The breath wells up from deep inside of you, eddies and swirls in your shoulder blades, courses down your arms to your fingertips, and breaks over the scar tissue in Caprichosa’s stiff hind leg as you exhale. You’re no expert, but the breath seems to help the healing process.

The Andalusian horse lifts her tail demurely. Blinks at you through snow white eyelashes. Threatens to fart.

Bitch. You say.

The crafty old mare holds your gaze, then relaxes her tail against her rump, which for all intensive purposes you are embracing, doing the sweeping strokes on page seventy-something of the massage book, in the section about scars. She dozes back off.

You work your way through the pages of the equine massage book. It's held open in the wheelbarrow by the Bute and the MSM bottles. You work your way down the length of the scar tissue. You’ve used the TTouch for years, so this doesn’t seem entirely unfamiliar to you. You bend, you stretch, you cajole the scar tissue with your fingertips. Somewhere you read that it can take as long to break down a scar as it took to build it up.

In the rhythm of the work, in between the breaths, you think of your own scars. You've got your stiffness and your soreness. Your knots. The less than fluid places. You can reorganize scar tissue, is what the massage books say. You imagine the work like waves crashing over rocks, pummeling them into sand.

Kind of like living does.

Caprichosa cocks her hip. When you work on her front end, she grooms you back. She'll put her yellow teeth into it if you don't pay attention.

You wonder at how massaging a wooly mare in the dead of winter can be so pleasant. But the sun is streaming into the barn. Soaking into her shaggy coat. Drenching the goose down of your barn jacket with its warmth.

The horse rests her head in the crook of your arm, breathing you in and out.