A beautiful day here in Colorado.  I just hosed down the back patio for Tess, my geriatric Golden Retriever so that she can rest in the shade.  Now, to work.

After a year and half of pushing hard, writing about six hours a day, I have four new manuscripts of poetry.  I’m very proud of my new work, and I’m taking a multi-pronged approach to getting it out there.  I post at La Parola Vivace, and I have four mss of three or four poems each in the “mail.”  I’ve also been putting up my memoir, Nightfall in Verona, chapter by chapter on its own blog.  I am so fortunate to be able to live for my work, after many years of scraping through.

I also have a myriad of interesting and busy new “friends” on Facebook.  I feel privileged to be among such amazing people, those at the forefront of keeping poetry and all other literary endeavor alive.

I was saying to a friend last night that I feel as though I’ve been flying through a series of storms– a court case that dragged on and on and was thankfully concluded at midnight on March 30, and the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced– to overcome a condition called “malunion” that developed in the wake of fracturing my right leg.  I spent six post-op months in a nursing home and then it took about two years for me to gain confidence that although the leg has bowed and shortened three inches and I ambulate chiefly with a walker, always wearing a brace, that I have reclaimed a measure of mobility and independence.  I live alone in a lovely little place.  No one believes that I am able to come and go in a five-speed Ford Ranger.

I’m also blessed to have a devoted significant other in my life.  It will be twenty-one years this spring since we met at a stable on the north end of Fort Collins.  I had just moved into a place there with my then Arabian mare; he boarded there as well, having migrated to Colorado from Texas.  We discovered we were both writers and inveterate animal lovers.

We’re getting old now:  surprise.  But we rendezvous each night to talk by candlelight and listen to music and play with our dogs.  He is still holding down the place we bought when we were engaged many moons ago– we started with virgin land and within a year, had a lovely home together.  Now silver poplars have volunteered their way around my kennel and the house.

Out of fallen-away old dreams of a traditional marriage and family, we have emerged as two tired people bonded by their history, there for each other.  Priceless.

This will be the first spring that we are each horseless.  That’s a big deal for two country people.  A year ago June I had my gorgeous GG Samir daughter, a real aristocrat, put down.  It was a year ago in November that Doug’s old quarter horse Little Bit went into the good sleep.  Now that the pastures are greening up I miss the sight of the mares wandering around with mouths full of grass.

I don’t, however, miss the trauma and drama of living with horses.  And we don’t miss the expense of veterinary crises and the cost of hay in winter.

It was twenty years ago when I found us a caretaker-couple job on the Joder Arabian Ranch outside Boulder.  I’ve blogged off and on about our many adventures in that year; he is charged with writing the memoir.

We’ve had many hard knocks and ups and downs, but have weathered all of it.  Not so long ago I didn’t think I’d ever get out of the nursing home to reclaim my independence.  Lo and behold.

Happy Spring to All!