When the weather falls...

     That hint of spiced crispness in the air? The slightly faded shade of sky?  That soft sound like a continuous inhale?

     Yes, Autumn.

     Okay, so maybe it's only 76 degrees outside, but hey, in FL that means it's time to pull on your boots and button up your flannel!
     And, for me, Autumn means horse ache.  Robin loved the Fall; she'd perk up the moment the temp. fell...
     For a while, I forgot how much I missed horse life.  When Robin died I filled the void with dance and school and writing and work.  Then I heard about Freedom Ride and decided to pick up a few more community service hours...

     Six-thirty in the morning.  “Bugler’s Dream” woke me from what was more like a nap than a night’s sleep.  It was freezing dark.  Getting out of bed was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did.  “Why exactly am I doing this again?”  I asked myself once my brain relearned how to construct coherent thought, my head hanging over the bathroom sink, listening to the water drip off my freshly scrubbed face and gurgle down the drain.

     A steamy mug of bold coffee laced my morale, made the morning a little brighter, and my heaterless car a little warmer.  Little encouragements started trickling through my mind: You love horses.  This will be fun.  It’s only for a few hours.  It’s sure to warm up soon.  I curved my car into the Freedom Ride property and parked in the bare grass lot.

     I shivered, and not just from the cold.  Life in the equestrian world ended for me only two years ago, but it was a whole different lifetime, things had changed.  What if I had forgotten how to halter a horse?  Would I remember barn jargon?  How would I react to being around horses again?  Sometimes, I still cried myself to sleep.  Memory would strike like lightning, the thunder echo “never again,” then the rain would pour.

     Ducking under the white fence, I saw a short, lean woman with brown curls bursting out from under a baseball cap, wearing a green Freedom Ride Staff hoodie, approaching me from the barn. 

     “Hi there!  I’m Lisa, the barn manager.”

     “Abi,” I responded, shaking her hand.

     “One of our horses is named Abby!  I’m awful with names but I won’t forget yours for sure.”  

     I followed her chucking into the white-washed barn.  Excitement crept up my spine as old but familiar things flooded my senses: the scraping of boots on cement floors, the jostling of feed buckets, the sweet smell of dusty hay, clicking halter buckles, the snorts of anxious horses impatient to leave their stalls and roll in the pasture.  It was like the voices of old friends calling, “remember me?”

            Yes, yes I did.

            After signing in my name and the time, 8:02am, on the clipboard in the tack room, I followed Lisa past the stalls of the horses we would turn out.  Dusty, Lucky, Ginger, Bella, Abby, Image… each horse had his or her name painted brightly above its stall.

     “You know how to halter a horse?”  Lisa asked me.

     I nodded. 

     “Can you grab Dusty for me then?  He’s gonna go in the gelding pasture, the one in the far back corner.  Oh, and you’re cool with taking a blanket off right?” 

     I was.  Dusty’s halter hung beside his stall so I snatched it as I walked in.  As a therapeutic riding horse to tons of disabled kids, Dusty wasn’t the least bit shy.  His ears pricked up and his thick, muscular neck craned away from his feed bucket to look me over before plodding closer, pushing his nose into my hands.  I felt the mist of his warm breath as he introduced himself with short snorts- horse courtesy.  

     It was the smell that got me, the musky, sweet, earthy, spiced, idiosyncratic smell that is undeniably horse.  My throat contracted and I swallowed hard, then let my face fall into his neck and simply breathed.  It was so good to breathe that smell again, to simply breathe it, not to remember, not to regret, not to anguish, simply to smell, and to heal.

     ... Oh, what sap!  But hey, a girl's allowed some sentimental expression now and then.