Pasture

It was a backward glance that started all the trouble.

A sedated horse looks like a drunken horse. I stand in front of Blue—a five-year-old blue roan quarter horse—and rub his large head. His lower lip droops. He sways like heavy, wet laundry in a light breeze. A leg occasionally buckles, then recovers.

"Will he go over?" I ask the vet's assistant.

"They usually don't." She kneels at his bad leg, rubbing it with hydrogen peroxide.

The vet spins a tube of Blue's blood to tease out a thin line of platelets, injects the transparent liquid along the tear in his ligament. In less than five minutes, the procedure is over. The vet and his assistant walk the drunken horse back to his stall—he at the head, she at the tail. Blue ambles over to the small opening in the bars where twice a day a hand enters with a scoopful of sweetened oats. I stroke his nose and speak softly. Blue rests his head on the grain bucket bolted to the wall beneath the opening and sleeps. I pull my hand away, hoping he'll lie down. Several minutes later he's still asleep—his head in the bucket. Just like any good drunk.

Orpheus and Eurydice, that most famous look back: a bride dead from the bite of an adder and a lyric poet who could charm the devil.

There is a certain romance in independence. The freedom to live our lives in any way we choose. In nature it's called wildness. It's strawberry vines —pulled the previous season—curling around newly born tomato plants. It's a branch of an old hickory pressing against the kitchen window. That wildness can be frightening—its antidote: planning.

Independence is grasped at by nations and islands, by invasive plants, by people—especially the young and old—for whom it's something new or something flaccid. My mother's wish was to remain independent in her house until one night, in her own bed, in the middle of a dream, she dies peacefully and pain-free. This is a common plan, creased and folded and yellowed in the back of a drawer to be pulled out when the time comes. See, we say to ourselves, this is my plan. The fragile paper breaks at the fold. This, a finger traces a once solid line, is the way.

My mother's map is in pieces. She's recently been placed in a nursing home by a hospital that could no longer help her after a fall at home. Her legs and feet are bad; she can't walk on her own due to a strange neuropathy no doctor—for the last several years—has effectively helped. We'll get you out, my sister and I tell her. We'll help you sell your house. Get you into a nicer place—nicer meaning no roommates who scream in the middle of the night that someone is trying to steal their teeth, no hallways that smell of bedpan. We had no idea as we said these things of the legal fix she had gotten herself into—planned for, even. And the emotional fix as well.

The Chinese character for mother is made up of two parts: one for woman, the other for horse.

In the dead center of white and gray strands of muscle and tendon was an empty black hole. The sonogram had shown a torn suspensory ligament of the left front leg. On a scale of ten this injury was an eight or nine, the vet had explained—torn both vertically and horizontally.

Box rest was prescribed after the platelet procedure. Lots of it—24/7 in the stall. Hand-walking only . . . ten minutes, twice a day.

At Thanksgiving I move Blue closer to my home. I walk him into his new stall—a stall with a window—close and latch the door. You'll be happy here, I tell him. I can see you more often. I'll keep your stall clean. And you have a window. He pulls apart the flake of timothy...