Dirty Work

doing your own dirty work & the Arabian stallions of my childhood

You can’t outrun your own dirty work. You fall in love and buy a house and a groundhog drops dead in the yard. Little did you know, this would be the first of a half dozen animals to take their last breath on your green Virginia lawn. In the back of your mind I guess you thought, “There’s someone else to do this now.” But his stomach is sensitive and he can’t look at the body. He’s not like you, he’s never seen anything dead. You love him, so much, you love him. So you find something to scoop up the body and a bag. You cradle the fuzzy heap of rigor mortis on the end of your neighbor’s snow shovel. You stay quiet and allow your heart to ache for 10 seconds. No more, no less. Tomorrow, you will scrape up the guts of the newly hatched chicks that fell from the nest on the front porch, the porch where the long black snake wraps his body around the railing, trying to climb up to eat the eggs from their nest. But it’s still the front porch you’ve always dreamed of. Because being happy isn’t a life without dirty work, it’s a life where you clean the messes yourself.

And it all reminds you of being a child, of your father’s vendetta against the gophers who dug endless holes in the California dirt. Because if the holes went unfilled, one of his horses could break a leg. His precious horses, who he bought before the money ran out and the well ran dry. They were equal parts passion and status symbol, both spiritual and stunning. The huge Arabian stallions who stood like shining, brave knights protecting your childhood. They were so regal, so beautiful, and they asked him for almost nothing. Unlike you. Who needs and bleeds and always loved your mother more. Because of course you did. Because why wouldn’t you?

The dead groundhog reminds you of the carcasses left by coyotes, of the flattened ribs of your childhood cat by the side of the road. You remember the horse who broke its neck, wrapped in a barbed wire fence. It had tried to jump, to free itself, but something happened. It misjudged the height, the distance. It laid in the twilight tangled in a manmade web of sharpness. And under the cover of night, your dad attached it by the neck with a chain to a tractor and released it, heavy and lifeless, over a cliff. Its body swayed slowly in the headlights as you approached the steep drop below. Some things you can’t make up. Some things you can’t unsee. But that’s okay. Because I clean the messes now. I care for the dead. And I still have dreams of those stallions standing like gods, coats liquid gold and mahogany in the sun. And I get it now. I understand. They are heroic, unstoppable angels when the light is just right. And I am so grateful that they didn’t break their gorgeous, holy legs.

Our stallions