EXCERPT (from Loving the Older Horse)

My life was in one of those long, slow skids where you grasp the wheel and try to remember what they taught you in Driver's Ed: turn into the skid, not away from it. My marriage was only part of it. I felt failure weighing on my shoulders like a yoke, and I possessed enough rejection slips to paper the walls of my house. My writing was going so badly I couldn't lift my spirits, let alone a pen. I was cleaning houses for a living, but my inner house was a mess. Riding lessons were more affordable than seeing a therapist. Then the worst thing imaginable happened: My trainer was breaking up the riding school and moving north. She offered me Tonto, her oldest lesson horse, a barn-sour Leopard Appaloosa whose back end looked like the losing side of a mud fight. A California girl, I knew enough Spanish to consider t5he source of his name. Stupid had to come from somewhere. The price was $150, which included two Western saddles. Nobody else wanted him. If I didn't take him, he'd go to auction, which translated to the dog food factory. At the time, I believed I needed a different kind of horse, maybe a shiny black thoroughbred overflowing with spirit. But my trainer knew what she was doing matching a sorrowful writer to the crankiest horse in the barn.

Of course, to afford a horse meant I had to clean more houses. It's pretty defeating to clean a thousand toilets, to peer into the porcelain day after day, to strive to make everything that is somebody else's shine. But scrubbing a toilet is nothing compared to a horse whose soul has been bruised to the bone by thousands of strangers miscuing him to halt when they mean walk, to jump the fence when they are clawing painfully on the reins. After many years of such treatment, Tonto wall all red flags and bad attitude. My first act as his owner was to take him off the lesson string. Initially, I think he believed he was on vacation. When the endless routine did not resume, I imagined his thoughts went something like this: Is all this business with the carrots and the soft brushes my last supper? Who in God's name is this woman with the terrible singing voice and why does she persist in aiming these songs at me?