CHAPTER 1

"What I'm looking forward to," my husband said, "is a week without horses."

"Shhh," I told him. It was seven-something in the morning, and daylight was beginning to dapple our bedroom. "They'll hear you." I didn't mean that their feelings would be hurt, of course. I meant, literally, that they'd hear our voices and know we were up.

Or, to put it more exactly, that I was up. And being up, I should be out there toting grain and hay, refreshing their water, and otherwise ministering to them, right?

Horses can be tyrants.

Especially my horses. Plum, my aged mare, had, for years, been relatively sedate about making her morning demands known. She'd, at most, rattle the rubber pail that hung along the fence line, a sound you could more or less sleep through.

Then she acquired a pasture mate, Spier, who taught her to be more assertive. Now Plum joined him in beating her hooves on the metal water trough the very minute a sign of life issued from the house (and of course, just before daybreak, they were always positioned to stare at the house).

Think of the drum break in Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein."

Think of the drum break as if played by a student drummer.

A pair of student drummer, student drummers wielding ballpeen hammers.

So of course I knew what Jeet was talking about when he fantasized a horseless week in New York City. A week of maybe snuggling for a minute or two before duty forced me to bound out of bed.

And sound carries in this part of Texas. My best friend, Lola, who lives with her boyfriend, Cody, on the farm next door, hinted around about it…and none too subtly.

"They make rubber troughs," she said.

"I've priced them," I told her. "Plus it seems criminal to throw a perfectly good metal one away."

"So have a yard sale," she suggested.

"Who would come to this yard?" Because Jeet and I live in really rural Texas. I mean, not prime yard-sale territory. And since everyone else I knew lived similarly, a yard sale did not seem in the cards.

"You could advertise it in the newsletter." She meant our dressage club newsletter.

"Hmmm," I said. This meant I wouldn't and Lola knew it.

But I am changing the subject here. The subject is Jeet and his upcoming New York jaunt, via which he was to become–we hoped–a published author, not just of restaurant critiques, which he regularly does for the Austin Daily Progress, but of a book, a memoir about the food he had eaten growing up.

Copyright © 2005 by Carolyn Banks