Someone at work told me about the Shetland pony. “My sister’s little girl has outgrown it. You ought to get it for your daughter.”
I didn’t know then how to be a cultural animal. I was poor, living in the north and working for one social program or another during the War on Poverty. Planned Parenthood or maybe, after a wave of budget cuts, for a job placement program in which I counseled poor people more desperate than I was and helped set up a drug intervention program for youth called People Who Care. My farmer neighbors, lucky to have land and cows and an appetite for hard work, used to laugh whenever I found a new job after a layoff. Other friends would sit around smoking weed, playing music, and complaining that there were no jobs. I would always find one. Linotype operator at the small-town newspaper, dishwasher at the ski resort, calf feeder on the dairy farm, horse teamer on the maple sugar farm. It wasn’t that I was so smart. And I certainly wasn’t accomplished. I was just desperate. And, coming from a theater family, I felt pretty sure I could do a reasonable performance of a person who looked like she knew what she was doing.
My twenties were a decade of rural self-exile. I was trying to complete the project of growing up, raising a daughter on pennies and pipe dreams, performing the role of a grown-up as best I could, writing poems in the dark of night on a barn-board desk, shuddering alone in bed beneath the blackness of eternity. I still love her, that desolate version of me, stubborn Yankee, who never quit no matter how bleak the odds.
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