So this is my American girlfriend here.
She brought me here from Tasmania and I don’t have a clue. Now she and her father want me to go back. Which I don’t mind actually. It’s just the way they’re going about it, blaming me for Gingham falling off her horse.
And of course for everything else. If she hadn’t run home to her parents (Oh, ok, her biologist father happened to be doing a study in Tasmania and he came to visit and told Gingham she was always welcome home back in the States.)
BUT, if she hadn’t gone along with that we would have had medical insurance down here. (And possibly she wouldn’t have fallen off a horse knowing I was close by.)
And so now it’s medical bills and though she’s still covered under her parents’ policy it’s outrageous the bills she’s getting! Her parents will have no end talking about it.
Her blind dog she picked up in Brisbane ended up with me and so did Gingham’s name for it, “Billie.”
I was surprised she could reach me when I’m out tending my herds, but the medical bills led to her calling me and she forgot about the time difference.
“The rehab was fine but I never heard of the people on the bills,” she told me. “You with your medical billing company, I thought you were being a wise guy and playing a game with me,” she said.
I’m just a Tasmanian shepherd, I reminded her, the same person she fell head over heels in love with right? (I wondered whether she had gone without oxygen at any point on the ride to the hospital after falling off her horse.) My company has nothing to do with it.
She did fall off her horse though. The EMT outfit which responded to the 911, to hear her tell it, seemed hapless from the get go. Which stretcher. Which paperwork. Oxygen or not. The old guy from the fire department was more helpful but only until they took off for the hospital. And then another hospital.
And then to one which accepts her parents insurance. In the country where they live, like where I live, I’m sure the ambulance will go anywhere a taxi goes and charge accordingly. Gingham had fainted part of the time on the trip, and the crew struggled to find a vein for IV. Meantime at the farm the horse was still panicked after everyone left. Mother rode with daughter in the back of the ambulance. Downhill skiers both, not the first time they’d been together in a medic van. Here’s Gingham trying to lay still and her mother is lecturing her about me.
“You dropped out right after you met him,” she accused. I used to enjoy visiting her long weekends at her family’s new farm and helping her father Brian with splitting logs or working on his old 1948 Buick Special. The whole family was world travelers who had gotten the recent idea they would like to settle down on a farm in the country.
“Why do you call him Shep,” her mother asked in the ambulance.
“It’s just a little joke between us.”
“Did he teach you to ride that way.”
“Mom, how many times have I said, Shep didn’t teach me to ride. I had an instructor, the best instructor in the country.”
“Remind me of the country again. Antarctica?”
Anyway, she still thought my company sent the bills out but that doesn’t really matter. They were real. It was real actual medical bills that she wasn’t telling her mother about. She thought she would quietly start paying the pesky unpredictable bills with her college money, $35 here, $60 here, $150 there. The cost of getting cured she figured. She should get on a horse sooner than later. She missed Shep and Tasmania. But the bills kept coming. Reading them didn’t help. She couldn’t tell if she was being charged for a pill or a test.
Dating locally was fine with her but now her new boyfriend who was also her English prof is in trouble because of it. And she couldn’t tell her previous boyfriend, the artist in residence at Bard; maybe about the horse, but not about me. Maybe older guys wasn’t her thing after all. Gingham’s sister Maureen has a boyfriend living with her on the Screen farm. Much more straight ahead situation, he teaches her how to work with rare woods. He has a source for some rare Brazilian rosewood. Besides Gingham and Maureen, the other sister Josiah apparently was born the wrong gender and is male now.
“You seem pre-occupied.” Mother said one day back at their farm.
“Yes, you need a vacation,” Gingham offered back weakly. She wanted her mother to think that the parents’ need for a vacation was pre-occupying her mind.
“I probably do need to do something other than ski on my vacations,” replied Mother. “My ankles and knees are beat to hell and my ski partner just broke her hip on a run in the Pyrenees.”
“Take a river cruise.”
Gingham had called a couple of the doctors. The offices all had some kind of code for the visit on the bill, mostly while she was in the hospital. While they were all curing her from her fall. Can’t wait to ride again. Maybe stay off the horse for awhile. She had picked up a decent job over at a plant nursery, got paid partly in plants and starting putting them in around the farm. And starting to catch up on the school tuition bill. And wondering if school will start in person or on-line. Her profs were much less appealing online. But dropping out was a bad idea. Dropping back in is the thing to do.
Her mind fell into a reverie of making love with Shep in the mud out in the woods. She actually told him, “this reminds me of riding a horse.”
“Dodging sticks coming up out of the mud reminds you of riding a horse?”
“Not that. More like the feeling of two becoming one.”
They had been walking the perimeter of the property, checking their phones and marking compass points. It felt useful. The quiet brought a long wet kiss and the requisite fumbling with clothes.
“you got any bug spray?”
“I thought you did.”
The love was nice and so was the shower afterward at the big empty farmhouse. Her mother was off skiing in Switzerland, father on a research trip studying invasive plants, one sister in France visiting friends and Josiah was off playing boyfriend to his girlfriend’s parents.
“Sorry you’re going back.”
“Hope your parents don’t think you’re crazy for hitting on a Tasmanian shepherd. I’ll call you when I’m home safe.”
“They've been wrong before. Maybe I should have told them you built up a medical billing company from scratch in the outback and the sheep thing is just a hobby.”
“No sense in re-thinking that,” I told her. “Part of what I do with the company involves keeping a good distance.”
“You seem to be a master of good distance.”
“Not so fast, sister.”
So making love after a shower is just as much fun as before of course. It might be one of the last times anyway.
I had told her no sense in trying to reach me via cell because there was no service in the field where I’m cross-training my people to herd ducks as well as sheep. But I would call when I got home and settled.
Which is just what I did of course, waited ’til it was a nice bright mid morning her time, Gingham time. I let the phone ring and ring but before it went to voicemail she managed to pick up.
“Sorry, I had to fetch this thing out of my saddle bag under a bunch of stuff. Hang on a sec…..oh….holy crap….”
That was it. I heard a big pile of noise and found out about all this later.
