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enchilar “1. to season with chiles; 2. (Mexico) to annoy; 3. to sting, burn.

A simple meal in the final execution, the preparation of enchiladas in my house was a labor of love. On a busy evening, it could be quick: a jar of sauce, pre-grated cheese, onion, whatever else was left to throw in, roll them up, stick them in the oven, and they were done. Sometimes, though, I made the sauce myself, boiling and scraping out the chiles, shredding the chicken (roasted–perhaps not traditional, but certainly tasty), softening the onions, nearly caramelized (again, maybe not traditional), before adding them to the cheese and chicken mixture, the mild peppers.

It was a meal that I had loved for a long time, and perfected during the Colorado years, in a land of hedonism and endless meal choices. It was there, watching Mexicans, many nearly invisible in the kitchens of a town many could barely afford to live in, that I was inspired to find the secrets. It was there, in the only affordable living space, a cheap deal in the land of plenty: the trailer court, that I first made enchiladas.

The trailer court was not my first choice for a home, snob that I was (well… not snob, to be honest: I was actually afraid of the trailer court). The trailer option did allow us to stay in town, and after a bit of arm-twisting, my then-husband convinced me that it did not have to be the place of tornadoes and dysfunction that I had grown up experiencing it to be. No, this was the West, not the Midwest, and things were different.

And different they seemed in those early days. I frolicked in the kitsch, put a clichéd pink flamingo out front, and started cooking. I became pregnant, blurred my doctoral dreams, nodded gazedly to the sudden move across the country. Boston. I was in hub heaven. I could still finish my work there, and made arrangements. My advisor said a class at Harvard could help me through the classical language requirement. Harvard! Imagine that.

The enchilada ingredients were harder to find, at least then, at least within walking distance of our house.

Fast forward several months. The baby was pushing to come out. Someone was asking me to sign something. A purchase and sale agreement was Fed-Exed to northern Vermont. “Why there?” you ask. Hell if I knew. I cannot even remember when I stopped asking those questions. The town we landed in was one of so many places where we picked up real estate brochures: Charlotte, Cheyenne, Guthrie, Belfast–at least this one was not a ranch. We could have landed anywhere, back in those days that any vacation could become the next home sweet home. Vermont seemed nice enough, though a bit lonely as the summer faded. I loved being in Boston. My then-husband enjoyed those pre-child moments, too, took long walks, played drums with a friend, went to car races with his brother on Saturday nights, tried to forget the doctorate he quit. No teaching work in Boston, he said, said we could not afford to stay, said we had to move. No job in Vermont, either, not for a long time. The house was a dream, a true beauty, the village isolated, dotted with dairy farms and cross country ski trails. Hard not to love, but to stay there? Babies came, many babies. I loved them well, loved them as if they were all I had. And maybe then, they were.

I was making enchiladas, my gloved hands dipping the tortillas into the sauce, then filling them with the chicken, cheese. Gloved hands—I had learned my lesson years earlier not to mess with chiles without some defense.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I was making dinner. I was cooking his favorite dinner, our favorite dinner, kids waiting, watching, wanting me to finish quickly. The oven was preheated, the side dishes were cooking, a salad waited on the table already.

“Those are gloves for cleaning toilets!”

I had two pair. The yellow ones for cooking, the blue for cleaning. Both were beneath the sink, on separate sides. Two pair: these were the yellow gloves.

“You are an unfit mother.”

He grabbed the dish from me and dumped the enchiladas into the trash. My older son yelled “NO!” while the others cried. I watched in horror as my husband, ‘till death do us part, ripped open hot dogs, baked beans, told the kids not to move. No one did. I saw the look in his eyes. I thought how I had bought the hot dogs the day before, at a grocery store seventeen miles away, thought how he was lucky there was something else to eat. My son said he wanted enchiladas, and I feared for the kid. He saw the look, too, bit into a hot dog, tears streaming down his face. I sat in the stairwell and sobbed, curled up as tight as I could, looking for a safe place, and there was none.

“If no one is going to eat, it’s bedtime.”

It was 6:30 pm. The kids did not argue, the four of them in the bath together. I went into their room, trying to put our life back together, convinced like so many other times, that it never really happened.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

My husband pushed me into our bedroom. I wanted to say goodnight to the kids. I heard myself protesting as he shut the door on me. I know I was yelling please. The key turned and locked.

“You are not safe to be around children,” he told me.

I thought maybe he was right about everything he said until then. I had told people I needed more help, found help. Four kids under six, one noticeably disabled. A woman came from the school, said we were a family, and had to work together. I cried. He was busy, I told her, had to leave early in the morning, and was tired at night. I was trying. She said I was a great mom. How could I believe what she said, if what he said was true? I begged for help. He told me I was telling everyone our business. I found help, strong women who helped me, who glanced knowing looks first at one another–then at me. He hated the invasion of privacy. I thanked God for the help. He said I was lazy, an unfit mother. I had tried to be better, but trying was never enough, never would be. I stopped making enchiladas, and the love in my heart seemed gone forever.

We moved once more–my choice this time. He gave me one present that last year we spent together. It was a pig.

The pig was a baking dish, made in Chile. It was shown in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue with enchiladas in it, he said. He asked me why I never made them anymore. Until I started the process I once loved, I had forgotten why myself. I never did find those gloves.

Last week, though, I did find the pig on top of my kitchen shelves, never used. I went to the grocery store yesterday, and bought the tortillas, the cheese, chiles. I have it all, watched the kids devour something similar at a Mexican restaurant not so long ago. They are ready for this kind of meal, and at last, so am I. Tonight I am making enchiladas.

Making a brown stock is something of a meditation, and works best, in my experience, in large kitchens with subzero barns attached.

Sometimes, in fits of boredom over the years, my obsessions have ranged from listening to the same song over and over, to yoga postures, to stirring risotto, to calligraphy. These are not entirely wasted pursuits. After all, any talents I could claim are the result of various fixations. Remember Buffon, “Le genie n’est qu’une longue patience.” I like to think there is some truth in that, considering the rarity of my first-time brilliance in most areas. Practice, repetition, persistence, soon enough it seems good enough; a bit past that, it seems just about right. Making brown stock requires that kind of obsession.

Stocks are winter-time creations. It has taken me a lifetime to admit this, but winter bores me. I lived in many cold, snowy places in my life, so this is quite a shame. Sure, it would have been great to spend the days cross-country skiing or snowshoeing, outside, running inside to make hot chocolate and warm up by the fire. Oh so Vermont. A bit tricky with young kids, especially a lot of them. So, it was at such a time, nursing a baby, entertaining a toddler, watching the snow swirl around the backyard, no phones ringing, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, that I baked bread and made stocks. Again, very Vermont. Around that time, the household lore maintained that grocery shopping was a hobby I enjoyed. Not true! Well, maybe in farmers’ markets, in France. Come to think of it, though, I kind of liked the coop in Montpelier, and I admit to enjoying trips to the Market Basket. Still not a hobby, but a great excuse to get out, after all.

But I digress. I did have a bit of shopping to do for my stock. It turns out that you need not so much meaty bones as meat. There used to be a butcher at the Grand Union in Morrisville who seemed to appreciate the notion of a stockpot simmering, and packed up nice bits for me. After doing this more than once, you know when you’ve got a great bone, great meat, with lots of connective tissue, for gelatinous stock… Oh my. I hope no one is disgusted by this.

That’s another thing. I have seen a lot of farm animals in my life, mostly treated kindly, but not always. My family hunted (never caught a damned thing, but it was hardly forbidden). I have pictures of my brother at age seven walking around the woods with a shotgun and an orange hat. I looked out my window for seven years, and saw dairy cows all day, everyday. (Hard to believe they are no longer there, like nearly all the dairy cows I knew when I lived there).

It just seems dishonest to eat a thing unless you can know what it really looks like when it is alive, and when it dies, and think about that. I really have nothing against eating meat, but I want to do it with as much respect to the animal as possible. For some reason, in my book this means thinking about things like feathers (well, not on a cow, obviously) and connective tissue, and shins, and not just picking out those prepared pieces, pre-wrapped in cellophane.

So, my obsession for stock was aided quite a bit by Madeleine Kamman, in her exhaustive “New Making of a Cook”. What a tome! With the commentary, it is pretty hard not to want to please Madame Madeleine. I pity the well-intentioned babysitter who recognized herself as the one who had washed Madeleine’s seasoned omelet pan. Again, I digress. The stock.

Stock is wonderful, because it allows all sorts of digressions, and yet forgives you for them as long as you eventually get back to the matter at hand. In my Vermont kitchen, the excitement built from the first step: roasting the bones, meat, various vegetables, a bouquet garni to add flavor. Into the oven they went, and stayed for some time. Wonderful aromas. I am probably going to forget something here, though, because I do not have the recipe here in front of me as I write this.

I do have things to admit here. I moved into the house I live in now about a year and a half ago, maybe a little more. The last several years have been.. shall we say? yes, busy. I have not thought about obsessive cooking since the oven in my last house broke. I really hated that oven, seemed to have a sort of wind tunnel inside, but that house was not in Vermont, and I do not live there now. And, by the way, I did not break the oven. It was just fate.

Now I have a new house, with a newer oven. So, the potential for obsessive cooking is there, if only I could find my cookbooks. So far, I have uncovered “The Cook’s Bible,” collected recipes from Cook’s Magazine. Now Christopher Kimball is one obsessive cooking man, if I ever saw one. I just cannot maintain that level of perfection in the kitchen. Obsession is one thing; the testing they do in Cook’s Magazine is just nuts. I found my ex-husband’s copy of “365 Ways To Cook Pasta,” which I have to give back to him one of these days. The Julia Child and the vegetarian cookbooks and the Silver Palate, and all those others that I used over the years, including the Helen Corbitt books that my mom handed down, must be in a box in my overstuffed garage. But it is raining today, and I am not inclined to go out and dig around.

Madeleine will simply have to understand if I am depending on my faded memories of meats roasting, stock simmering for hours, pots all over the kitchen, then shallow pans lined up on the frozen tables in the barn. It was such a process, executed over several days. The key was making the stock shimmering, as I interpreted it. How simply amazing!: pouring the filtered water and a little white wine over the roasted meat, celery, onions, carrots, and letting the low heat work its magic. Time passed, time to take all the solid parts out, pouring the stock through cheesecloth, reducing it a little more, then straining it again, skimming the top for fat, or any other evil particles… this indeed made the layers of flavor, simply marvelous.

This repetition went on for some time. By the time I finished, the huge quantities of broth had become a much smaller amount of glorious brown stock, the base of most things magnificent in my kitchen. For the health-conscious, it was nearly fat free. For most others, it was simply heaven. Nothing is more splendid than the meal that braises in the sublime.

Busy lives, crowded minds, fallen tears… so much seems to take from life at times. And yet, the good things always remain, waiting, until we look for them again.

I used to leave my house in northern Vermont with some combination of trepidation (would my family survive without me?) and anticipation (hot damn! I’m headed to the big city!) as I headed out across the countryside toward Montreal. The first time I went, I took a bus, enjoying the tales and tribulations of the rave organizer who sat next to me. I decided the next year that it was much more satisfying to have the option to stop along the way, and pile the car full of treasures that at the time were usually no problem to drag across the border duty free. I managed to fill my farmhouse with mod furnishings from Caban, electronic music, exotic vegetables and enough elaborate pastries to extend the stay at least a few extra days in feeling, if not in fact.

It was a getaway for me, to be sure, and I craved the city with the passion of Lisa on Green Acres (sans Hungarian accent), like a smoker trying to quit. “Bloom where you’re planted,” my neighbor from the dairy farm across the street told me. Oh, I tried. I tried. And I did sometimes, managed a few nice flowers from time to time. I looked across the street at the Holsteins and her business sign, “The Beauty Hut,” and the grey hills and the sky, and I tried.

And then, an hour into the trip, I could feel my heart race—literally race—as I drove through the fields and saw the skyscrapers in the distance. I loved the way that the city just sprang up like that, somehow adding to the excitement of it all, like Oz. The traffic picked up there, adding car after car, a few crotch rockets zooming their riders off to an inevitable early grave. And I would finally reach it, le Pont Champlain, there at last, over, then off the bridge, driving fast. Yee haw! (or something a bit more sophisticated than that).

I loved racing down the hill on University, downtown, to Rene-Levesque, the thrill of being back where it was busy. It’s hard to imagine the contrast from where I lived, where the first traffic light was ten miles away.

For all the luxury of time, bookstores, hair coloring (it was red then), and room service, the trips also gave me perspective. Vermont was beautiful, glorious. I was involved in the community, advocated for my kids constantly, knew everyone. I loved that, but I also always knew that at heart, I was a flatlander. Not my fault, really—I just didn’t grow up there. And I had this kid who needed so much. Once, in a grocery store, a man saw me pushing him and his sister through the store, and thought to share his thoughts with me.

“I hope you don’t plan to have more of them,” he said. I was taken aback. The man didn’t even know that my older boy was in school then. For all the time that I had faced the realities of my son’s disabilities, I had honestly never heard anyone actually voice such an opinion to me directly.

“These kids cost everyone else a lot of money,” he informed me. I found myself dumbstruck, then hostile, thinking of the man’s own cost to society. He was older, certainly had health concerns that were undoubtedly some cost to Medicare. But in spite of that, the man did deserve those benefits. I could not think of a thing to say, so I just told him that I loved all my kids, and walked on.

I checked out, pushed my groceries out to the car, helped my little girl and my three-year-old son out of the carriage. My daughter tried to climb out herself, but my son did not. He did not try to walk. In fact, at that point, he was unable to do that, but was getting closer to that developmental milestone with the help of over two years of physical and occupational therapy. My boy smiled, and let me load him into his car seat, placid, trusting. The man from the store was standing behind me, and I stiffened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I said that. It’s really none of my business.” And he walked away.

I am sure that he felt better for apologizing to me, but I felt numb for a while, then mad at myself for not having the appropriate, politically active, stereotype-shattering response. Then, I just felt sad. I always assumed that everyone just absorbed the love that my little boy exhibited with his belly laugh and hugs. It never occurred to me that he was viewed as “too expensive.” I felt sorry for the man, probably counting every penny, and thinking about Town Meeting and property taxes. After all, he was right. My son’s education, which was still nowhere near appropriate, did carry a hefty price tag that was all too evident in the school budget.

Days after the man shared his thoughts about my right to have more children, I found out I was pregnant with my fourth child. And yes, I continued to take my disabled son out in public with the others, and let the glarers glare. Sometimes, someone smiled.

So, that brings me back to the perspective I gained from Montreal. What was I searching for? What could this Oz grant me? There, I was not the mom with a cause, except as I wished to be. I escaped, spoke French, saw plays, and thought about the life I had been called upon to lead. Sometimes it struck me, after days of seeing not one person like my son, that life felt superficial. Then, I’d come upon the man who sat, speechless, with a cup on Ste. Catherine Street, just a man and his dog. I knew he probably had autism, probably some other mental health issues, but enough skills to sit out there all day and collect his money. What more might he have been doing? Was this the life he chose, or was it all that was left for him to do?

I went because I loved the luxury, the freedom of letting go of a reality chained to limits imposed by disability. I could let go, once in a while. But why chains? why such limits? If I left feeling exhausted and questioning about why this life had been handed to me, Montreal did take me home. I returned to have it in all its fullness, with new energy and hope, a new fire blazing to make a difference.

So, now, fully recharged from the laziness of summer, I return.

When I lived in Vermont, I was always fascinated by a sign that pops up not far from the Canadian border on I-91. I cannot remember the exact wording, but it informs the passer-by that you have reached the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. Wow. The sign is north of Newport, and I often saw it in times when the snow had been as high as my car for several months. The thought that a person could go even farther north, where it was certainly colder and snowier, simply horrified me at the time. Then, it made me wonder what was up there. So, one day, I decided to cross the border.

At the time, in the late 1990s, it was fairly easy to go to Canada, and not a whole lot harder to get back into the United States. Canadian customs agents usually came out, asked you the purpose of your visit, how long you were staying, and told you to enjoy your trip, all the while hoping you’d spend money and save l’économie québecoise. There was one place I crossed regularly, and the guy just stuck his head out the door and waved to me. I do not remember where that was, and it will never happen again in my lifetime, I am quite sure. On the other side, the US guards were a sometimes a little less friendly, sometimes asked a lot of questions, once made me cry (that was after 9/11), but I never had any serious problems getting back into the land of the free and home of the brave.

Still, I did not realize it was that easy at first back then. I was pretty sure something terrible would happen, some agricultural product stuck to the back of my van, and I would end up questioned in a room with a chair, a bare light bulb and two Mounties. Wait. That sounds a little weird. Visions of Dudley Do-Right…. And Nell. And Dudley’s horse. Definitely weird. I think I have just insulted the entire Canadian population reading this. No. You must understand. Many of my neighbors were very wary about crossing the border. When the speed limit signs said 100, they told me, it does not mean miles. That was different. And sometimes, in some places, there are no signs in English. You cannot turn right on red, and if you do, you are guilty until proven innocent. You can see why I was nervous.

But I went anyway. It’s kind of like the first time you go to a drugstore to buy contraceptives. You are sure everyone is going to make a big deal about things and tell you something is wrong with what you are about to do. Then you walk out of the store with your stuff, and it’s never a big deal again. Crossing the border was just like that. Well, without the sex.

It did not take me long to figure out that spending money in Canada was a good thing. I could have felt bad, and maybe should have after Ames went out of business, but honestly, I liked to dress my kids like the ones on “La Boîte à Lunch”. It was one of the sweetest programs on Canadian television, which is about all we got for pre-dish television, except Channel 3 from Burlington. Ames did not sell clothes like the ones Julie-Pier wore, and they also did not return your federal and provincial sales tax. Or speak French to you. Or tell you “qu’est-ce qu’ils sont mignons!” when they saw your kids in the store. And actually, I found nicer, warmer things. I love the United States, but I also like nice clothes. In the cold climate where I was living then, I liked warm clothes. I also liked the exchange rate. And as I discovered the benefits of nice, warm clothes, great exchange rates, and returned sales tax, I also had more excuses to return across the border, which I was also starting to enjoy. It was a vicious cycle, and one I came to love.

So, no visit to Canada was complete without a trip to the duty-free shop. For one thing, it was the place you had to go to get your sales tax back. For many northern Vermonters, though, the purpose of a trip to Canada WAS the duty-free shop, and its glorious and relatively inexpensive selection of what I think is termed in Canada as booze. [Now, I have no idea if this was a loose usage of the language, or if it was considered the term of choice for alcoholic beverages up there, but I did see the word used once, on the front page of the Gazette—I swear—in an article where you would normally expect a more formal description of the beverage consumed before the accident.] I liked many things in the duty-free shop, including the nice selection of watches, pens and perfume, also the booze… um… fine wine and chocolate. But hell, I was happy with a trip to Costco in Sherbrooke, too. I liked Nutella and Tin-Tin videos.

What I really loved about crossing the border was the people. I loved crossing the border and immediately speaking French—albeit a French that I had trouble understanding at times, especially when older people in smaller towns talked to my kids. Most of the time, though, it was just fun. Sherbrooke had a mall, one that grew during the time we lived there, a mall. This, you must understand, was something I did not see everyday in the Northeast Kingdom. At Christmas one year, we were fascinated by a display that had real, live reindeer. I loved that what was the north in the United States was the south in Quebec. Lake Memphremagog was beautiful on its US side, but luxurious on its Canadian. Funny how perspectives can change. People talked to us all the time, and my older son began to pick up French. He liked Tin-Tin, too. That helped.

I loved the escape, the feeling that as isolated as I sometimes felt sitting in my Vermont living room, watching the snow swirl around the backyard on a bitterly cold day, I could get in the car and go to another world, with better coffee and people who talked about literature in French on the radio. That was pretty exciting to me. Not to say that there was none of that in Vermont. I still miss things from there, like the Eye on the Sky from St. Johnsbury and picking strawberries and that swirling snow and the Milky Way and packs of coyotes howling in the night and neighbors, both down-to-earth and eccentric, and hidden gems and the Willey’s Store in Greensboro. But crossing the border was different. It was the escape, the feeling that I had crossed into something new, something different. And that was before I discovered Montreal. I found Montreal a while later, and then… well, then, nothing was the same. But that is another tale for another time. I have wandered a lot from my intended topic, I think, but please be patient with my exhausted and circumlocutious writing style; for I am weary at the end of the day. Good night.

Yes, I did note that one of the private things in my life is that I am a one-time horse-owner. I do not recommend it, especially if you feel the least bit intimidated by animals that are bigger than you are.

Forgive me, horse lovers. I have surely hit the nerve of some of you out there. I assure you, I voice my caution with utmost respect and admiration for the equine enthusiast. Indeed, I imagine that it is you, oh horsey friend, who truly understand the care and loving that these animals need.

So how did this all begin?

I was pregnant, pre-doctoral-exam and, looking back, half mad. I had gone from my normal coursework, teaching and student life to pre-mom panic near the hub of the universe. We lived in Brookline. We had just moved from Colorado, and I loved the hustle of the city and the feel of being in the East. But, when prompted sufficiently, I did have to agree that it was sort of noisy, and really expensive. So I entertained the notion of at least looking at houses one day while we were on a little getaway in the Northeast Kingdom. There were some nice houses, much cheaper, of course. Some were on beautiful, quaint commons. Some were in the woods. There was one stunning house, on pavement (as opposed to the ubiquitous dirt roads found in those parts), that just went with the image of canning and berry picking, and drinking tea on the back porch after a satisfying day’s work on a novel I had not started, or even considered writing… I would be embarrassed to admit falling for the whole thing, had not so many others been similarly seduced by this image of bucolic utopia. A few months later, we packed up the new baby and headed for the hills. It was March, and they were snowy hills, I might add. There was a LOT of snow, and it did not melt until May. Late May. It was forty degrees below zero the night after we moved in. Nothing melts when it’s that cold.

Although I found many things to love there, I felt a tad isolated—oh, I can tell more stories about that, too—when I lived in Vermont, and the horses were no help. Mostly, they took a lot of time. Now, you all may assume by reading this that I don’t take well to critters. Not true. When I was little, we fed raccoons in our suburban backyard. I was a big birdwatcher. As for bigger farm animals, as a little girl, I rode horses, albeit cautiously, nearly every time my family went to the country to see my aunt and uncle, about once a month. I was never the horsey girl who was in the equestrian troop of the Girl Scouts or wanted riding boots or read Black Beauty over and over at the age of eight, but it was pretty fun seeing my cousins and riding Dixie. (I also shot at cans with a rifle and drove homemade go carts too fast through the hills, but those are yet more stories for another time.). Dixie was gentle, and fun to groom and feed, and I really liked the barn. And then I went home and didn’t think much about horses. That was my experience with them.

So the question is sure to have come up in your mind by now. Why horses?

Well, the answer is simple. They came with the house.

The house we moved into was beautiful. It had two staircases—a dream I had growing up, because of the house where I used to take piano lessons. Add to that the push-button lights, three huge clawfoot bathtubs, pocket doors, leaded glass, a full walk-in pantry. It was elegant, wonderful inside. And outside were seven acres of perennial gardens on a gentle slope. Around the back was the entrance to the updated stables in the lower level of a three-story barn attached to the house. And there, in the stables, were the horses.

The big Morgan mix was twenty-six years old. Her name was Amber, and she was cranky. I couldn’t say I blamed her. The people who owned the house seemed to love her, and she loved them, and now they were going back to merry old England. The younger one—who turned out not to be that much younger—was named Marc Antony, or Tony for short. Tony the pony. Oh yes, he was a pony, and he was hell on wheels.. ahem, hooves. If Amber did not get out, Tony did. And if Amber did, it was usually because she was worried about Tony, who had already loosened the gate and headed down the field, or possibly the street. Have you ever tried to catch a naughty pony? The normal techniques I tried with cats sometimes worked. Tony liked oats, and occasionally came running if I shook the bag. When that trick failed, though, it was not fun, especially because I was not used to hip-deep snow, ice, and otherwise nasty conditions. So that was it for me. The care and maintenance of beasts, as well as starting the fire in the woodstove, were now in the hands of my then-husband. After nights up nursing, I had a good excuse to sleep in until seven a.m., after all.

There were still many coincidental worries around the animals. We were constantly running out of hay and feed, and the bit about shoeing them was more trouble and expense than I ever could have imagined. We had to lock the oats away from Tony, or he would eat too much and somehow develop founder, which is a scary condition I had never encountered. I felt that we were probably not doing everything quite right, and at best, were not giving the horses the opportunities to pull carts and be otherwise useful and productive. I had the idea that Tony’s shenanigans were as much a statement of boredom as a simple part of his personality.

Still, we kept the horses. I would have given up much sooner. Once, I was on my own for a couple of weeks. I was six months pregnant, had another baby in a backpack, and was shoveling manure. It was not a graceful or comfortable thing to do. In context, though, it did not seem like a big deal. What made it somewhat easier was the fact that many of the people I had met up there were dairy farmers. They were in cold barns working from four in the morning, sometimes with a young child or two in tow, sometimes pregnant, usually tired, and taking care not of pets, but of the animals who were their livelihood. I have never seen anyone work harder. They were often out there for hours later than any normal bedtime, repairing machines, tending sick animals, haying in the summer. I saw their raw hands and red faces, day in and day out, and I couldn’t really find it in myself to complain about a couple of cranky, but somehow amusingly mischievous horses.

Still, it was during my then-husband’s first long motorcycle trip that I realized the horses needed to go. By that time, number three child had arrived, and I realized that my role as a mother was turning into something I had not expected. My second boy’s delays in development across the board were quite evidently not cured by the various therapies I had set up, and a Leo the Late Bloomer scenario was becoming less and less likely. In June, my son was diagnosed with autism.

A neighbor gave me the name of the previous owners of the horses, and I called them. A few days later, they came and took Amber and Tony back to the horse farm where they had lived years before.

Strangely enough, after a couple of years, horses were exactly the thing that gave my son more than any other therapy he has ever had. I have no statistical data to prove this, and it could very well be argued that all the other efforts we had made just came together right then. It did seem like a miracle, though. He learned to walk, then run, after just a few rides on the back of a horse, a very calm horse—well, actually, a pony. I never knew this, but according to the occupational therapist who ran the show, humans ride horses comfortably because our gaits are the same. Horses are therapeutic, she said, because they give the rhythm of walking to those who don’t have it themselves. It seemed to be exactly the case for my son. And the magic continued. He said words he had never said before or since when the rhythm was right on the back of those animals. He smiled when he was riding, and rode on trails for several weeks with his brother one glorious fall.

Now, it takes a special sort of horse to be able to be a therapy horse, and I can tell you right now that Amber and Tony were a little past their prime for that kind of training. One thing was certain, though. I was no longer afraid of big animals. I stayed away from their backsides, more to avoid being kicked or stepped on than anything else, but aside from that, they didn’t scare me anymore. Chasing an ornery pony around the yard in the dead of a cold Vermont winter was a great way to dispel any fear I had.

So, when the time came to put my four-year-old son, who could barely sit up, in the saddle, I handed him over, watched him, and waited. I trusted, watched, waited, much as I do today, and will no doubt continue to do, as his life moves on at a different pace from the lives all around him.