Writing takes time and a certain amount of solitude, even for a chinchy blog like this. Now I'm sick, and mom and Lonnie are gone, so I have a modicum of both, like it or not. So what to say?

Here alone, caring for all the animals in the barn I feel like I'm living somebody else's dream. Somebody who saw a Marlboro ad once (the two cowpokes shouldering their saddles out to the frost licked corral), lit up their cigarette and dreamed of escape from the morning subway commute. I hope I'm not stealing their dream. To me, my situation seems to fluctuate from the romantic to the prosaic, and though that romance may not be one written for me, I can still see the attraction.

Morning. I wake up and put on the coffee, then the same clothes I was wearing the day before. Gloves, hat, call the dogs, we exit the log house into the waiting teeth of the winter cold. Frost covers the standing horses, who wait impatiently for the fuel their furnaces burn. Clouds of steam are pushed through their nostrils and they paw at the frozen ground. Two large crows are huddled on the fence-line, they take flight from their icy post as I march to the barn. In the east, the mountains are roughly cut by the sun from the clearness of the brightening dawn sky. In the west the easter colors follow the morning's setting moon down beneath the frozen earth.

Horses fed and the sun's begun his day's labor. And so have I. As the temperature climbs to some number no longer conveniently expressed in degrees Kelvin, I start cleaning stalls. The frozen, dirty marbles of manure clatter on the sides of the empty wheelbarrow. Some frozen, urine soaked shavings are glued solid to the ground. I trade my rake for a shovel and try to dig out the dirt. The poor plastic shovel responds to the combined force of the cold and my foot by shattering. Six more stalls to go. Sometimes I listen to music.

When night comes and sets the world in crystal I'll feed the horses again, check the barn one last time. Kick the water buckets to break the ice, close the doors and turn the lights off. The nights are as cold as the perfect black space above, and all the water is pulled from everything and turned to ice. A silent, plutonic world of noble gas and crystal, forgotten by the sun. The snow is fine, dry and brilliant under the silver plate of the moon, as Kino and I huddle into bed, to sleep, to make ready for the next day.