A Hundred Horses

On close calls and living another day.

Met a woman with silver hair yesterday who said she had a hundred horses. Asked me where I lived. Said she had just sold the house one street over to a man who was finally going to fix the roads in the neighborhood— a man I just saw on my walk, sitting on his front stoop wearing a bright orange construction vest with a black labrador’s head in his lap. She said he was going to take over the HOA board— that if anyone could shape things up in the neighborhood, he could. Her friend, a gravitational force in patched overalls, agreed that he was a guy you wanted on your side. I’ve known a few of those and haven’t always trusted them.

At least he has the love of a dog, I thought, watching him dip his head to whisper something to his friend. Also, he had hung his laundry on the line in a way that made me believe he might actually do what he said he would do. His shirts were upside down, clipped by the bottom hem so as not to crease the shoulders, and his pants straddled the line by the back rise seam for the same reason. Not a lot of folks know how to properly hang laundry. I learned in Alaska, flipping linens over a line that danced in Denali’s shadow. I loathed ironing out crimp marks, so I listened when the elders told me how to drape them.

I raised my hand to the dog-loving-laundry-man-with-a-penchant-for-pothole-repair and thought again of the silver-haired woman with the horses. She and her friend asked if they could join my daughter and I at our picnic table near the Sri Lankan food truck, and it pleased me greatly that they did. People also don’t ask to share tables enough in this country, and we miss many a good conversation because of it. My daughter jumped up to greet their two tottering corgis, Max and Jack, who plopped down under the table with their tongues lolling out. She then told the horse woman her name and asked if they could be friends. The woman nodded and stuck out her hand, and I noticed as they shook that their fingernails were equally caked with dirt, though one hand had spent decades gripping leather reins in the sun and the other had just begun its many skin-scorching adventures.

The woman opened the lid of her food container and popped a fry in her mouth, tossing a couple to the dogs, and then procured a pocketknife from her jeans to cut her burger in half. My daughter clucked her tongue at her new friend like a worldly old soul and said, sure is nice to have a knife handy, isn’t it? and the woman nodded sagely as she slid her fingers along the blade and said, sure is, honey, before licking the red ketchup from the tips with obvious enjoyment. They both sat in silence then, nodding together as though they had unlocked a secret that very few had a key to.

The gravitational woman chimed in then, telling us that she wished she’d had a knife the other day out on Gunn Ranch Road, when her dog had been attacked by a cougar. We all turned to her, two surprised faces and one knowing one waiting to hear the tale, which she immediately obliged us with. We were walking alone towards dusk, and she just pounced right on top of him. Was only about a hundred pounds to his seventy seven. I ran right at them— I had planned on what I’d do in this situation, you know? And we all nodded, because we did all know, we all had plans, and then she said, I think she would have dragged him away, but I was running and yelling to let him go, that he was mine, and she spooked and released him and I got him back to the car alright.

My daughter dipped her head under the table and looked at the corgis, astonished, and asked which one it had been. The woman chuckled deeply and told her that her dog was bigger than those little things and had been left at home. She said he was fine now— just a quick trip to the vet to treat a few puncture wounds— didn’t seem all that phased by it, to be honest.

I wondered how that could be. How could you survive such a thing and shake it off as though it was business as usual? Maybe it was the company he kept. He lived with tougher cats than that one, after all.

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I met a tiny kitten over the weekend with one eye and a broken jaw. My friend’s husband found the trio of abandoned babies on the side of the road, sitting in the grass with nothing nearby but hay bales. Their son named her Uno. She was the most skittish of the lot at first, when they were bottle-feeding her in those early days, but now she was eating a slurry of formula and kitten food and, while still smaller than the rest, her puff of cloudy fur had a new sheen to it and there was a promising little potbelly under all the floof.

It confounds me that anyone would discard a kitten; look at this sweet baby.

I picked her up and she melted into the crook of my arm, her one eye blinking open and closed as she let me pet her tummy. Her mouth was twisted into a lopsided smile, which was both adorable and utterly heartbreaking. I couldn’t stand to think what had happened to her. Had she been tossed out the window? Abused? My throat closed and temples pounded at the thought of it.

But she was thriving now, in this home filled with love and warm milk, and I wondered if she remembered life before. How could you survive such a thing so early in life and curl into a human’s arms with all the trust in the world? Maybe it was the company she kept. She lived with healing hands and tender words now, a few steps and a million miles from the crueler world outside.

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My husband left the oven on in the mobile home last night. The mobile home is not our home— our home is seventy seven steps away, and the evening was heavy with heat, so we decided to use the oven in that other house on the property, the mostly abandoned one, to crisp up dark green sheets of oil-glistened kale into flaky chips for an appetizer. He usually never forgets such things, being a very meticulous and thoughtful man, but last night he did, so when I went to the mobile home to retire for the night (for that is where my bedroom is, as we gave the only bedroom in our actual home to our daughter, and my husband prefers a couch to a bed so he sleeps in the living room, and I sleep seventy seven steps away, and have for six years now, because this is just the way it is right now), I walked in to find the oven timer was still dinging and the red light glowing in the dark and the house smelled like acrid grease and hot electric elements and general malaise.

I turned everything off and padded down the threadbare carpet to the bedroom, grateful that the air conditioning unit in the window was humming away and that little corner of the house was an oasis of chilled air and soft blankets and half-read books on the bedside table.

Only, I began to feel sick and dizzy after about an hour with my nose buried in an Isabelle Allende novel. I wondered if an electrical appliance could give off carbon monoxide. (It cannot, but the off gassing from the grease can, said a furtive internet search). I had carbon monoxide poisoning once, in a mobile veterinary unit that I worked on in my early thirties, and I mostly remember a dull headache and a sharp, uncharacteristic irritability with my coworkers. We all survived just fine, as did the animals, because someone figured out what was happening before it was too late. But my uncle didn’t fare so well. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning the year before I was born. He was co-piloting a single engine Cessna in the interior of Alaska, and there was a leak, and he and the pilot were not able to crack a window to breathe in the lifesaving air up among the clouds, so they died trying to land. Maybe, by some mercy, they died before the plane landed. Maybe they were forever sleeping when it slammed into the ground, and the wings were torn off. We cannot know. But we do know about the leak and the carbon monoxide because that’s what was pieced together by the men and women that assessed the wreckage of flesh and metal in the weeks that followed.

I slept curled up in my daughter’s tent in the corner of her room last night. I dreamed about the one-eyed kitten, about survival, about trusting an intuitive sense of impending danger in order to live to breathe another day.

My daughter woke me up with her warm body curled into mine early this morning. I do not know when she came down, only that she sought the safety of my arms sometime in the hazy dawn hours. I buried my face in her hair and tried and failed not to wonder what she might need to survive in the long life that lay ahead of her. I hope that she is able to shake off whatever it is and then find arms to hold her in the wake of it— mine or someone else’s— that she is able to open a window to gulp in fresh air when her instincts tell her to get out. I hope that she rides a hundred horses and rescues injured kittens and becomes the kind of gravitational force that convinces the people who manage wildlife to spare the young cougar who attacked her dog, because she was just trying to survive in this hungry world, just like the rest of us. I hope her fingernails always have the earth underneath them, and that she carries a pocketknife that only ever becomes crimson from ketchup at a picnic table.

I awoke grateful to live another day with breath in my own lungs, and a warm body to press up against, the company of tough cats and tender hands. I think I will bake a rhubarb pie today and swim in a lake and look for horses and cougars and kittens and airplanes in the passing clouds. Perhaps this is how we move forward— we bow to the close calls, and we stand up straight and spread our arms towards the sky and we live and we live and we live.

Photo by Vladimir Vujeva on Unsplash