I don’t remember exactly when I first started writing. However, I remember the first piece I wrote that I didn’t struggle, because when I started, what I had to tell, to share, to put down on paper was essential to process through writing.
I was around the age of 10 and I wrote about the more recent experience I had paid witness and participant in during my adolescent life on the farm. When I was 8, we moved from an end row home in a small town to a 30 acre farm 26 miles away from the previously mentioned small town.
I will tell you the event, but I must first make known the beginning. I was 8, and my mom and dad took me up to the abandoned and cobweb, filthy barn on the property. They explained that if I wanted the responsibility of a horse, my first step would be to clean the barn.
Such began an intense curriculum of how to drive the tractors, shoveling, sweeping, pressure washing, scrubbing, and building new stalls. Where to buy buckets, feed, mats, hay, how to plan out a barn, making and setting schedules, safety of the horses, our other animals and me. My parents there, teaching and helping me every step of the way.
I had been put on a horse at 18 months old, and spent the next 4 years begging to ride and at the age of 6, during the summer, one of the last ones we spent all summer at in Cape May in the 3 room cottage my parents had bought, my mother got me lessons.
I rode a horse named Catherine that summer and the destiny of it all was not lost on me, nor my romantic and curious soul. I remember I had two pairs of jodhpurs I would wiggle into that summer when I wasn’t wearing a bathing suit or my brother’s hand me downs. I drove past the farm this past summer and I remember it being much bigger and more intimidating. It was neither. Just an island horse barn on a small property. I remember this first instructor not being the most patient of women, but my next instructor, Kari, was.
Kari’s parents were Norwegian and Kari lived in the barn apartment above the stables on her parent’s farm. She was everything, a mentor, a guardian, an empress of horse knowledge. She taught on the magical property belonging to her parents, a place my mother drove me 45 minutes to for lessons. I remember my parents bringing out a map and including me in the drive planning, Which way, how, when. A noted and loved connection, my mother had taught Kari years and years previously when my mother and grandmother ran a beginner’s riding school on their property. Horses are, as you can now understand, in my blood.
Then came Lightning, a schooling draft mix with a long slash of lighting down his handsome chestnut face. He was everything. Sturdy, and sweet, a true old gentleman horse who ushered me into horse ownership. Kari had Lighting before us, and I had ridden him a lot. She agreed that he was the perfect horse for me, he was old and needed to retired somewhere he would be loved, and love him I did. I rode him around the property in a way that makes my soul now ache, running through dressage exercises at a snail’s pace with him in the makeshift ring my parents had made for me, riding next to the stream, trotting and cantering with him. Us both choppy, but pleased with each other. I remember whispering into his ears, thanking him for being my friend, I remember my soul blossoming, feeling, living, growing.
I remember specifically the day we had to give him mercy in his old age, and his partially crippled state. I also remember that it was not a peaceful sleep and goodbye, a new vet and a wrong dosage, quickly fixed, but the flash of fear in Lightning’s eyes haunted me until I wrote about it. Not only that, but the act of saying goodbye to a dear friend, never to be seen again. One of the first times I saw death in front of me, and experiences instant grief. Writing about it, and apparently with detail enough that warranted praise, helped. A skill of healing learned and encouraged.
Grief has many forms. This one was first hand, and not the last. I’ve been blessed with many dogs and cats, and most of them lived well into their geriatric years, forcing forever goodbyes to animal friends to be one of the most painful things I have encountered in this life.
It was not like when I was 8 and I walked into to say goodbye to my grandfather, and then saw him at his funeral, gone. It was a little like, however, his wheelchair bound twin brother at the funeral gesturing to me and exclaiming his niece’s, my aunt’s, name. This thin familiar stranger thinking me her. That grief lives differently inside of me, tinted by the difficult love and affection my father had for his father, and his having worked and taken over the company from his father. Grief tinged by childhood memories, but adult understanding.
Grief doesn’t go away. It becomes a part of you, it grows without us tending it on it’s own terms. Writing doesn’t go away just because you aren’t writing. It lives inside of you, in your experiences, it lives in the jokes you tell, the sadness you carry, the notes you write, in the voicemails you leave. It grows on it’s own, it wilts, it kills off part of itself to survive. When I write, since the first time I wrote about my life, I understand me better. I understand who I am, and who I got to be in the past, and who I get to be presently. I also realized by sharing my writing, it enabled other people, it seems, to put their feelings and emotions into words, a gift not everyone has.
I will never stop writing to understand myself, in fact I believe it is the one thing that the me I have been, the me I am, and the me I will be will have in common.
-December18th, 2019 - Katharine Keegan
