My job here is to stay close.  Be ready.  Break a fall.

Three of us and a horse—six feet and four hooves—kick up a lot of dry earth as we walk and trot around the outdoor ring. The rider has been taking weekly lessons for almost three years. Her legs are strong, and she sits deep in the saddle. Heels down. Spine straight.
     “I want to canter,” she says.
     At first I think she’s joking. A horse’s canter falls between a trot and a gallop, a three-beat gait averaging ten to twelve miles per hour.
     “Take it right from the walk up the long side,” the instructor says. She looks at me and the other sidewalker and indicates with her hands to move in closer.
     In a canter the horse—part of the time—is suspended off the ground. To tell a horse to canter is to balance on the wind through the sheer force of speed. 
     As we turn the corner to the long side, I focus on my job, fix my eyes on the rider.
     Her leg moves behind the girth and squeezes the horse’s ribs. “Canter,” she says and makes a kissing sound with pursed lips.
     The horse rears its head, brings forward his hind leg to push off, and I run—sideways, not looking where I am going but at the rider. Straight, at first. We round the bends at the top of the ring. The horse leans into the curve and away from me. I’m the skater at the end of the line, struggling to catch up. Which means I run faster. Sideways. Down the other side. Everything stacattoed. Our voices. Our breath. Our arms slightly akimbo, slightly flailing. Lifted. For balance. For the rider. Just in case.
     “Trot,” the instructor yells.
     The rider pulls back on the reins, slows the horse to a trot, walk, and finally halts just before the turn at the bottom of the ring. All of us out of breath. The rider smiling, laughing, hugging the horse’s long curve of neck. Begging for one more time. 
     “It’s like flying,” she says lifting her chin to the sky. I look up too and wonder what she sees or imagines she sees. 
     The rider is blind.

To walk, though unable to stand. To run, while unable to walk. To fly though unable to see. These are the gifts horses give to children who come to ride at Lovelane Therapeutic Riding Center: mobility, rhythm, a rush through movement. On the horse, these riders discover the experience of cadence, harmony through balance, resonance, tuning: gifts, as well, in music.
     Most of the Lovelane children wear various labels of disability: autism, cerebral palsy, Angelman syndrome, C.H.A.R.G.E. They move as water moves, not so much under their own power but compelled by a force contained in their cells that swirls beneath them, around them. The outside forces they encounter are plenty: the human urge for forward movement, society’s fears and ignorance, a parent’s drive for progress, a horse’s powerful legs. All this thrust—a way to leave what’s past behind. But the best riders—handicapped or not—are the ones who trust themselves and their mount, who find their seat between their body’s innate wisdom and the gait of the horse. Remembering what they haven’t yet learned.

The first student on Mondays is the curly-haired girl. She is ten years old with cerebral palsy. She wears thick glasses, bell-bottom jeans, and pink boots that would fit a Raggedy Ann doll. She is prone to teary break downs and spends the first half of the lesson asking for “Ma” or “Da.” Stringing two syllables together is rare. Her father lifts her from her wheelchair and tentatively touches her feet to the floor. Behind her, up the mounting ramp, he not only supports her but pushes each one of her legs forward with his own to mimic a gait. He always makes jokes, usually at the horse’s expense, seems to need to make us laugh or, I think, let us know he can. The instructor lifts the girl into the saddle and settles her like a pillow. I walk to her left with my hand on her thigh and keep my eyes turned up towards her.

If you miss the turn for Lovelane onto Baker Bridge Road, you continue north on Route 126 into Concord and past Walden Pond where Henry David Thoreau camped out for a year in a now infamous log cabin. You’d never know it was a pond more remarkable than any other pond except for the brown and white state park signs that mark the entrance and large parking area most ponds don’t require. I like to think of Thoreau when I’m at Lovelane, someone unafraid to live life differently, who cared more about being wild than fitting in.

While we are in the ring with the curly-haired girl, another instructor works with two boys at once. They are total opposites: one tall and slim the other short and squat. One has bright red hair and freckles, the other is dark. The red-head talks a lot; the darker, shorter boy is quiet and always looks as if he might cry. They share a diagnosis—Autism, though obviously the severity varies. I watch them, knowing I probably shouldn’t, as the girl’s instructor adjusts her stirrups.
     “I am on fire today,” the red-haired boy says to his teacher. 
     “You sure are,” she shouts back.
     The boy’s face clouds over for a moment. He touches his index finger to his temple then shakes it in the air and adds, “But that does not mean I am in flames.”
     I smile, hope no one notices, then pretend to be involved with the stirrup-shortening process. I have to get better at managing distraction.

The curly-haired girl is crying for her father. She sits up high on the horse and holds her breath as tears stream down her face. The lesson is at a standstill. We have to remind her to take a breath.
     The boys watch her and ignore their teacher. Finally, they move to the other end of the ring. I can hear the taller one reading a list tacked on the side of a ring describing the qualities of a horse in alphabetical order with large capitals at the beginning of each word. Loyal, Mighty, Nimble, Obedient… Like many children diagnosed with some form of autism, they are strong readers. 
     P-P-P-Patient, the shorter one butts in. His speech impediment becomes exacerbated when he rushes, though his words smooth out when he rides. Trot, Stop, Fast, all roll smoothly off his tongue as if he had been running with pebbles in his mouth or shouting against the surf like Demosthenes.
     The boys are focused again. The curly-hair girl lets out her breath and collects herself. The instructor asks her to make her horse “go.” The girl separates her lips—a kiss without the pucker—forcing an empty sucking sound, a nonverbal yet auditory “go” for the horse. 
     “Use your words,” the instructor urges. “G – o. G – o.” 
     The girl repeats. “G” then “o.” She uses letters and sounds more than words. But to trot she has to first walk, and to find the hard stone of a word she’ll have to spit out many pebbles.

We constantly have to remind many of the children to stay present, stay focused. Good listening, we tell them. Good looking. They are easily distracted (as are new sidewalkers) by other riders or overly focused on remembering the steps they are to take throughout the lesson. Look at me, the instructor reminds them to make eye contact when speaking to pull them into the present moment where nothing else matters but them, their horse, and the instructor.
     Concentration can usually be recaptured when it slips away. If only for short periods of time. Getting a child “into his body” is one way to do it. Touch your belly, touch your cheeks… The combination of tactile and cognitive—using different areas of the brain at the same time—is what therapeutic riding is based on.
     Making eye contact with the parents here was at first difficult for me. These are people who have lived through a parent’s greatest fear—that their child isn’t perfect, isn’t equipped with everything the outside world demands, isn’t normal.
     The unfairness, the inequity, the difference in our daily struggles makes my prayers look small and selfish. Truth is, I’m embarrassed to have normal children around these parents and it will take a while before I realize how wrong that is. 
     Look at me. 
     Everyone wants to be looked at. To be looked at is to exist. To look is to know.

Kevin’s legs are as thin as my arms and he cannot walk unassisted. He is twelve but has the mental capability of a six year old. He has difficulty remembering, except when he sings. Kevin loves to sing and can belt out stanza after stanza while riding. He is also the student most fearful of the horses. Before we take a step he is hungry for information that will reduce his anxiety. What’s the horse’s name? Has he been ridden yet today? How long has he been here? Then he attempts to name the horse’s anatomy. The parts he remembers are always the same: forelock, mane, withers, neck. That every horse is the same—that constant—makes him less leery.
     “Have you got me?” he asks me as we begin to walk. I strengthen my grip on his thigh—sidewalker’s hold we call it. A horse and rider are a duet, two voices singing or two hands playing one piece of music. I’m not the conductor. Neither is the instructor. We are only the lines the music is written on.
     “I got you,” I tell him.

Music is a vessel of memory. Rhythm, rhyme, and beat—the beat of music or hoofs—are mnemonics. So is poetry. This is why Kevin can remember verse after verse, and why most of the children can relate everything that happened in their lesson to their parents that night including long conversations they had with their instructors. They absorb and retain information through cadence.
     The curly-haired girl once went missing from her house as the sun went down. Her mother could still feel that terror in her body three days later as she told us the story. They found her in the dark, under a tree, making guttural noises. Not vowel sounds but the sound that comes from deep in the diaphragm when singing though her parents knew it wasn’t singing. They heard it as singing much the way we hear “girl” from “gah—lll.”
     I tried to think of something positive to say about the experience. Something wise or reassuring, tie it all up with an aphorism about luck or fate or the universe watching out for us. There’s nothing I could say to this mother. There’s nothing she needed to hear from me. My guess is mostly she wanted to be heard. 
     If you have a secret, a Chinese saying goes, climb to the top of a mountain and carve a hole in a tree. Whisper the secret in the hole, cover it with mud, and leave the secret behind. Parents often give us a recitation of what kind of week their child has had since the last lesson. As an indicator of how this lesson might go, as proof of progress, as a caution about some new physical restriction, or as a way to leave something behind in the telling.

When we enter the woods on a trail ride, Kevin sings. It’s a long song about the importance of saying please and thank you. Parts are spoken as if by a narrator and Kevin infuses his voice with the inflection of a game show host.
     There are hints of new life everywhere. Forsythia limns the edge of the forest and once inside there is as much green from new needles and leaves as there is brown from the lingering dead. It has rained recently, and the bark is dark and musky. Kevin sees none of it. The expanse of space outside is scarier to him than the enclosed riding ring. When his horse stumbles in a rut or over a tree root, his breath catches and I feel his thin leg tense. The distraction of fear is more difficult to pull children away from. Even when we ask him for a song, Kevin grips the reins and his knuckles whiten like moons. 
     The instructor tells him a story about a recent family dinner and a dog that ate all the deviled eggs when no one was looking. He doesn’t laugh.
     Ahead a tree has recently fallen across the path, and the smell of deep dirt exposed by torn roots permeates the air, overtaking the smell of horses and sweat.
     “A tree fell in the forest and we saw it. I guess that answers that puzzle,” the other sidewalker says. 
     I’m confused. But the instructor catches on, more used to the abstract leaps a mind can take.
     “Do you mean the riddle about a tree falling with no one there and whether it will make a sound?”
     “Sound? No, it’s about seeing the tree fall. Something like that. Anyway…” She raises her eyes to Kevin to make contact. “I see the tree fell. Do you see that the tree fell?”
     “What tree? Where?” he asks.
     “Across the path. Look in front of your horse.”
     The boy leans forward, almost standing, to see past his horse’s nose forgetting—for a moment—his fears. 
     “Can’t you see it?”
     With some help, moves back.
      “Of course I see it,” he says settling back into the saddle. “I’m not one of those blind kids.”
     Lovelane holds a sign language class for staff and volunteers once a week. I have learned that the sign for thank you is the same gesture as the sign for you’re welcome. The act and the gratitude entwined, inexorably bound. 
     No matter what is asked for. Or what one is grateful for.

The left brain dances with the right on a horse. Language partners with movement. The children focus on balancing thoughts and motion. The horse’s body walks them limpidly around the ring. At the trot, they are jolted, tousled. Many of these children can barely walk, never mind run. They are the ones who love speed the most. 
    To sign “fast” I hold my thumbs tightly in my fists then roll the fists forward and flick out the thumbs. A father once told me that during the entire ride to Lovelane, his son Chris sits in the back seat flicking his thumbs. Chris is seventeen years old. I don’t know his diagnosis, but he doesn’t speak, moves with difficulty, drools heavily, and often seems unaware of what is happening around him. 
     “Flicks his thumbs,” the father said proudly, “and smiles.”

Horses sense fear through a rider’s posture and balance. They also smell it on us, as deer smell fear during hunting season.
     One of the instructors I sidewalk for is pregnant. She must wonder if she will give birth to a perfect baby. Do the parents of the Lovelane children wonder as well? They don’t seem to. The mothers easily engage in pregnancy tales and advice. Most of these women have other children without disabilities. Some have two or three older, normal children. Some have gone on to have more children after their handicapped child was born. 
     Their fears were made real. Everything changed in the flick of thumbs. Now, they no longer have reason to worry; we worry only until the worst happens. That is when, I guess, the worries and bad dreams stop or are supplanted by a new variety.

If instead of sidewalking, I am asked to lead the horse, then all my attention goes to the horse and anything in the environment that may spook him. I speak softly to earn his trust. I watch the horse’s ears. The position of his ears tells me if he is paying attention, if he is listening to me, if he is relaxed or angry or afraid. It’s like sign language. When fearful, a horse’s ears lay flat.
     The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. The opposite of fear is not courage but trust.
     During my afternoons at Lovelane, I focus on the balance of a child or the ears of a horse. When Gypsy stumbles or Poncho spooks, the muscles in my gut and lower back tense and remain that way long after the incident is over. I carry tissues in my pocket to wipe noses and chins. I sing the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat with words we make up, and recite the alphabet. In another pocket, I carry smooth white peppermints as a bribe for the horses but more like a talisman of faith because I’m the one who is fearful. I don’t want life to be so random, like hooves that stumble suddenly on rocks and break open the earth.

On our way out of the woods we pass a tree that looks like a puzzle. The trunk rises and splits into two. One half lifts straight up and soon thins to a stick like taffy pulled too far. The other half is shaped like the letter “N,” rising, falling, then rising again up towards the canopy of tree tops where it ends in a sky-puddle of green.
     “Look at the funny tree,” Kevin says.
     “What letter does it look like?” the instructor asks. “What sound does it make?”
     We are always teaching. 
     Kevin looks confused. I’m afraid he’s remembering the previous discussion of sounds and trees. Finally, he sets his teeth together to make an “Nnnnn” sound.
     “A tree does that when something goes wrong,” the instructor explains. I tighten my grip on the boy’s thigh to keep him steady. The awkward tree has distracted him from his fears but also from his balance. The instructor goes on, “A tree can fix itself when something goes wrong with it. Grow a new limb. Slant more towards the sunlight. It leaves the sick part behind and moves in a better direction.”
     Kevin turns back to face front and grips his reins, the white of his knuckles showing again. “Hmmph,” is the only reaction we get until he begins to sing the please and thank you song.
“I wish to speak a word for nature,” writes Thoreau in his essay “Walking,” “for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.” 
     Thoreau saw nature as a means to enlightenment. Nature, I am sure, does not look at us in the same way. For all its gifts, it is also cruel and seems to lay out a path that can be too rote, too programmed, robotic, unfeeling. Nature doesn’t give a flip about the deformities, deficiencies, and curiosities that occasionally appear in a plant or animal.    
     It is not my job to understand these parents though inevitably, through their stories or their children, I obtain glimpses into their lives. They seem like any other parents. There is no way to comprehend on the surface what they struggle with, what they have lived through. There is no way to know what their expectations are for their child other than what happens at Lovelane. Some of these children have profoundly shortened life spans. Others don’t. Some can survive independently. Others can’t. Some parents tell jokes. Others won’t.

Back in the ring, Kevin’s mother sits on the mounting ramp reading People. I am sure these are probably the only thirty minutes of stillness in her day, and whenever we return at the end of a lesson there’s a whiff of disappointment behind the smile she greets her son with. Kevin’s mother isn’t afraid to push. She wants him to canter and every week asks the instructor when he’ll be ready. The instructor always answers the same way: “That’s up to Kevin.” The mother thinks it’s up to us. And lets us know it.
     She walks over with a carrot for Kevin to feed to the horse. She wears sandals and white crescent moons tip each toenail. They look odd in the manured dirt of the indoor ring. Kevin begins his recitation even before we help him dismount.
     “We saw a tree, Mom. You should go out and see this tree shaped like a letter. Nnnnnn.”
     His mother slips him the carrot.
     “Just like that,” he says. “Nnnnn. Guess what letter that is.”
     “I don’t know, Kevin.”
     The instructor helps him hold the carrot loosely because he has a tendency to grip the carrot even after the horse has most of it in its mouth and will then pull or try to bite closer to the hand.
     “‘N.’ It’s ‘N’. Nnnnn. Do you know why it’s shaped that way? I can tell you why it’s shaped that way.” 
     Kevin is speaking in full, perfect sentences. His diction and annunciation are perfect, like when he sings. The horse opens its mouth. Kevin offers his hand. I look to the mother to see if she too notices the improvement in speech.
     “It’s shaped that way because when something happens to a tree it grows another limb or gets all twisted to find the sun. It goes squiggly but doesn’t die.”
     He has embellished the story and this is really something. The sound of crunching carrot fills the air. The mother is contemplating her toenails gone dusty. When I can see her face again it holds a look—not about ruined pedicures or worries about horse bites—it’s the look of someone who deeply understands the story her son is relating.

Left foot, right foot: a walker moves across landscapes both inner and outer. Left brain, right brain: the gait of thought and response. One misstep creates a tear in the intricate tapestry of emotion and intellect, sensation and communication. The human body is born astonishingly resilient and unexpectedly vulnerable. Many people choose to ignore the dual nature of walking, concentrating only on left or right thereby walking a continuous catenary curve. Nature or genetics or an accident of fate have denied the children at Lovelane any choice. Breaking out of their circle, restoring the gait is why they ride, is how their parents give their children and themselves a chance to break from that circle and move forward.

I worked one day with the red-haired boy. The instructor carefully enumerated the steps he was to take once he had mounted:
     First, weave the orange cones.
     Second, posting- trot to the door.
     Third, walk a circle.
     He performed each step perfectly and in sequence without a reminder. This was progress.
     “Now,” the instructor said. “Do it backwards.”
     “Lisa,” he said without any hesitation, “I don’t think that would be very safe.”
     Speech here is like poetry—every word counts.

Each June, Lovelane hosts a horseshow for the kids and their families. A gesture of completion. All but two of the students and their families attend. The instructors are in the ring with the students as they perform in groups of two or three so the rest of us do whatever is needed—tack horses, find kids, helmet and mount them, lead the horse, or sidewalk. Some of the students are nervous. Some, I imagine, don’t really understand what’s happening.
     Vanessa clips three ribbons to her horse’s mane that match the pink and purple ribbons tied to the back of her helmet. I’ve been to many horse shows outside Lovelane. All parents act the same way when they watch their kid perform on the back of a horse.
     Vanessa keeps her head low. I sidewalk.
     “Look at the crowd,” the instructor tells her. But Vanessa looks away.
     “Get up into half-seat.” Put them in their bodies.
     Vanessa stands in the stirrups. Her knees slightly bent. Her weight on the horse’s neck between the ribbons. The mane tangled in her fingers. Half-seat requires balance, strength, and concentration.
     “Look,” we all plead. “Look for your Mom and Dad.”
     Slowly, as we pass the crowd, she looks—eyes slide first—then she turns her head to find her parents, sees them and smiles. She lifts her left arm from the neck of the horse, waves at her parents whose reaction I don’t see because I’m focused on making sure Vanessa stays on the horse. By the time we start the turn away from the crowd, Vanessa is throwing kisses like a movie star.
     She’s a cowgirl. She knows it.

Loss is a singularly personal event. Loss lacks objectivity. I wonder how to act around those living with loss. The question, in its use of the word “act,” implies a response that is not genuine? Where do I find a genuine response?
     “The great secret of morals,” writes Shelley in his Defense of Poetry, “is love.” The “love” Shelley refers to is the same type of love religious texts speak of. It is the love the Dali Llama speaks of when he tells us he can love his murderous persecutors. It is the solution to war. This love means slipping into another person’s skin, if just for a moment. Look at me. Not living their grief or loss or terror or evil but acknowledging it and understanding, even when they cannot, that this is just a small portion of what makes them who they are. We are more alike than different. All parents at a horse show are the same.

Many students come to the show dressed up. Cowboy boots, chaps, fringed leather gloves, and English riding breeches with suede knee patches are almost as prevalent as they are at any horse show. Parents fret, snap pictures, boast, and applaud.
     There is a flow of movement in yoga called Sun Salutation that begins with the hands in prayer position in front of the chest and the feet squarely on the floor. One yoga teacher would tell her class that if they were leaning too forward on their toes, they were living in the future. If they were leaning back on their heels, they were living in the past. Balance on the four points of each foot the goal. “The gospel according to this moment,” Thoreau calls it. I think of this when I watch the kids ride.
     When I started riding horses I had a tendency to lean forward. Maybe to be nearer to the ground. Maybe to feel closer to the horse’s neck so I had something to grab if I lost my balance. I was desperately frightened of falling. And fall I did. Once every six months or so. 
     When I changed teachers, the new one was always yelling at me to sit back, sit back. Leaning forward was a dangerous habit that took me nearly a year to completely break. As if I had needed to be pitched into the future for some sense of assurance.
     I try to stay in the ring as much as possible at the show. I usually only see four or five students a week and to see so many gathered in one day is electrifying. I watch the kids. I watch the parents. The parent’s will leave the show assured that their child is making progress. That’s also part of our job. The instructors and sidewalkers leave knowing we have done something good. 
     I don’t wish I had a child here. I don’t feel special for having normal kids. But I realize I envy these parents their opportunity to see the world through the eyes of these children. Not one of them pitches forward. Or back. Each student sits as deeply in the saddle and as straight as their body will allow. Some need a gait belt and two strong sidewalker arms to stay upright. But they do.
     Thoreau has such a moment he describes at the end of “Walking.” 
We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening. 
     The light he describes is not the first light of morning but the light at the end of the day.
     Maybe it’s the riding lessons that keep the kids so centered in their saddle. Maybe something else.

A week after the show, driving to no particular place, Dylan on disc singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” I get the feeling I cannot close my eyes. But feeling is not the right word. I know I could close my eyes if I tried, and what I am experiencing is not a physical sensation. It’s more of a thought. One that I know is not true and true at the same time. So I don’t. I don’t close my eyes. Body and mind wrestle. I force what I believe. It feels natural at first; then my eyes begin to sting. Then it becomes an effort. For as long as I physically can, I keep my eyes open until their surfaces and my ability to drive is threatened. I blink. My eyes had become so dry they feel gritty as if behind the lids were grains of sand: the accumulation of time, the grit of pearls. Of course, when I open them, I feel nothing, of time or pearls. My eyes settle back into a rhythm as natural as breathing, and I and continue on my way, the summer sunlight sharpening the world outside as if something had darted across the front of the car then run to the other side of the road, as if I could know something was there without actually seeing what it was.