Nobody knows that I…..

… am a cowboy.

Well that’s not exactly true.  This is a photo that’s been hanging around since LBH and I went to the Minnesota Sate Fair several years ago.  She likes horses.  Well I do too.  But I’m neither a cowboy or a cowmaturelady.

The thing about these kind of prompts – the reveal secrets you’ve kept forever!!  up till now that is, is that it’s pretty much impossible.  I can’t tell you really bad, disastrous things.  Or at least I need to think about them a bit before.  And anything else is kind of boring.

Yet…..

The other day I was asked if I had any piercings.  Right, that is a surprising question.   I answered by saying I’d had my ears pierced decades ago because I thought I might be able to get my husband to buy me earrings.  He was buying his girl friend jewelry and I thought he could get me some too.  He bought me one set I didn’t like and I let the holes grow closed.

Whoever asked then asked – your husband had a girl friend?  I said yes, his highschool sweetheart, the love of his life.  He carried her photo in his wallet.

When I was pregnant with my second child and pretty fully committed to the marriage, she called.  I knew it wasn’t an ordinary phone call.  Afterwards he said it was a male friend and he was going out to meet him.  He went out again that weekend without telling me where he was going.  It was Labor Day weekend 1969.    Later I asked him, that wasn’t T was it?  He said no.   I asked if it was N.  He said it was.  He said he hadn’t had sex with her because he had too much respect for both of her and me.  (that line is in public domain now so feel free to use it if you ever have the opportunity)

Years later in the late 1980s, she called again.  He was making peanut brittle and I had to stir while he was on the phone.  That time they met several times, he  spent a weekend at her house,  I even went to a party there.  It was quite an experience.  She taught him how to dance.  The only time I ever danced with him was in her basement.  There were letters in a drawer and hours long calls on the phone bill. Again we were committed to each other, to our parents, to the farm.  There wasn’t much we could do.

After he died in the early 2000s, she called and talked to my son, and then later wrote me a letter.  She felt bad that she hadn’t been there in his ‘time of need’.  She asked for a copy of his obituary and the funeral home card.  My son took her letter into the basement and put it in the wood furnace.

That’s the last time I heard from her.