| My Mother with Horses |
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by Julie Hensley
It started in Big Stone Gap in the front yard We rode the school bus to the public library where she worked, where there was Misty of Chincoteague, The Red Pony and Billy and Blaze. If she was busy or we were loud, she would sit us in the back on the blue carpet to watch filmstrips about Pony Penning Day. She wanted those two pinto ponies, lesson animals who knickered when we leaned out the car windows, who licked sugar from our palms. For years afterwards she thought she saw them down dirt roads, ordered my father to have a look on the way home from Sandbridge or Buckrow Beach. Finally a Welsh saddle pony— old and nearly unrideable—was the first we could afford. There is a picture of her in my father’s drawer, hair wild, hips small in brown corduroys, holding the halter as my youngest sister and I lean off an abandoned hay wagon to caress the brown fur. I was still young when she found the Arabian Quarter horse mix, a mare who had miscarried many times. That winter I held the cord of a sled that would not move across the half inch of frozen snow. I sat next to my sister—both of us stiff in snow suits— watched her drag cinder blocks and a rotting fence post from behind the barn, watched them rise together, the horse’s tail spreading like light against the gray sky. This is how she washed our hair: She pulled a wicker bottomed chair to the kitchen sink leaned into our backs, one at a time, lathered and rinsed Prell from a green bottle, then held each of us, squirming, between her knees and worked out the snarls with a wide-toothed comb. She awaits the first birth in a house without daughters, a foal swelling and turning inside the brood mare she gave her only girl grandchild. I imagine she takes her time now, moving the curry comb in slow circles, letting the winter dander float like milkweed from her fingers. Julie Hensley grew up in the Shenandoah Valley, but she currently makes her home in Kentucky with her husband (the writer R. Dean Johnson) and son. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Her poems and stories have been published in many journals, most recently in Western Humanities Review, Redivider, Quarterly West, Ellipsis, and Talking River. |
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