03.18.2009 - 6:53 p.m.

They tore down the barns.

It's supposed to be this: turn into the gravel drive, pass the little two-story farmhouse on the right, a barn full of sawdust and a few stalls for quarantine on the left. Come through the gate, close it behind you, and the drive curves left between two more barns, an open-sided one with the show horses and a closed one for the boarders and some of the higher-level lesson horses. Parking was across from one last barn, the tin-sided one with the boarders' tack room and the beginner lesson stalls. Behind that barn was the last building, the office/bathroom attached to the indoor arena.

In the kitchen of that farmhouse, boarded up now, is where I got my first real, paying job, mucking stables every Sunday for $4 an hour. Okay, mostly-real job; that wasn't minimum wage and they sure as hell weren't paying taxes. But I was just shy of fourteen, not legally employable anyway, and it was horses. And it would pay for my weekly lesson, which was more horses. Which, as a package, was everything I'd ever wanted.

That job was five years of hard work. It was filling big wheelbarrows with used bedding and trodden hay, lugging it to the end of the row, then setting the barrow's handles to the small of your back and letting it impel you down the hill to the manure pile, quick-footing to keep your heels from getting caught under it and using your whole body to swing it around and dump.

It was doing this same thing also in ice, wearing long johns under jeans, and two sweatshirts under an old jacket, and also in torrential rain, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a ratty tshirt plastered to your body, because trying to stay dry was stupid. There was always the same pair of ugly gore-tex boots that were the only part of your wardrobe you bothered washing yourself. Always, too, the same rock station ball cap you'd found in the feed room that first summer, once black, now grey-brown and frayed along the brim.

That job was waking before dawn, and calling the horses in from the fields, and watching them run to you through the morning haze, the gold sheen of sun along their backs and in their tails the only real thing you could name. It was noticing when a horse came in wrong, or didn't come at all, roaming the big field to find them, and letting them tell you what they'd hurt and how badly. It was learning to administer syringes full of crushed pills between the bars of their mouths, or changing dressings on leg sores, or getting even skittish ones to stand quietly in epsom salt baths for their inflamed hooves. It was, once, grooming a broken-down horse one last time, because she loved it.

That job was stretching to crick the shoveling out of your back as little kids poured out of cars with their little rubber boots and wide eyes and grabby fingers, and helping them tack their mounts when they suddenly grew solemn and shy, and smiling to watch the ponies go the right way even as their riders gave four rein signals at once. It was walking back out of the office with a bag lunch and a palm-sized sketchbook, stalls mucked, horses fed, kids in their lessons, to draw whoever was grazing up by the fences while waiting for a ride.

I still want to talk about the way the sawdust hung in the air, the smells of animal and leather, the soft, solid clunk of those boots on packed earth, the names of the animals and barns and fields, so many other things, but I won't have the words I want for this place they tore down; just these pieces of memory. It wasn't a home�I had a home, a good one, though it was full of the wants and needs of five other people. This farm was the place where I went to work, and belong, and dream, all on my own. Even when I left it for college and serious boyfriends and a river that knows my every regret, that place was still there, waiting for me.

It isn't anymore.

It never will be again.

-stonebridge

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