We drive to the Pedernales River this morning for a hike. It is quiet around 11:50 except for the last of the churchgoers leaving mass. We cruise under a weary, overcast sky that echoes a landscape hardly awake from winter, except for a lone quince tree blazing pink alongside a truckstop. 290 is growing. What was once a frontier escarpment of limestone and prickly pear is now claimed property of “Muirwood” and “Oak Haven” and the mycelium of other residential real estate developments. But the road itself is still old. We climb and descend each hill like a motorboat on choppy water, tossed about by the scars of traffic and extreme temperatures on the road, our eyes following the varicose veins of long asphalt-filled cracks in the pavement. Scores of Open House signs are everywhere, in short trains of five or six (per builder) they picket the shoulder. There’s a balmy southern breeze and the American flag at the Pulte Highpointe Information Center is at full-mast, waving gloriously. I wonder how many prospective homeowners will visit this trailer today. A part of me can understand how a person would appreciate a home, like the ones I see beyond the trailer, sitting on two green acres and surrounded by white ranch fencing. Perfect for your one-horse family and sidekick goat.

People driving along this road must buy a lot of pottery, rustic metal art and deer antlers; every other store has a side yard filled with chimineas and yard art. Sheet metal silhouettes of cowboys leaning against imaginary walls are among them, so you could (if you wanted to) lean one of those buckaroos against the entrance to your ranch, right there next to the gate. So everyone would know your home was cowboy-friendly, supporting all cowboy-related endeavors.

Damon used to work on the King Ranch. When he was in high school, he had many different roles on the ranch, and his least favorite was the caballero duty of processing freshly-purchased cattle for their new life on the King Ranch. And since he worked during the summers, I’ll begin the description of setting to include blistering heat and dust. Add to that, a two-foot layer of bull shit to stand in (and I mean literally), the smell of burnt flesh, the bustling sounds of hydraulics and metal and groaning cattle.

There’s a short list of duties to perform on the newly-purchased stock: a bloodbath of dehorning, branding, castrating and immunizing. You corral cow into the chute with a cattle prod. If it’s female, the most effective way to move her is to stun her with a cattleprod to the clit (I kid you not). If the cow has horns, you take a large pair of tree pruners and slam, slam, slam them together until the horn lops off, trailed by a river of blood from the marrow (since the horns are, after all, a part of the cow’s skull). While the cow is bleeding out, you take a branding iron and burn the famous running W onto its hide (a cow may have many brands over the course of his or her life). Then, if it’s a bull, you have to castrate it. It’s a systematic thing, really: you slice with a razor blade, pull them out. Period. Lastly, you immunize. If you look up occasionally while injecting, you can pound the huge hypodermic needle accidentally into your own leg, as Damon did. While all of this is going on, the Mexican laborers will take a few testicles and fry them over the same fire that’s heating the branding irons, a sort of freak show snacking. And at the end of the day, the laborers will often take a long latex rubber glove, the kind used for artificial insemination, and fill them with the leftover balls to take home. They’ll leave, smiling and proud, holding a bloody bag of bluish-pink cow balls to cook up later, for themselves? For their family?

Yes, we are in the middle of country with a capital K, as in Kountry Kitchen, Kountry Klutter and Hill Kountry Kabins. I had to retype these names a few times to get it right. It was difficult.

The river is low. The river bottom is worn smooth, and deep crevasses bore through the bedrock like swiss cheese. I hold my breath as I boulder with Chas in the backpack over deep divides, and gasp when Ford leans over edges, peering into the whirlpools. We stop to investigate fossils, embedded everywhere along the riverbottom terrace.

On our walk back up the trail, I stop in my tracks to listen. I hear a slight symphony beyond our parade of noise: Ford is belting out more White Stripes, while Chas is simultaneously repeating Dvorak’s New World Symphony (to the three syllables “Hi Daddy, Hi Daddy,” over and over again–amazing in itself!). Everyone stops, and we all hear it, the distant sound of geese underwater. Looking up, we see birds flying in V-formation, due North, but they are clearly not geese. In a less-focused, more carefree jaunt, these are actually Sandhill cranes flying at about 2000 feet. We watched as they flew over the river, paused, and dissociated into a flowing fabric of cranes, wafting upwards on thermals in freeflowing spiral, resting their wings as they ascended. For about three minutes or so they did this, until one set course and the rest followed, straight into V-formation once more.

We learned three new things on the longish return hike uphill:
1. open-toed sandals and sand do not really mix well, according to a 4 year-old.
2. Ford will knock down any structure, no matter how sacred, to prove his power over inanimate objects.
3. Chas will always attempt to get in the water, so never take him out of the backpack without preparation.

The past two days have been unusually exhausting. I’m not sure if it’s Chas’ being sick, or missed sleep or, quite simply, Ford, but I rarely feel so mentally drained. I sit down to write, and feel nothing. It’s a dull, cottony feeling. I type three sentences, erase two. Type ten sentences, erase eight. I am not making any sense, and my stomach feels sour.

It’s not so bad being tired and numb, but it’s awful being blind to what’s running underneath, although I have a feeling it’s symptomatic of sleep deprivation. I’m standing in a pitch dark cave without a headlamp`, groping for a wall to guide myself towards someplace concrete, and hopefully in the direction of light, although I’d be content just to feel a wall to lean on and hug. Why can’t I just sleep at night, when it is dark? Why does my body want to stay awake, even if my mind is asleep? What little time there is to claim, after they have all gone to bed, is very little in exchange for the sacrifice of mental clarity (or something remotely similar).

So tonight (and for the next week) I am signing off an hour earlier. I want to see what happens when I redistribute the weight on the scales. It is 11:15pm, and the laundry is piled up, the toys are still scattered across the house, there may be a pile of spaghetti on the kitchen floor: I am TOO tired to tackle it now, and power to the bug that discovers it first. I’ll clean up in the morning.

It’s 8. Yes, we ate all the leeks from the farmstand last week in a potato and leek soup. Here are the leeks, chopped and soaking in a bowl of water, de-sanding themselves. I steamed the leftover romanesco and served it atop the soup, drizzling hemp seed oil around it. The presentation appealed to the kids, and they ate it up. I braised the rest of the carrots in honey and butter, based on a recipe from Deborah Madison’s cookbook (which I HIGHLY recommend). Ford made honey whole wheat bread. Yum. Chas won’t let me type much more than this, every task is getting interrupted with bouts of constipation and running snot.But tomorrow is market day again, so I’m looking forward to stocking up again on agrarian sights and smells. And vegetables. Hopefully, Amy will meet us there, again? Hopefully the kids will be better. Hopefully Chas will finally POOP….

Zilker park, public restrooms. Bad hair day. Blah. We’re all pretty tired.

SPT

I think my days have compressed. We joined a gym nearby, where a friend of mine teaches yoga, and I’ve found myself going there in the evenings on a daily basis. This, in itself, is a good thing. But it cuts into my writing time. Fortunately, however, we still find time to paint.

We rode down to the lake today. There were hints that March winds were about to blow, that it was on the horizon. I brought a crinkly nylon kite and let Ford have his first go at flying solo. But his eyes were reddish, and snot dangled from his nose, quivering in the breeze. I didn’t have kleenex, so my shirt sufficed. Dogs galloped in arcs around us, hollow barks ran through the canyon. I discovered that my children have become afraid of dogs since we sent ours to grandma. Ford cried when a yellow lab pup jumped up and licked him, bumping Ford’s lip and making it bleed. Then there was bloody drool dangling in the breeze, suspended, as Chas shrieked like an alarmed chimpanzee.


Clover is everywhere. The sweet smell reminds me of baseball and bee stings, afternoons napping in the sunny infirmary with a swollen hand resting on my chest.

I came home tonight from the gym at ten o’clock, ravenous, to find leftover chicken BBQ on the dinner table. So I dropped my bags, haunched over the table (too hungry to sit down) and started inhaling a drumstick. Outside the kitchen window, the hedge whacked into the pane suddenly. I froze, staring into my reflection: I stood over my food with my hair on end, arms outstretched, and chicken in my cheek, not much differently than my dog does when Damon looks at him sideways. But I wasn’t about to run to the window for a face off, up close, to see what I was up against. Instead, I stood there, chewing the meat, guarding my kill and watching the bush sway back and forth; all I could see were the illuminated leaves beating against the glass. After a few seconds, it ceased.
I kept a blind eye on that black window, until I was convinced the animal had either left or settled comfortably in the bush to stare at me while I ate, and then I licked my greasy fingers and continued engulfing bird parts.

We’re on the cusp of Spring, you can smell it in the damp air like pheromones. Grass shoots tint the meadows, still covered with leaves. On some property near home, Chas ditched his wellies to run sockfooted down a long dirt trail, his cheeks bounced up and down as he ran and sang. He shoved his head into a hole in a tree, shouted, and plunged his foot into a burrow near the creek. Life was hidden everywhere. But closer to the lake we passed under a gossiping flock of Red-Winged Blackbirds, a throaty playful labyrinth of song in the pecan treetops. Once we were directly below them, and they noticed us listening, all talk ceased and the troupe flew away like a fluttering, carefree black veil. Chas followed them with his eyes. It was quiet like that for a few seconds, before Ford started belting out White Stripes lyrics (I still have ‘Blue Orchid’ pumping in my head). On the drive home, close to dusk, a very large Coyote jumped the fence into the chaparral. I shouted and pointed it out to the kids, almost running off the road, but when I looked back at them, both heads were buried into the sides of their carseats, asleep.

This is my vice. I remember trying to stop biting my nails when I was about eight. There was a small vial of Stops-It or No-Bite or something, which tastes bitter. It worked for a while, but long enough. Look at this! I can’t believe people see me do this. Yet, whenever I have a dry cuticle, it has to GO, and the fastest way to remove it is to….bite at it?

I’ve just set a new goal for the year. I’m NOT going to walk around looking like this.

See more real people.

The house is thick with testosterone, even when they are all sound asleep. At night, the clean scent of my lotion cuts through it like a warm knife through butter. In fact, I can barely smell a thing, it’s that subtle. But Damon will sit up in bed, half asleep, and declare, “I can’t take that smell! You don’t understand, it’s killing me.”

I’m outnumbered by men, three to one. And that’s not including the dogs, who (for the love of God) are not here right now. The boys are getting older, though, and more willful. Chas is already throwing flailing tantrums, of the head-bashing variety, when his brother takes the basketball away from him. Ford, for his part, is already a little man.

I was carrying my open laptop into the bedroom today and found him lying on my bed, watching some afterschool, non-PBS-type, commercial-interrupted cartoon show. I stood there, frozen in the doorway. And he just lay there, staring at the tv, oblivious to the screaming going on in my head. And I couldn’t help notice that his hand was, as usual, in his pants.

“Ford, this show has guns. You know how I feel about guns! I hate them. Guns and greed are the root of all evil.” Well, except testosterone, right?

“Well, Mom, you’ll just have to keep your eyes on the laptop, then, okay?”

I lay draped over him like a lead apron. I am shielding him from any lingering resentment hovering in the air around me; in the last half hour I’ve kept busy while stewing in anger. But I’m sinking deeper and turning softer, as we breathe together. Nothing else matters at the end of the day, even if neither of us can understand the other’s point of view. What matters is that we’re here in uninterrupted silence, in a heavy pile of forgiveness, on the bed together, (alone!) staring at the wall and the ceiling with relaxed faces.