The First Lie

Love takes many forms

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The Sebastopol Times is taking a break from news over the holidays. We got 24 submissions to our personal essay contest. This is one of several essays we are publishing between now and New Year’s.

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By Debbie Matteri

In my early twenties, I rented a funky, one-bedroom cottage behind a family home on Hearn Avenue in Santa Rosa. It was the 1970s, and the owner of the property had turned the garage into a bedroom, covering the cement floor with a multi-colored shag carpet. There was only one small window in the bedroom, and fake wood paneling on the walls made the room even darker.

The kitchen was tiny but doable. The bathroom had a shower with floor-to-ceiling, black-and-white 4x4 tiles with just enough space to turn around. I learned quickly not to drop the soap because I’d have to get out of the shower to bend over and pick it up.

The cottage was clean and functional, and I made it my home by hanging ruffled, muslin, tie-back curtains over every window. I set my grandmother’s Singer sewing machine beneath the small bedroom window and placed my ceramic jersey cow cookie jar in the nook of the built-in kitchen hutch.

But what really drew me to the cottage was the outdoor space. It was large enough for me to plant my very first garden. I grew up on a dairy ranch on Petaluma Hill Road, and my cottage was about five miles away from that beautiful 325-acre ranch. As I began to get the soil ready for planting, I asked my father for some cow manure. To my surprise, he drove his John Deer tractor with the plow attached and the front loader scoop filled with manure all the way over to my cottage on Hearn Avenue. He drove into the backyard, dumped the manure in a heap, spread it around with the scoop, and tilled the soil. The garden area grew bigger than the cottage itself.

I wonder what the other drivers thought that day, seeing a farmer wearing a blue sweatshirt, calf-high rubber boots, and a knit stocking cap, driving a tractor down the center of a two-lane road, chewing on a piece of alfalfa and slowing down traffic. Lord knows if they were behind him, they would have gotten more than just a whiff of that load of cow manure raised up in the scoop. To my family, that odor was the smell of money, because selling cows’ milk to Safeway fed us and sustained our family financially for as long as I can remember.

I had a loving and caring dad, and he had multiple ways of showing his love. Delivering the manure and tilling the soil for his daughter’s first garden was just one of the ways he showed his love. He was a man who would drive his tractor anywhere to help someone out.

The last time I saw Dad driving down the middle of the road was in 2006. I was headed over to visit him, and I saw his four-wheeler coming down the center of Petaluma Hill Road. Memory loss was playing tricks on his mind, and I imagine he was back in his younger years, seeing all those Holstein cows that needed to be rounded up for the second milking of the day. That had to be what he was thinking because Petaluma Hill Road was no longer a quiet country road, nor were there any cows left to milk. Some of those 325 acres had been sold to the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, and later became part of Taylor Mountain Regional Park.

That afternoon was the first time I remember lying to my father. I pulled into the circular driveway of the family home and patiently waited for him to park his four-wheeler in the field. I got out of the car to greet him as if nothing unusual had happened. He headed inside to take a nap, another routine he had done for years—nap and eat lunch before the next milking.

I waited for him to fall asleep, and then I walked out into that field and removed the keys from the ignition. When he later asked what had happened to the keys, I felt my heart sink.

“Dad, I don’t know, they must have fallen out of your pocket in the field or gotten lost somewhere.”

Maybe that was my way of loving him back.

Debbie Matteri loves spending time in nature, deepening her friendships and having her 20-pound cat, Soma, fall asleep on her lap.

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