Free My Million-Dollar Donkey by Ginny; East

childhood horse, Chiquita, but the moment I saw her there was no question whether or not I’d be taking her home. I took a two minute ride around the ring, pulled out my checkbook, and wrote the price quoted me. It didn’t occur to me to bargain. How was I supposed to know the price of a horse was a starting point, like when buying a car?
    Eric acted surprised, guilty even, at how easily the transaction occurred, so he threw in some tack, a saddle, and offered to deliver the horse for free.
    “You’re getting a good bargain considering this mare is pregnant and all,” he said, leading Dixie to the trailer.
    Mark’s eyes doubled in size. “Pregnant?”
    “I bred this horse to my best stallion a few months ago.”
    “We’ll have a baby horse in the spring, honey. We’re getting a great deal, two horses for the price of one.”
    “I don’t know...”
    Eric waved his hand as if we were being silly. “You’ll have a mule of your own next season if you keep this mare with your jack after she drops this colt. At least by buying a pregnant mare, you won’t end up with a mule this season.”
    “Our donkey’s name isn’t Jack.”
    “Every male donkey is called a jack. A female is a ginny,” he explained patiently.
    “I knew that.” I not only didn’t know that, but until that moment, I had no clue I’d been named after a female ass. I was, however, feeling like one more and more nowadays.
    We got into our car and followed Eric’s trailer towards our land. Kent cradled his new puppy with more reverence than he ever afforded his X-box or Legos. I listened to him gush forth lofty plans to train his dog to be so perfect Lassie would seem like a slacker by comparison. I wanted to throw my arms around Mark and kiss him for saying yes to our son, to me, and to life in general.
    I leaned over in the car to offer the kiss, but he shrugged me away. “Are you sure you’re ready to deal with a baby horse?” he said, as we watched Dixie’s tail swish at flies a few car lengths before us. “You have the donkey to take care of already. A horse and a donkey is enough to make our property feel like a farm, don’t you think?”
    “I suppose.”
    I craned my neck to get a closer look at a bunch of chickens pecking in the dirt at the side of the road. “Gee, but chickens are interesting! The kids would have fun raising chickens, don’t you think?”
    “I don’t want chickens. I want a puppy like Kent’s. Can I have a puppy too, Dad?” Neva said.
    “One pet at a time,” Mark said as he craned his neck in the same direction as I. The difference was he wasn’t looking at chickens.
    “See that tree they are cutting down back there? I wonder if I could nab a section of the trunk. I could make something nice out of that.”
    “Chickens can’t be hard to raise. I see them everywhere. And they lay eggs, you know.”
    I smiled at the variety of birds I spied scratching in the yards we passed.
    “Maybe I’ll come back later with Kent and toss a piece of that tree into my pickup. Whaddayasay, want to thank me for the dog by helping me with that log?”
    Kent and Neva were so engrossed with the new puppy that they couldn’t care less about chickens, logs, or anything else their parents found interesting.
    “Are you even listening to what I say?” I said to Mark.
    “Are you listening to what I say?”
    In that moment, Mark and I were together, both gazing in the same direction, both wanting to create a new, country life, yet we were seeing totally different things in the same landscape. For a couple who had always shared a common vision, this difference was as if we were going blind.

“Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”
    — Henry David Thoreau
SIXTY FIVE PERCENT REAL
    My Eliza Doolittle project was set to