My draft horse, rag rollers, and la luna
This morning Tobias the draft horse is more interested in the brand new curlers in my hair than he is in his hay. He snuffles the silly curlers I just couldn’t resist from Wal-Mart, blowing excited alfalfa-redolent breath through quivering nostrils as he tries to figure out what in the world is wrong with my head.
The Chinese manufacturer has covered plain old rag rollers—like the ones with which my grandma set her long hair when she was a girl—in ridiculously gold metallic fabric. My head is honeycombed with them. I glitter in the dawn, a high priestess of the barnyard in Carhartt coveralls and barn boots.
Toby’s whiskers are tickly, and I know it’s just a matter of seconds before the fascinated horse tries to steal a curler from my hair like he does the gloves from my pocket. “Quit!” I tell him, and the Percheron reluctantly does as he’s told. I stroke the gentle fellow’s head, tracing the perfect crescent moon between his dark, heavily-lashed eyes—an eclipse of white on an otherwise jet-black horse.
Beyond Toby’s big ears, the full moon, la luna, is setting in the west, hunkered down like a cold opal over the roof of my house. The eastern sky burns red, announcing the arrival of the sun. Soon sun and moon will hang suspended together in a perfect balance.
It’s years ago. I buy a house with water rights from a woman in the Pojoaque Valley. She tells me that every full moon the acequia (wiki) overflows and floods the three-acre property. The woman doesn’t shave her legs, wears psychedelic kaftans, has kinky gray hair that needs a good combing, doesn't smell very good, and sports enough chunky astrological jewelry to drown her if she tripped into the neighbors’ farm pond. I think she is probably prone to exaggeration. That is, until I find myself wading in ankle deep water across the back yard of my new house the first morning of the full moon to feed my horse and chickens, and every middle of the month after that.
Our ranch is dry as a bone this winter. With little rain or snow, we’re worried about a drought and the surrounding National Forest lighting up like a tinderbox in the summer lightning storms. But as sun and moon level off in the blue vault of sky this morning, I am overflowing like the Pojoaque valley acequia, awash in waves of lunar and solar—
Good and bad. Light and dark. Joy and sorrow.
I am all of these things right now.
I bend down to pick up the gold Wal-Mart curler that Toby has managed to nuzzle from my hair. It glimmers in the dirt next to his pie-pan-sized hooves. I run a hand along the horse’s thick velvet neck while he sniffs one last time at the gold rag roller I offer just beneath his muzzle, and head back up to the house.
