Covert Mom: My Girl

Mariah Mottley

 

This was the last Christmas I’ll ever spend with my Dad. Thanks to Hospicare, we’ve been having some really important talks. Life. Death. The songs he would like us to sing at his Memorial Service. Where his ashes should go. Whether he and my mother should have gotten divorced. What happened during the latest Star Wars movie. If he weren’t sick with stage IV cancer, we would have seen it together. Would have, my least favorite verb combination.

I’ve made him many Bloody Marys. Described every detail of the movie that I could remember. Finally, I got sick and had to spend two days on the sofa at home, only getting up to feed the woodstove and the horse, both whom are Norwegian brands. Everything seemed bleak. The remote control helicopters I bought the children lasted longer than I anticipated. I am tired of being sick, tired of being sad, tired of people trying to land helicopters on me. The house felt claustrophobic. I looked out the window and tried to remember a time when I didn’t feel like this. Our family horse was out there, licking her salt block. My girl.

Named for a giantess from Norse mythology, Fenia will be thirty this year. Like Mary Poppins, she knows that she is practically perfect in every way. A purebred Norwegian Fjord, everything about her is tidy, round, and a little bit bossy. She is dun colored and has a flaxen mane shot through with black. Little girls recognize her as the horse from Frozen. When I bought her, eight years ago, I had big plans for what I could teach her. I didn’t know that you don’t teach old mares anything. If you’re lucky, you learn something. She is just as ornery and wry as the day we met. She won’t stand still to be mounted, always walks away when you’re only half on. There’s the branch thing.

I got her bridle and hopped on. We walked in crooked circles around the wild apple trees. I suspected she was being agreeable in the hopes of running me into a stray branch. Clotheslining, we call it. It’s a fun game, as long as I’m paying attention, she can’t do it. When I get distracted, she is always ready.

Sean, my husband appeared. “You got Fenia out,” he said. “She looks good.”

“We’ve been circling the apple trees,” I said, “in the fresh snow.”

He rubbed her neck. “Oh no. I’m sorry, mare. Is she making you work?”

Fenia took a step towards Sean. She likes him. She had icicles on her whiskers. “Check out how sound she is,” I steered her into the arc of hoofprints I’d already made. Fenia put her head down and powered from her hindquarters, ribs swinging, gait supple. No clicking in her hips.

“Wow,” Sean said, hitting himself to keep warm. Only the best husbands stand around in single digit temperatures to watch your mare walk around a tree. He also, I suspected, was grateful to Fenia for babysitting me for a little while. I’ve not been a picnic to hang out with recently.

The branch, when it came, was thick enough to push me backwards, and stiff enough that I couldn’t snap it. I didn’t see it coming, since I was thinking about where Sean was at with me emotionally. I lengthened and tightened my legs, leaning back like I was doing some kind of mounted limbo, the branch pressing on my collarbone. Victorious, Fenia came to a polite stop before I fell off. Sean giggled helplessly.

“Whoops! Weren’t paying attention, were you?” He has been the recipient of many of Fenia’s branches himself. As I squirmed from the branch’s grasp, I saw the moon in the cold inky sky above, felt Fenia’s broad bones and warm muscles below my own. As soon I was upright I asked her to walk forward, but she feigned confusion and went backwards, into another branch, which smacked me across the back of the helmet. Then she went still again, lest I miss the point.

Sean laughed so hard at the complexity of her punkery that he had to bend over and cough, the sound like a bark in the dry air. “That’s what you get for the circles,” he croaked.

“Worth it,” I told him, running my hand down the black stripe in her mane. The claustrophobia was gone. We set off again, around a different tree this time.