fields of barley.

Ya know, I think I'd like to live in the 1800s, when the west was still wild. I'd like to be a farmer in Oklahoma. Grow fields of wheat and barley, just like that Sting song, beneath a sky made all the more dazzling blue by all the gold on the ground. Get up with the dawn, work all day, come back and eat dinner by firelight, every night, tumble into bed with my laughing bright-eyed wife, whom I'd love with all my heart.

Except I think some nights when the October moon is full and the wind's blowing across the fields, making the wheat bend, making it bend like waves on the ocean--

I think then, I'd remember some other woman I've loved from afar in my youth. Someone highborn, above the station of a humble farmer. I think I'd remember her and I'd dream of her and when I'd awake I'd go to the window, which is probably a hole in the wall we'd cover up with boards and paper in the winter, and I'd look over my autumn fields and I'd think how much they looked like her hair in the moonlight, because she's a blonde.

And I'd know how her hair looked in the moonlight because I'd known her before for just one night, on some other October night years and years ago before I left to go west, on the edge of her father's plantation in Virginia while the cotton bloomed all around us and fell like snow.

I think that's a good way to spend a lifetime. Or a heartbreaking one, depending on how you see it.