spider's web

Felix and I were mucking out the sheep barn, half a year's worth of compacted and decomposted manure, pee, and shavings. Felix called it gorilla slime and we were team Gorill Slime and he was very pumped. It was hard work and he shoveled for about 40 minutes, dumping his tiny wheelbarrow loads on the growing manure heap outside the barn. At one point he stopped in the doorway, watched me work for a minute and said, my gosh mama, you're a beautiful woman. Stunned I asked him where he got that phrase from. From the sixties, he said. Little kids are a total trip. During our video call with Papa today, hamish noticed what I was wearing; Mama must be feeling fierce today, he said. She's got on her leopard print shirt and the long antler earrings that make her canines look longer. I was truly surprised. He was right, and he noticed, and he remembered that about me. It felt unfamiliarly intimate, like he actually is my spouse. It was such a nice feeling. I can't listen to country music anymore now. I have to shut it off, it makes me unbearably sad at what him and I have become, whatever that is. It's sad because it's so far from what we were. Or what we had. Maybe we never were that strong, we just had a lot of fun and closeness. I could two step for hours and I taught him, nine years ago in Kamloops, and we went to dances and we stayed up late learning moves and we danced in and on numerous kitchens and lawns and fields and aisles and decks and sidewalks whenever a good song was heard. Country music was also our theme to those glorious early wild days of firefighters and whiskey and then to the following years skiing and new zealand and moving around together. it's part of our mythology. It all feels like everything's hanging from a strand of spider's silk now and he's got the next move but he's still drinking.