"Did you lose something this last winter?" I smile to hear Uncle Andy's Vermont accent once again, but I must admit that for the moment I am clueless--what have I lost and how does he even know that I am home? Is he calling to tell me that his mother has died?
Andy Ward is not really my uncle. I moved to St. Johnsbury, VT almost four years ago, a despairing sixteen-year-old leaving behind many riding friends in Langdon, NH and having troubles believing that God would provide others. Within a week I discovered that the dirt roads and trails around my house were extensive and that there were many fields containing horses about three miles away from me, but also learned that Grayson was the only horse in my immediate neighborhood.
Barb Machell was the first horse-lady I met on one of my exploration rides into the horse-inhabited areas, but she didn't seem like an immediate connection. And then several weeks later I was coming home from a hike with my family when we passed two thick morgans pulling little carts about 3/4 of a mile above my house--by the time they reached the edges of our property, I was bareback on Grayson, standing at the end of the driveway.
And that was how I met Andrea Turner. "Yeah, my mom told me about you," were her first words. Her mom? Had I met her mom? Apparently so: hadn't I met Barb Machell?
That first summer was a glorious one and among other newfound Vermont delicacies, I spent hours riding with Andrea and her Morgans--Misty, Magic, and Major. The trails around Andrea's house, I learned, were truly endless and kept winding you around corners and hopping you over logs, and coaxing you through just one more muddy puddle or over just another hill from which you could then see the trail, and the countryside, stretching on into the distance, forever. And I learned too that the little schoolhouse sitting at the bottom of Andrea's hill, where my grandmother went to school as a child, belonged to her grandparents, and that the farm below her's was her parents', and that her uncle Wes lived only a half-mile or so away if you took a shortcut through a field, and that just up the other side of the hill from her Grandparents, lived Andy Ward, her uncle.
One evening as Andrea and I were riding past her grandparents' house, her Grandpa Ken came out and took our picture, one which I would have loved to see: A slender grey Arab and a stalwart black Morgan, a sun-browned woman and a blond girl both in braided pigtails. Andy was there too, leaning quietly against his truck and smoking a cigarette.
After I knew that Andy was Andrea's uncle, it seemed that I saw him everywhere--sometimes he was outside his house when I rode by, sometimes he passed me in his white truck. And then I learned that he sold hay, and that he would be glad to supply hay for the girl with the "neat little white horse who looks like he's just floating along." Standing there and chatting in the hayfield as we settled up after a hundred bales, I learned that Grayson was the nicest moving horse that Uncle Andy had ever seen.
***
When I came home from college for my Christmas break this winter, one of my projects was to get a few musty bales out of my barn. $2.00 a bale in Vermont had seemed more economical than paying $6.75 a bale in Massachusetts, but by the time it had been transported four hours and then discovered to be full of dust, and by the time it had caused a visit from the vet for a hint of heaves, it wasn't that much cheaper. I figured that I might as well pay the higher price for better hay, and when I talked to Uncle Andy from whom I had never bought bad hay in the past, he quickly agreed to take the offensive bales back and reimburse me.
***
Grayson and I are back in Vermont now, he finished with Thayer Stables and I with my sophomore year of college. Two days ago while traveling with my mum, I mentioned that I wanted to call Andrea so that we could make the most of my few weeks home. But when Mum checked the messages upon our arrival home, Andrea had beat me to it--"Just wondering if Emily and Grayson are home."
We were going to ride yesterday, but she called me several hours before our meeting time and informed me that her Grandma Florence had passed away early in the morning and that riding would not be an option for a couple of days. No, there was nothing I could help out with as yet, but she would call me of things changed.
***
I honestly cannot remember losing anything this last winter. Now, if Uncle Andy had asked if I had lost anything recently, that would have been a different matter--but January? Has he found one of Grayson's freedom-craving easy boots, even though I am certain that both are sitting in my barn loft?
***
Tom Barrett has a sugar house on Frank Lawrence's land and runs his sap lines throughout Frank's woods at the top of, "Lawrence Hill," the road that runs parallel to our own. Such an arrangement is perplexing and only begins to make sense when you combine the bartering nature of many old-timer Vermonters, and Frank Lawrence's generosity, and the love for the woods that often brings Tom Barrett up Lawrence Hill from his place down in the center of St. Johnsbury to run his dogs. As fellow frequenters of the sugar maple lot, my family bumps into Tom Barrett once in a while, the rest of the time deriving that he has been there by the snow shoe trails along the sap lines, or by the extra attention that our dog, Oscar, might give to a particular patch of tall weeds.
A few days ago, even long past sugaring season for the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, Tom was poking around in the maples when he happened to look down and notice what looked to be a check folded in half and lying in the grass. As it had Andy Ward clearly printed on it, and as he knew Andy, he brought it over to Andy's place and they chatted for a while, briefly wondering how it might have arrived three miles away, through a field, and up in a sugaring lot. Tom eventually left, leaving Uncle Andy with the check to scratch his head over.
***
Uncle Andy tells me that he laughed after he looked up the check for $37.50 in his ledger, laughing some more that it was still intact--except for the ink being smudged in one place--and thinking to himself: "I bet I know how it got there."
Now that he knows for sure, Uncle Andy thinks that he'll tell Tom Barrett about it, too. But to me he simply says--"That reimbursement check must have jiggled out of your pocket somehow while you were riding that neat little horse of yours."
No comments:
Post a Comment