It was a strange engagement. Romantic, but different from what the word used to mean in my life. In the past, "romance" and "trickery" were basically synonymous. Mark had no idea how to have such a relationship. When he was in third grade, he wrote a series of long, tangled love letters to several girls in his class. The boys stopped him in the playground, fished love letters out of his pockets and read them aloud on the monkey bars. But that didn't stop him from writing. His favorite girl that year was named Claudia, and he used his pocket money to buy her a shiny poster: a white unicorn in the foreground, with a castle and a rainbow in the background. When she shyly told him she couldn't accept it, he gave it to another girl. The girl said no, too, so he shrugged, took it home and hung it over his bed. He was fearless then, and he is fearless now. He never knew timidity, he never hid it, he never turned back once he started. When we first met, he let me see what he was like and never hid his intentions. As a result, our romance had new and different origins, and we were bound together by a common goal as an intimate group of two. I think it's something that was forged in boot camp or shared exile, even though we were banished to a fertile land. We wake up in the morning and go to bed at night talking about livestock, seeds, drainage, tools, or how to simplify chores, skip steps and save time. We are so tired. Sometimes, in the brief moments between going to bed and falling asleep, our fingers touch, and we jokingly call this farmer's love. I thought, if we're going to have a baby, it's going to be late winter, the longest night. I let my hair grow, not by choice, but because it was never a priority to make or keep a haircut appointment. I forgot to pluck my eyebrows, too. I hardly ever looked in the mirror.

Once I looked in the mirror and noticed that outdoor work had created wrinkles around my eyes that had eroded my face and made me red and freckled. I began to feel the weight of my skin on my eyebrows and the wrinkles in my face around my mouth. It all happened so quickly. I resisted a few times, plucking my eyebrows, moisturizing, exfoliating, and for a while mourning my old self, who had vanished into the ether. Then I slackened off and let it go. March is a tense and slightly dangerous time, like the border between two conflicting countries. It is not the wildness of winter that troubles you, nor the dampness of spring, but the absence of life in between. The weather was fickle, sometimes freezing at night, sometimes forty degrees Celsius, and the wind blew the tin roofs of the barns loose and the horses wild in the pastures. In the fields, the snow slowly recedes, ceding more territory to the mud each day. Beside the driveway, sharp piles of metal shards emerged from the thawed ground. In warm weather, the mud in front of the barn was deep enough to cover and trap our boots. The pitted mud became a menace. The melting snow revealed two small buildings that had crumbled to the ground under the weight of winter. We walked up and down, our feet shivering in our wet boots.

It was a strange engagement. Romantic, but different from what the word used to mean in my life. In the past, "romance" and "trickery" were basically synonymous. Mark had no idea how to have such a relationship. When he was in third grade, he wrote a series of long, tangled love letters to several girls in his class. The boys stopped him in the playground, fished love letters out of his pockets and read them aloud on the monkey bars. But that didn't stop him from writing. His favorite girl that year was named Claudia, and he used his pocket money to buy her a shiny poster: a white unicorn in the foreground, with a castle and a rainbow in the background. When she shyly told him she couldn't accept it, he gave it to another girl. The girl said no, too, so he shrugged, took it home and hung it over his bed. He was fearless then, and he is fearless now. He never knew timidity, he never hid it, he never turned back once he started. When we first met, he let me see what he was like and never hid his intentions. As a result, our romance had new and different origins, and we were bound together by a common goal as an intimate group of two. I think it's something that was forged in boot camp or shared exile, even though we were banished to a fertile land. We wake up in the morning and go to bed at night talking about livestock, seeds, drainage, tools, or how to simplify chores, skip steps and save time. We are so tired. Sometimes, in the brief moments between going to bed and falling asleep, our fingers touch, and we jokingly call this farmer's love. I thought, if we're going to have a baby, it's going to be late winter, the longest night. I let my hair grow, not by choice, but because it was never a priority to make or keep a haircut appointment. I forgot to pluck my eyebrows, too. I hardly ever looked in the mirror.

Once I looked in the mirror and noticed that outdoor work had created wrinkles around my eyes that had eroded my face and made me red and freckled. I began to feel the weight of my skin on my eyebrows and the wrinkles in my face around my mouth. It all happened so quickly. I resisted a few times, plucking my eyebrows, moisturizing, exfoliating, and for a while mourning my old self, who had vanished into the ether. Then I slackened off and let it go. March is a tense and slightly dangerous time, like the border between two conflicting countries. It is not the wildness of winter that troubles you, nor the dampness of spring, but the absence of life in between. The weather was fickle, sometimes freezing at night, sometimes forty degrees Celsius, and the wind blew the tin roofs of the barns loose and the horses wild in the pastures. In the fields, the snow slowly recedes, ceding more territory to the mud each day. Beside the driveway, sharp piles of metal shards emerged from the thawed ground. In warm weather, the mud in front of the barn was deep enough to cover and trap our boots. The pitted mud became a menace. The melting snow revealed two small buildings that had crumbled to the ground under the weight of winter. We walked up and down, our feet shivering in our wet boots.