Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 4

I just work here

Checking in with the weather is something I do when something big is brewing, like a thunderstorm or an arctic blast. For the daily stuff, I like to wait and see what will happen without catastrophizing potential outcomes — but this has been a hard-earned lesson. The weather shifts I don’t see coming are worse than the ones I imagine in my head. So it was a nice surprise to encounter False Fall at the farm this week. It started with cool nights and transformed into breezy days. The horses and the humans came back online, awake from their deep, conscious, summer hibernation.

The days are warm again, but nothing like the all-encompassing sauna of early August. I took the weekend off to continue marking the property lines around the woods and to hang out with Christopher.

Wedding invitations were imagined, created, and sent out — and then something magical began to happen. As if I needed any more reminders that love is an active verb, that it is a call to action, people reconnected with me in amazing ways. Some deep wounds were healed, their scars buffed into tighter strength.

There really is a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in, thank you, Leonard Cohen.

Chapter 4 of my story begins this week with love being a solid answer to most questions. If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read previous sections here:

|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three ||

Let’s get started.

Photo by Shuvra Podder on Unsplash

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Ten Times I Said No To Love

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

-Pablo Neruda

4. I Just Work Here

The asymmetrical cruciform of the barn with its outward-facing shed rows form a rustic labyrinth of aisle ways. The barn is designed for maximum air-flow. It’s also great for eavesdropping.

If I want to have a private conversation, I take people into the middle of the riding arena because the line of sight is straight like a desert and I can see interlopers approaching from all angles.

Laci and I stand there in the safe zone with a new bay horse with one blue eye and one brown. He’s with us on a trial basis to see if he approves of the place and if he would consider moving in with us and teaching the public about horses.

Laci has spent an hour with the horse, slowly learning the rhythm of his footsteps, noticing the things he notices, taking deep breaths together, settling in, and leaning into trust.

My heartbeat slows as I stand with them.

“I think I love him already, but someone told me that’s a bad idea because he might end up leaving,” Laci says.

“I already love him a little too,” I say.

“We shouldn’t. We’ll be sad if he leaves.”

I watch Laci’s hand where it’s pressed against the new horse’s neck.

“I’d rather love him as long as he’s with us. If he stays, he stays.”

“I love him,” Laci says.

“What can it hurt? If we act like we love him, he might adapt to being here better. And if I say I don’t love him, I’ll still be sad if he doesn’t work out,” I say.

“So, it’s okay to love him?”

“It’s okay to love him. It will be our little secret.”

Around us, the other instructors work with their students along the fence line of the arena. Where Laci and I stand quietly with the new horse, we could be talking about anything at all. No one is wiser.

Sometimes I pretend

I’m not me
I only work for me.

This feels like
a secret motor
chirring inside my pocket.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

I’m half on and half off the couch in the back sunroom of the farmhouse. The room is half bedroom and half office, and the sunset through the wall of windows, the way the last light carves over the mountain and slides through the forest is an ever-changing study in light. I could watch the sunset here every night, but I’m usually with the horses as they create their own studies in the riding ring.

I’m supposed to be at a workshop on equine physiology in another city, but I have too many unfinished stories that converge in the crux of the mountains where the event is taking place. It’s the region where my mother’s family arrived on the continent with a land grant that gave them a claim to a slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My father’s family settled weirdly nearby in a less traceable beginning and tilled their secrets into the red Georgia clay until my father’s father killed a man. It’s also the place where I almost threw my life away for a horse trainer with a southern accent so thick I, born and raised in this place, had to strain to understand him.

That sort of stuff. You know, the little things.

Instead of the horse workshop, I decided to stay home and write, but as day one draws to a close I’ve successfully accomplished only one thing — dissolving into the couch to watch the sunset.

A movie plays on a laptop that is perched on a table that is heaped with stacks of unread books. The books are like a college fund accumulating for some wispy wish of future learning.

Maybe education is less vital than security.

I glance at my diploma on the wall and think about my own college fund that I refused to touch. The oldest of seven cousins, I was so often accused of trying to live off the family’s money that I refused to spend a dime of it. Allowing my college fund to run at liberty in uncertain markets was more important to me than using it to pay for a semester abroad. I was the opposite of a problem child, but mostly in my own mind. In the game that no one but me was playing, I was clearly the winner.

I used the college fund as seed money to start the farm.

There is a polarity in the shadows from the trees and the light streaming in through the canopy of leaves. It is mythic, uncanny, like a story being played out in opposites, like a black and white photo, like aching to belong, to merge with something.

Soon, the light fades completely into milky darkness. I don’t turn on a light, but I rise every so often from the couch to refill my glass, timing my movements to not run into my mother in the kitchen. It’s a schedule of sounds, footsteps, avoidance.

Fireflies blink through the low cover of muscadine vines and saplings. Raising my gaze to the tops of the windows, I follow the lights of a jet receding across the night sky. Everything is both near and far, a camera obscura of motion while I lie still.

I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen while I’m simultaneously entranced with the idea that I don’t have to do anything at all.

I write — when I’m actually writing — because my mind works like a border collie. I’m high drive. I write because the the continuous running narrative in my mind needs to clean its cache periodically or else the words will compost together like a septic tank, the pipes will back up. I will infect the whole house.

What if anxiety was simply energy without purpose — an overabundance of power waiting for direction?

I reach over and click another movie into life on my computer screen. I don’t pay attention to the plot.

I refill my wine glass.

I haven’t written a word all day, but I’ve reached out by email to writing teachers who showed interest in my work when I was fresh and young and beautifully difficult to manage in the tortured way of baby poets, the ones fortunate enough to have academically famous people with tenure read their work.

I chase validation with the horses in the same way, but the horsemen who made me didn’t give two shits about literary influences or posterity. Their joints ached too much to sit still for reading, plus there was a lot of work left to do before the sun went down.

It’s almost midnight when my phone dings.

“Company? Or is it too late?”

It’s Christopher.

“I have a thing tomorrow,” I type. I don’t have a thing tomorrow. I have nothing at all on the schedule tomorrow, which is kind of like an event. “The farm’s all locked up. I wish I could visit with you tonight, but I can’t.”

I almost erase my words and start over.

“Okee dokee. Very understandable,” he writes.

I’m suddenly bereft and uncertain about my decision to not see him. It feels like when I was twelve and I skipped a trip with my grandparents because I was afraid of feeling car sick.

I turn the computer off and sit up.

“Is today your birthday?” I type.

“Nope.”

I’m still awake two hours later and I am torn between the desire to ask Christopher why he wanted to stop by and the fact that asking will disprove my alibi.

“What are you doing?”

“Skating in a parking lot.”

“Where were you earlier?”

“Parked at the front gate of your farm.”

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

-Emily Dickinson

My tractor isn’t just a farm implement. It’s a symbol of how I escaped the chains of patriarchy — hear me out.

She is orange and she’ll be paid off in December. Despite — and in spite of — the rumors, I didn’t purchase her with funds from the sale of my family’s communications business. She’s financed.

The tractor is washed once a year when she goes in for a service. In the intervening months, she gathers dust like your great-aunt’s, glass-shelf figurines, not from lack of use, but from the weekly dragging of the riding arenas.

I named her Polly Gray after the late Helen McCrory’s character in Peaky Blinders. My tractor is stylish yet tough.

I’m coming off the three-day hiatus where I was ostensibly writing, but in reality, I drank wine and sat around thinking. I am uninspired. The piece I’m working on is non-fiction, but even my own life is failing to deliver a narrative.

I’ve lost track of my own story.

I still wear the ring that I pulled out of the bank’s safe deposit box to celebrate this year that I’ve spent engaged to myself, to keep me on track, to remind me that I’ve got it, that I’m fine by myself, that I don’t need help, thank you, I am managing just fine.

And I am, in many ways. I’m okay. The farm is thriving. I’m about to fly to Colorado to present the story of the farm to colleagues and world-changers. I have lived and breathed and worked this farm for so long that I’m indistinguishable from it.

The farm is my identity. I don’t know who I am without horses.

The ring on my hand still sparkles. It came into my possession through a series of intricate fabrications, a fancy setting of lies. While I’ve lost track of my story, the ring reminds me that I had one at one time, that being a product of events doesn’t dictate tone and voice, that I am in full control of the plot twists and the themes that bring redemption.

The ring reminds me that the best stories are crafted through revision.

I park my tractor under an aluminum awning, and it’s cool in the gravel-grinded shadows at the side of the farmhouse. The ring of forest guards this part of the farm like a charm, an enchantment spell that obscures vision. Few people know this space is back here.

The tractor vibrates into life in a rush of power beneath my dusty seat.

Most of my career has relied on men doing the basic tractor work for me: bush hogging the fields twice a year, scraping the driveway down to the bone, shifting sand into a smooth plane in the arenas, like a useful, barren football field that cushions horse toes.

I pull the lever to lift the bucket at the front of the tractor. I slide a handle beside the seat to lift the bush hog that I keep attached to the tractor most of the time. It’s a bitch to line up, secure, and balance. The counterweight of the implement and the water installed in the rear tires improves stability on this farm of hills and sharp stones.

Earbuds under ear protection, I scroll through my phone to find a playlist lengthy enough to occupy me through the duration of this task.

I’m uninspired.

The hooked metal drag rests like a slug at the end of a scored trail of dirt beyond the tractor shed where I can connect it without needing to reverse. The drag is stationary. It is inert.

I position the bush hog over it and imagine, in the running cinema of my continuous stream of worst-case scenarios, the tractor rolling over me as I dip down behind the behemoth tires to attach the metal ring of the drag chain to the ball hitch.

I am the drag.

And I don’t trust physics, like that one time when my first truck, purchased brand new from the lot, rolled inevitably — without a driver — down the hill and into my horse trailer. I just watched, powerless to stop it. It was my first lesson in four-wheel neutral, and why I should never slide the gear into that position ever again.

To the best of my knowledge, neutral exists to allow towing without damaging the transfer case (I’m open to any wisdom here) but the reality is a truck in park is still capable of free and unfettered motion.

I, personally, no longer feel capable of free and unfettered motion. Maybe I never have been. My internal parking brake is worn down through resistance. Any new, forward motion will happen despite, and not because of, my default settings.

There is an art to dragging a riding arena. The act fluffs up the sand and levels it with an aesthetic bonus of geometric designs. Spreading the rough footing into beautiful lines is methodical and soothing, like a Zen rock garden.

I start around the edges of the lower ring, the one that sees the most traffic at the farm. I score down the centerline and begin to fill in the blanks as I go.

On the twentieth, or so, loop, I pause the tractor to change the soundtrack.

I think about the story I started to write and stopped, the one where Christopher and I went driving in the mountains.

I search for music that suits this mood while I’m simultaneously surprised at the longing that’s arrived suddenly, like a stone too large to drive over. I can go around it. I can move it. Or I can stop and look at it.

I’m staring at the screen and have no idea what I want to listen to when a message arrives.

“Question for you — I have two tickets to a show in Atlanta and the second might not be able to make it. Wanted to offer it to you before anyone else,” Christopher writes.

“I was just thinking about you. I’m interested in going.”

“Excellent.”

“Is today your birthday?”

“Nope.”

I settle on a song and cue up a playlist thanks to Christopher’s offer.

I look around at the striated paths that look so uniform at first glance, but a closer glance shows the irregularities, the curves, and broken lines, the angles of designs that hold the narration of action.

The energy motions me forward like a little nudge.

I might not know where my story is going, but I’m glad for something to listen to as I figure it out.

|| Chapter 5 ||

Some lines are visible here, but the magic is that I was dragging the arenas in this pic during the full solar eclipse in April. The shadows are all eclipse shaped and doing their pinpoint camera thing.

It’s almost September. It was just April — I have no explanation for this. I’m going to be absent-minded and giddy until the wedding next month, but there is no better time to celebrate our story, how we got from there to here.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. I’ll be back next week with Chapter Five.

Love,
Kim