I pull out the red corduroy shirt tonight and take Caprichosa for a ride.

The red corduroy shirt is the one that means autumn is coming. The one I like to pull on first thing in the morning with my favorite gray sweats and fluffy Acorn slippers so I can start the coffee brewing. The one I’ve wrapped my kids up in so many times I can’t really say. All those times when they’ve gone out without a jacket. Even though I told them about a billion times (yeah, that’s when I was counting) to bring a light jacket just in case. Because here in the high desert it can go from hot as hell to winter just like that. And they don’t listen. Because not bringing a spare jacket in the face of impending weather is the cardinal rule of nearly all kids everywhere. And of course the day turns chilly, because I do know what I'm talking about. So it sometimes happens that my children are snug and warm and wrapped up in the red corduroy shirt, and I am left out in the cold because I’m the mom and the big softie around these parts.

The red corduroy shirt matches the sky tonight. It matches my mood. Red but not raw. Not quite. No. The feelings are right under my skin. They pulse. Ebb. Flow.

I choose the bareback pad over the western saddle because riding our Andalusian mare Caprichosa is like riding one of those thunderheads floating above us in the increasingly crimson sky that will be lit up by a full moon later tonight. They are as full of the potential for rain as Caprichosa is for a good romp. They pound their chests and make a big broo-ha-ha about the storm they are going to brew up, but I feel only a drop or two on my face. Cap arches her neck and offers up the splendid trot only Andalusians are capable of. Even if she is plagued with arthritis in the hind leg that got injured once too often over the course of her life to date.

The summer is dying.

I wear the red corduroy shirt because I need to be wrapped up in crimson tonight like the lucky members of the household of that industrious and too-good-to-be-true woman in the last chapter of the Old Testament Proverbs. You know, the perfect mom with all the answers, the one we could all use once in a while. The one that none of us had, and that I probably won’t be either.

I choose the bareback pad because I can feel all of that Andalusian moving underneath me, and then I am alive. As alive as the white mare is. Although worry about her stiff hind leg wakes me up in the middle of the night sometimes, and then I lay awake wondering if it will ever be better. If the beautiful Andalusian mare and I will be lucky enough to grow old together, and when exactly will that be.

Is it now?

I call Caprichosa “Momma”, although she’s never had a foal. It’s something that I picked up from a horsewoman friend of mine. And then it just kind of stuck.

All of the mature mares are “Momma” to some degree at my house. They mother my kids and their friends, they boss around our only gelding Toby, and they console me with their somber liquid eyes. Who would ever think that such comfort could be gained by sitting on an upturned bucket in a dirt pasture among a bunch of mares who are half dozing with their hips cocked? My mares—with their whiskers, their broad rear ends, their scars, their swishing tails and languid sighs, their breath like wine—make me believe in the absolute solidity of something, in some essential truth of the universe, the underpinnings of what’s visible to my inadequate eyes, although I can’t quite put my finger on it tonight.

I pull the red corduroy shirt close.