I must have been five years old.
I stood alone in the backyard of a hundred-year-old blue house while my aunts and uncles hauled furniture to a moving truck. Probably? It must have been there somewhere, although the specifics of it are parked just outside the scope of my memory.
Surrounded by old tall fences and even taller pine trees, I held my hands out to a small spring horse suspended by a rusty metal frame. The springs were uncovered, and had pinched every finger I owned. She was a brown horse with a real, blonde maine and her name was Polly. I pulled a small Barbie hairbrush out of my pocket and brushed out the knots of her hair with a sad heart.
We were leaving her behind.
As young memories go, everything is a little bouncy and scattered. But I do remember, distinctly, this: I told her goodbye. Quietly, so no one would laugh at me. I remember the deep regret that I hadn’t played with her enough. Her springs were rusty and pinchy, yes, but she was a perfectly good toy. And now I was leaving her.
Perhaps, I thought, if I had played with her a little more, she wouldn’t be sold with the house. Maybe if I brushed her hair this one last time, someone might notice and scoop her up into the moving truck—maybe she could be something that remained the same in the face of such an upheaval.
I see the picture clearly now, like someone had snapped a Polaroid and hid it from me all these years. A small blonde babe brushing the matted hair of a plastic horse, carefully avoiding being pinched by the springs, feeling something that so many decades wouldn’t erase.
Years later, I’d ride a horse in Southern Indiana named Polly, and my mind would muddle the memory ever so slightly; was it a coincidence? Did I retroactively assign that name to the first and only horse I ever owned? Was it a sign telling me I was galloping down the right path?
Or was it just an old plastic horse, and was I just an odd little child?
Today’s Reminder:
The things you’ve left behind are the breadcrumbs that brought you here. Leave them, kindly, to the birds.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, identify the thing you own that you’ve had the longest, and place a grateful hand upon it.
The plastic horse girl 🎠