In My Dreams, I Have Always Been a Cowgirl. Was That a Singing Cowgirl?

Ready for ME?

Dream Scenes

It’s true. Ask my mother. My very earliest career aspiration was cowgirl. Later came veterinarian, poet, singer, actor, writer, philosopher, and, finally, bookseller. But girlhood cowgirl dreams are like creeks during drought times: they may go underground for years, but they never die.

Is there anything on earth that smells better than cows and hay and fresh cow manure? How about horses and hay and fresh horse manure! What about combining the horses and cows? HEAVEN!

When David read about a weekly livestock auction in Willcox, he knew that expedition had my name on it, and we drove over a couple days beforehand to make certain of the location. Cochise County leads the state of Arizona in cattle production, making Willcox (and not Bisbee, the county seat) the Cow Capitol, so I guess that makes the Willcox Livestock Auction (WLA) Arizona’s Cattle White House. 

Thursday finally came! Auction day! I wish I could include here the feel of the hot sun, the sound of calves bawling, and the smell of the dust and the cattle and the horses and the hay. I wanted to be everywhere at once – watching the riders and horses work the cows,

inside where the calves came in one side to be auctioned off and then scrambled out the other side when the gate was opened,

out by the pens where groups of calves awaited their turn in the auction house,

and especially in the outdoor stall shelters where the cowhorses, in turn, took breaks from their demanding work. 

I wanted to be on a horse, too, and also flicking a flyswatter at calves to move them from one side of the auction “ring” to the other, and I wouldn’t have said no to opening and closing an auction ring gate.

We sat indoors a while to watch the buying and selling and at first weren’t sure about the prices being knocked down. Per lot, or per animal? Because sometimes as many as eight would come through at once. Light dawned at last: the calves were being sold by the hundredweight. So if a 500-lb. calf brought in a $120 selling price, that calf would cost the buyer $600. It made sense.

We went outdoors again, into the sunlight, to watch the horses and riders work the cows (Midwesterner that I am, it’s hard for me not to put that word in “scare quotes,” when we’re talking calves and often steer calves) through a complicated system of pens and gates on their way to the auction ring. A man in a cowboy hat, walking by the pens with his little grandson at his side, asked, “You folks buyin’ today?” “Not today,” David answered. “Just lookin’ today.” David was wearing his cowboy hat, and his boots were appropriately scuffed and dusty. Two little boys looking for adventure caught their mother’s distant but vigilant eye. “You boys get outta that pen right now!”

As we were leaving, I was surprised to see one truck pulling out with an empty livestock trailer but quickly realized the driver must have been selling that day, not buying. We left in a Toyota sedan with a Michigan license plate. What did people conclude from that?

I could have stayed all day. I could go every day and stay all day! As we came back down Haskell Avenue into town, I noticed the new custom T-shirt shop open in an old gas station. “COWGIRL IN MY DREAMS,” I told David. “That’s what my t-shirt would say. And I bet a lot of other women would love it, too!”

Happy girl, living my dream

*  *  *

But the day was not over yet. After a lazy interlude of iced tea and corn nuts at Railroad Park, we went home to rest, have a light supper, change clothes, and then –

The Paris Opera

I’m not kidding. It was Les Noces de Figaro, i.e., “The Barber of Seville,” a videocast from the Opera de la Bastille in Paris, France, and we saw it at the Willcox Historic Theatre in Willcox, Arizona. 

The tickets were only $5 each! Never could we have seen such a show at that price in Northport or Traverse City, let alone in Paris! But yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s true: for a mere $10, the artist and bookseller on winter sabbatical were transported to Paris for the evening. I couldn’t believe it was happening!

Intermission interview

There was the handsome, urbane but enthusiastic announcer (whose name has escaped me), introducing the production in French (with, as you see, English subtitles for export audiences), and indeed, after a magnificent orchestral overture, the curtain rose, and we were there, in the Opera de la Bastille, watching Damiano Micheletti’s electrifying 20^th-century staging of this well-known work.

I didn’t take any photographs during the opera itself. Even though the performers were not, in person, onstage in the theatre with us, it just didn’t seem right. Here, though, is the barber, a perfect Figaro!

And here is the chorus, taking their curtain call, a shot that shows you part of the two stories of the fantastic four-story revolving stage set. 

My heart had wings, there were stars in my eyes – and yet, on the way home, I kept an alert eye on the road ahead for javelinas and coyotes. We’d seen two dead javelinas on the side of the road the morning before, and they didn’t look like anything we’d want to run into ourselves.

Again – what a day! Quelle journée! Époustoufflante!

Little Adventures of Ordinary Days

We don’t go on long expeditions every day. Sometimes we have a day of simple errands in town and then come home to read and write. But even those ordinary days hold a drive to Willcox, which means a cruise through beautiful mountain views and past the mysterious Willcox Playa, an old lakebed from Pleistocene days, which I’ll write more about another time. Anyway, I get a lot of pleasure from our daily routines. Away from home, they take on an exotic air to me, although we, of course, are the exotic ones in this winter landscape.

First, the post office, where everyone there has been friendly and helpful from Day One. And now that we have a p.o. box, with our very own keys, I feel like a citizen of the desert when I unlock the box to look for mail every morning. Best of all, sometimes there’s mail in the box! I love that! Today, though, the box was empty. And Monday a holiday! I am momentarily crushed by disappointment but then tell myself I'll have a longer time for anticipation to build....

Most days we also go to the library, just one block from the p.o., where we check out books and movies, chat with the librarian, and where I update my blog and read new e-mail. It’s a very friendly library and has a wonderful large Arizona section and another large section of books in Spanish. (Unfortunately, I would not get much out of a book written in Spanish. Even the Spanish-language television programs go too fast for me to follow. A word or a phrase here and there is the best I usually do. If I get a whole sentence, I feel triumphant.) Naturally, the library also has computers of its own for patrons and the latest newspapers. The library is open every day but Sundays and holidays.

We go to Benson about once a week and have made three shopping expeditions already to Lenore’s wonderful bookstore, the modestly named Paperback Recycler, but Willcox has its own little bookstore. Run by the Friends of the Library, the Friendly Bookstore is not big or fancy and doesn’t have a curated collection, but it lives up to its name, and we usually find something to carry home. 

The first day of the 10-cent sale in the alley, we found many treasures! And yes, the bookstore really does sell local honey and jam. On the day of our first visit, I’d chosen jars of prickly pear jelly and catclaw bush honey for purchase and carried them to the counter before we even realized that the beekeeper himself was the volunteer clerk that day. We learned a lot about the agriculture of the region in conversation with him. Meeting new, interesting people far from home counts for an adventure in my book.

Before returning home, we always stop for coffee on the shaded porch across Railroad Avenue from the old train station. The business is a coffee shop, ice cream parlor, antique shop, bookstore, and more. There is a resident cat, and her name is – Sarah! There’s an old woodstove in the back, warming the indoors on chilly mornings. Our own Sarah is welcome to sit out on the porch with us and is always greeted by name by the genial proprietor.

(In my dreams, this is me.)

Coffee shop Sarah

From the porch we look across the street to the former handsome old restored train depot, now City Hall, and watch long freight trains roar through the crossing, and when we look off into the distance we see our “home” mountains. Sometimes a livestock trailer pulls up to park out front, and sometimes it holds horses and sometimes cattle, and sometimes cattle and horses, and one time one cowboy had cattle and horses and dogs – a fully-equipped cowboy outfit! Don't it turn my blue eyes green!

Horses

Border collie

Aussie

One day we had lunch down the street at Rodney’s, sitting out front with him at the sidewalk table. When the weather warms up, his patio garden out back will be shady and cool for dining. I had BBQ and beans and asked Rodney what kind of beans they were. Pinto beans, of course. Pinto beans are the beans around here. Rodney says the secret to good beans is that once they’re cooked, you never let them cool. Kind of like a French pot-au-feu, the bean pot should always be kept warm, and that way the beans stay soft and tasty. 2/15 addition: I found the cute photos of the guys that I couldn't locate the other day. Here they are:

Nearby is the old Willcox Historic Theatre, where we went recently to an evening concert given by the high school jazz band and had a wonderful time. We may go to see "Figaro" this coming week. I'll let you know if we do. Sadly, the night we went to the student concert, I left my camera at home and thus missed a killer panoramic sunset on the way to town, as well as great photo opps of all the musicians onstage. Lesson learned?

Sometimes we take a detour off the road home to see what’s happening at Willcox Lake. There are usually ducks and grebes paddling around on the water, and “my” loggerhead shrike may be perched near the water’s edge. Once a whole flock of sandhill cranes came flying in. But even without cranes, there are cattle grazing in the near distance, and it’s a lovely, peaceful scene.

I have omitted the grocery store from this litany of errands, although one of the two large grocery stores out by the expressway is quite fascinating to us, with its array of Mexican foodstuffs and an entire aisle of colorful piñatas, but will go back into town to close with the laundromat, because right next door to it is a little food truck that sells Sonoran-style hot dogs. Hot dogs not mean much to you? Didn’t mean much to me, either, until we tried them and found out what “Estilo Sonora” means: smothered in beans and sauce and hot peppers!

Sarah, we’re not in Michigan any more!

There Are No Small Meanings, Only Small Minds

Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. – Elizabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Confined to bed by a mysterious illness and unable even to sit up, Bailey became fascinated by a small wild snail brought to her by a friend in a clay pot of woods violets. Observing the snail gave interest and focus to her interminable hours of solitary confinement and forced inactivity.

In solitude very far removed from that of Bailey’s sickroom isolation, I was studying alone one evening during my first year of graduate school in a small, almost empty apartment in a strange city. The minimal furnishings of my monkish space consisted of a wobbly-legged dinette table, two wooden chairs, a low coffee table holding my typewriter (I sat cross-legged on the floor to type) and, in the bedroom, a futon on the floor and cardboard boxes, on their sides, open end out, holding books. I was lying on the carpeted living room floor when a tiny, bright red mite, smaller than the head of a pin, appeared on the page I was reading, moving purposefully across the lines of type. Had I pricked my finger with a needle to draw blood, the insect would have matched that blood in color. Another living being! I was so pleased! The next day, as usual, I walked to campus. When I told my fellow students about the mite, they all understood.

Bailey’s situation was prolonged and extreme in comparison to mine, and her snail was more than a moment of cheer. It was quite literally her lifeline. Later in her recovery, she wrote of the snail to her doctor:

Watching another creature go about its life . . . somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in life mattered, so I kept on.

Along with a highly personal odyssey of immobility (if I may call it that), the author explores natural history and poetry, tracing what others have discovered and noted in the miraculous complexity of this one small, inconspicuous wild creature. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a jewel of a book, destined to become a classic.

Wild snails in my neighborhood would do well to continue their hibernation a bit longer, but I have chosen today’s images (photos taken Saturday afternoon) with snail scale in mind. Perhaps a note on today's heading is appropriate here, as well, although anyone who has spent time in theatre will recognize the allusion. In the world of stage and greasepaint, one is often reminded, "There are no small parts, only small actors." Never a star, I drew strength from those words.