My grandfather was a dentist during the week, and his weekends were all about spending time out in the country with his horses. When my mom was younger, the horses were rideable, but by the time I was a little girl, most of those horses had passed on. There was one last horse, born right around the same time as I, who was broken in his youth. I remember freaking out as a two year old when they tried to out me on him. I don't think they tried to ride him much after that, and he eventually forgot most of his training. I always regretted that they never gave me another chance on him, but he lived a very long, happy life as my grandfather's spoiled pet.
If I understand the history correctly (and there's no guarantee that I do), my grandparents took two tiny cabins off the old dairy property that our ranch was before we got it, and combined them at the top of the highest spot in the area, to make one small two bedroom cabin. It was rustic. Not just because there was no air conditioning, but because it didn't even have a line of "city water" running to it until at least 1980. We had to warn people not to drink from the tap, and even now, I don't trust it, and I swear I still smell the pond water that was used to flush the toilets. To this day, I wish I had gotten some pieces of the old barn, enough wood to use to make a kitchen table, and maybe the pieces that had the hand-painted names of the old horses. I never did.
The weekend ranch that my grandparents played on was slowly sold off over the years, little pieces at a time when someone needed a new car, or someone's relative needed a couple acres to build a house, then faster after my grandfather died. The barn rotted and eventually fell over. Now all that is left is the hill, and the cabin where I spent so much time, where so many members of my family--and so many people from my hometown--hold so many amazing memories. We used to go out all the time when my grandmother was still alive, to tend her garden, feed the horses, and best of all, sit quietly on the back screened porch after dark, to watch foxes come up and eat the dog food my grandparents scattered on the cliff for them. Church groups would go up there on Easter Sunday, to gather on that cliff and watch the sun come up through the trees. My favorite photo ever taken of me, right around my 30th birthday, was of me standing there, looking over my shoulder at the man holding the camera, giving him a look that said, "This cliff is the most beautiful spot on the face of the earth, and there is nothing you can say that will change my mind about that."
Thirty-five years ago today, my mother and stepfather had a sunrise wedding service at the Presbyterian church in town, a beautiful white building on its own hill, with early morning light streaming in the fifteen foot tall windows. It was a small service, with close friends, and my mom in a simple butter-yellow knee-length dress. A friend of theirs played guitar and sang. And then we all drove out to the cabin for a breakfast reception. I was ten years old, and a little skeptical about this whole process. I needn't have worried. It was a big change for me at the time, but now I can't imagine my family any other way.
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