And yet I keep them.

A complicated relationship with horses.

Affinity aka Finny

She stretches like a cat when I open the barn doors in the morning. Front feet out, butt in the air—she bends so low she almost disappears from view behind the stall wall.

When she canters she is so balanced, so buoyant, that I experience near weightlessness at the apex of each stride. She is sometimes so full of energy she feels as if she might explode.

She notices everything—a rabbit in the tall grass, a distant truck with a broken muffler. This is sometimes problematic.

She is ravenous, catastrophically messy in her stall, and never passes up an opportunity to gently smell my children’s cheeks.

I find it difficult to write about horses, which have been my family business, in one way or another, since I was a child. I often resent them–they are so much work, they are too stubborn or too spooky or too energetic (or all of the above), they cost too much money to keep alive.

And yet I keep them. I trudge down to the barn at night, after the kids are in bed, to clean stalls, to stuff hay nets, to fill water buckets to the brim. I do these tasks unthinkingly–these are chores that I’ve done since I was a child. The swing of the rake, the sweeping of the broom. It is the closest I come to meditation.

And then, the reward: One by one I walk them in (there are three). It is difficult to say what it is, exactly, that soothes me. It is the size of them, maybe–the perspective of being in the presence of something so much larger than yourself. Or it is in the minutiae–the soft hollows of their nostrils and the warm blasts of breath that they use to ask questions, to say thank you. They are grateful to me, comforted by the routine.

I linger in the aisle for a few minutes after everyone is in place, listening to their sounds–the munching of hay, the shuffling of hooves in fluffy shavings, the click of a tail flicked against a side. But it is getting late. I have to go. The doors are locked, the lights above each stall are turned off, one by one. They are quiet. I am quieted.