scheduled chores just as the day became blue. We took up pitchforks, wheelbarrows, brooms. Balance could also be found in labor, in the repetition of small tasks that occupied the body as they freed the mind. We learned to wash the tack. We climbed ladders, crawled into the cupola with a rag and a tin bucket. Once inside that cupola, I found an intact but dead dragonfly. Its body glinted green, like the ones I’d seen in the woods. The wings were netted and reminded me of the nylons my mother wore. How odd, something similar between two species that shared next to nothing. And yet, maybe the spaces between them were not so great. Weeks went by. I learned to balance on the broad back of a horse. As I did I found I could do more than just hold on. I found I could talk to the horse with my legs, my hands, my weight, and that the horse, in turn, could talk to me.
Reassuring, yes. Apparently nature had these built-in bridges, and who knew how far they could go? If a thousand-pound, hard-hoofed beast could understand you, and vice versa, well then, who or what could not? Horses proved that there was no such thing as an impossible conversation.
I think we came to Flat Rock Farm for this impossibly possible talk. We were all girls between eleven and sixteen, but the gaps in age were irrelevant here. All the ordinary dividing lines dissolved: old/young/fat/thin/pretty/ugly/well-dressed/slob/rich/poor. Here all girls were equaled by shoveling shit and putting in bits. When everyone stinks, no one does.
While Freudians posit that girls are drawn to horses as a form of heterosexual practice (in both its private and public manifestations), maybe the opposite is the case. Perhaps girls are drawn to horses because these grand animals provide girls a rare opportunity to be together, as females,
unsaddled
by cultural conventions. At Flat Rock Farm, Jenny, the fat girl, was friends with Theresa, the prom queen. I remember one rest hour going to the barn, all twelve of us girls, and finding there in the back tack room an old trunk.
“Open it up,” Emily whispered.
Outside it was high noon, glaring and hot, but inside the tack room the air was dark and quiet, the saddles on their mounts looking haunted, their shape suggesting a rider we couldn’t see.
We opened the trunk. It was from another century, lined with crumbling floral paper. In there we found a black-and-white photograph of a stern, slim woman sitting high on her high horse. With one hand she held the reins, in the other a bouquet of roses. Beneath her a judge was pinning a ribbon and rose to her horse’s bridle.
We found flouncy skirts held up by hoops; jodhpurs padded with threadbare suede; boots that laced up the front with tiny tarnished fishhooks; a postcard showing a massive ship, its prow raised above the wild waters of what must have been the Atlantic, on the backside someone’s spidery script, impossible to read except the end:
Love to you all, to the farm, to Lady–Moi.
“‘Moi’?” whispered Amy.
“‘Me’ in French,” whispered Jenny, holding the card, turning it over and over.
“Why are we whispering?” shouted Theresa.
All twelve of us girls jumped as though we’d been stuck with a cattle prod.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!” said Jane. “Jesus!”
“Look at this,” said Elizabeth, and she pulled from the trunk a straw hat banded by a cucumber-colored ribbon; she put it on.
That was the beginning. Someone else pulled on the old black boots, another girl the once-white skirts. That trunk had no end; from its interior came more and more clothes, came pearls and brooches, hard hats and sun hats, multiple corsets with ribbon and eyehooks, crumpled kid gloves. Despite the heat, we shucked our standard uniform and dressed ourselves right out of this world, and when we were done, we walked around, bowing to one another, admiring.
Not long ago, Amy Brisbee, a girl who’d been at Flat Rock Farm during the same summers I was, e-mailed me a picture of us
Reassuring, yes. Apparently nature had these built-in bridges, and who knew how far they could go? If a thousand-pound, hard-hoofed beast could understand you, and vice versa, well then, who or what could not? Horses proved that there was no such thing as an impossible conversation.
I think we came to Flat Rock Farm for this impossibly possible talk. We were all girls between eleven and sixteen, but the gaps in age were irrelevant here. All the ordinary dividing lines dissolved: old/young/fat/thin/pretty/ugly/well-dressed/slob/rich/poor. Here all girls were equaled by shoveling shit and putting in bits. When everyone stinks, no one does.
While Freudians posit that girls are drawn to horses as a form of heterosexual practice (in both its private and public manifestations), maybe the opposite is the case. Perhaps girls are drawn to horses because these grand animals provide girls a rare opportunity to be together, as females,
unsaddled
by cultural conventions. At Flat Rock Farm, Jenny, the fat girl, was friends with Theresa, the prom queen. I remember one rest hour going to the barn, all twelve of us girls, and finding there in the back tack room an old trunk.
“Open it up,” Emily whispered.
Outside it was high noon, glaring and hot, but inside the tack room the air was dark and quiet, the saddles on their mounts looking haunted, their shape suggesting a rider we couldn’t see.
We opened the trunk. It was from another century, lined with crumbling floral paper. In there we found a black-and-white photograph of a stern, slim woman sitting high on her high horse. With one hand she held the reins, in the other a bouquet of roses. Beneath her a judge was pinning a ribbon and rose to her horse’s bridle.
We found flouncy skirts held up by hoops; jodhpurs padded with threadbare suede; boots that laced up the front with tiny tarnished fishhooks; a postcard showing a massive ship, its prow raised above the wild waters of what must have been the Atlantic, on the backside someone’s spidery script, impossible to read except the end:
Love to you all, to the farm, to Lady–Moi.
“‘Moi’?” whispered Amy.
“‘Me’ in French,” whispered Jenny, holding the card, turning it over and over.
“Why are we whispering?” shouted Theresa.
All twelve of us girls jumped as though we’d been stuck with a cattle prod.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!” said Jane. “Jesus!”
“Look at this,” said Elizabeth, and she pulled from the trunk a straw hat banded by a cucumber-colored ribbon; she put it on.
That was the beginning. Someone else pulled on the old black boots, another girl the once-white skirts. That trunk had no end; from its interior came more and more clothes, came pearls and brooches, hard hats and sun hats, multiple corsets with ribbon and eyehooks, crumpled kid gloves. Despite the heat, we shucked our standard uniform and dressed ourselves right out of this world, and when we were done, we walked around, bowing to one another, admiring.
Not long ago, Amy Brisbee, a girl who’d been at Flat Rock Farm during the same summers I was, e-mailed me a picture of us
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