Fall

It’s the distinct memory of an animal you no longer own (though her offspring are still in your fields).  The lone Jersey cow, always aware of her privilege of being fed grain twice a day, seemed more insistent in the cool months.  Though she’d never purposefully injure them (and was in fact prone to rubbing against them for pets and scratches), your children quickly learned to stay out of her path once the door was unlatched.  The cow became accustomed to their squeals of delight when you interrupted the steady streams of milk rhythmically whirring into the milk bucket to send an arc of milk shooting into one of the waiting barn cats’ mouths.  The hot milk steamed in the cool air, and the cats waited eagerly for their portion of the night’s bounty.  To milk the cow by hand was an inefficient use of time, but the single cow provided sustenance enough for your family and two calves—and the cats might have refused to keep the mice out of your grain bins if you hadn’t dutifully measured out their daily compensation.  To rest your forehead against the cow’s warm side, your hands manipulating the udder with motions you’d repeated so many times you no longer had to think about them, was a welcome respite from the physicality of the day’s work.

It’s the crunch of leaves underfoot, and the chill of an unchecked wind darting around trees and buildings.  It’s the weanling colts, snorting and cantering away from threats both real (in the form of the indifferent hound dog passing through their pasture) and imaginary (a tuft of grass waving in the wind is the closest thing to a threat you can see).  You ignore their antics and continue your daily routine until the dog’s incessant barking alerts you to something out of the ordinary.  You see the colts galloping headlong toward the fence, and you realize they’ve galloped through the strands of electric wire they’ve obeyed since birth.  Emboldened by their success and the brisk wind, they continue their mad run into the cow pasture, trying to get the cattle to join in their disregard for established boundaries.  The cows cease grazing momentarily and a few of the younger members of the herd take half-hearted sidesteps away from the colts’ path, but the collective remains unmoved by the equine antics.

It’s the moment you lose sight of the colts, and you listen to their thudding hooves and pray silently they turn before the stretch of barbed wire fence—the fence you keep meaning to make the time to replace.  You’re on foot, and a grim scene awaits you when you reach the barbed wire.  The beautiful chestnut colt stands, too shocked to fall, the blood from the open gash on his chest coating his white feet.  The dun filly and the bay colt are off to the side, their wild run now halted as their companion can no longer join them.  As you approach you find the gash is deeper than you first thought; the barbs dug into his flesh as he ran through the wire, slicing his chest in an ugly, jagged line. The colt turns to you with frightened eyes.  You stroke his blazed face and force yourself to speak in soothing tones; his last, labored breaths will be as peaceful as you can make them.  You pay the neighbor with the backhoe $100 to bury him the next day, and you take down the remaining barbed wire, rolling it up around a fence post and leaving it out of any animal’s reach in a dusty corner of the barn.

It’s the call you must place to the same neighbor a few weeks later, and you hope the temperatures haven’t been below freezing long enough to prevent his work.  You find it strange to not hear the indignant nicker of the Shetland pony when you tend to the chores after the neighbor has left.  The pony has been with you for over twenty years and has never once let you forget her importance, even up until this, her last day.  She has always been a part of your children’s lives; “Princess is my pony” was one of your eldest daughter’s first complete sentences, and you’ve lost track of the number of crayon portraits bearing the pony’s name.  Princess was exceptionally patient and gentle with small children, plodding along in a way that set even a nervous child at ease.  If a small passenger were to wriggle about unexpectedly, she halted the instant she felt something awry in the saddle.  She accepted her duties with marked regality, demanding her food before that of the larger horses as just compensation for her efforts in instructing your children on proper horsemanship.  When the children grew larger, though, she took it upon herself to teach them courtesy: if they urged her to move too quickly on a particularly warm day (or on any day, once they reached a certain size), she would remind them to be mindful of their mount’s comfort by swiftly and deftly removing them from her back.  Her method of choice was the cedar tree in the side yard, as its branches were the perfect height for unseating her precocious young riders.  True to her training, though, she always froze in place once riderless—and her rider was significantly humbler upon retaking the saddle.  You watch your children stroke that familiar fuzzy coat on that last afternoon, and you realize it’s been many years since they had to stand on tiptoes to reach the pony’s coarse white mane.  The pony acknowledges her children with a flutter of her nostrils; her body is too tired to produce the sound you all know so well.  She leaves your life with the same dignity she demanded when she entered it.