Memoir Monday: There Were Good Days

 At times as I decry some of the harder times I went through in my early years it may seem life was constantly grim and ugly. It was generally not easy, I admit, and I did a lot of work but there were dozens of good days and highlights and times I was so very happy to be alive and to be me. Most of them centered around horses. I fell in love with the equine species early and expanded that to include the half-assed part of the herd and even some of those mules' other heritage. 

Getting those two old cowponies when I was about ten started me off on that path. I loved Lady, a big old bay mare with a kind and loving way and even Chindy--who was actually Tchindi, a Navajo (Dine) word for the restless spirits of the dead, mostly the worst ones! She was not a bad horse but had an arsenal of tricks. I learned a lot from them both but the highlight of my life for ten years was the mare I got as an eight month old filly in February 1956. My Valentine or Tina  was always truly mine and the only animal ever to come into our ownership or management that was never at risk of being sold or swapped off. She was a red-bay with black mane and tail, a full blaze down her pretty face and one white foot, the near rear. She grew to be a big mare, about 16 hands high ( a hand is a common horse measurement taken at the withers and 1 hand  = 4") and 1000 pounds or so at her full growth. 

Leggy and tall with a Thoroughbred's build she had a Thoroughbred's spirit and energy but was never stubborn, nasty or crazy. Equally at home scrambling up a steep rocky mountain trail or running for the joy of it down some dirt road, she became a mainstay of our whole operation. That was an evolving business of buying/raising, training/breaking and selling a bit over 100 different animals in that decade. We could count on her to be steady and calm leading a young or wild animal to get it trained, snubbing a similar one for the first few times it had a rider aboard and being the bell mare the herd would always follow. 

She never actually retired but we eventually gave more work to a number of other horses and especially some good mules and let her run in pasture more. At eight years old, we bred her to our new Appaloosa stallion, Yavapai Chief. She produced two colts with him born just over a year  apart. Bravo hit the ground on March 19, 1964. He was the image of his mama except lacked the blaze and white foot, just a tiny star, but almost identical in disposition. He learned quickly and was just about ready to begin serious training when the business fell apart and most of the herd was sold away. Rico was a bright copper penny sorrel with dazzling white markings --but not Appaloosa--and he was born on my birthday, April 27, 1965. A big colt, he took a  lot out of Tina and she was sick off and on that summer and fall. I nearly lost her several times.  The reality she would some day be gone was hard to accept.

In retrospect I know now we should not have bred her back so quickly after the first late foal. She did not have enough time to totally get her strengh back. Then carrying and birthing Rico was very stressful for her. I lost her the following spring, on March 16. Still, in that decade she had given me so much. I know she loved me as she showed it in any small ways, always listening for my whistle to call her in when she was out at pasture, resting her big head over my shoulder until it almost drove me into the ground though she did not realize the weight she applied. It was just her way to be close and "hug" me as a big four footed creature could not otherwise do. 

There were several other favorites over the years who gave me bright happy moments. Horses: Lady II, Tonalea, Colonel, Ritzi--though she had a tragic end at age two, Patrick, Buzzie, Old Chief himself, Leo Mix, a young Quarter Horse stud who didn't realize he was a stallion for some time, and Little Dusty, another sad loss. Among the mules there was old Louie, the first one, and then Stella, Ruby, Beano, Trixie, Cinder, Stonewall Jackson and especially Annie and Prez. They all served me so well and we shared many miles, them at a trot or running walk and me sitting easy on their backs as they carried me wherever I needed or chose to go.  The special symbiotic realtionship you build with an animal where there is mutual trust and reliance is unique, upifting, almost sacred. From those experiences I can fully empathize with the mushers (sled dog drivers) I now admire and respect. We all understand this bond and truly feel it in our hearts. 

For having learned and known that if there were nothing else, I know I am deeply and eternally blessed and I will carry those memories to the end of my days and likely beyond. In fact I fully hope and expect to see them all--the horses, mules and dogs I have loved --when I come out of that passage tunnel into the golden light of a much better place. Some call it the Rainbow Bridge--I just call it my kind of heaven. 

Notes on the photos--the first is Tina with me and brother Charlie within days after she came home. The next is that summer, though not yet trained she was gentle. The third is Bravo, the fourth Rico and then two of me and Tina--one as she was being trained probably in the summer of 1958 and the other a couple of years later--I loved the way her spirit came through here--ears up and taking that hill like it was a race to be won. What a splendid horse she was!

I need a time machine

 I've been very much immersed in working on my memoir recently. That has  involved a lot of rereading of my old journals to pin down dates and events and just to recapture some of the things I thought, felt, fought, dreamed... I almost said "she thought..." In many ways I am very detached from that girl-almost-a-woman. Was she really me or am I really her descendant? I am not 'her' per se, at least not completely. 

I just realized today that I feel very sorry for that young woman back in 1963. I am impatient with her also but I wish I could go back and give her some advice, some encouragement and most of all, a big hug. She was so troubled and so lonely and so very needful of a friend--and of a bunch of hugs. She was in a very withdrawn and touch-me-not place right then and felt she had almost no friends. There were some pen pals and two younger girls still in high school that she did not see as often as she would have wished, but besides that, there was no one. 

Her graduation from high school the year before was almost like something she had read or an excerpt from a television program. It did not seem real or important at all. How could someone be so isolated in the middle of the 20th Century? It was not pioneer wagon train and horse and buggy days after all! Of course there was no internet or cell phones or many things we take forgranted now but there were phones, the US mail, radio and TV, trains, planes and automobiles! 

To understand you have to have some awareness of what an enmeshed family is like and that complicated by emotional incest and a pair of mentally and emotionally troubled adults that were supposed to be heading that family.  As badly as she often wanted to leave--to jump in the first pickup truck that went down the street or go hitchhike on 89A that ran by a quarer of a mile from her house, she could not. Several times she wrote in her private notes how she felt she had to stay there and try to hold things together while her parents argued, dug themselves ever deeper into a financial morass and had various physical health issues as well as their mental ones. She felt she had to be the responsible adult for them and her two younger brothers. Going outside to seek help was unthinkable. Family matters must remain inside those walls and not be shown or told to anyone! No one outside could be trusted to begin with and a cloud of shame and confusion also hung over her. Secondarily, she deeply cared for the herd of horses, mules and burros for which she was generally the primary care taker. If she was not there who would see they were fed and watered, exercised, doctored and cleaned up after, who would? They would die of neglect or run off or...

I recently read a bit about a new book that I have ordered and actually have waiting on Kindle to read. It is called Secrets At The Big House --I apologize that I negected to note the author--and apparently is a kind of memoir and attempted self-help guidebook for some of the walking wounded damaged by issues in their childhood or youth. Here is the quote that captured me while I was looking at other things on Amazon: 

"But from inside The Big House, my mother’s hysterical, histrionic fits were covered up by her parents, her brother and the loyal servants. She was a master manipulator.

We were never sure where our mother’s terrible wrath and rage came from, at least not as children. We suffered her anger in the ignorance and innocence of childhood. We suffered her lack of patience, her irritability. Her inconsistency. We swallowed her detachment, choking on her never ending criticism, her cruelty and her judgments.

How easily words poison the mind.  My mother was a master at poisoning minds.  She made sure any budding sprigs of self-esteem and pride in myself were nipped short before they even had a chance to grow.  

First, she delivered the initial blow that would open the wound, then she made sure the wound never healed by continuously pouring the stingy poison of more hurtful words on to it.

My self-image was poisoned and she suffocated my natural optimism and joy. It would take many years to undo the damage she inflicted upon my psyche."

Substitute father and he for mother and she, exchange extreme poverty for the wealth and high society and I could merge into that narrative. There were no servants and others outside the immediate family to cover anything, just me/her and the nightmare that went on far too long. In time a composite effort by some good people who somehow picked up the subtle clues and sensed thngs were wrong and did their best to alleviate it, at least for me, and a few true guardian angels helped me find freedom. It was not easy and I was troubled by guilt for a long time, but I made it. I am here today some decades later to share the story and try to give others a bit of hope, courage and daring so they too may find freedom and release. 

I want to reach out to anyone else who is one of the walking wounded. You can  escape; you can in time rebuild yourself. Dream it, dare it, and DO IT!!   Feel free to write me any time or even call. I may not answer the phone but will call back shortly if you leave a voice mail and a number. 575-404-8573 or azwriter427@yahoo.com.  I will never deny or turn my back on a kindred soul in this journey. I pray you can find peace and wholeness for yourself.

Seasons

Of course there is nothing absolutely Arizona about seasons although the SW definitely has many differences in this aspect from other regions. I've lived almost all my life in the southwest's high desert although Colorado's eastern slope and California's big valley are on the periphery. Still that only accounts for about twelve of my many years, Being a bit of a meteorology nerd as well as very outdoor oriented I notice, talk about, react to and watch the weather almost all the time. Seasons are very much a part of that picture. 

In Colorado they often say there are just two seasons, winter and construction. I'd say that is not totaly true but not too far off, at least on the east side of the Rockies. Spring is often little more than a chinook wind melting the snow almost overnight and tearing things apart as it crashes by. Fall is a glimpse of aspens, a few milder days with a hint of white on the peaks and a reality to wake one's dread of blizzards,cold and long gray days coming--they may be short in daylight hours but they can sure seem long! In north central California, the summer is very hot and dry, blessed by few to none of the summer thunerstorms and refreshing rains the desert enjoys. Winter is fog, days of peasoup when the sun never shines and darkness is only different in its greater lack of light. Spring and fall are hard to separate, a staggering shift from the one extreme to the other, a day here, a day there--no more. 

Ah, but Arizona and New Mexico! We do have four seasons, honestly we do. You will not find the familiar eastern or mid-western spring with all the trees leafing out and farm lands coming to life but here are wonderful desert flowers, not every year perhaps but often enough to inspire and delight. Spring may often be rather short but oh, it is so welcome and so beautiful! Falls too are different--no Indian Summer smoke, haze and sweet scent from burning fallen leaves with a hint of wood burning in those early warming fires, stove or fireplace, and of course the blazing colors of yellow to deep red in those leaves just before they drop.

I allow it is beautiful but we have beauty too. Many fewer leaves since most of the southwestern forests are evergreen rather than diciduous but we do have our golden aspen groves in the high country and our amarillo hued cottonwoods in the valleys and along the streams. There are the smaller brushy maples in the mountain canyons that turn a lovely red and the sycamores which often sport a pretty rusty orange hue. They contrast with the inimitable turquoise sky, so bright and blue it almost hurts your eyes emphasized with a few bits of white from the residual clouds left by the summer rainy time or the monsoon. 

Whoever wrote of "Ocotober's bright blue days," could hardly do them justice. In the lower half of both states, this fall period often lasts nearly to Thanksgiving. Little wonder many of us call this our favorite time of the year. Here are two fall an two spring photos. Oak Creek Canyon, Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, Blooming desert and Ocotillo in bloom, New Mexico's state flower. Only the Wolf Creek shot is mine. Sadly I have no credits for the others. Wishing all a good autumn season!