"Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?"

"A great shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from bed... "How do I feel?" he cried." Well, I don't know how to say it. I feel, I feel" --he waved his arms in the air-- "I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!"

- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Return of the King

I read the Tolkien books to my two kids when they were babies.

This was in part due to my mother's insistence about the importance of reading to infants and me trying to maintain some semblance of my sanity with a one-year-old and a newborn. I was doing full-time web development work from home with absolutely no help around the house from their dad, who was essentially worthless. (Still is, I hear, in terms of helping my kids' stepmother with that sweet little baby.) I was also getting pushed around and advised regularly by Mr. Charming that I was nothing, absolutely nothing without him.

Luckily, that's no longer my problem...

Lord, I don't believe I've ever been so tired in my life as I was when my two were babies. I could have laid down on a slab of concrete and slept soundly if you'd told me I could have a 15-minute nap way back then. I see exhausted young mothers sometimes, and I fight the temptation to say what everyone said to me, "It will get easier." Because you just can't see it. At least I couldn't then.

I have grieved what I lost during that part of my life. I have sat down and I have cried. Rivers. No one putting their hand on my stomach to feel the baby move. No one pressing their ear against my swollen belly and listening to the new beating heart inside of me. No long Saturday afternoon naps when I was pregnant and filled to the brim with life because I wasn't, believe it or not, allowed to. I could go on and on. A lot of the joy could have been sucked right out of me. But there was always that ember inside that refused to get snuffed out no matter how hard he tried.

Tolkein sustained me.

Will everything sad come untrue? I don't know the answer to that question.

I do know I have two beautiful kids who are a joy to me. Monday night when they got back from their dad's, we lay on our backs in the buffalo grass, shoulders touching, stretched out along the curve of the earth, breathing in the cool mountain air, watching the sun set and the half moon raise its pale face in the pale sky. I marveled at the two pairs of deep green eyes, so much like my own, snapping and flashing as my ten- and eleven-year-olds told their stories about their school day and we were laughing. I have the sense sometime when we are together that time is speeding up to double or triple what I would expect, and it is slipping through my fingers like the dry red earth that manages to produce the coarse stuff that passes for grass here in the desert. They grow so fast.

I know that yesterday morning at work, when I went to meet with a psychologist at the State Penitentiary, I was greeted with a depth of warmth you hardly see in other people any more by the inmate who was cleaning her office. He clasped my hand and introduced himself, and I told him I was glad to meet him. And I was. My friend the psychologist works every day with men who've done some unspeakable things, and yet she manages to see them as more than the sum of their mistakes. Occasionally I am in awe of that woman. I left my meeting there wondering at a life force blazing as bright as an orange jumpsuit.

I know that when I went to the pasture last evening, our appaloosa horse Teyla was waiting for me at the gate, like she's been doing more and more often. I cast my eyes down as I approached her, because she still gets nervous. I stand by her shoulder, give her a rub, feel her muscles relaxing. Move my hand down her back as she turns her head and her eye softens. I inch up to her head, cautiously, and surprisingly the horse doesn't move. I trace her jaw, rub her speckled ears. She wouldn't have let me do that a few weeks ago. But my husband Dennis, the horse whisperer, the one who whispered me back to the land of the living nearly a decade ago, has taken to currying the generally standoffish horse nearly every afternoon. He says she looks itchy to him, shedding out all that crazy winter coat of hers.

Something's shifting inside of the horse.

As I caress her face, I ask her if she has forgotten. If she has forgotten the years of abuse before she came to us. The loneliness. The despair. The pitch black dark place where you hit the bottom. Where chains rattle and where, if you are not strong enough or smart enough or capable enough or you just don't know how to open the goddamn gate, you are hog tied and branded. If somehow it has slipped away from her, slipped away like an old garment.

I let it fall to the floor until suddenly I am standing there naked. My bare feet tingle against the cool hardwood planks. And then I remember. I remember how I used to ride bare-footed as a girl. My ankles pressed against warm flanks. Toes tickling fur.

The horse lays her eye on me softly, a caress. One ear is cocked in my direction. To let me know she's listening.