Much is taking place in my world these days, and much of it has to do with Ham. These changes and transitions have called forth from the past deep seated memories and emotions, recollections that are coloring my thoughts and dreams. In them, I am transported back, seeing myself in flashes; three years old wearing blue jeans, red cowboy boots and a skirt, refusing to sacrifice frills for the saddle, insisting I could strattle both worlds. Ten and playing with Breyer horses on the thick green carpet, announcing to myself the “1999 wooooorld champion,” as I moved the model horse and rider through their victory pass. And then I am thirteen and looking down at the New England tricolor around Barry’s neck, how the red and blue silk catches the afternoon sun, how his sweat stains the fabric, how the celebratory ad in the Morgan Connection said, “I am so proud, -Judy,” and how my heart swelled when I saw it. And then seventeen, hoof black imbedded beneath my finger nails, baby oil everywhere, driven and serious and with Ham, Columbine, Curiosity behind me, feeling myself a horse woman at last. Like the afternoon Judy let me ride Wham-O and how for a moment at the end I felt him rise up beneath me, hovering suspended in that magic and timeless spot. And that instant at Oklahoma when my number was called and Ham and I became the National Champions. How I thought to myself that I wouldn’t be the type to cry and how my body betrayed me, letting lose a flow of tears that started out slow and grew to an uncontrolled catharsis, ending hours later, quelled by the return to normalcy, the familiar feel of the pitchfork in my hands. How the next year we won the world, effortlessly, as if it had been intended all along, and how I knew somehow it was. How Judy said, “it’s about time,” and how we left the ring, a blur of ribbons and red roses. How somebody handed me a cell phone, and how my father’s voice sounded on the other end, “Oh Allie,” and then tears, and how even now, four years later, the memory of that moment makes me cry.

And how there is so much more. A million moments in between these memory flashes, a million times the New England sun stripped me of my last reserves and how I forced myself to move despite that. How Marion’s hugs pressed my sweaty shirt against the silky inside of my show coat after a winning class, how Ginny held the reins and popped a grape into her mouth and said something like, “well that went well,” or, “maybe next time,” as I slid off and ran my stirrups up. How the towel hung from my dad’s back pocket, and how he held the wet bucket in his right hand. How the beads on Judy’s jacket caught the light, and how I saw myself walking behind her, a part of something, at home in my role as I was in the saddle, settled there where everywhere else, I was displaced.

All this is living inside me now, nestled in my heart and mind, painful but alive. And I wonder what to do with it, what it all means, and how it can possibly hurt so much. Because behind these memories, these thoughts and feelings, I am indeed thirteen again, and my mother is moving out of our family home, loading pieces of our life onto a moving van. And my father is crying, and yelling, he is locking himself in the back room for hours. And I am alone with the anger, the sadness, the lies and the past, the things I thought forgotten that have now coagulated in my chest, having been covered over all these years by the one constant I have known, the horses and my Ham. And so I, in this moment, looking back and afraid to lose it all, find my world upside down all over again. But I realize as well that such shaking up of things is life in a nutshell and the changes I've feared may just be the ones I need. I don't know what will happen from here on in, not for me, not for Ham...not for anyone really. But I refuse to be afraid any longer.