Tony's daughter, Jessica, has a wide and caring sensibility. Even though Tony is her father and carries the gene for Machado Joseph Disease, she has empathy and compassion to listen how living or sitting, or laying in bed next to this disease turns a screw in me. Jessica says there are so many people in her family with the disease it is something that has always touched her. I hope that is the only way it ever touches her. What a blessing to be honest and speak form words, take them back, and restate them in another way to someone not in a hurry, not afraid of the sadness, the way it twists and turns you. It was a gift to spend the week with Jessica. And we all loved Patsey the DD goat, Rick, Jessica, Makaila and Nick. Patsey was carted around front legs dangling. She was hugged and held. They woke up thinking of her. Today was a 7.5 on Patsey's scale. She is drinking better from the bottle. She nurses, she takes some drinks from the bottle, goes back to nursing and finishes with the bottle. She never tries the grass, the hay, the grain. I push dandelion flowers in her mouth. The yellow disappears, she spits it out mottled, I push it back. One day at a time, no solutions, just hope this is a good day.

Bitterbrush: Antelope brush, quinine brush, one of the most important and palatable native shrubs in the Western United States. Flowers early summer. Wrote a rough draft of a poem about Sonja. Knew her in high school. Sonja and Plum. Wonder if I can write a series? Rough drafts for summer. Last talk with Anne for 6 months. I have some relationship boundaries now. They feel over the top but probably under the bar. Last night Tony was on a tirade. I talked, I listened, I walked away: there's nothing I can do/I can't fix it. So many of my poems are Tony Atypical Ataxia and the travail of goats. I want to bend the helix and write about bloodlines of horses, dogs, cats, goats, chickens and the dysfunction of society not prizing adolescent girls. Can I do it? Rough drafts: Bird by Bird, Annie Lamont.

The murderous night, many people exhale and never draw another sip, that part of night plagues me. Time I never felt so alone. I have the weight of dumb-bells pressing on my shoulders. My mother, my father. They looked out for me. What's best, what's worst. A handicapped man, a disabled truck driver no longer able to drive, to decide, lives in a fog. This man only able to look out for himself - it takes his whole nucleus to keep one foot side-by-side lurch. But there was a Ted talk on FB and it said that in Africa people say "I wouldn't be me without you." And I try to hug these words like I would the Pyrenees. I don't know how to build this house, how to manage 30 acres, how to raise goats, butcher goats, eat goats, have 3 horses, 4 dogs. I don't know how to maintain this thing that bucks and kicks like a camel in a sand storm before hit lays down and buries its face. Yet, no one else would come here with me. In the mornings there are the young things, the silky soft things, thick black mane on Kalypso, the smooth brown and white spots of my blind baby kid. Three baby kids hop and race and race and race like outboard motors stuck on high and I feel my lips smile.

Grandsons. Drop them off at the truck stop North Bend. Their mother is so thankfulfor the days. But then my first hour at Kathy's taunt weave of thoughts about to split and fray. Stand to leave then sit back down and another hour for an inch under the surface where my thoughts are my thoughts and not who wants: what's there to eat, can we watch a movie, can we go down to the creek, can we start a fire? Finally Kathy and I talk about men. Somehow it comes out of nowhere how badly men age: Truck driver, CEO, contractor. Once it was enough that they were muscled and healthy. Provide and then not sole providers and then no providing at all. They used to stand out in the world. Did things only each one could do and the point was not to share. It was the wheeler dealer one way or the other. And we women did all the other things. All-the-other-things. In a cooperative, with feeling and we are still doing it. These men got anxious and depressed. They are surpassed. Their muscles are slack, hands shake, and carburetors lie rusting in the junk yards. But Kathy and Jacki and I, we never could rely on our beauty our ability to wear bikinis unabashedly. We were impossibly supple, lithe with smooth skin but only saw the quarter inch of roll above our jeans. We saw that our eyebrows spilled forward toward our nose, that our cup size was never enough and we went into aging counting only on our own resilience. There is a myth that men age well but women decline. But it was always only appearances. Men, our generation, age badly.