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the man i love i crave to see

but he's up the country and he won't write to me

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so one day i will live in a house. it will be close to the desert, or maybe in the desert. there will be mountains in the near vicinity and the air will be dry as bone. there will be a huge wraparound porch and an old pirate flag hung out front to warn off door-to-door salespeople and mormons, but fundraising kids will be regulars. girl scout cookies are always welcome, but i'll also buy plastic cookie cutters and candles (i will prefer pie-scented) from every kid that comes my way. they will make a killing off me every year, but that's all right because i'll make them the good kind of peach tea and they'll tell me how their families are doing and we won't care about the money anyway.

we will never worry about getting rain because we don't need any. we will probably haul our water from wells our predecessors dug themselves. because it is a small desert town, there will be offbeat music festivals and weird art shows going on frequently, which i will attend for the free wine. i'll buy an old beat-up piano so i can have jam sessions with the neighbors. they'll be mostly alterna-thirtysomethings with small toddlers who came out here to, you know, get away from it all. they like the laid-back school system and predictable weather, all the better for sandsurfing and stargazing. some of our neighbors will be old, very old, and they can tell us about the good old days. they won't ever be lonely in that old-people way, because we'll all sit on the porch late at night and pretend we're good at whatever instrument we happen to be holding and swap stories from the forties or uganda or that one summer. we'll all come from different walks of life, metaphorically speaking. we will have laugh lines and working-outside skin. someone will have a tattoo in hebrew on her back. she got it in high school and forgot what it meant shortly afterwards. she'll invite our educated guesses and we'll talk about people we like, like God.

maybe i will have a husband. he'll most likely have shaggy red hair and a thing for billie holiday. we'll sit on futons and watch country music videos late at night when the kids are asleep and can't catch us. we make fun of the videos but we both secretly like them. we enjoy each other's company. sometimes we do immature things, like pretending we only speak a strange dialect of cajun french when the occasional mormon manages to break through the pirate flag defense and goes after our souls. we will like what we do and we will pretty much do whatever we want. i'll open a shop and sell people muffins and old stained glass windows. i'll throw in good advice for free. maybe he will design dune-surfing apparatuses.

it is agreed that neither we nor our kids watch tv. we bought the set for lame country music video viewing purposes only. i will have a garden full of strange desert plants that don't need water, or very much of it anyway. the doors will always be unlocked, and we'll always be playing some old americana song about some crazysexy woman's cheatin' heart. we'll buy our eats at the farmer's market because who knows what they put in those pesticides these days. our kids will grow up with a love of bluegrass and moving water. we won't make them wear shoes unless we suspect pesticide infiltration. because of the clear mountain air and our organic meals and our favorite pasttimes of dune surfing and telling sarah palin jokes, which will always be funny, we will live until we are at least a hundred. we'll meet death quietly in the middle of a dream, in the predawn still. neither of us will ever see the inside of a nursing home.