Transylvanian Horseman on life in a place where they still deliver hay with horses and carts. Perhaps the local people somehow, deep inside their consciousness, still feel the need to defend their homes and livestock? Many farmsteads are laid out in ways that suggest fortification. The stable may be under the same roof as the house. Or house and stable may be contained within a stout wall. There are always dogs on guard. Being careful of life and possessions is a habit formed through long experience of tumultuous history, generation upon generation. (Read it all.)

Right now, during the dead of winter, I’m going to work in the dark and returning early enough to have about 45 minutes of daylight if I’m lucky. Dennis has a longer commute than I, and different hours, so he goes to work in the dark and returns in the dark. Sometimes in the evening, we stare out the windows into the cold, black night, knowing that the horses are fed and watered and warm in their shaggy winter coats, heeler dogs humped up in front of the wood burning stove, kids snug in their beds, and we have the same conversation.

The one where Dennis says he would like to have lived 200 years ago. Or maybe even earlier than that. Back in history when there were still places to explore. You know, like when anything west of Ohio was The Wild Country. (This is the trickster cowboy who talks me into 12-hour horseback treks in the mountains from which we barely return before dark.) He chews over the thought for a moment before asking me, how about you?

And then I launch into my doubts about life before antibiotics (my former father-in-law, a long retired OB-GYN, used to wax poetic on this, one of his favorite topics, at family get-togethers, usually at the dinner table, while expertly carving a rare roast beef for which we had all suddenly lost our appetite), statistics about how many women died in childbirth back then, no birth control, etc. I forget to mention the plague (See Connie Willis’ Hugo and Nebula award winning Doomsday Book), at least this time around.

He rolls his eyes at me in exasperation for what is my appalling lack of imagination, and launches into the wonders of being Lewis and Clark. Or of tracking the buffalo. Living off the land. Building a log cabin.

Yeah, that’s fine for you, I tell him. You’re a man. I would have been in the kitchen, cooking. I wouldn’t have been able to vote. I would have had twelve children if I had managed to live through the first eleven, and then maybe some more to boot.

I finish up with my old standard-- I guess I would have had to be a guy for that to work. Maybe one of those fellows from Lonesome Dove.

He’s not liking where this is going, ignores that last bit, and forges ahead.

So this, right now, is the time you’d like to live in then? he asks. You know, if you had a choice in the matter? (This is actually a viable conversation in our home, because my husband is well acquainted with my love of time-travel science fiction.)

Well, no … is my answer.

So when?, he asks, enjoying how we are treading over the same familiar path together, our conversation like winding up a trail in the mountains on horseback, as much as I am enjoying it too.

And I’m surprised that I just don’t know.

I can’t really pick a period in history where I’d plunk myself down if that was within my power. With all my fascination with the idea of traveling back and forth in time (just see the science fiction books piled beneath the four-poster bed), I don’t have a date, to my utter amazement. No pick from the annals of time.

All of history has been tumultuous, fraught with danger, wolves howling around the barn as far as I can tell. Deep down we’re all defending our homes and our livestock. Whether we live on the farm or in L.A.

Maybe timelines and history are not where my answer can even begin to be found. Maybe I've got to look a little further out. Or in.

The disciples said to Jesus: "Tell us how our end will be." Jesus said: "Have you already discovered the beginning that you are now asking about the end? For where the beginning is, there the end will be too. Blessed is he who will stand at the beginning. And he will know the end, and he will not taste death." Gospel of Thomas

Hmmmm. Something to think about.