Farms have fences. People have boundaries. Mine began crumbling the day I knelt behind a male sheep, reached between his legs, and squeezed his testicles. This unsettling event took place the blustery November day when I joined a group of shepherd-wannabes for a weekend class on the basics of raising sheep. I was there with my partner Melissa, the woman I’d lived with and loved for twelve years, because we were going to start a farm.

Janet, the course instructor, had motioned us closer. “Grab his testicles here, around the widest part,” she commanded. I shot a look of panic to Melissa. Janet wanted us to what? We moved in to hear her over the frigid wind. “Ram testicles should be about sixteen inches around,” she said.

I huddled closer to Melissa as I tried to stay warm in my leather aviator jacket, red scarf and white sneakers. My head was numb from the cold, but a hat was out of the question because I would not appear in public with “hat hair.” I snuggled down as far as I could into my collar, and realized something soft and lumpy was stuck to the bottom of my sneaker. Melissa wore a heavy winter coat, a massive wool hat with flaps, bulky winter snow boots. She looked ridiculous.

She also looked warm. I pressed my upturned collar to my icy ears as Janet nodded to Melissa and me. We were next.

I stepped forward and stood behind the sturdy ram locked in a head gate, calmly chewing his cud. Sixteen inches. Cripes. Skeptical, I moved closer. “You sure he won’t mind?”

“Positive,” Janet said. Her long gray hair whirled around her reddened face and she wasn’t even wearing gloves. “You need to know what healthy ram testicles feel like. Grasp them firmly, feeling for any soft spots or hard lumps.”

Right. No problem. The ram, built like a small chest freezer, had stood still while seven other couples fiddled with him. Melissa danced in place beside me, eager for her turn.

I knelt behind the ram, whose thighs narrowed to tiny sharp hooves that looked dainty but deadly. His cropped tail covered his anus, but small dried hunks of manure clung to the edges of his wool. Please don’t poop now, I prayed as I leaned forward.

“C’mon, Cath, you can do it,” Melissa said, practically trembling with enthusiasm.

I moaned under my breath. What on earth was I thinking? At that very moment most of my friends were attending a writing conference in St. Paul. They were warm, clean, and didn’t have anything soft and lumpy stuck to their sneaker bottoms. They were discussing point of view, character development, and the latest publishing information. Their boundaries were intact enough that they were not feeling up a ram with sixteen-inch testicles.

Wincing, I reached between the ram’s back legs with my thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t pinch him,” Janet cried.

By now the rest of the class had turned to watch. Embarrassed, I took a deep breath and wrapped both hands around the pendulous testicles. They were warm, squishy, and woolly. I squeezed gently, wondering briefly if this was the ram’s favorite part of the course.

I let go and shot to my feet. “Okay, next?”

“Me, me,” Melissa whispered as she dropped to her knees and immediately began poking and prodding the poor guy, even craning around his hip to stare at his penis. The books we’d read had said when you buy a ram you should manipulate the penis to collect a semen sample for testing. Even Melissa, a hands-on person if there ever was one, had reservations about this procedure. Luckily Janet hadn’t included it in the weekend’s curriculum.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets. My eyes watered from the wind. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to be working on my new children’s book, which had nothing whatsoever to do with ram testicles. But instead I hunched over against the wind and followed the class to the next task, which involved wrestling a two-hundred-pound ewe from a standing position back onto her rump.

The bored ewe stood there as, one by one, the class members grasped her under the chin, then under her tail. They grunted and groaned and twisted her back, but few were successful. I was too damn frozen to even think about taking my hands out of my pockets. I’d lost all feeling in my face, fingers, and feet. Melissa tackled the leggy ewe with enthusiasm, and was nearly successful, until the fed-up ewe twisted, turned, and darted through Melissa’s legs. With a whoop, Melissa suddenly found herself riding the ewe, backwards. We laughed so hard I thought my cheeks would crack in the cold.

Melissa and I had laughed our way through crises and misunderstandings and disagreements. We shared a bed, a bank account, and—after Melissa’s energetic campaigning years earlier—we shared an underwear drawer, my size 7s commingling twenty-four hours a day with her size 5s. Sharing an underwear drawer had seemed a small and easy concession, but apparently underwear-mingling is a slippery slope, one of life’s dangers they never mentioned in Health Class. Underwear-mingling can lead straight to the more disastrous sharing of dreams, because Melissa wanted me to share her dream—of owning a farm, of living on that farm, of being a farmer.

Farming had never been my dream. My dream was to grow my writing career into something I could call “successful,” whatever that was. I’d already sold two children’s books and a handful of magazine stories. I was hungry for more.

Could our dreams of farming and writing coexist? Why not? Charlotte’s Web creator E. B. White had been a great writer, and he farmed. Ernest Hemingway had used Key West as a romantic place to write. Hadn’t the Brontë sisters lived isolated lives? I could imagine myself sitting under the spreading canopy of a mature oak tree, penning a best-selling novel while our wide, green fields glistened in the sun. I’d collected most of my knowledge of country living from art, so I was pretty sure we’d have haystacks like Monet’s. We’d lounge around in the shade and drink lemonade like in a Renoir. We’d live the quaint life painted by Grandma Moses.

Unfortunately, I did not realize that once you’ve squeezed ram testicles, all your well-maintained boundaries collapse and chaos moves in. Would I help Melissa farm? My life with her had led me on many adventures I’d have otherwise missed, so what harm could one more do? The classic face of farming in Grant Wood’s American Gothic was about to get a facelift: two thirty-something women in bib overalls holding pitchforks.

It turns out that, at age thirty-eight, I knew myself about as well as I knew the breeding habits of the Pygmy Butterfly, which is to say, not at all. So when I answered Melissa’s request to help her start the farm with a hearty yes, I might as well have stood on the center line of a four-lane highway and opened my arms. I would witness chicken sex. I would witness duck sex. I would even get frightfully involved in sex between two goats, something no feminist should ever have to face. I would also totally lose myself to my partner’s life—gosh, surely the first woman to do so—and would come to question whether my size 7s really did belong in the same drawer with Melissa’s size 5s.