Grimby’s Gratitude – A Horse and Her Girl

the E-Newsletter of Goldeen Ogawa • Issue 17, April 2019

Originally posted for Patrons on April 5 on Patreon

What have I done?

• Cleanups for “All The King’s Mages” (The Camilliad, Book 2)
• Edits for “Paving the Road to Hell” and “Escape Plan” (Arcana 2.8 and 2.9).
• Read-through of Lucena in the House of Madgrin (FINISHED ON MARCH 7 WOOHOO!!!)
• Interior illustrations for The Aubergine Spellbook (Felpz Volume III)
• Sticker sheets and personal work!

What am I doing?

• Cleanups on “All the King’s Mages” (The Camilliad, Book 2)
• Edits for “The Three Cavaliers” (The Camilliad, Book 1).
• Final read-through revisions for “Critical Magic” (Arcana 2.4)
• Interior illustrations for The Aubergine Spellbook and more personal pieces!

Where am I going?

I will be at Norwescon at SeaTac April 18-21, where you can see my work in the art show and find me rambling around the convention with the WoMo in tow (or towing, as the case may be).

A Horse and Her Girl

Most of the year 2002 I spent preparing for, recovering from, and going to horse shows. The woman who had been giving me riding lessons for the last six years bred and exhibited Appaloosa horses (the spotty ones), so that was what her students did too. I was one of a handful of girls who did the circuit that season, all of whom had richer parents and prettier horses than I did.

Their horses were tall, graceful, colorful. Lots of spots and flaxen manes and agreeable temperament in the show ring.

My horse was an opinionated chestnut mare with a lovely face but an overactive tail that pretty much kept us out of the top three in pleasure classes for our entire career. She also had a tendency to kick out after fences and generally show more personality than was considered desirable in a pleasure horse.

She was, despite her lack of spots, a registered Appaloosa with the registered name Empress of King. She was half Appaloosa and half Quarter Horse and looked at cows in a way that made them very nervous. She liked dogs and cats and rolling in soft sand and doing what she liked rather than what she was told and she hated being stuck in a 12ʹ ⨉ 12ʹ stall for a weekend. She was smart enough to know a pattern after one practice round, and smart enough that she got bored of it after doing it three times.

Her name was Emmy, and I loved her very much.

She died on June 19th 2015, at the age of 22. That was a bad summer. California was well into its worst drought in recorded history and that June had been torturously humid as well as blisteringly hot. Emmy was diagnosed with cancer at the end of May and spent a couple weeks eating steroids with molasses and spending her nights on pasture and her days in a 12ʹ ⨉ 12ʹ stall under a fan until one morning I came to move her and she was Done. I’d seen the look before, on my trainer’s old gelding who was dying of kidney failure. It was terrible, but also a relief.

I’d sort of expected Emmy to die from something sudden and tragically preventable, like colic or founder. She was prone to sand colic and had problematic feet. A fracture in her left front  navicular bone ended her show career in 2003, to the eventual benefit of both our lives. After a year of tender care and rehabilitation in which I learned a great deal about listening to an animal that speaks in twitches and ear-flicks and subtle changes in gait we started riding again, but this time on dirt trails where there was no judge to penalize us for Emmy’s swishy tail. Which tail, once she got free of the arena and any need to keep her head in a particular position for the sake of a Look, stopped swishing except to swat flies.

I did a lot of things in those years. I started mountain biking. Wrote three or four novels. Became a raft guide. Did three webcomics and got into the Furry Fandom. But through it all Emmy was there, and our weekly rides into the hills behind the ranch where I boarded her, and where she had the run of a two-acre paddock, helped me survive an increasingly toxic life at home with my parents. Once, to escape a particularly bad row with my dad, I rode my bicycle, crying, to the ranch, right up to Emmy’s paddock. She was annoyed that all I wanted to do was stand there and hug her neck and cry, but she’d put up with me braiding her mane and soaking her feet in buckets of epsom salt and injecting her with antibiotics and giving her oral dewormers not to mention washing her belly and she was patient and waited, and eventually her girl stopped crying enough to go get her some grain so it was all right, really.

All I could think was, At least you’ll never hurt me. At least I have you. I don’t know what I would do without you.

On June 19th, 2015, she was done. There is no hospice care for horses. There is one last trailer ride, one last morning, and a nice lady with some syringes who smells of antiseptic and straw.

And her girl, holding the lead.

I led Emmy a lot of places in our time together, but she was the one who carried me. I couldn’t carry her body home, so I donated it to the veterinary clinic that had saved her life at least three times before. Bodies are good and useful, even after they are dead. I took Emmy home in memories and smells and little pieces of my personality that developed to deal with a sharp, opinionated mare who preferred to be asked rather than told what to do, but when asked nicely would do whatever it was with brilliance and precision. Emmy existed perfectly in my head, I knew her so well. A fully developed character, if a horse-shaped one.

There are some people, I know, who love horses for their own sake and will always find ways to have or be around and interact with horses. I thought I was one of these people until Emmy died. Then I discovered I was specifically in love with one horse, and once she was gone I didn’t have the heart to love another. Not so much that I feared the pain of their inevitable separation, but that I had poured all my love for horses into Emmy, and now it was all bundled up with her memory, inextricable.

I see horses, I see Emmy. I miss Emmy. I want her back. At the same time, I don’t want the responsibility. I don’t want ivermectin paste snorted in my face. I don’t want any more nights walking in a circle, waiting for the vet to arrive. I did that for Emmy because I loved her. I’d need to love another horse just as much, and I don’t think I can.

I will always love horses objectively. Old habits die hard. I will always miss the feel of a canter up a hill and an easy walk down a trail. But I can never have that with Emmy again, and so I do not want it anymore.

When I first read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu in my teens I did not agree at all with what happened to Ged. I felt it was a betrayal. You can read the book yourself and see what you think, but I recently read it again. After Emmy died. Now I understand Ged. I identify with him because in many ways I have done as he did: I poured out what I had spent my life investing in, and once it was gone I went home.

Not home to the house I grew up in, but to the home of my future self.

What did I do without Emmy? I moved to Bend. It was a Honda Fit that carried me there, far from a dragon. I arrived, exhausted and horseless—but in undeniably better shape than Ged did upon Gont. I am done with that part of my life, and now I am moving on. Perhaps I will even get to hit a rapist in the head with a shovel at some point.

The parallel is not exact. I still have all my magic. I am young, compared to Ged. I still have a lot of work to do. And I have all my love and memories of Emmy to carry me through it.

Right now I am working on a quartet of novels about a girl who runs off to become a cavalier. There is a lot of intrigue and adventure and horses and fighting. The horses are all fully developed characters. 

Some of the people die.

None of the horses do.

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What’s coming in April?

Patrons can look forward to:

• Saturday updates to the Sparks Gallery
• Sunday updates to “Travels in Valdelluna”
• AND exclusive sneak peeks at upcoming projects!

ProTip

Getting exercise and eating healthy takes a lot of time and effort. A good first step is to strip getting exercise and eating healthy of any moral value. You do not have to be an athlete or eat tons of beans to be a good person. You have intrinsic value. So take care of yourself as best you can. Getting exercise and eating healthy helps!

This post has been generously sponsored by my Fellow Traveler patrons. Come join the party!