Rock Circle and Scrub Oak
This morning. My son's greedy mare Piñon does not come as I toss hay into the feeder one heavy half a bale at a time, already steaming hot in my coveralls zipped up over pajamas. Usually the long-legged quarterhorse trots down from the top of the pasture nose to tail with our even greedier percheron Toby, whickering the dismal state of her empty stomach in the dark chill of what can barely be called dawn these days.
Coleman lantern in hand, I go looking, my impossibly long-legged shadow leading the way like some otherwordly harbinger of what? I don't know. But I could work myself up into a few good and increasingly bone-chilling scenarios given a few more minutes of no horse in sight. I call her name. "Penny!" Start huffing and puffing along the perimeter of the fence. "Piñon!" Thinking about the time she got that dead branch impaled in the back of her leg, right behind the knee. "Pin-Yon-aaaaaaaah!" I stop to catch my breath. Sometimes this inky morning air is almost too thin for human consumption. Scramble through moss rocks and scrub oak, relieved that I don't find her tangled in the wire fence.
Gold and red leaves appear inch-by-inch from the darkness as the sun rises much too slowly over the horizon, along with the skeletal remains of scrub oak eaten over the years by a herd of horses with way too much time on their hands. A few leaves cling to the stumps of scrub oak that jut up out of the rocks and boulders. You can't kill the stuff. Although my husband has tried. But he gave up waging that war several years ago.
Sunday. The kids and I climb with our two tenacious heeler puppies up the mesa to the place where boulders so big that surely they were put there by giants rise up out of the earth and form a rough circle. Not exactly Stonehenge, we call it simply—Rock Circle. I settle into a kind of slouch in a crunchy heap of scrub oak leaves that have collected on the ground near the center over a slew of seasons. J. scales to the top of a big rock, removes her heavy leather boots and wool socks, and wriggles her bare toes on the sun-warmed stone and moss, arms outstretched towards the Pecos, looking infinitely happy. C. splays out on the flattest boulder, the one he always claims, walking stick in hand. His nose, and chin, and blonde double-fringed eyelashes turn up towards the blue dome. Hot and tired, and this being their first big hike and all, the heeler pups dig thenselves a nice cool dirt bed beneath a rock shelf.
From where I lay, I compare the veins on the backs of my hands to the sun-embossed nervures of the red and orange scrub oak leaves dangling in the breeze just above my head.
"Look, Mom!" J. is doing a little jig on the top of one of the boulders before hopping to the next. C. joins in. The puppies bark and jump on top of me. They are all teeth.
Tomorrow, J. and C. go back to their dad's for a week. They told me this week (And I did not ask. I do not pry.), during my official State-Sanctioned Period of Responsibility (that's POR for you uninitiated ones), that their dad and his wife sleep all weekend, nearly every weekend, when the kids are with them. I'd like to call him up and ask him very politely to please (goddamit) just try and stay awake, at least while J. and C. are there. I worry about the kids being left pretty much up to their own devices in a big suburban house with a postage-stamp-sized yard. From what they say, I gather my children are, more often than not, not paid all that much attention to. Stepmom is jealous of my daughter, vying for what little shred of attention her dad can muster for anyone. I do feel bad for the woman. But she chose what she chose. And I will always choose my daughter and my son.
I usually don't allow myself to feel these things. Maybe I need to feel them more. Because then they won't get stopped up inside like a log jam. I am mad. And I am angry. I am sad. For all of their fleeting childhood, I will see my own son and my own daughter only half of that time. The thought of that separation, of that many years missed with these precious two, hurts. More than I care to fully explain here except to say that tomorrow afternoon I will be unraveled. All at loose ends and sixes and sevens. I will be sitting with the pain for a while tomorrow afternoon until it passes through me and goes on its way.
But this is today.
I toss a handful of scrub oak leaves at J. Then more at C. He tosses me an impish grin amidst a shower of red and yellow.
"Can we stay a little longer?" he asks.
"Sure." I say. One of the puppies whines and licks my hand.
I think I could stay up here for eternity. In a bed of scrub oak leaves, surrounded by stones. The high, sweet voices of my children filling up the empty air.
This morning. Piñon's thin white blaze appears like a spectre from out of a tangle of branches, a mess of scrub oak leaves. She comes ambling at me through the early morning light, brown eyes blinking. Apparently not all that hungry this morning.
I pull a dead leaf from her forelock.
What's lost is found.
Check out these beautiful Flickr photos by: koenigNazgul, roarksfork, Alix King, Rebecca Ellen
