Dandelion Farming

Dandelion Farming

Martin only returned to South Jersey because his younger brother had been killed in a car wreck. That was one of the reasons, a very good one, on why he didn’t want to be back there. His career had finally been on track in Houston, he had gotten that piece about the Medicare scammers published in Texas Monthly and the story about the lady who lived with the tigers. He imagined himself leaving Abilene and joining the Houston Chronicle soon. That’s all he wanted, to write stories for the state’s best newspaper. But then he got the news that a drunk driver crossed the yellow line. He was in bed with a stripper from a local strip club when he took the call at home. And he bought his ticket the next day.

Eddie was relieved when Martin joined the paper. He had only been at the Asbury Park Press a few months but they were long ones. He had previously worked as a stringer at the Daily News. In New York, he had covered people jumping off of bridges spread-eagled style and suicides by harakiri. He had brought that hard-boiled sensibility to his new paper but that’s not what the editors there wanted; they wanted anything but that in fact. They were from horse country, all of them, in nearby Monmouth Country, and they wanted stories about pastoral life, the quirkier the better, articles that moved along like a lazy river. He didn’t know how to write those stories so he was miserable. He figured Martin, who was from the area, might show him something.

Eddie’s assumption was correct. He didn’t know where Martin found all the characters that populated his stories, but he had the accompanying photos to prove that these people existed, as he piled up articles that featured retired rodeo clowns, blacksmiths, and Civil War reenactors. Eddie was jealous, but try as he might, he couldn’t write stories like Martin. Only Martin alone could find dandelion farmers living in the area. Until he left and returned to Texas.

Willy, the craggy bureau photographer who had taken all the photos that ran alongside Martin’s articles, decided that Eddie would have to do after Martin left. And before too long, it was Eddie who was riding shotgun in Willy’s F-150 most mornings as the two of them prowled the same fire roads that Martin and him had traveled.

“Look at these houses,” Eddie told Willy on a sunny November day while perched up high in the passenger side of his truck. “That one is crooked on purpose, like the style is ‘Jersey Weird.’”

“I’m taking you somewhere,” Willy then said as he jackknifed the truck around and started heading in the opposite direction, veering off of the fire road they were on and back onto Route 9.

Thirty minutes later, Willy pulled off of the main road in New Gretna and stopped in a heavily wooded area. “There,” he said, pointing. Just off the road, partly obscured by brush, was a gingerbread house set back in the woods. It was the same burnt-orange color as the Christmas season cookie with white piping encasing its windows.

Once they parked, got down from the truck, walked up to the house and rang the doorbell, a four-foot elderly woman with periwinkle eyes opened the heavy door. The tiny woman asked them if they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They told her no, they were reporters. She then looked behind her and pointed at her still-crisp copy of that day’s Press lying on the kitchen coffee table. “My husband was the one who read your paper, but I can’t bear to cancel it since he died,” Marla told them.

She was delighted they were interested in her house, and she invited them inside. A Tasmanian tiger’s head was mounted above the massive stone fireplace. And five calico kittens were drinking milk from a saucer beside it. How did she end up living in such an unusual-looking house? they asked her. And she told them:

Marla’s late husband, Ed, was born in a barn in New Gretna, and he jumped out of an airplane when he was eighteen on June 6, 1944, in Saint-Mere-Eglise, France. Ed promised himself the day before the jump, on June 5, that if he survived even that first day, he would return to the Shore after the war and do something really special. He would build a magical house deep inside the Pine Barrens. After he met sixteen-year-old Marla sunbathing on Long Beach Island in 1947, he shared his plan with her. “I know it was a woodland fairy that saved my life that day in Saint-Mere-Eglise; my plan is to build a house where it can live,” Ed told her. Marla figured Ed was shell-shocked after the war, but he was a good-looking guy with strong legs and the best backstroker she had ever seen, so she went along with the crazy plan, and she married him. Once they got married, Ed got started on the house, and it took him exactly one year to complete it. The finished gingerbread house was strange-looking, Marla thought. But it proved to be a good home. Two children were born and raised in the house. And they only had to replace the roof once in their entire time of living there. Ed touched up the white piping every other year, hacking away at the branches that encroached on the home. When Ed passed in 2000, Marla vowed to stay in the house until the day she died.

Eddie felt proud driving up to Marla’s home to deliver the day’s Press himself on that day. Her house was featured on the front page in all its glory. To Eddie’s surprise though, no one was home. He knew that because a note had been nailed to the wooden door. The note addressed to him explained that the fairy had told her to leave the house the night before. It was no longer safe there. The fairy told her to move to Clearwater Beach, Florida, so that’s where she was headed. “I am giving this house to you,” she wrote. “I thought about drowning the kittens in the tub like the rest of them, or putting a little arsenic in their kitty chow, but I am giving them to you too. I’ll write more from Florida! And have a blessed life. Remember to pray to the fairy everyday. That’ll be the only thing keeping you above ground. Ed had a lot of wild ideas but I found that to be true.”

Eddie tried writing to Marla in the months that followed but he never heard back. He also tried corresponding with Martin in Texas. But he eventually heard that he had left journalism and had joined the Mexican wrestling circuit. Eddie thought about traveling down there to find Martin and write about his exploits, but he found himself too busy taking care of his new home and its occupants. Jersey Weird, indeed, Eddie thought, when he himself quit journalism one day and began giving tours of the house.

People came from far and wide to see what was happening deep inside the woods of the Pine Barrens. Wondering if all that they heard was true.