Our calf’s name is Billy or, My Angel if you want to call him something tender and sweet. Sometimes I call him My Best Boy. Or, My One and Only. Or even, My Best Friend. He really is a very good friend and a steer is a good friend to have. But anyway, we are weaning him. We are weaning My Billy Boy. He had his last day of nursing yesterday. I wanted to honor his last day of feasting on milk with a photography shoot that he could look back on later, when he was older. Or maybe, even offer him a crown. I could fasten the crown to his head with some string and place it in between his growing antlers. It could work. I know you don’t believe me but really, it could work. 

There is a shotgun hanging up in our closet, just below our hat rack. I put up hooks for the lean gun to lie steady on. I held my breath as I drilled holes for the gun rack. I don’t have a good history with drywall plugs. I never use the right size drill bit and then the hole comes out too big. I usually don’t have the right sized plugs to begin with because I just use whatever is in the shed or, when I hammer the plug into the wall, the plug bends and gets stuck in the drywall. Then, I have to hammer the plug further into the wall until it disappears, a yellow, orange or red plug forever embedded in the bones of the wall. I know the plug is there and it bothers me. A wall should not be made up of lost drywall plugs. A wall should be cleaned and tidied. Clear of rat feces, clear of old mud from previous abode walls that have been drywalled over. You should know, that behind your wall, is everything a wall should be. Just the clean necessities. Wood. Screws. Nails. Air. Maybe some chicken wire and thick, dried mud if you live in New Mexico. Adobe guts. 

My wife and I celebrated thirteen years together on Wednesday. Technically, it was our three-year wedding anniversary but I get into trouble when I say we’re celebrating three years and not thirteen years. It’s important to my wife to honor our full, thirteen years together and so I do. Thirteen years. Not three. Remember that.

We go out to dinner to celebrate — to eat a medium-rare ribeye and to try not to eat the potato tower that comes with the ribeye. I end up eating the entire potato tower that comes with the ribeye and it is crispy on each edge and falls off into my mouth in buttery flakes. Who can resist a potato tower? I defiantly cannot.

People often ask Heathar and I about what it’s like to live in the country, in rural America, in a place where they feel isolation might swallow them or even worse, define them. Living rurally is a great way to catch the projections of city dwellers. They cast their fears out onto me, onto us, to see if they land. Often I let their fears fall at my feet, like baseballs that were not thrown far enough to a willing receiver. In order to catch them, I would have to bend forward and break the stance I am in. I don’t bend. I don’t break my stance. They ask if we feel lonely, if we feel removed from the world. They ask where we buy groceries. They ask if the roads are safe to drive at night. They ask if the acequias flow in spring like they are supposed to. They ask if we are scared of the fires that are coming. They ask if we feel safe, if we have a gun, if we lock our doors, if we lock our truck, if we lock our gate. They are very concerned about how the locks work.

I didn’t think I would ever be that kind of queer woman who would say she needs a man, wants a man. In fact, the other day I said to some friends at dinner, “If I wasn’t queer, I doubt I would be married at all.” To which my friends relied, “Yea, because men suck.” Well, yea. Kind of. But it turns out, I am a queer woman who needs a man and who wants a man. I want many platonic boyfriends. I want platonic boyfriends who can build me rock walls, who can break down cement, who can make dump runs, who can wire the electrical properly in my house, who can dig septic lines, who can use chainsaws and who can dig trenches. Yes, I want so many platonic boyfriends. I dream about testosterone now. In fact, I dream in hormones. Because Karen, it turns out that when you live in rural America (maybe rural anywhere), when you run a five acre farm and homestead and when you have endless outdoor projects — you need bodies that tire less easily than a menstruating woman’s. You need bodies that don’t bleed. You need bodies that don’t go through a luteal and follicular phase. You need bodies that are endlessly willing, productive and strong.

Today, I looked up from mucking the cow pies that are starting to loosen in the unseasonably warm, early, glorious, terrifying spring — that are already starting to fall through the cracks in the pitchfork, that require a second and third scooping in order to collect all the pieces of manure — and turned my head toward the cottonwood tree that had come to life. I looked up from mucking the cow pies and saw the cottonwood tree filled with small, cackling black birds. Don’t ask me to explain them more than that. They are black birds that are not ravens or crows. Perhaps you know them? Perhaps you will tell me what these birds are? Perhaps I am overcomplicating it. They are a kind of bird that is black, something like a jackal of a bird. There were one hundred of them, or some other dramatic amount, standing on the naked and bare cottonwoods stems, making the tree look like it had budded and flowered all at once. The birds were having a raucous meeting in which everyone was talking all at once. They know nothing of politeness. No hands were raised. No one was taking turns as far as I could tell, but what do I know of bird meetings? Perhaps in the world of birds, they speak more in chorus, in rounds where the music makes you think the world may be ending or just beginning.