Lots of people write me about me about my relationship with Maria and about our love for one another, they think it is sweet and uplifting. Well, there is that, of course, but there is another side to our marriage and as may be obvious, we are two strong-willed, independent and sometimes volatile people.

I believe Maria is a lot sweeter than I am, it has been suggested by a good friend that I am an angel in wolf’s clothing, which sounds right, sort of.

And if you want to see how sweet Maria is, just try telling her what to do (I sometimes try) or how to make a quilt or hanging piece. (I never have.)

We are not sappy people, trust me. I believe in arguments, they are like flushing a toilet, they get rid of the waste and built-up toxins. I don’t believe any good or real relationship doesn’t have arguments. I think love means you can have a nasty argument with someone and then realize you’d rather argue with them than not have them in your life.

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote than you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words. I can still count the number of serious arguments Maria and I have had in our seven year marriage, and I can count the scars as well.

And no real or good marriage is all sweetness and sap, I don’t like to give that impression, any more than support the idea that life on a farm is a perfect life. Maria and I have our share of arguments – she is, after all half German, half Sicilian – and you don’t get to do what she does by being docile.

I put up my love poems, but I don’t put up my arguments.

In a sense, a good marriage to me is much more about dealing with conflict and differences than kissy-face or love poems.

The  fights in our marriage tend to be odd, surprising, idiosyncratic, we are not normal people, and  somewhat in the nature of farm life, which can be isolating and unnerving. And they reflect the unique and strange nature of our battle-tested personalities.

I always like Dale Carnegie’s reflection on arguments: “You can’t win an argument,” he wrote. “You can’t because if you lose it,  you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.” If you are married to Maria, this is very true.

You may remember that she once tried to run me over with her toilet bowl of a car while I was talking on my cell phone.

During the day we don’t see one another much, she is making her magic in her studio, I am making mine in my study. We give each other plenty of space in day light, you don’t want to be around either one of us if our work is disturbed, or anyone is trying to tell us what to do. I am psychotic when I am disturbed in the morning.

I think this latest fight we had, over the manure rakes, is the kind of fight you have to have if you want to be truly married, as opposed to pretending you are a Disney couple.

Marriage, like democracy, is not always pretty or romantic. Our manure fight was brief, fleeting and mostly forgotten. But it was also memorable. Most people don’t get to fight over manure rakes in a Pole Barn.

When Maria was in India, Cassandra Conety came over to shovel manure in the morning, a task Maria and I share most mornings. I rake and she shovels. I noticed that Cassandra had a new technique for raking out the barn, I usually just get the horse and donkey manure, I don’t bother much with the smaller pellets left by the sheep. They tend to get ground into the dirt and don’t amount to much.

Cassandra had a different approach, she methodically raked out the sheep pellets and left the barn floor smooth and clean, like a baseball diamond after the grounds crew cleans it up. Smooth and even. Hmmm, I thought, this is impressive.

I made the mistake of mentioning this to Maria who is much more competitive than you might think, and takes chores very seriously. She said nothing for a day or two, and then came up with a new idea for raking the manure, she turned the rake upside down and pulled the pellets into a pile, then shoveled them out. She pointed this new technique out to me, she was quite pleased with herself.

I believe this was the birth of the argument,  along with the fact I was distracted. There was no way Maria was going to accept that anyone else could rake out the barn better than she could.

I ought to say that Maria and I have pretty substantial egos, you can’t do what we do without big egos. Sometimes one ego bangs into the other.

If I had been fully awake and alert, I would have responded to this affirmatively and respectfully.  How great, honey, look how clean the barn is now! As it was, I was stewing about something else and blew her off.

I was not paying attention, really, and I tried her method and it didn’t work for me – too many of the pellets were missed – and I kind of ignored her, raking in my usual style. I didn’t think a thing of it, who cares about the position of a manure rake?

I had the sense that she was glowering at me for a moment, but it didn’t register that I was already in trouble. Well, she huffed, I guess you are not interested in this new idea I had. She was, I knew,  still very tired and somewhat edgy from her grueling trip to India.  Arguments are a process, and we were now in it.

I admit I was in a bad mood that morning, grumpy and ticked off at almost everyone I knew and everything I read. I get that way sometimes, I just hole up until it passes, it rarely lasts long. But it was too late. I muttered something about her idea being no big deal, it was not working for me, I said, not worth even discussing. If she liked it, she could do it.

After I half-heartedly tried it once more and dismissed it again – this was my last chance to avoid the argument  –  she walked off in a huff. I said this was nothing worth fighting about, and that was not the right thing either. The fight was on.

We both got angry and upset each other over the manure rake. What an odd thing to fight about, I thought, but as if often the case with arguments, that wasn’t what we were really fighting about. We would get to that later.

We sulked and pouted for a bit, then retreated to our various work spaces. When I get angry, I just get quiet. When she gets angry, she just goes to work. It was hours before we got back together and moved along, the next morning until we finally talked and laughed about it and returned to normal. The good thing about fighting is making up. I think another value of arguments in a relationship every now and then is that they prove that love is resilient and the relationship can survive them.

I am quite confident that when Maria and I argue we will survive, and then some. It is good to see that once in awhile.

The argument came because I was in a bad mood, and resented being told how to rake the manure in a barn. My dog.

She was exhausted and sensitive from her trip and felt dissed. Her ego.

We realized we both had to pay more attention to the backlash of the India trip, and I had to stop working for a few hours, maybe walk in the woods and get past my funk. I drove over to the Mansion with Red to do therapy work, it always makes me feel good. In a sense, the India trip was exhausting and disrupting for me too, just in different ways.

The thing about arguments is that they are hardly ever are about what we think they are about. In this way, they can lead us to things that really do matter. For the next few days, we were conscious of being gentle and loving with one another. That was nice.

The rake argument shrank to insignificance.

This morning, out in the barn, I turned the rake over and used her new method to get the sheep pellets out of the barn and leave the ground smooth and clean. You know, it was strange, but this time it worked to my surprised.

“Hey,” I said, “this kind of works,” I said. Maria laughed. “So you finally had a good idea.”

Ah, I thought, Dale Carnegie was smart.