I had a wonderful husband who for every apple he picked told me a story about Ohio, for every potato in the basket he told me a story about Idaho, for every Osage Orange that grew in the big hedge around the barn he told me how the Comanche Indians used that wood full of beautiful coves and veins to create their bows and from the bark they extracted the yellow Osage dye to paint their faces and clothes in the magical rites of a Texas that still exists...

Together we walked the long dirt road that took us out of this Ranch...
We were all dirty but happy....

Like the last time we went together from Texas to Colorado to visit my elderly mother....it was the last trip because then my husband died of a heart attack while we were looking at the beauty of a lake.

My husband bequeathed everything to me.
From tears to smiles, the horses and the cows, the fences to be dyed every year, the barn, this old pick up, lots of shit to shovel, an old John Deere to be able to transport the bales of hay from the stable to the horses...

My husband left me the horses, the poems to read, the texts scattered throughout the house, the pens he used to write with, the usb stick containing 100 different versions of his favorite Bruce Springsteen song (Tougher than the rest), the USB with 10.000 photos of Florida, Wyoming, Tennessee, that time in Arizona and New Mexico ....

It's been so many years now...and birthdays, summers, Christmases and Easters have passed where I have always set the table for two, I have always lit a romantic candle for us, I have always wanted to cry out his absence in this silence which is never silence.

And in the evening, before taking off all my clothes, I look in the bathroom mirror and see very small wrinkles that remind me of the beautiful Osage Orange wood...

Sometimes I laugh but sometimes I screw it up because I burst into tears and the light shines through the tears, and the tears itch and burn because they are the memory of him running through my soul.

So I go to the dining room, take one of his plaid shirts and dry my sadness trying to be strong, trying to spend this March 8 with him, even if he isn't there and if he is....
He's in this old pick up while he takes pictures and he tells me...

<<Hey Honey, do you remember how we met?
It's already been 10 years...
I was in Texas and you were in Colorado, I insisted and you got mad...
It was enough to look at a lake a thousand times because that lake was a little more beautiful than you ....
Only because it reflected your beauty which added to his and it made my heart race.>>

Happy International Women’s Day to all the men who made these kind of women strong, wonderful and immortals.

Cowgirls & Cowboys