Our good friend Bailey Guidon was with us this afternoon cleaning up the farmhouse (the old one) and we were talking about Maria. I was telling Bailey about the many things Maria can do – art, carpentry, painting, gardening. Today Maria and I were rolling around a neighbor’s farmhouse dunking angry donkeys and curious cows (all coming after Red) and then she and Bed dragged the sheep into a truck and the two of them rode off in the cab down a busy highway hanging onto the sheep for dear life to keep them from leaping out onto the road. Maria does so many things, I said, it sometimes feels to me as if I married a beautiful man, a sensitive man who does all of the things men usually do – few of which I can do – but then is beautiful, sensitive, artistic, not to mention attractive in so many ways.

Bailey cracked up and said she never heard a man say that before, at least not a straight man. She told Maria and Maria frowned at first and said she wasn’t sure how she felt about that description, but then when she thought about it, she laughed, and she said she was proud of that.

It’s true, really, Maria combines the best traits of both genders. She is strong and competent and skilled, sensitive and loving and artistic. She shovels manure, hauls furniture around, scrapes paint, peels wallpaper. She learned this things early on in life, and didn’t want to spend her life doing them – it didn’t feel like a choice to her sometimes – but since no one is pressuring her to do them and it is her choice to do them, she enjoys it. Watching her sit in that truck and ride off to save the sheep, I just shook my head. Maria jumps right into life, although she doesn’t always recognize that in her life, and her strength and skills enrich mine.

And she doesn’t have the worst traits of men, she is not competitive, violent or convinced she can control the lives of other people. And she talks to animals. How many men do that?

So there it is, it feels  like I married a beautiful man in a beautiful women’s body.