One-eyed Jack

So. About fifteen years ago in a town not too far away, I found a playing card face-down on the pavement. I'd  once found a piece of jigsaw puzzle in that vicinity (a piece of the puzzle!) which I carried in my wallet for a long time. It had an abstract design I couldn't make heads or tails of, but it seemed significant.

The card I found had an ordinary pattern on the back. I picked it up. It was a jack of spades, a one-eyed jack in his usual finery. Well, cool. I put that in my wallet too and left it there. At some point I ditched the puzzle piece, but I liked the card. I carried it.

A year or two went by. I was in the parking lot of my small town's grocery store when I saw a playing card (face down) on the blacktop. 

Well. It had a hole punched in the middle and said "Casino Niagara." I scooped it up. There it was. A jack of spades.

Whoa. Not least because I'd recently visited Niagara Falls, and, as an evolving humanist who'd rejected gods in favor of natural wonders, found it very inspirational. All this and the jack of spades, too.

I set the first card in a safe place and began carrying the second. 

I believed there would be a third. So I waited.

Years went by.

I wondered.

I don't believe in patterns built into the universe on purpose by a benevolent Designer. I did back when I was a Christian Scientist; not recently. I've read about chaos theory. I've seen the whorls of frost on how many window panes. I've taken the time to marvel at individual snowflakes on my sleeve on a winter day, each the same and yet different. I remember  reading the mathematical equation that estimated potential differences in crystals thus proving how our planet's total number of uniquely patterned flakes from snowstorms, glaciers and blizzards can't possibly have come anywhere close to exhausting the possible variations.

I also know that we humans by nature seek to find patterns and threads in our  universe. So when I look at Jack Frost's artwork on my winter window, I see flowers and leaves of bitter- cold flora. My jack-of-spades bug was something similar. I believed it had to do with paying attention more than a message.

So I waited. Years went by.

I never consciously gave up. I just found myself not expecting the third card. I thought, Maybe I'm the third card...maybe the search is what's important to me...Maybe et cetera. I was OK with this. Still...

More years went by.

Four years ago, I stood in the wood-fired kitchen of a friend's log cabin gourmet restaurant here in upstate New York when I saw the card (face down) on her window sill. Pattern similar to the first I'd found. Normal playing card.

Yeah, I thought. There is no way. It's not a jack of spades. But I have to turn it over. I don't want to see the pattern fail, but I'm OK with it. It's amazing enough that there's a third card in my path, the only feral, wayward playing cards I've ever come across.

And yet I knew as I flipped it over: hello, jack. His one eye almost winked at me.

I didn't carry that one in my wallet very long. (The woman gave me the card when I told her; how  could she not?) Instead I put the three together in a frame. An homage to the numbers.

The odds are infinite enough to form a pattern. A single clear eye is all it takes to notice. It's just a matter of watching.

My Problem With Prayer: Part 3 of 3

Prayer was a critical daily ritual when I was a kid. Every morning I studied the weekly Christian Science bible lesson and tried to focus my thoughts on  a perfect all-powerful God. I took it more seriously when I wasn't feeling well. I had to say the Daily Prayer by Mary Baker Eddy: "Thy kingdom come, let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all sin, and may Thy word enrich the affection of all mankind and govern them."

Then I was hit with osteomyelitis, a sledge hammer of a bone disease, when I was thirteen (and fourteen). I survived, bedridden for a year at home. I never saw a doctor about it until twenty years later. Beyond my fused knee, the crutches and my shell-shocked mind, I was left convinced that my church's teachings were infallible. I had an imperfect  leg because I'd 
failed to understand my way to perfect health. The most frustrating thing was that no matter how badly I wanted to throw myself at situation, tackle it, slam it to the ground and pin it, the only solution I was offered was more prayer...quiet, intense, inspired studying to lift my thought and bring my whole experience into the consciousness of God's spiritual universe.

So I kept praying. And I dove into the hardest physical work I could find. Physical exhaustion kept me from thinking too much for twenty years before I finally left the church. I survived my twenties galloping bottom-rung racehorses and did farm work; I stacked hay bales, pitched manure or straw, shoveled snow or shavings. My end-of-the-day drug of choice was ice cream. Lots of ice cream. Chocolate ice cream. Every night. I slept soundly, other than the twitching and jerking awake that comes with PTSD.

There's nothing as simultaneously as thrilling and lulling as the gallop of a twelve-hundred pound thoroughbred you ride standing in short stirrups, aware of everything in general and nothing in particular. One emotionally rough summer, I drove the baler when we hayed. It was both deafening and soothing to open up the tractor's throttle as the baler roared and clanked a beat that shook the whole rig. Baling required me to watch where the windrow fed in, glance behind where the bales dropped out, keep an eye out for woodchuck holes and a dozen other variables. It took a wide-angle concentration, "soft eyes" as the Centered Riding folks say. See everything without staring too hard at one thing. Prey animals use this ability to watch and then flee from danger. Quick reflexes. Like the frogs my daughter catches (sometimes) in our pond. Or like a wild horse.

I started investigating what's called natural horsemanship around the time I left Christian Science. I was grateful to find I wasn't a disembodied spiritual concept . I was part of the natural world. I didn't have to take responsibility for everything I came in contact just because I was conscious of it as I'd been taught. My transition into being mortal was rocky, but all the while I was learning similar things about horses that I'd noticed but never really considered. The way they need their herd, need a leader, need to pester and push each other all day every day to stay in a healthy pecking order that determines who survives. I've never liked  anthropomorphism. But I'm guilty of "equinizing" myself. When I stopped trying to be the image-and-likeness-of-God, I started seeing all my own prey animal traits.Yes, I'm technically a predator. But Christian Science imprinted me with fear: fear of doing wrong, embarrassing myself, shaming my family, or even of causing disease by my fear itself because that's the slippery slope of that particular church. Prayer was my obsessive compulsion. I didn't dare stop. 

Natural horsemanship required me to stop fearing and be a herd leader so strong that the most frightened or belligerent horse could respect me. I had to stop fearing, demonstrate my competence on a horse's terms in various exercises, usually on the ground at first, then on horseback. I had to relax and breathe. I had to emanate confidence, strength and leadership. In all kinds of little practice drills, I had to demonstrate such safety and presence that my horse would also breathe, relax, and wait for me to lead the way to safety. If I didn't want my horse to take charge and bolt home, I needed to learn to hold still and exhale my tension, whether at the end of the rope or on the horse's back.

That terrified, damaged creature inside me didn't want any part of it. At clinics the instructors yelled, "SLOW DOWN, Liz! Take a breath!" At home I tried to practice sitting still. I sat on a chair on the deck. OK. But if I closed my eyes and tried not to think, all the millions of words and prayers and bible stories boiled up. Screw that--I was moving! I was out of there. Prayer was the religious stick I was beaten with. It was a pressure to escape.

But I needed to figure it out. For myself as well as the horses. Horses had carried me so far, at times so fast, on their legs. Now it was time to turn and face details of my life that were just a blur from the back of a running horse. And if I succeeded, the horses would take comfort from it too.

Taming myself is still an ongoing project. I gradually coaxed myself into easing up and slowing down. As I passed forty my leg began to wear out, my joints all complained and my back was tricky. I'd gotten away by running, in a manner of speaking, from my thoughts all these years and I couldn't hold that pace. But it was OK to feel myself become methodical. And then amputation downshifted me right into diligence. I can't be quick wearing an above-knee prosthesis. I miss my agility. I miss the days of galloping at the track although I knew they weren't going to last forever. I miss the rambling trail rides that are the perks of the two-legged riders. 

But there's such relief in having turned and faced the fear that chased me so long. I have my motion-meditation. In swimming. In a smoother walking gait than I had with my own legs for thirty years. In playing my drumset, which I started three days before my amputation. I know that to relax--to let my thoughts drift--I need motion and rhythm. Who knows? Maybe I'll get back to riding more. I might be ready to take the time to learn the finer points I was in too much rush to focus on when I had two legs. My horse won't mind if we go slow. She just enjoys my company. She feels safe with me, in my herd.

My Problem With Prayer: Part 2

A few months after I was able to stand upright on crutches I climbed on my crazy appaloosa and started riding. I was fifteen the summer of 1977: I'd spent a year in bed and six months in a wheelchair with a bone disease my parents and Christian Science practitioner treated only with prayer. As I crept around on my crutches with my rigid bent leg held out ahead of me, I continued to pray desperately. I wanted the perfection I was assured I could have, not just the scarred survival I'd clawed my way into. To give up on a complete HEALING through Christian Science would have been to revolt against the cause that had ruined my knee and crushed my normal transition out of childhood. My mind was as weak my twisted leg. Neither was strong enough to support me. So I went on praying.

Christian Science prayer is the mental contortion of imagining without insisting, yearning without selfishly wanting, envisioning and "opening your thought" to perfection while being one thousand percent grateful for what you have already, even this excruciating opportunity itself. It's a gentle gloved hand reassuringly resting on the back of your neck that can slip around your throat and squeeze. And squeeze. It holds the pain of your despair of failing to be HEALED exactly in balance with the agony and shame you'll feel if you try to extricate yourself. This was my experience with prayer. "Be still and know that I am God." Or else.

But on a horse? Movement. I could travel, explore, gallop and jump. Riding was motion and rhythm, freedom and flight, power and strength and speed. When my anxiety descended in the late afternoons as darkness loomed and fear clamped its hands on my shoulders, I could slip onto a horse, preferably bareback, and feel my mount settle into a loose-limbed walk down a trail or back road. It relaxed my mind; it settled my mood; it let me meet the night on my own terms. Riding gave me back the running that my legs would never manage again. And though I wasn't conscious of it, riding gave my cornered and frightened self a way to relax in peace.

I was a devout Christian Scientist straight through my twenties; the only thing I treated as seriously was hard work and riding. I'd always wanted to ride racehorses. I got my chance when a local track built for quarter horse racing opened as a training facility. It had a five-eighths mile track, a quarter-mile chute down the homestretch, and a starting gate. It also had a thousand empty stalls, acres of crumbling parking lot and a grandstand full of pigeons. There were never more than fifty horses stabled there at one time, usually only a dozen or two. But the horses needed galloping. And so did I.

Exercising meant endless circuits of the track at a full gallop, usually two, four or more laps per horse. The colts and fillies we started had to learn a steady gait to develop condition and balance before we could tap into their competitive spirit. The seasoned horses were athletes. They knew the drill, knew how to breathe and snort in time to their stride.

I loved those laps pounding along at a strong and yet effortless gallop. I'd stand balanced in my stirrups with the sun warm on my shoulders and the wide rubber-coated reins snug in my hands. I learned to breathe in time to the stride so I wouldn't get a stitch in my side the way I used to back when I could run...run... It was an antidote to the inward spiral of fear and concentration when I prayed. It set free the caged animal in my brain.

My left leg was fused slightly more open than ninety degrees. Trainers had to leg me up in a different way and I couldn't hike up my stirrups super short. But there weren’t any rules at the little nowheres-ville track. There was effective riding and ineffective. To slow an iron-mouthed veteran I stood in my stirrups like a water-skier and leaned my weight against the bit, or gathered the reins short and set my hands down on the horse’s neck to use his muscle as leverage against him.

The irony of those countless, steady laps was that it was the rehearsal for a flat-out racing pace. Each day galloping taught the colts about the setting and the company of horses running beside them. It prepped their muscles to breeze. The methodical, tiring, and usually--fortunately--uneventful laps were the building blocks of speed.

When I “worked” a horse, I crouched low over his withers and let his strides quicken until the beat began to sing, began to inspire him to pass his stablemate. To stampede down the stretch in front of a hollow grandstand full of  birds and a woodchuck in the infield. Horses understand the goal of getting there first. The need to outrun and not be slowest is how this animal evolved. To survive. Honing that need for flight into a celebration of power transcended wild fear, harnessed  and guided it. Riding horses that loved to run on that equine autobahn of track was the most powerful thing I'd ever done. It was a rush unlike anything else.

I didn't view it as another form of flight from my own issues until years later. I didn't recognize my own inability to be still, like a nervous horse that won't stand. Like a horse, I've felt the paralysis when movement is frustrating and impossible, when I cannot step forward as asked. But I've also had a need for pounding hoofs and reactive horses that bolt rather than balk. Don't force me to hold still. I can't. I won't.

Eventually I had to learn to be quiet, and breathe, and stand my ground. More on that tomorrow in Part 3 when I wrap up this meditation on prayer.

My dad took this photo of me working Rite On John up the stretch at Tioga Park in 1985. Those were the days, you know?

My Problem With Prayer: Part 1

Prayer in Christian Science is defined as the desire to align your consciousness with God rather than to ask for something. I was raised to believe the universe was spiritual. Any discord or physical problem was due to my misunderstanding or ignorance of God's perfect creation--something like mathematics, where an error in my understanding can't change the reality of the correct equation. Two plus two is not five, but believing it is five causes problems until I realize the truth.

My ability to pray was put to the test  when I was not quite fourteen. Overnight I developed a bone disease in my left knee that incapacitated me. I spent a hellish year praying--studying the bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and all her many other writings, speaking to my Christian Science practitioner (whom my parents paid to pray for me) on the phone and in person as my infected leg drained pus. I'd never taken a pill in my life, not even aspirin, and I didn't then. I never saw  doctor. I did what I was told: I prayed. My parents and church staked my life on prayer.

I expected to be healed. Instead I experienced a year of bedridden anguish, terror, isolation, shame, and pain. Lots of pain.

Brain scans (magnetoencephalography) on people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder have shown abnormal physical changes. I was diagnosed with severe PTSD at age 33 after leaving Christian Science and my first marriage. It was a relief when I read that the mind-bending, brain-warping trip of my childhood had caused damage that could be measured as physically as the deformation of the fused leg I limped on. (This was after I learned to accept that the physical universe is, in fact, real. That was a hard one. When my sanity came, I thought I was losing my mind.)

I'd been in the habit of reading and studying Christian Science literature like a mad thing. In that metaphysical mindset, how you think about everything is critical. It not only determines your happiness but your health. You spend most of your time as your own thought-police. Ever since I could read, I was encouraged, taught and urged to pore over the bible lesson (inlcuding Science and Health) every morning. I read articles in the  church's weekly and monthly magazines. After I got sick, my practitioner told me to read Science and Health straight through, five or ten pages a day, cross-referencing significant words in Eddy's other writings. Words like run, knees, life. Material life was only symbolic, after all, like warped  numbers written on paper. Over the course of thirty years as a diligent, prayerful Christian Scientist, I probably read every single word Eddy every wrote. I read Science and Health from cover to cover probably--what? Half a dozen times? Ten times? Prayer was a lifeline. Durint the state of receptive, fervent quiet, I ached for just one glimpse of my true spiritual being. It would lift my consciousness into health and peace. It was a mental headlock I welcomed. It was the only way of life I knew or could imagine. Prayer was my only hope.

When I left Christian Science, I stopped praying. Guess what? I didn't miss it. The lack didn't make any difference in my life. When I broke down, fell apart, thought I was dying and prepared to step off the edge of my fearful, sacred world, there was no edge. I braced myself to fall but the world kept going. I didn't have to pray. I could thumb my nose at prayer and at the concept of a "God", mock it, blaspheme it, ridicule it. It made no difference.

The biggest difference was that I stopped being afraid. I still worry about the parent stuff, something happening to my kids. But almost nothing else really bothers me. This is a paradox because I suffered from panic attacks and flashbacks, emotional triggers and five-alarm meltdowns for many years. I'm not immune now, though I'm a lot more stable. But the level of fear in  my life has been negligible compared to the anxious paralysis I lived in all those years, and the trance-state of euphoria I used to "pray" myself into.

So I didn't (and don't) miss praying. (It also opened up a lot of time in my schedule.) But I noticed a side effect. It was difficult for me to hold still. I couldn't just sit and think, relax and chill. I just didn't like to. The time I tried a mild meditation exercise with some friends almost sent me into a full blown crisis. It was too much like prayer. It sent me reeling toward panic and terror. I had to get up and move.

Or better yet...get on a horse and ride. Clear my mind and let the rhythm of hoof beats bring my breathing back to normal. Trail riding was always critical to me; it became my form of meditation, motion without too much thought, activity that let the wheels in my head spin in neutral while I relaxed. It saved me.

More about this tomorrow.  I'm heading into territory that is important to me and, I hope, to you. I welcome your comments & thoughts.

A Pony (Almost) in My Lap

I trimmed my little pony today. I did most of my horses' trimming for twenty years, except for tricky cases or corrections. That went out the window when I joined the ranks of the unipeds. Forever, I assumed. 

But in a moment of weakness a while back I bought a mini colt. My logic was pretty good, in a horse-aholic's twisted way: I'd teach him to drive, get a cart, and use the mini-size harness my daughter bought half a dozen years ago. (Never mind that the harness is still in the box because she never got around to driving her mini either...) I thought a miniature horse was a good compromise, half way between a full-sized horse and the model horses I started with as a kid which I feel destined to return to in my eventual fossil-hood. And I can drive a pony cart with my prosthesis on, which would solve one problem I have riding without it.

The colt's a sorrel, unregistered, not well-bred, with a blond tail that drags on the ground.  A friend of a friend sold her collection of minis because of her illness. I just took a look of course, to be polite, but this little guy sauntered up to me with brassy curiosity and immediately I remembered the new harness in the box at home. 

It's been two years and I admit I haven't had the harness on him...but he's mannerly and sweet and a blast to watch gallop around the pond or play tag with my older daughter's St. Bernard. And I trim him myself.  Usually I work the nippers with one hand and hold up his foot with the other because I can't put his hoof between my knees. The rasp is easier, one-handed. Today my organic knee began to make these ominous crunching sounds as I leaned over the little hoof. It's been doing this a lot lately. It doesn't hurt but it sounds as though the brittle pieces of joint and knee cap are all grinding together under the skin like a tin can of rocks.

Well, hey. The ground was dry (too damn dry for March in New York state. Mud season is a time honored tradition you can count on no matter how much or little snow we get) so I sat down. I felt a little ridiculous: I spent twenty-odd years as a fervent, conscientious instructor with posted rules and regulations in my barn and a pristine safety record. I was a stickler for correct positions and thinking ahead to what a horse might do. But I've punched out on that clock. It's time for practicality. I tried kneeling as I trimmed, and that worked pretty well...but I gave in and sat down. Gave my little pony a manicure. Why not, you know?

He's no toy and I know it. People get in trouble thinking minis aren't wired exactly like their twelve-hundred pound counterparts, usually with a Napoleon complex to boot. But I've taught him to behave, and I actually put a halter and line on him and did a little ground work refresher course, you know, before I sat him in my lap.

I'm still teetering a little on my increased-height prosthesis. That thigh's a little wobbly this week between the extra work it's doing and the latest pummeling (ahem: lengthening) work by my massage therapist. I think it'll steady out pretty soon. 

Then it'll be time to get that harness out of the box and put the little guy to work.

My Ph...(TS)...D...in panic

The term 'panic fear' comes from stories of the Greek god Pan. According to myth, he howled in the darkness to scare the sheep and goats, and their human shepards. Panic is the mindless, instinctive, all-encompassing need to bolt. It's hard-wired in prey animals, including horses, as a survival mechanism. It's also found in humans who've been pushed too far by fear and stress and powerlessness.

Horses have taught me there's no finite definition of abuse, no measurable amount of stress that causes this permanent damage and reactivity. Individuals react differently, whether they're horse or human. One trauma isn't worse than another; mine wasn't greater or lesser than anyone else's. Trauma happens when you're pushed past the limit of what you can bear. It's that point of no return. It's too much.

I spent twenty years pretty sure I was crazy. Not the high-as-a-kite mood swings and craving for risk from riding a fractious horse away from my crutches (bareback, no less) at fifteen when I couldn't yet walk, to climbing fifty-foot-high trees when I was twenty, to galloping racehorses, fused knee and all, including when I was pregnant with my first child.

The behavior that worried me was much worse. It was my months of uncontrollable bingeing and fasting in high school as I tried to force my body into a shape I recognized. It was my compulsive treks walking laps through my house as I tried to force my knee to bend or straighten even as the joint fused itself solid. It was the rages, the black despair that knocked me off my feet into a fetal position in bed for hours or days at a time. I loathed myself and my inability to be HEALED by Christian Science. Which I knew was my own inability to understand some element I lacked, some instant of spiritual harmony and enlightenment that I'd been waiting for since I lay in bed for ten months with osteomyelitis at fourteen. The key to  the moment when I would feel my motionless joint and tendons stretch and flex, maybe just a little at first. Or maybe all at once. And my knee would let me walk and run again. It had to happen. Or everything I'd already been through was for nothing. That was not a concept I could look at.

I couldn't always get myself to school, and then I couldn't always stay there. I sleep-walked through high school for weeks at a time. Idle remarks from friends or strangers triggered avalanches of shame that buried me alive. I felt isolated from my handful of close friends. I thought about killing myself. 

But I had to do my chores. My horses were waiting for me at the pasture gate. So I hung on and kept putting one foot in front of the other even on unbearable days.

Married at twenty-two to my first boyfriend, I'd be triggered during an argument. I'd jump into my battered old Dodge Dart and slam the pedal to the floor around a miles-long country block, straddling yellow lines, squealing bare tires on curves as the fear acted as a tranquilizer and soothed my raw nerves. Maybe that was part of the appeal of exercising racehorses. It was a form of anesthetic. Like the way I sometimes punched myself in the head, above the hairline. At times pain felt better than despair and panic.

Teachers said I had a bad attitude. School acquaintances wondered aloud if I was manic depressive. My first husband told me I was nuts. I was afraid he was right.

I first saw a psychotherapist when I was thirty-three. I was divorced with a five-year-old. I'd finally rejected the religion I'd bet my life on and my mind was coming off the rails. I shook and cried when I told the therapist my story. She told me I had severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

She saw me two (and sometimes three) times a week that year. I stayed in therapy more or less fifteen years including group and individual sessions. And gradually I learned how to manage that wild-eyed, dangerous animal hysterically kicking in the darkened stall in my head, the creature who was also a girl in bed praying to be healed while she wished she could die.

I've found a truce with the resonance of that panicked girl. It's taken all these years of talk therapy and meds and paying attention to what I feel. I'm here to tell you: self-awareness is a bitch. It's taken a long time for me to learn to recognize when my anxiety is starting to hum, and regard it as the herald of a rough patch I can treat, and not accept that the walls are truly crowding in. Now I can (usually) separate myself and view it as a symptom of my chronic condition, something to be managed like a migraine. Not lose myself in it so that I believe everything is wrong and it's up to me. Flashbacks don't have wavy dissolves and echoey narrators saying, "Let's go back in time," like a B-movie. My flashbacks open a trap door under me or drench me in icy emotional water if someone says certain words that set me off like a plastic bag blowing under a horse's feet. I get plunged into that old crazy emotion. I'm not my panic. But it still sits close to me. 

Novembers are hard. My childhood ended one Saturday in November when my leg swelled and the bone disease began. And a lot of sundowns are tough, especially when the days are short and night comes too soon. I like to be outside at dusk when I feel that hand clamp onto my heart. I like to walk in the woods in the dry leaves listening to sticks breaking under my feet. I like to stay out as the darkness falls. I'm OK with the night; it's just the sunset transition when I need to know I'm free to move.

The last few nights I've heard coyotes howling in the woods around midnight, yipping and screaming like girls at a pool party. I like hearing them. They're the voice of the night in my pocket of New York state wilderness. They're not old Pan. He sounds (and feels) completely different when he starts calling.

My crush on the colt next door

He's in the big pasture down the road where it turns and slopes downhill, there by the barn that has a fading painted smile. He appeared last winter: a bony brown critter with ribs and hips jutting. He kept his head in the hay feeder or eagerly devoured the sparse tufts of dead grass. Rescue case, someone said at the feed store. Over the winter he gained back all his missing weight and rolled his chestnut coat clean in the grass. He's filled out. He feels good. I've seen him bucking and chasing the old pinto draft horse he's pastured with. He pesters like the two- or three-yearold stud colt he probably is. Lately I've seen him in the corral, maybe in time-out. Give the old horse a chance to catch his breath.

I slow down my truck as I drive by. He's a tough little colt with that short-backed rugged look that appeals to me like sideburns on men and a cerain kind of mustache. Maybe he's a mustang from the adoption program. Maybe he's quarter horse crossed with a pony, with a little Arab thrown in. I've thought about stopping my truck to say hi.

It's the spring that does this to me. It's that colt's look. It takes me back to horses that got under my skin, a few out of hundreds I've met, fiesty fillies and capricious colts that lured me into their lives whether it was good for me or not. Tough little horses to trot down dirt roads, stroll between hardwoods and pines on the hills, lope along logging trails and over the downed trees. Hard-headed overgrown ponies to gallop across a hayfield and then hose clean, step right into the trailer and head for a parade or show. 

Yeah, some were heartbreakers; I was lucky they weren't bone-breakers. But none of that matters. The leaves are budding, grass greening up, and I gaze at the colt as I drive by.

I'm not twenty anymore. I'm certainly not fearless. I don't even have two legs. I'm in a committed relationship with a fabulous mare at home, my sane and sensible mount, the only horse I've ridden since my amputation. I should know better.

But I feel this ache. I know the woman who owns that farm. She's got llamas and peacocks and a camel, too. (She gave me a ride on the camel). She swims the lake every summer with me. I could ask her about the colt.

I'm not going to. I don't want to know. The colt looks like frosty October trails with an exuberant buck saved for when a deer dashes across the path ahead. He's the dust and blistering sun at the summer 4H shows, and the bareback jump course of plastic barrels in the pasture after supper. I'm going to keep watching him wistfully with this sweet arrow through my heart for what I've had, for what I wish I could have one more time. He's one of the colts of spring. I'm glad to recognize him. And let myself imagine what we might have had.