Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards Page A

the thread that seemed to keep me stitched together. Georgia was, in asense, my therapist. For years she listened to my rantings as we tore around the woods. I couldn’t help it. I needed an ear and there they were, two big ones, right in front of me. Georgia needed someone, too, so less than a week after she was returned to me in the divorce settlement, I acquired Hotshot to keep her company and, a few weeks later, Tempo. And eleven months later, there was the surprise arrival of Georgia’s foal, Sweet Revenge.
    Despite the business of the new career, the new house, the new life, the urge to write a book did not subside with the passage of time. I’d been saying I wanted to write for twenty years. I’d said it so often and for so long that people who knew me didn’t even hear it anymore. It was just one of those things I repeated, like “I should re-gravel the driveway.”
    “I want to write a book,” I said to Allie.
    “Did I tell you about that eagle?”
    “I just can’t think of anything to write.” I’d throw up my hands.
    “I was in my kayak and this eagle was standing there, not twenty feet away, playing with a snorkeling mask somebody must have left on the beach last summer.”
    “
Other
people write books, why can’t I?”
    “A bald eagle!”
    “Wow,” I said, “a bald eagle.”
    Even though I said it all the time and no one listened anymore when I did, the secret was, I meant it. I’d always meant it. Actually, the real secret was stranger than wantingto write a book. The real secret was that I already thought of myself as a writer. I’d hardly written a word and I couldn’t think of a single idea for a book, but in my mind, I was a writer. I’d been a writer since I was seven.
    Thirty-five years is a long time to carry around an idea about yourself that has no foundation in reality; it was as if I secretly thought I was the Grand Duchess Anastasia. The evidence was so slim that a pessimist might say it was nonexistent. But I was pregnant with book. I could feel it kicking to get out. I was one of those women designed by nature to write books: wide in the hips, perfect for long hours sitting at the computer. I could birth a lot of books with those hips, if I could just get started.
    Yet I didn’t get started. For the next two months my days were full. Mornings before work I rode Georgia. All day I counseled clients, taught at the college, and once home again, I nursed Lay Me Down back to health. I worried about my bad back and the gray hairs appearing on my head faster than I could pluck them out. I had always promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those women who clung to youth when youth was gone. No collagen, no surgery, no expensive creams that promised to reduce or eliminate wrinkles. When the time came, I’d throw out the short skirts, the clingy tops, anything with Lycra, and just look and dress my age. But accepting age was harder than I’d expected. More than the physical changes and the chucking of the accoutrements of youth, the hardest part of middle age was realizing that time was finite. The more grayhair I saw in the mirror, the worse I felt about not writing. I was like a woman facing forty who was desperate for a baby.
    A few weeks after her foal left, it was time to blend Lay Me Down into the herd. She’d gained a hundred pounds since I’d gotten her (you weighed horses with a measuring tape that gave pounds instead of feet and inches), her lungs were clear, and she was lonely. She grazed near the gate of her pasture even though there was better grass farther away. If she stayed near the gate she could see the other three horses, and my sense was that just seeing them helped her feel like part of the herd.
    I didn’t introduce her to both geldings at once, as planned. My instinct now told me to bring Hotshot to Lay Me Down’s pasture and leave them alone to get acquainted. Hotshot was old and sweet, Lay Me Down was crippled from racing and lonely, and there wasn’t a