Gifts From the Garden

Today from my organic garden I made beautiful chemical free jalapenos lightly grilled and then stuffed with cream cheese and bacon. 
Yummy!
I ate them all.
Parts of me are now on fire.
I may not survive...actually hope that I don't. 
Ice cream doesn't work.
Prayer isn't all that helpful either.

The Ring

She had the ring picked out before the man, too bad. She imagined it from the start, the first start. If she couldn’t be a cowboy then she would marry one and she twirled where cowboys gathered. At the time it seemed a reasonable plan.

The ring would be a simple 10mm band, 18k rose gold with his their brand embossed equidistant in five places. Husband, wife, two children and one more after they were married, just to seal the deal. Five equals, no more, no less, forever.

It couldn’t be a complicated brand or the sentiment might be lost in the heat of it. Nothing that would form a hot spot to scar when they punched it to the shoulder of a 3-month old calf. Something with a mill iron would be fine.

It should have been a Running W, but she was slack in his rodeo now. Still damn good fun at a ropin, or in the empty calving shed way up in the bluffs with no one but the eagle as witness. Fun is not for marrying, too bad. A fence crawler with two small children is worse than a breachy second calf heifer. No matter they were his calves she weaned, or what good hooks and pins she had. But the way she swung her rope…he would remember and calls her still, when he’s drinking.

Her brand would tuck inside the band, engraved, marked, scratched, branded, scarred, forever, this time.

She found him, a Lazy J mill iron. No hot spots there, none. Finding a herd sire isn’t difficult when all you’re looking for is a simple brand, and it only took the honeymoon for her to understand she had a two-hundred pound pizzle rot Lazy J mill iron bull-ringed through her Achilles tendon. The brand made it hard to swing her rope, so she quit tryin.

A Name For it

There isn’t a name for it, that thing when you make a memory, lifelong. She was 23 and pregnant. Just a girl walking up the stairs to sign a real estate contract with her first, soon-to-be-ex, husband. Just a man coming down the stairs, their hands sparked on the rail, a connection, a jolt to the system. Not her type, late 40-ish, drab Mister Rogers cardigan, penny loafers, scraggly moustache, prematurely graying hair with an unlit pipe clenched between uneven teeth. She was a pretty girl, but he looked past her pretty into “I know you, you are someone to me.” 

Their eyes met full, unembarrassed. Neither apologized, as is customary when you touch a stranger on a stairwell. Neither dropped their eyes or glanced away from invading personal space, like an invisible force field around modern society they stared directly into the eyes of not a stranger and fell instantly sad, ancient sad. What do you call it? Profound loss? and you have never met? never will? 

He turned to follow her up the stairs. Stopping at his office door to check his watch, fumble his moustache, watch them file into the room. She hung back slightly, the last inside, her eyes drifting again to his, just to be sure, to be sure. 

No, never, not ever. She was sure of it, so was he. They kept eyes to eyes until the attorney asked if she was feeling all right. “Could I get you some water?” “No, thank you.” Pulling her eyes away from not her type she went inside leaving the door wide.

            He followed their business with something like interest. Leaning back in his chair to put his feet on the desk he watched. She leaned forward laid her hand on the table and watched as two worlds revolved into an easy, familiar balance.

            He twiddled no particular thing at all until he thought to light the pipe. Good for at least five-minutes of ritual. He was new to pipe smoking, but not for long. He would think of her always when he smoked, on the golf course between drives, after making like to his wife, puttering in his orchids when he was older. His last thought would be of long black hair and unashamed eyes when she took his hand into eternity. He wondered why he knew her. Why he knew her so completely.

She thought of him when she went into labor, would have called out his name had she known it. Thought of him when she was baking cookies, planting carrots, folding laundry. She thought of him years later when she buried that child, would have cried out his name had she known it. Would cleave unto him had she known it.

“Missus? Missus? Are you all right? Can I get you something? Is it the baby?” She should pay attention, but she couldn’t, the room felt airless and uncomfortably tight.

“Pregnant women, friggin’ weird,” the attorney thought. “It’s the hormones,” the attorney thought. But he was wrong. Not hormones, the light and dark, good and evil, yin and yang, man and woman of it.

When she left the room he followed her as far as the bank of glass at the top of the stairs. He watched her walk down and look up as she swung slowly around the newel. He counted her steps through the building until she came into view in the parking lot. She stared long at him before crawling inside the car. He watched them pull away, watched her fingertips press the car window as his own pressed the glass. They watched until there was nothing left to see.