When Dreams Are Horses, This Beggar Takes Time Off to Rethink the Ride

The dream didn’t TELL me to play hookey from this blog for a week and neither did its central character–a frolicking colt. The timeout was my idea now that I’m retired and don’t have parents or a truant officer spying on me and gained momentum when posting day rolled around and I still had come up with nothing.

Along about midweek of my unpaid vacation, I remembered a childhood “neigh”-borhood that bordered a horse farm. Argghh! I love puns, but if you don’t, play along, okay? The colt in my dream was a playful little guy, so his story cries out for humor. I was also reminded of two favorite books–both novels with horses as central characters and supporting casts of people raising them, racing them, loving them and exploiting them. A colorful, if not always reputable, lot.

How to fashion it all into a compelling story to share? Well, by first beginning, that’s how. Sometimes the end presents itself along the way. At least I hope that will happen. I read that often enough while studying writing and repeated it even more when teaching. You be the judge of whether I succeed at my own game.

Into the starting gate: a straightforward dream

A young colt frolicked around a room inside a house while I sat and watched. I say a “young” colt because a colt is a horse under four years old, and this one was probably closer to a year. He was dark brown–a bay–and incredibly agile. I consciously noted his agility and wished I had some of it. He jumped up onto tables and chairs, knocking about the room, though not hurting anything. Unlike me, he was uncannily graceful.

Eventually, he hopped up next to me, curling up like a cat at my side, legs folding beneath him like a Chinese rice-paper fan.

The dream felt warm and comforting, even though inside a house is hardly an appropriate place for colts to even BE, let alone frolick.

The meaning, I feel, is that something new wants to emerge in my life, probably my writing life, something playful. And since I’m watching the colt play, I’m meant to be on the watch for that something new to appear in waking-life. As an aside: I say “waking-life” instead of “real life” when analyzing dreams because dreams ARE real and so a part of real life. They just happen inside our heads while we’re sleeping, which is also real. So sleeping/dreaming-life + waking-life = real life.

At this late stage in my real life, I don’t expect to regain the agility of body lost through the years and frolick about a room like my dream-colt. But I can still experience a new agility of mind, of perspective. A fun, frolicking one.

Don’t you just love the word frolick?

And they’re off, with memory taking the lead!

The summer I turned 10, we moved to Fairport, NY, a suburb of Rochester and lived in a new subdivision called “Indian Valley.” I remember myself as a clumsy (rather than agile) colt of a girl, taller than most kids my age, but smart and imaginative, and sometimes imperious.

My dark brown hair was unruly, and I hated having it washed. In the summer, I went barefoot all the time, and my feet were black by the end of the day and callused a few weeks in. When I wasn’t writing plays and corraling friends to put on a show, I went exploring with a gaggle of other kids, and Indian Valley offered many a setting for our adventures.

One block east were construction scrap piles, full of discarded tiles, molding and flooring from new-home construction, and my knees and elbows were usually bunged and scabbed from scrabbling up and down them, always on the lookout for something sparkly. Thank goodness for tetanus shots, right?

Another block farther east, the neighborhood ended at the old Erie Canal, in disuse by then but still 10 feet wide and just as deep. We played along the towpath and sometimes climbed the locks. Mom would’ve had a heart attack if she’d known!

I remember it as wild and woolly–a real escapade. The towpaths were dusty, the vegetation scrubby, and the locks rusty from disuse. But in the winter, the canal bank made a great place to snow slide, sailing a saucer sled, down over the bumps and into a friend’s backyard.

On the street behind mine, houses on one side faced the subdivision’s south boundary–a horse farm that was, hands-down, the biggest draw for kids. It didn’t always smell so sweet on downwind days, but it never deterred us from ending up there.

The farm was fenced in, of course, but there was a tree at the edge where the horses gathered when they wanted some shade. The tree was also fenced in to keep the horses from chewing on the bark, I suppose, but it provided the perfect place for all the girls of the neighborhood to gather, climb through, pet and feed the horses.

Remember, horses are irresistible to girls of a certain age, and apparently, girls of a certain age are irresistible to horses, because it got so they would trot over to that tree whenever they saw us approach. Maybe, too, it was because they knew we had apples and carrots we’d pilfered from our mothers’ kitchens.

I remember how strange the horses’ lips and gums felt against my hand when they extracted the treats from it. I felt the brush of their teeth, but never a bite. And, of course, their mouths were a little slimy, but I just wiped my palms on my shorts and kept petting their flanks and scratching their head and ears. They stuck around until our moms called us home.

Each of us picked out a favorite horse and gave it a name, and we looked for that horse and it looked for us at every visit. My favorite was one whose outer appearance was a bit bedraggled, though I can’t remember what I named it. It always confused me that this farm raised “thoroughbreds” (it said so on the sign at the end of the farm owner’s driveway), which made me think “racehorse” and sleek and fit, but this one was not, though it was friendly anyway and I liked it for its good heart.

I realize now “my” horse was either older and retired from racing or a companion horse. But I liked imagining what kind of adventures it might have had when it was young and spry and its back not so swooped. The owner of that farm never once came and told us kids to beat it. I guess he knew we helped keep his horses happy. They sure did the same for us.

I also remember that my cat, Mittens, climbed that tree at the horse farm once and was afraid to come down. We always let her roam during the day, and she came home at night when we called. But one night she didn’t, and I worried about her all night, tossing and turning in a fretful sleep. When day broke, I walked the neighborhood, calling and calling her name.

Eventually, I heard a faint “meow” and followed the sound to the horse farm tree. She was way up at the top. I told my dad, and he said she’d come down when she got hungry enough. But another night passed, and she didn’t budge. She just cried and cried and cried. Eventually, one of the neighborhood dads got out a big ladder, climbed up and brought her down.

Mittens spent two—maybe three nights—in the horse farm tree. My head and heart wants to remember my dad handing Mittens back to me, but I really don’t know who got her down for sure anymore. I just remember getting her back, after she kept the whole neighborhood awake for a few nights with her wailing.

And it’s a photo finish between 2 books!

I’m an avid supporter of libraries and e-readers and don’t often buy hard-copy books to keep in my limited shelf space unless I know I will read them again and again. Both of these qualify.

What I love most about Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley is that the animals are the stars, and the humans make up a supporting cast. Headliners include two horses and a dog.

Justa Bob, who gets top billing in my mind, is a plain brown gelding who always wins by a nose but becomes a lovable claimer passed from owner to owner as he falls from the winner’s circle. I love his name, and he had my heart from the get-go. Maybe it was him as a colt in my dream? The other horse, Mr. T., also a gelding, is raced in France, rescued in Texas, and discovered to have unusual and amazing talents.

The third member of the trio is not just any dog, but a Jack Russell terrier named Eileen. She has real convictions and the will to implement them. You’ll love being inside her head and hearing what goes on there as she plots the best outcome for the clueless humans.

Speaking of which, there’s Rosalind, a rich, bored housewife; Tiffany, a young woman stuck in a Wal-Mart job; Farley, a faithful trainer in a slump; Buddy, a ruthless trainer who can’t seem to lose; Roberto, an apprentice jockey growing too big to race; Leo, a gambler whose system never works out; his son Jesse, who knows everything about that system, except why it doesn’t work; Elizabeth, a 62-year-old theorist of animal communication; and her friend Joy, a mare manager at the ranch that’s the center of it all.

Smiley deftly and humorously weaves together the trials and tribulations of the two geldings plus two more fillies with those of the humans, as the horses cross their paths and touch their lives. She positions Eileen at the fringes, always watching and pondering and nosing everyone toward where they should go without actually saying a word, except to herself, in true Jack Russell fashion.

I’ve read this one twice already and am getting ready to read it a third time. Check out the full summary on Book Browse, but click on the titles or cover shots in to buy copies.

In Horse: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks, the central character is a non-fiction animal: Lexington, one of the most famous racehorses of all times. But the story unfolds nonlinearly, in three timelines with separate iterations of the champion.

He’s a horse first, of course. We meet him as the foal called Darley (a bay foal like my dream colt!) and watch him mature into the stallion renamed Lexington.

Then he lives another life as the subject of equestrian paintings with provenance that meanders throughout the book. Finally, Lexington is an artifact–a skeleton being studied in a museum. This dust jacket summary explains the people and circumstances that make up the supporting cast and multifarious settings:

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamour of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. A gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters becomes obsessed with a 19th-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. A Smithsonian scientist from Australia and a Nigerian American art historian find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in a horse–one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his speed and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Inspired by the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.

I’m getting ready to read this one a second time. As with Horse Heaven, I bought the hardcover edition because I knew it would queue on my reading list over and over, like those classic movies hubs and I like to watch.

So, did my rambling make the winners’ circle?

Hmmm. All I can say is the dream set off the string, and writing about it was as much fun as dreaming it.

It’s weird that while I’ve always loved horses, I never really liked riding them the few times I had the opportunity. And I don’t think they liked having me on their backs. I was too tentative at the reins because I didn’t know what I was doing, and they could sense that. Horses are nothing if not masters of subtlety.

Once, on a church outing in high school, the horse I was riding simply strode off the path into the woods so a big branch would sweep me from the saddle. Pretty smart thinking on his part, I must confess, and I don’t hold it against him–anymore, anyways–though my pride (and my behind) smarted for a few weeks back then.

Much later, when I was dating hubs, we took his two-and-a-half year old daughter to a fall festival, where she wanted to ride a pony. The pony they sat her on was tired out after a long day carting around toddlers and must have communed with my mount from my high school outing. He knackered at her the whole way around the circle, and she shrieked and sobbed in response. She couldn’t wait to get off! At least there was a handler to keep the equine on the straight and narrow and not dump her.

Endings are usually mysteries that peek out at us along the way. So maybe the point of this post is that something is always becoming something else, and my colt wants me to keep watch, observe, enjoy and, possibly, write about it, if it feels right.

My dad’s work took us to Pennsylvania after just a year and a half in Fairport, and the construction junk piles disappeared as soon as the vacant lots filled with new houses. generations of cats have filled the void left by the long-gone Mittens, and decades later the Erie Canal has been renovated and reactivated for leisure boats and tourists, with paved towpaths for bicycles and joggers.

But the horse farm? It still looks much as it did when I was a kid. It’s now called “Up The Creek Farm” and describes itself as “a premier equestrian show stable specializing in hunters, jumpers, young horses, and sales.”

The fence and tree at the edge of the horse farm pasture looks about the same now as then. And I bet it’s still a draw for young girls and horses hungry for treats and mutual adoration.

While I could always go Up the Creek to the actual farm, the dream is proof I can go there without moving an inch beyond my bed or chair or home, and feed imaginary carrots and apples to dream horses, who nuzzle and lick me back and never bite.

And so far, they haven’t dumped me.

Watch this space for more secrets of a dream-colt, a.k.a, playful takes on the world as we’re coming to know it.

Share a dream or animal story of your own in the comments…

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