I hold the view that one’s life is best understood as a True Story with many chapters, the story-line running through one after the other, chronologically and continuously.

In the narrative of my life, there was a recent chapter that I mistakenly believed had come to an end, but apparently wasn’t over. As of now, that one still looks unfinished. 

It began at a stable where, for an hour on Friday afternoons, I used to ride. It was no ordinary stable. First, the horses looked to be top of the line, Arabians maybe, as I heard them called one time. People went there to train for competitive events. Whatever the precise character of the professionalism, it was real. So, a serious place to ride.

Of course, what with my neuropathy and all, my real riding days are over, or else will have to wait till I get to heaven. Where I have friends with whom I hope to ride again. Here on earth, I’d had friends who lived and farmed in Maine – and knew horses – the way other people know people. So much for my equestrian background.

But locally, down here in Pennsylvania, the stable where I rode had this distinctive feature: the young woman who walked the horse around with me was a horse whisperer. So I would voice whatever was uppermost in my mind and she would put into words his equine responses.

Lest you think, “Oh Abbie,

how gullible can you get?” 

I respond – “Very. Just try me!”

I’ve long supposed that we humans intuit a lot more about each other than we let on, so why shouldn’t animals – who aren’t regimented by our social conventions – know a fair amount about us too?

At any rate, one afternoon in June of 2024, the requirement of candor inherent in my relation with horse and horse whisperer led me to mention the October 7th 2023, attacks that, just then, were on my mind. I have family in Israel and a good chunk of my heart lies there. And another heart chunk – lies in academe, now loud in support for those attacks. For me those combined events had been, quite simply, unbearable.

The horse whisperer’s answering remarks – instant and expansive – were plainly her own and not anything a horse would imagine. She caricatured the victims and elevated herself to a moral high ground founded on her own ignorance of the barest rudiments of the actual events. 

I had believed myself safe here – far from the combat zone. In our horse-to-rider dialogues, part of the protocol had been to retain no defensive walls. That was the context in which what she said to me became the more deeply wounding.

Though I did not return, about a month later I felt sufficiently repaired to write her a letter explaining my absence. I’m a teacher after all, and thought she should know that words such as the ones she had used had real-life human consequences.

My letter went unanswered. It’s been half a year since I wrote it. So I’ve understood her silence to be her answer. Believing that I’d met my responsibilities, I did not brood about the matter but considered the case closed.

Until this holiday season, when I received two successive phone messages from the owner of the stables, who was the mother of the horse whisperer. The second message left the impression that she wasn’t just calling to keep a client but really wanted to know why I’d dropped from sight. 

That second call left me with a problem. I did not want to go behind her daughter’s back, but I did feel that some sort of honest response was due to the mother – a woman I respected. So, returning her call, I said merely that the topic of October 7 had figured in the course of my last ride, that remarks were made to me that I’d found deeply painful, that I’d written her daughter a letter explaining my view of the incident, which letter was met with silence. Therefore, I had taken the silence to be her daughter’s answer. 

     “She never got your letter.”

     “What?”

     “We get our mail at a post box – not at the stable.”

It was the last thing I expected. Novels like Thomas Hardy’s, where the whole plot turns on a letter slipped under the door – never seen because it also went under the rug – always irritated me. Hardy’s unhappy endings had causes that were trivially accidental. In real life, I thought, consequential endings ought not to have inconsequential beginnings.

On the other hand, the truth is the truth. It seems that serious consequences can have trivial causes. Wrong inferences can be drawn because a key bit of information is not known. I’d kept a copy of the misaddressed letter. Having now written down the P.O. box address, I sent it off again.

It reopens a story I thought had ended. Soon we will see –

whether the story continues –

or not.

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