Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 3

Blood Money

I made an exciting announcement on social media last week. Christopher and I are bonafide now that our engagement is official on Facebook, but the truth is, we were engaged by the time we arrived home from Hawaii last February — before that, even. I asked him to marry me pretty early on, and the plan is for him to take the last name, Carter.

This isn’t my first marriage, but it’s the first time my soul is completely at peace with the decision. He and I have the freedom to write our own story. He was born without a care for societal limitations, and I came by my individual power slowly and with much struggle.

It’s taken me a long time to edit the expectations of others out of my narrative.

Every Thursday when the next installment of this story lands in your inbox, it’s a gift to Christopher — something that I can make with my very own hands — but it’s mainly a gift to myself, a document that chronicles the journey. The horses made me and I would be lost without them, but love continues to make me, in all its iterations.

I’m in love with Christopher, but my love is big and sweeping: love for myself, for you, for nature, for every woman who learns — always the hard way — to follow her gut.

Chapter Three begins with a ring and ends with a vision.

If you’re joining me for the first time for this creative non-fiction series, you can find previous chapters here:

|| Chapter One || Chapter Two ||

Let’s get started.

Photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash

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Ten Times I Said No To Love

The tame world wants to control everything but nature is uncontrollable.

— Craig Foster

3. Blood Money

The bank lobby is crowded with lunch-hour patrons cashing checks and arguing with the tellers about unauthorized charges. None of us want to exit the big, stately doors and rush to our cars because it’s cold as hell outside.

My neck is stiff from the scarf I’ve twisted and tucked into my base layer. It’s my traveling scarf, periwinkle flowers twined into silver-grey borders, a gift sourced in a Bagdad market from a friend I haven’t seen in years. It’s been a long time since I’ve traveled.

I reach a point around February every winter where my body hurts from bracing against the wind. Horses are nuts in cold weather and none of us in the barn are moving fast enough to keep up with them. We’re too bundled.

I’m told that I haven’t earned the right to complain about the cold because I farm in the foothills of South Carolina, but northern states have indoor riding arenas. It’s baffling to me how places with true winter like Canada were settled, the fences planted, livestock bred and managed.

The holidays were mild this year compared to the deep cold that has settled like a haunting over the mountains, freezing the water buckets, stalling the tractor.

I had this dream before making horses my job, back when they were creatures I enjoyed in sunlight and they were someone else’s problem to manage once I’d driven off to meet someone for dinner in a warm restaurant. In this dream, I lived in a farmhouse and I hosted family Thanksgiving dinners.

I had not cooked a turkey yet when I first considered this dream, but in my head, I imagined the driveway filled with parked cars and the house warm and packed with love and kids and laughter.

Before our phones began blowing up with strangers who knew our names and digits, this promise of healthy holidays was the oldest fraud we fell for.

I’m almost to the front of the line in the bank lobby.

My mother and I ate chicken cacciatore on Christmas Day. It was weird not having someone barricaded in the guest room, but the holiday was relatively drama free. The horses had no medical emergencies — veterinary farm calls on holidays are rough — and barn staff kept their feeding shifts.

“I’d like to access my safe deposit box,” I tell the teller.

I follow her to a long room of boxes. We insert our separate keys and she transports my long, thin box to a cubicle. It’s been a long time since I opened the box. I don’t remember most of the things I placed inside it for safekeeping. My gauges of importance shift around like the weather.

I lift my grandmother’s bracelet, the $2 bill she shoved into a purse charm intact along with the jangling resistance of her world travels, and find the little box I journeyed here at lunchtime to retrieve. The tiny hinges of the box crackle in the quiet room as I open it up.

I woke this morning with the compulsion to put this ring on my finger. The ring was made for me to wear in another lifetime and it is beautiful, balanced, extravagant.

I slip it on the ring finger of my left, freezing hand, put the box away, and drive back to the farm. The opposite of a bank robbery.

*

Brandon rakes the front aisle way as I march up to him. I thrust my hand out between us. “I am officially in a relationship with myself,” I say.

“Did you say yes?” he asks.

“I did.”

“Good,” he says. “Would you like me to officiate when you set a date?”

*

That night I sit beneath the bare bulb of a tall lamp and I watch the ring sparkle in the light.

How many millennia of women have based their worth on tokens?

This ring, for me, is blood money. I should have sold it a long time ago, but I couldn’t let go. It’s a symbol of my repeated mistakes in love. It has importance and sentimental value, priceless as a cautionary tale, like crime evidence, like a prehistoric tool dug up from a buried city.

This ring is my proof of life.

I lift my hand to the light and gaze at the ring from beneath as if my shift in perspective will create enlightenment.

I’m not expecting an answer to this question, but I say to the empty room: Why do we shame people for mistakes?

I have been judged throughout my life on my failed romantic relationships. Not on the value of the businesses I’ve built, my resume, certifications, or my writing. People like to remind me that my refusal to play the game destroyed my chances of promotion.

I’m known for having consistently tried — and failed — to find love.

In a culture defined by the very human act of growing from experience, we’re taught to hide our failures, tuck them into a box where they fester like dirty wounds, like unspent $2 bills. We’re taught to only acknowledge our triumphs.

I recognize the smell of shame, but I know its scent from experience.

What will I do with these lessons?

I keep the ring on my finger as I climb into bed. It fits nicely on my hand in the cold winter air, my skin tight and numb. I’ll need to adjust the size in summer when the unrelenting heat expands and fills all the vacant spaces.

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Photo by Hiroshi Tsubono on Unsplash

“Is today your birthday?” I text Christopher.

“Nope, not today.”

“Where are you?”

“On your front porch.”

True to his word, we meet at the farm every month for dinner. There are several of us who come and go, a rotating cast of characters with one constant: Christopher’s unwavering loyalty to seeing that we honor our commitments.

I find him unpacking two lanterns on the porch table. It’s spring and we planned a picnic by the pond that glimmers past a sharp slope in the forest behind the farmhouse.

With the descent of daylight savings time, we have an extra hour of sunlight, but what’s left this night is creeping behind the hills as the others arrive and we walk on a worn path through a gulley that leads to the water.

“This is where the new trail starts. I haven’t caught the person cutting it yet, but I left a note for them in a plastic bag,” I say, as I bend down to pick up a wild turkey feather and poke it into my front pocket. The feather brushes my chin.

“What about the cameras?” Trish asks. “Have you caught anyone on them?”

“The cameras are pointed in the wrong direction,” I say.

My boots slide on a bed of pebbles along the pond bank as we come to a stop and stare at the water. “We need to buy signs and mark the perimeter of the property.”

Christopher reaches down and picks up another turkey feather. He hands it to me. Absently, I stick it into my pocket with the other.

“The revised law now lets you mark the boundary with paint. Let’s set a date to do this,” Trish says.

Christopher hands me two more feathers. I place them in my pocket.

We didn’t bring the food with us and as the sun sinks lower behind the trees, our chances of eating in the wild fade, but it’s good to be in the woods with other people, with friends.

A hawk showed me the strange, new trails as I sat on a big rock in the woods in the middle of a workshop led by a visiting teacher. The purpose of the event was to instruct us on how to heighten our animal communication skills. I sat at a distance from the other people and my question to the creatures in the woods was simply — what do I need to know? The hawk landed on a low branch above me. I watched it rest for a moment, spying down on me, and followed its take-off as it swooped and glided low and slow, hawkish, as if it was saying — look over here, dumbass.

Following the arc of the hawk, I found the new trail, all the low hanging branches sliced away, and the thick loam at my feet brushed bare and straight, an unexpected pathway for new erosion.

As I stood and looked at the clean-cut stretch of it to the left and right, a man I had never met before walked toward me and came to stand in front of me. He had a walking stick and he moved purposefully. He knew where he was going.

I explained that I was hosting a workshop and he was on private property, which only made the man angry. He screamed and refused to turn around, ranting gibberish about his unfettered rights to the natural world. He had a point, but I also live here alone and the new trails led to a point below my bedroom window.

It feels safer in a group of friends as the sun goes down. The air is cool and the low light glints across the water.

“I wonder what’s hiding at the bottom of the pond,” I say.

“Probably mud,” Christopher says. He walks behind us all as we head back to the farmhouse with its human comforts and lights.

I turn to ask Christopher another question as we arrive at the porch but he’s reaching out his hand.

“It’s a bouquet of feathers,” he says, and passes me a handful of turkey feathers all gathered from the forest floor. I stare at the designs in them, the browns and blacks, the interesting scoop at the tips. He’d assembled them as we walked.

“They seemed important to you,” he says.

I tuck the feathers into potted plants on a shelf, a place where they’ll be safe from summer storms.

We turn on the lanterns as the last light fades and stay up talking late around the table.

As we’re bringing plates into the kitchen, I hug Christopher and thank him again, for the feathers, for being him.

He’s kind as always, but as I hold on tighter he stands rigidly. He quickly pulls away.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

-Marcus Aurelius

I’ve destroyed potentially great relationships with employees by requiring them to teach summer camp. The horses’ eyes narrow and they move like four-legged zombies by the end of August. Trust built in the academic year crumbles with the summertime clientele. We see camp clients for a week and they rarely come again.

The registrations begin in February, usually in peak hours after bedtime by parents at their computers with a glass of wine and a summer calendar they’re filling like Tetris, plugging holes of inactivity. Most summertime parents and kids have never seen a horse before they arrive at the farm gates.

For herd animals wired for a slow trust-build and relationships formed by understanding — a long, slow process — the constant turnover of nature-deficient children is painful to watch. It’s like speed dating with strangers who are frustrated and angry because you cannot speak their language — the kind that blames you instead of figuring out how to say hello.

I’m trying something new this year with the summer camp program. We’re not riding the horses. We’re doing groundwork, which is the ancient art of learning to speak horse. It’s where we start before a saddle is ever placed on a young horse and a conversation we keep up with the rest of the horse’s life. It’s the foundation of all that we do with the horses, the difference between someone knowing how to slide a halter over a horse’s head and lead them to where they need to go, or standing mutely in a field watching the horses run from human touch.

Without the basics, a human can only guess what to do with their bodies when they swing a leg over and sit on a horse’s back, or they have to be led around by a person who knows groundwork holding a lead rope as they walk beside the rider and the horse — which is what summer camp has always been until this year.

But selling groundwork to people who have never seen a horse is like preaching the Slow Food movement to people who only buy fast food. They don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. They don’t care how the potatoes sliced into french fries are grown, they just want extra salt and some ketchup.

They’re mad that the fries are cold.

McDonalds is the reason I’m here today. I’m not judging. Fast food raised me.

Cocoa, the pony, looks like a round potato with a golden crest of mane, but he’s short-tempered when the person working with him doesn’t pay attention. I watch him jerk down for a bite of grass as a camper drops his rope to wander off into the shade for a water bottle. Barn staff grab Cocoa’s rope before he sneaks away beneath the tall arena gate.

The revenue generated by camp is essential to the operating budget of the farm, else we would skip it entirely. As the barn staff keep a watchful, collective eye on campers, I take my notebook to a far corner of the arena and perch on the edge of a plastic mounting block. I plan to brainstorm ideas for making money.

No one farms horses because stables are profitable. It’s a calling, like joining a convent or signing up for the Peace Corps. Non-profits are plentiful in the industry because horses help people heal, but mostly because even the most successful barns have slim margins. Tax-deductible donations are a boon that creates livable wages and fiscal safety nets.

I’ve crafted three 501(c)(3) shells and ditched them all when it came time to name a board of directors. Boards are the devil’s work. They’re self-righteous microcosms of Machiavellian politics in action. I watched boards destroy my family. Boards have the potential to strip even the best humans of diplomacy and compassion.

My farm is for-profit, but not.

The paper in my notebook is damp in the mid-summer humidity. The pages curl at the corners and the binding is thready and weak. The ring I retrieved from the safe deposit box at the bank in winter is tight against my swollen finger, the glitter dulled with barn dust and sweat.

The pages of my notebook are filled with abrupt, short starts to stories. The beginnings are outlined without a middle or end.

I sketch two columns on a blank page.

I stare at the lines and click my mechanical pencil.

And I begin to scribble in the margins using a tiny, illegible script, the kind of writing I used to do on the deconstructed edges of offering envelopes in church after I realized that I could lose myself in stories if I didn’t like the shape of reality. Using words to create new worlds is an old and ancient magic. We’ve been doing it ever since our first thumbs picked up a stick and scratched in the dirt.

It’s been so long since images formed in my mind. When I write, words arrive from a drenched recognition of atmosphere that pours through my body. It’s like remembering the future. This sense of witnessing a river that flows beyond the details of my lived experience happens independently from me like I’m watching myself from a distance.

I’ve dreamed within the waters of this place since I was very small, and I mostly drowned in them throughout my 20s, but it was during this time that the farm emerged on the banks of this place, and I thank the river for this.

Some people call it inspiration. I don’t have a word for this longing. I don’t want to name it. It’s the place where words come from, but words don’t honor it with suitable reverence.

This river of possibility has saved my life more often than I can count. It has also led me to make decisions that — while filled with lessons, growth, and surprising strength — seem foolish to the outside observer.

Governments fail and we call it progress. Women fail in relationships and we’re blamed for the rest of our lives. Because of this, the images that flood my mind as I sit at the edge of the riding arena during summer camp feel dangerous.

Using short sentences, the tip of my thin pencil snaps as I press too hard against the page — thinking, thinking. I finish a sentence and move on to the next.

Writing in my notebook is a secret. It’s safe. No one will see this. Yet I’m aware that if I write too much, the details will spill out into the world around me.

We’re driving through the mountains. It’s night and the headlights illuminate the edges of the trees that line the winding road. The branches interlace like fingers above the car, the stars visible in the spaces between the dense canopy of leaves. We’re not talking. We don’t have to. We listen to music and I feel the sound of it in my cells, all my senses uncovered. The music is a delicious ache. The music feels like longing.

Music is how I sink into the river, I write. Where has my soundtrack gone?

I have difficulty naming the person in the car with me on the page. Naming is a sacred art. Christopher is my friend, and I’m not sure when the lines intersected, when my thoughts shifted. I don’t know when I allowed him to become a character, a muse, a possibility.

I press the pencil to the page and begin to describe the person in the driver’s seat of my imaginings. Physical details are subjective. It could be anyone.

I’m suddenly shy.

It’s not just anyone.

It’s him.

I can’t write his name. Maybe I could write this scene in the third person?

“What are you doing?” Sarah asks.

I close the notebook and clip the pencil to the cover. My smile is too strange to pretend I’m working. “I think I’m writing a short story,” I say.

Sarah smiles back. “If I take a horse out, will it get in the way of camp?”

I motion to the horses and volunteers lined up in the shade. “I think everyone’s done for the day.”

“What’s your story about?” she asks.

“So far I have two characters in a car and they’re driving through the mountains.”

“Do your characters have names?”

“No. Not yet. I’m just going to see where the story takes me,” I say.

I hug my notebook against my chest and look out across the heat-drenched riding arena. Everything I’ve built in my life has been created despite of, because of, and in the spirit of fear.

What’s the opposite of fear? I don’t know.

Maybe I should start with that question and work my way back.

|| Chapter 4 ||

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Sunsets are pretty spectacular at the farm

Thank you for joining me every week.

I’m taking the weekend off from horse duty and I’m hoping for writing time and driving around with Christopher in the mountains while we listen to music. But Friday night, I’ll meet with several of you fine people for my in-person journaling workshop on the farmhouse porch. It’s not too late to join us if you live locally. I’ll be posting the recording of last week’s Zoom workshop for all paid subscribers very soon.

I thank you for journeying with me through so many words each week. Thank you for supporting my writing, and by gifting me with that treasure, supporting a tiny farm with a huge mission.

I’ll be back next week with Chapter Four.

Love,
Kim