn’t work, fixing a hole in the bathroom wall, replacing weather-stripping, taking her SUV in to get an oil change, those kinds of things.

We decided to drive to Virginia to spend the New Year with our parents since we hadn’t seen them at Christmas. We left the cats, but took the mice. My parents had moved from my childhood home into the house my father had grown up in — an 800 sq. ft. house in southeastern Roanoke. We watched the Y2K celebrations bemusedly, waiting to see whether all the toilet paper hoarders would be vindicated. I called friends, sang “Auld Lang Syne” with my dad, and relaxed for the first time since leaving Montana.

And then my uncle called.

I will never know what conversations were had between the time we left Wisconsin and I got that phone call from my uncle. I will never know what the thought processes behind the phone call were. All I knew at the time was that my uncle was calling me and telling me that my grandmother wanted us to leave. We had been there a grand total of two weeks.

It was before the era of cellphones, and all I remember is how heavy the plastic receiver was against my ear and how I kept winding and unwinding the coiled cord around my fingers. “She doesn’t want you there anymore,” he said. “You need to leave.”

It wasn’t like a movie where I let the receiver fall to the floor in shock. I don’t even remember what I said. I don’t know why I didn’t explain that I had a line on a job, that our living with her was temporary until we found jobs. It suddenly occurred to me in a way it never had that my being there on the farm was a threat to my grandmother’s children, who stood to inherit quite a bit from the sale of her farm when she passed. Though I had always wanted my own farm and hoped maybe to learn something from her about farming, I never once considered asking her to give it or sell it to me. Though I had made a mock plan for the farm as a living history farm and nature center for a graduate non-profit management class, I knew that was just a dream and an easy class project — not something I expected to become a reality.

All I wanted was to be with my grandmother, to get to know her, to help her, and to spend a little time on the land I had loved as a child. I hoped that if I was there for her, she wouldn’t die alone.

It is unfortunate that my hopes for such a relationship proved to be too great a burden for her to bear.

And so we returned to Wisconsin, packed up our things and the cats, and moved in with my parents in Virginia. My grandmother left me a letter on the bed, saying that she hoped there were no hard feelings, among other things I’ve since forgotten. I left the letter where it was unanswered. I never spoke to her again. I spoke to my uncle once years later at his wife’s funeral, which I attended for her and my cousin, but certainly not for him.

We’d been home a week when the International Crane Foundation called and offered me the job I’d interviewed for, a job I had to confess I could no longer take because my grandmother had kicked me out.

Thus began what felt like at the time one of the worst years of my life. We were destitute. I began trying to apply for jobs as soon as I could. My husband started volunteering with a black bear project and was gone much of the time, which prompted an ongoing bitter battle with my father over the fact that my husband wasn’t taking care of me like a man should. But it was the only thing he could get nearby in the winter, as he waited for wildlife technician jobs to begin advertising for summer fieldwork. I didn’t mind because I knew he was trying to build his resume, and he needed the experience almost as much as the money.

I got a job an hour away as a technical editor and commuted every day back and forth to write disquisitions on the merits of this lightbulb or that aquarium for exotic pets. It was my first real job, and I was kind of terrible at it, but I was making money and writing my novel when I could at night, as well as searching for other, better jobs.

I know exactly who told me about the job in Hong Kong, but I don’t remember how it came up or why my friend from graduate school thought to mention it to me. It sounded like an absolute dream — an Education Manager position at a farm and botanic garden in Hong Kong. Andrew and I had always wanted to live and work in China. It felt like the longest shot imaginable, but I applied.

I spent a lot of that spring and summer going down to the woods behind my parents’ house, raging and sobbing about my fate. I don’t know if it’s a prerequisite to being a writer that one must be given to melodrama, but I suppose I always have been and seemingly none more so than that year.

To this day, the fact that Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden contacted me for what would begin a long series of interviews in late spring of 2000 amazes me. Because of the time difference, they called me at 2am for my initial phone interviews, leaving my father surly and growling when he handed me the cordless phone. “Don’t they realize it’s 2 in the morning here?”

But it was 3pm there.

In the summer, the Farm requested that I come to Hong Kong for a week to do a trial run of the job for which they felt I would be most suitable. Not Education Manager — they had a local in mind for that — but Senior Editor of all English language publications. I made an excuse to the pet supply company that I had to go finish moving my things from my grandmother’s in Wisconsin, and I flew to Hong Kong.

The first thing that happened in Hong Kong was that my husband’s camera — a graduation present — was stolen. But that misstep was quickly overshadowed by sheer awe at the beauty of the place to which I’d been brought. I’d been a bit dubious from the get-go that any such place could exist, but it was only because of my own ignorance of the country. I was ensconced in the Executive Director’s flat, where I was woken the first morning by the sound of gibbons singing in the nature center below. Views of Lam Tseun Valley unfolded before me, while Tai Mo Shan (Big Hat Mountain) leaned far above Kwun Yum Shan (Kuan Yin Mountain) where I stood. The air was alive with the scent of orchids, ferns, and the dense verdure of subtropical jungle life. When I was taken on a tour of the Farm, I was surrounded by hordes of butterflies, just a few of the 250 species that call Hong Kong’s New Territories home.

I did some sample work for them while there on their website overhaul. I spent time with both the family owner of the Farm and his girlfriend, whom I was later to learn came from two of the richest, most powerful families in Hong Kong. There is so much more to say about that week, but the image that remains with me is of sitting with Lena — the owner’s girlfriend — in her car high on a mountain looking out over the islands of Hong Kong and thinking of how they rose like green faces from the water, thinking I wanted to be there more than anywhere in the world.

It was not long after I returned home that my offer came. My salary there was more money than I had ever made in my life, and it was only last year (in 2019!!) that I finally topped that salary that I was offered in 2000. But that was only the icing on the cake. I could not forget the beauty, the mystery, of that mountain. I said yes without hesitation.

It took a long while for the paperwork to process for my employment visa, for the Farm to prove that they could find no one better locally than me for the job. They also had Andrew’s spousal visa to process.

Our parents were not happy. “Why China?” my mom whined at me on more than one occasion. They hated that we would take our skills and talents overseas rather than use them in America. But this was a dream of ours, a dream we had put off for family, only to come to grief. We were resolute. This was our chance and we took it.

It was November before everything was processed and we were cleared to move halfway across the world. This time we left our beloved cats behind with my parents, unsure of when we’d see them again. The mice became the pets of nieces and nephews. We were allowed to use a guest flat on the Farm for a month until we found a place of our own, which we quickly did with the help of my co-workers — a little pink house at the foot of the mountain in the village of Pak Ngau Shek.

We took the second floor flat. Below us, a family of seven lived in the 700 sq ft ground floor. Every morning the grandfather rose and made offerings of incense to Kwun Yum in the direction of Her mountain, the mountain on which I worked. In the evenings, the family opened their doors to the sunset breeze flowing up the valley, and I’d often hear the clacking of mah-jong tiles or smell the roasting of corn from one of their pits in the courtyard.

We quickly made friends with my co-workers, first with the Scots and English who worked there and then gradually with the Cantonese who worked with me in my office, who were a bit more cautious about befriending a gweilo, quite understandably. We went from being cooped up in my parents’ tiny guest room with our cats and mice to suddenly being invited to the pub every Friday, to barbeques on co-workers’ rooftops, and luxurious dinner cruises in Saikung for the birthdays of people we’d only just met.

On the winter solstice that year, I got the news while friends were over that my grandmother had died. Just as I’d feared, she’d died alone out in her car in the shed, evidently on her way to play cards. There was thankfully no talk of me attending the funeral, and I was grateful that half a world separated me from the obligation. All I felt at that moment was the sad vindication of my premonition and the knowledge that my love, imperfectly as it may have been offered, had simply not been able to be received.

Days later on Christmas Eve, we went to the pub with friends, rode home drunk on the train, and had a quiet, headachey Christmas together. On Boxing Day, we had a lovely barbecue at my new friend Tiger’s house, where her little girls floated around in fairy wings and boxing gloves. It was absolutely the loveliest, most perfect Christmas I have had before or since.

The vast sweep of change in my life in that one year hardly occurred to me as anything out of the ordinary. But as I look at it now, I’m flabbergasted. I went from a desolate, destitute winter one year to a literal jungle of abundance the next. Never mind what happened after — that is another story to be told another time, as a certain famous faun once said — but just now, here in the dying of the year, I want to celebrate that remarkable capacity for change we have within all of us. We can be at our worst, at our most beaten and lost, but if we persevere, there is hope. There are remarkable things around the corner. There have been and there will always be, if only we have the heart to believe it might be so, if only we are willing to work toward and believe in that moment.