Why is it we are so surprised when someone dies?
I was born into a place where the great red oaks spilt their dry sienna leaves onto the earth every fall and the mud froze and crackled under your feet and the snow buried the leaves and the mud and the grass and everything in it for the winter. It was a place where you sometimes had to just hold your breath until the sun grew a tad higher and brighter in the sky and the first crocus pushed their way through the icy carpet and the promise of Spring felt real again.
Janet emerged from a place like that, too. Yet, somehow she and I both found ourselves in an Eden where it is always Spring—sometimes the cruel Spring of March, sometimes the mellow Spring of May, but Spring, nonetheless—a mostly evergreen place, where to remind yourself that the earth is in perpetual motion, you must watch it draw the sun into the sea on a clear evening.
Janet had a hunger for Spirit and found solace in the presence of horses. She and I had a relationship that shifted much like the seasons. At times, each of us could be cruel or mellow, tender or threatening. At any given time, each of us was both student and teacher. I would set up the massage chair in my tack room at the end of the day and I’d press my knuckles into the muscles of her back and we would philosophise over things we could not understand. I knew the knots along her shoulder blades and the sinews of her slight neck as if they were my own. My hands can still feel them.
Why is it we seem so slow to grasp the obvious?
Somewhere in the cold places where Janet and I were born, the purple and yellow crocuses are holding their breath, ready to pry open the snowy crust that blankets them and rise again to face the sun.