Across the back of a Pony

            Her mother has been calling for her. The first minutes, her voice is thrown into the warm summer morning, a simple thing. Now, much later, anyone who picks up on the sound would hear the irritation as her daughter’s first and middle name ring across the green grass and dirt road, disappearing into the breeze. 

The little girl doesn’t even notice. She is lost in her own space and time, beneath the rough branches of the small crabapple orchard on the far side of the driveway. Her mother will call all day, but the girl won’t answer. 

See, how her eight year old frame lies across her pony’s? The little Shetland is completely at ease, his soft white muzzle down in the grass as he grazes, occasionally crunching a fallen apple, still too green and hard and sour for most tastes. He doesn’t mind the girl, draped across his back like a saddle pad. They are lost in the warmth of love only understandable by girls and their ponies. Lying on her belly, her yellow polyester shorts are bright against the pony’s sandy beige coat, the limberness of youth allowing her knees to hang by his sides and the backs of her feet to rest upon his rump, her head falling to the left of his withers, her arms absently stroking the softness of his neck, up and down, back and forth, hypnotizing to anyone who might stop and watch for even a few minutes. 

Both girl and pony sigh, his a wet blow between bites of grass, hers a whisper of sound into his coarse white mane as she settles even closer into her friend. No one can find her here, not even the calling of her mother’s voice echoing off the steel barn. 

Thirty years later, the girl, now a woman, stands in her kitchen window calling for her own little girl of eight. She calls once, singing her daughter’s name, hearing how it vanishes into the tree line less than fifty feet behind her home. Leaning forward, the woman looks west and east, and a smile breaks across her face. She knows her daughter is unable to answer, but the woman doesn’t worry. Instead, she heads outside, slipping her feet into slightly oversized paddock boots. She takes her time, meandering to the east field, stooping to pick an almost ripe apple from the sagging boughs of a tree she planted herself many years ago. The woman reaches the three board fence that separates her slightly overgrown yard from the pasture. Easily climbing to sit upon the top board, the woman’s eyes sweep the field. She smiles when she finds her girl beneath the sheltering of trees upon her old Appaloosa mare. The seat of little Levi’s coated with permanent horse sweat and the spotted rump and black tail are barely visible in the late afternoon sunshine, the rest of the pair hidden in the shade of ancient oaks. 

Sitting upon the fence rail, the woman crunches into the apple in her hand and remembers the Shetland pony who began her own love of horses when she was the same age as her daughter now. Her eyes close and she savors the sun’s warmth, knowing without needing to ask that her daughter is smiling, her small frame draped across her pony’s back, her arms stroking its neck as they simply are, together. It is more than enough, she thinks, almost too much, she thinks as she feels her heart swell with joy. It is more than enough.