It hits me every time I go into Rural King. Or when I pass a barn with a riding arena, set up for rodeo or jumping—that familiar twinge of admiration and envy. It’s an agony of nostalgia if I encounter a trail rider and they are mounted and I’m on foot, hiking.

I miss who I was when I was a horse person.

I’m still a horse person. But not like I was. Not when I smelled every day of leather and horse sweat, when there’d by hay in my hair and baling twine in my back pocket.

I still have round pen panels in the garage. I have one remaining saddle, some brushes, a feed pan. I keep a lead rope in the truck.  There’s a hoof pick in my desk drawer in my office.

I go into the farm supply store to buy chicken feed, dog and cat food. I avoid the horse aisles.

I hate not buying fly spray and dewormer and supplements. I hate walking right past all those rows of horse halters and mineral blocks, hoof treatments and curry combs as if all of that never had anything to do with me. As if I never had anything to do with it.

I’ve been blessed with some amazing horses. Pat, the pony who was my first horse love. Beautiful, brilliant, fast Merlin, the horse of my heart and soul. Sweet Crocodile and Mythic the mischievous, Ghostbuster and my dear Joker. Caesar, the gentleman. Pantheon, the rescue I could never quite reach.

Since I was about 5 years old, I’ve said I was born loving horses. I said, “My real mom or dad must love horses.” It was a statement that reverberated within my adoptive family.

And as it turns out, it’s true.  

Ironic: I’ve found where I belong, and I’m not there right now.

I found my biological family, including my father, and I’ve ridden his wonderful mare, Keeper, and we can talk horses all night and all the next day, but my anecdotes are from years past.  There’s nothing new to tell him.

I’ll have horses again someday. I plan to, anyway. Right now, I’m focused on my career as a horror author, a teller of dark stories and flash fiction. I’m rewriting (again) my first novel, and I’ve got four more lined up right behind it.

Truth is, if I have a horse, I won’t write. It’s the time, sure, but more to the point, it’s that the angst pushing me to write evaporates in the presence of horses. I don’t have to do anything more than put my face against a neck, right where it meets the shoulder, or run my hand underneath a mane for everything in my world to tilt onto a more stable axis. (Pun intended.)

I feel like writing is what I’m supposed to be doing right now. Some days I’m sure of it, some days it’s cloudy.

As I write this—this reflection so often in my mind—I can see, from where I sit, the edge of what will someday be a pasture for a couple horses. I know that, if I had horses there now, I could walk outside, go to the gate, and they’d come with their nickers and their face rubs and all this angst would melt.

Instead, I’m holding onto it. I’m about to go back into the document labeled Version 11, with Outline 4, and see if I can tempt a future reader (you, maybe?) to fear the cold, dark water of a strip mine pit lake and the primal creature who swims there, not alone—a creature who misses the way things were before the diggers came. And a main character who is trying to hold onto who she is.