Wherein The Ocelot Ponders The Garden And The West.

The Husband and I dug up the Garden tonight. Dirt under my nails and turned earth up my nose and the desire to roll in it naked. The urge to spill seed onto the ground, to spit into the dirt, to let fluids fall onto the soil. To transfer the fertility I've been avoiding all my life to a little patch of something that might feed us.

Except this is Texas, and I got bit all to hell yesterday in the barnyard while fully dressed, so I know better than to try to have a Blessing of the Crops end in a mad dash for Benadryl. Such things can only end in ant bites and unpleasantness.

I saw a picture of Billings, Montana, today, and it made me miss the Rockies so much I almost wept. The sky was a million miles wide, out there, and it's almost enough to make me forget that even though I loved the foothills and the plains by the airport and the mountains, I hated Denver proper. And that I don't miss snow.

But I do miss all that space. The wild places where you don't hear traffic. That feeling that you could ride across the plains forever and never see another soul. The Gods were there, though strangely removed and very present all at the same time - it isn't the Northeast, or even Texas, and They sound a little different, there.

I never rode in gloves. I always had grut from the tack under my nails and my blood is literally in the dirt somewhere in Westminister, Colorado. My trainer, wiping it out of my eyes after that breaking that went so terribly wrong so suddenly, the closest I'd ever heard to panic in her voice, asking where all the blood was coming from until she found the cut at the bridge of my nose, and the young horse looking abashed not ten feet away, his head hanging and standing quiet as the grave.

Maybe I just need to go camping. Or to finally sling the saddle back on my horse and remember the days when I knew less fear, or at least how to deal with it better. I've already decided to go to my divorce hearing alone, just to show that I don't need the entourage I'm sure The Ex will bring. To quote "Pretty In Pink", that amazingly 80's film, I want to show that I haven't been broken. That I can still pitch my heels to the sky and unseat anyone. That, as Deb said in an email, I'm bulletproof now.

I dig the dirt. I ride the horses. I go on no matter what life throws at me and I pray to know The Gods better when I take my dog out every night, head thrown back and eyes on the stars. And I dream of Colorado and the wide-open spaces thirteen years gone.