We have a redbud tree with a tiny nub where its main trunk once grew straight up towards the sky. This redbud is in a spot on our property where we buried one of our cats, and despite my many attempts to grow her a memorial plant, everything I have put on her grave has died. The redbud, which is not directly on her grave but very close by, looked like it would be the next victim. But though the main trunk did die off about two feet above the ground, there were some skinny little twigs that slowly took over and grew upwards. The tree gets hit by our strong northwest winds, even more so since we took down the disintegrating locust trees that sort of blocked some of the wind sometimes (but that also flung branches down on the redbuds sometimes), and the way it has grown makes it look like it’s being bent by a strong wind even when the air is still.

I haven’t counted the trees we have planted in a while, but there are over twenty of them. Some of them have had uneventful lives, growing straight and strong and healthy. Others, like the redbud, have suffered one way and another, sometimes with known causes and sometimes unknown. The eleven year old maple tree that marks one of the horse graves has a split trunk because what was the main trunk got bitten off by one of the other horses when the tree was still tiny. There are two young tulip poplars we planted in the same season. One of them is about four times the size of the other because the little one’s leaves kept getting eaten by something that didn’t seem to find the other one tasty, despite the two trees being only about thirty feet apart. Our two Bradford pears did what Bradford pears do, and split beyond saving in two separate storms, though the second one to die continues to stage Night of the Living Bradford Pear and sends up little zombie shoots despite all kinds of discouragement. Some of our strongest trees are the volunteers – the trees that seeded themselves from another tree on our property and chose where they wanted to grow.

It used to be that when I had to answer family medical history questions at a doctor’s office, I said that except for my grandfather who died of a heart attack at 55, everyone was pretty healthy. We are not a talking people, my family – at least not about personal topics – so it took a couple decades of collecting and extrapolating information before I realized there probably isn’t room on the forms to list all the things. In addition to my grandfather’s heart attack, there is high blood pressure and high cholesterol and thyroid disfunction. There is quite a bit of depression, probably two suicides, a lot of alcholism. There is some range on the autism spectrum. There are at least six different cancers. I’m never sure how helpful it is for me to know these things. Some of them don’t affect me, some I can stave off or manage, but some of them just are or will be.

My father used to say that he didn’t understand depression. His suggestion for a cure was “Just decide to be happy, and be happy.” Of course, he also said that he didn’t understand drug use because he “just got high on life” – and sometimes he said it with his daily beer or vodka and tonic in one hand, a bottle of wine open in the dining room to breathe so it could be consumed with dinner, and a liquor cabinet full of options for his after dinner nightcap. He was a man of contradictions, with a sidecar of denial. Once, when talking to my then sober grandmother (my father remained convinced that both my grandmother and my aunt went to AA meetings because they were lonely and it was a way to make friends), he said “We don’t drink” and my mother looked up from her newspaper and said “The hell we don’t!” which I thought was considerably more accurate.

I’d be hard pressed to describe my father as happy – the emotions he displayed tended more towards anger than joy – but he was curious, continually interested in life, and I think he was content. Knowing what I do know of his childhood, I would say he was a bit like my redbud tree and grew strong in the directions he could with what he had to work with. I am a child born of his seeds and blown by his often stormy winds, and like many of my trees, I have chosen where I want to put down my roots and I have grown as I will. My brain is not a good guide for my emotions – if my brain had its way, I wouldn’t have any emotions at all, so deciding how to feel is not in my life plan. But feeling what I feel and growing because of it, in spite of it, or when necessary around it – that is something I can keep doing.

I’ve been baking a lot of cake lately. Now, I love cake, but it’s not normally on my list of things to have around the house. My cakes have been getting more complex as I go, not because my cake baking skills are improving, but because that’s what happens when you bake your feelings and your feelings keep getting more complex as the world seems to be disintegrating around you and you hope it can be made anew and better but you aren’t sure how to help make that happen so while you work on that you make cake.

My most recent effort was a ten layer Russian honey cake, which I had never even heard of but the recipe sounded too good not to try. The recipe also contains this note: “The batter will begin to foam and emit a curious odor,” so maybe it also sounded too weird not to try. Making it occupied the better part of an afternoon, though it began the previous day with making dulce de leche. You do this by boiling a can of sweetened condensed milk for several hours, which I’m sure is a terrible idea but I’ve never had the can explode and it really does taste so much better than the pre-made cans they sell in the grocery store. The next preparatory step was making something called burnt honey, which is more like making caramel only with honey instead of sugar. No actual burning involved.

The honey cake itself involves some of the burnt honey, some unburnt honey, lots of eggs, mixing over a hot water bath, and baking very thin layers on many, many sheets of parchment. The icing layers are a mix of the bulk of the burnt honey, the dulce de leche, and a vast quantity of whipped cream. The whole thing is covered with the toasted crumbs of an eleventh layer of the cake, and then it has to sit overnight, and I promise you it is well worth the effort and the wait. It also freezes well and is delicious straight out of the freezer, which is a good thing because a cake with 10 layers of cake and 10 layers of icing and a coating of more cake is really quite a lot for two adults who are sheltering in place in their house during a pandemic.

Prior to the honey cake, I was on a bundt cake kick, after having never made a bundt cake in my life. I did not grow up in a house with advanced (or even intermediate) kitchen tools or pans. The cake my mother most commonly made in my childhood was made in a plain rectangular baking pan. We called it the Bouncy Icing Cake and it came from the Joy of Cooking which most definitely called it something else, though I’ve yet to figure out what. The cake was a yellow cake, and the icing was chocolate, and it had a definite bounce when you tapped it with your finger. I’ve only looked for the recipe out of curiosity, because it wasn’t all that good a cake or icing, but it was fast to make and therefore quite handy when children forgot to say until that morning that they needed to take a cake to school. I think the recipes had names like “lightning cake” and “quick icing,” but so far they remain a mystery lost to time and that particular edition of the Joy of Cooking.

For the bundt cakes I turned to Maida Heatter, author of the best dessert cookbooks I know. In our teen years my sister and I spent many hours making pies and cakes from her Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, struggling to parse instructions like “pull the wax paper toward a narrow end” but always ending up with wonderful results. Our favorite was a pie that Maida introduced by saying “I never know what to say when people tell me, as they often do, that this pie is better than sex.” We first saw this recipe when I was a freshman in high school, and when my sister said “We have to make this pie!” I said “We can’t make it yet – I won’t have anything to compare it to.” My sister said “I can tell you. The pie will probably be better,” but we didn’t make it then. In fact, for several years my sister would start conversations or letters by asking “Can we make the pie yet?” and I would say “No, no we still can’t make the pie.” We did eventually make it, and it was quite delicious. We have made it many times and fed it to many friends and relations, always telling the story of our name for the pie (Better Than Sex Pie, or just Sex Pie, though it has a real name). The voting has trended towards a result of “It depends.” This is never a reflection on the pie.

The first of the Maida Heatter bundt cakes I tried is called East 62nd Street Lemon Cake. It is a type of lemon drizzle cake, where you first bake the very lemony cake and then brush it with a lemon or lime (or in my case, lemon-lime) glaze. It has a texture much like a pound cake, and the tang of the lemon zest in the cake and the lemon and/or lime in the glaze turns it into something sublime and extremely difficult to stop eating.

Because I knew I wanted to make this lemon cake, I had to first buy a bundt pan. I got to ruminate about recipes while I waited for the pan to arrive (remember – pandemic, no retail stores open). For someone who loves kitchen implements – and just about the only type of store I can spend hours in is a kitchen supply store – I don’t really like having one-use tools in my house. The first time Rose was in my kitchen she asked me if I had an ice cream scoop, and I held up a spoon. She also asked me if I had a cheese slicer and I held up a knife, and then she asked if I had a pizza cutter and I held up the same knife. For our first Christmas together after she moved in, I got her an ice scream scoop, a cheese slicer, and a pizza cutter. I have vastly increased my kitchen gadgetry over the years and I especially love tiny things – I have a collection of tiny loaf pans, tiny pie pans, tiny tart tins. I haven’t yet bought tiny bundt pans, but I think I’ve identified the ones I want.

The second Maida Heatter bundt cake, which I selected while waiting for the bundt pan, is called 86-Proof Chocolate Cake. I suppose I should have been forewarned by the name that it would be VERY boozy, but I wasn’t, and it was. Still, it’s cake, it’s chocolate, it’s coffee, and it’s hard to screw up that combination. Having never had it before I can’t say if it’s suppose to be quite as dense as mine turned out, or to have a crunchy outer layer around a more pudding-like (in the British sense, not the American) middle, but I suspect both things are correct. Some of the booze flavor dissipated after a couple of days, it too freezes well, and it goes perfectly with vanilla ice cream.

My next cake will probably be one of my standby easy cakes: blueberry coffee cake, Nantucket cranberry cake, Truly Awful Cake (it’s not, and it’s triple chocolate), or maybe the lemon bundt cake again. It should take us a day or two to get through one of those, and while we snack on that I can plan my next cake adventure. Multi layer cakes appeal to me right now – the layers reflect how my insides feel, and layer cakes manage to be complex and simple at the same time. They also give me a way to occupy my hands for several hours, largely leaving my mind free to work on knottier problems.

Rose and I have been the only people in our house for several months now (all alone with all the cake), but when I bake the kitchen becomes a gathering place, as kitchens will do. There is my mother, of course, who has been dead for fifteen years. My sister who lives 3,000 miles away, and my sister who died last year. My aunt, dead for 8 years. Our kids, who live in different states. My best friend from 7th grade who lives on the other side of the country and who made me a memorable and delicious cake for my 13th birthday. My friend who lives on the other side of an ocean and who I have yet to meet in person but who got me started thinking and writing about cake this weekend. I recently made a playlist (yes, I almost called it a mix tape just then) called Kitchen Dance Party, because I need more dancing in my life right now and because there’s something I like about dancing in the kitchen, as long as it’s not while the cake is rising. I’m far better at virtual parties than actual ones, and I welcome everyone to gather in the kitchen, share the cake, and dance to the music.

I have said before that I want to want to do yoga more than I want to do yoga. I think what I want is the benefit of having done yoga, but I’m not even sure what I mean by that. Mainly that when I do do yoga, I want it to suck less.

What sucks about it? I’m bad at it. Everything hurts – whether or not I’m doing yoga, but more so when I try to twist and stretch and balance. I’m not flexible and I used to be flexible. That’s probably a lot of what’s wrong between me and yoga: the distance between my perception of what it should be and what it actually is for me. The distance between how I see myself doing it and how I actually do it.

When I was a gymnast, I was flexible. I also practiced pretty much all the time that I wasn’t doing anything else. Not formal practice, but just repetition of things I wanted to be able to do that I couldn’t do at first. I wanted to be able to do the splits, so I split as far as I could (and often farther than my pants could) over and over and over, until I could get all the way to the ground.

I took the same approach to walkovers, round-offs, front and back flips, and endless attempts at aerials, though those only clicked for me one magical practice in the gym, never before and never after. I can’t say I would now recommend learning and practicing front flips or back layouts on the sidewalk in front of my childhood home – or any other sidewalk, for that matter – but I was nothing if not determined.

I had a similar approach to riding horses back then. If I decided I wanted to be able to jump up on a horse bareback, I would practice and fail, and practice and fall, and practice and scramble and gracelessly heave myself onto the horse’s back, until I could do it. Or later, when I wanted to get a certain feel in the canter transition – the feel that it didn’t feel like anything, really – I would do it over and over and over and over.

Age and horsemanship wisdom tell me now that drilling a horse is a sure way to sour them, but there’s a world of difference between repetition for the joy of the feel of the thing, and the numbing drilling of a rider with visions of perfect dressage scores dancing in their head.

My riding life bears a striking similarity to my yoga life these days. I feel like it’s something I should want to do more than it’s something I want to do. The things I study and believe about the importance of developing a relationship with the horse rather than doing things to the horse, or making the horse do things, can create a wall that feels insurmountable on some days. I have no interest in competing in any discipline and if asked what my horsemanship goal is, or what I want that relationship between myself and my horse to look like, my answer would be the same as my yoga answer: I want it to suck less.

Intellectually I know this is not a good goal. “Intellectually” is my problem, however. Nothing gets in my way quite like my mind. When I do yoga I have a little too much time and space for my mind, as Anne Lamott says, to think its thinky thoughts. The more I try to clear my mind, the thinkier my thinky thoughts get. The only time they get thinkier is when I’m around my horses trying to do the “right” thing.

There’s a good likelihood that the repetitive practice I used to do is a lot closer to the visions I have of what yoga – or horsemanship – should look like than anything I’m doing  now. It would look like doing something. Doing it badly, doing it awkwardly, doing it wrong, doing it laughing, and every once in a while, for a brief shining moment, doing it just the way I picture it.

Limbo is not my favorite place, yet here I am, entering week four.

I have a horse who is sick. REALLY sick. For many of the days of these limbo weeks, I have gone out to his field with the certainty that this will be the day I find him dead in his field, or down in his shed, unable to get up.

There are several blog posts I have started in my head, most of which are not about this horse, but I can’t seem to write, or do much of anything else, right now. Then I thought maybe I would write about this horse, but we are in limbo, and I don’t know how the story will end. How can you write a story when you don’t know the ending? How can you write anything at all, when all you seem to be able to do is stare at the horse?

He has lost at least a quarter of his body weight, if not more. For a minute there, he went from being a fat horse (“when is that gelding due?”) to being a thin horse, and the weight looked good off of him, but it came off too fast, and it came off because he was simply not eating. He is not quite a skeletal horse, but if you saw him in my field, you would probably call the ASPCA. I probably would, if I saw him in your field.

The vet has made several visits, and has run many tests, all of which have been inconclusive. His symptoms add up to… symptoms. They might mean a disease (one of several), or they might just be what they are because he’s not eating. The why of his not eating remains a mystery. It is a mystery to the vet. To the dentist. To the chiropractor/acupuncurist. To the craniosacral healer. To the farrier. To me. If it is not a mystery to the horse, he’s not enlightening the rest of us.

Small things have made him feel a bit brighter. He loves the fact that we have opened his gate so he can wander the lanes between the fields. None of the other horses get to do that. He teases them – and lets them flirt with him – over the fence. His walk is shaky and a bit sideways from weakness, but he covers quite a bit of ground in a day. He recently got to roll in the sand arena and I felt like I had taken a kid to the circus.

Some days he likes to be out with his best buddy, but some days when I open the gates between their two fields, they simply switch fields. Sometimes I find them crammed into one ten by twelve foot run-in shed, close enough that another horse could fit next to them, if they ever entertained the idea of letting another horse into their little world of two.

This is not my first rodeo with a possibly dying horse, but it’s hard in a different way. For one thing, he does not feel in my heart as if he is a dying horse. There have already been more than a few days when it would have made sense to call the vet out to put him down, but he is giving me no indication that it’s time and I have never had an animal not let me know. Whether I have accepted it or not is a different story, but they always say.

For another thing, the shades of so many who have preceded him are surrounding me right now. Not just the animals, but the humans, too. There are the animals about whom, years later,  I wonder if there was something I missed or did not try. There are the animals about whom I wonder if I waited too long.

There is my father, stumping up the sidewalk to Starbucks for a coffee and a natter with his neighborhood cronies, shadowing my view of the horse meandering up the hill to visit over the fence with the horses in the next field.

There is my mother, the week she stayed with us the first time she got out of the hospital, and me then, trying to make small, artfully arranged plates of food to tempt her to eat – and me now, creating a cafe tray in a flat rubber pan to give the horse options of things to eat with none touching the others in case the wrong thing causes him to eat nothing at all.

The second – and last – time my mother got out of the hospital, the only thing she wanted was orange sherbet from Le Lion de la Nourriture (known to most of us as the Food Lion). For a time last week, the only thing the horse would eat was carrots. I’m pretty sure a horse can’t subsist on carrots alone, but he was still reasonably comfortable, and he really enjoyed his carrots. If every day might be his last day, I figured, let him eat carrots.

On Sunday night, I was sure we had reached the end of the road. He was no longer even interested in carrots. When I first looked out in the fields Monday morning, I thought he was down – in the exact spot I plan to bury him when the time comes. When I went outside I realized that when he stands in that spot he is over a rise in the hill, and it looks like he is lying down, but he was not.

We spent much of Monday waiting for the vet, and then talking to the vet and having the vet examine the horse. The vet did not quite say “it’s time to euthanize this horse,” but he did raise it as a possibility in the near future. This was not a surprise, or a new idea. And yet. It doesn’t quite feel like time.

The part of Monday not spent waiting for the vet or with the vet, I spent being frantic. Not doing anything, but just feeling like I was coming apart at the seams. Some time after the vet left I realized that during the decade in which we experienced the death of four horses, six cats, one dog, four parents, one dearly beloved aunt, three friends, and our children’s grandmother, we barely had time to mourn before the next death was upon us. We’ve had a respite for almost three years, during which mostly I think we remembered how to breathe, but I’d be hard pressed to say we have recovered. That’s a lot of grief for one horse to bear, when it all comes bursting out at the seams.

On Monday during the vet visit, we talked about what we would be willing to do – treat for everything it might be that is treatable – and what we would not be willing to do – drive him two hours to a horse hospital where they might say “Oh, this is what he’s dying of, isn’t that interesting?” After the vet left, we rounded up the rest of the things we had decided to treat him with. Another shadow crossed my path, reminding me of laying out the many, many pills my father needed to take in his last months, so that he – or his care giver when I could not be there – would not lose track.

Today, for whatever reason, the horse has decided to eat. He has eagerly consumed all of six small meals. Unlike my mother, who could be tempted by half a bagel with cream cheese and lox, plus a few vibrant raspberries and enormous blueberries, he is content with his senior feed. Nutritionally it may be the equivalent to Cheetos, but now is not the time to pick nits about grain quality. He ate a fenugreek flavored treat, which yesterday he would not even look at. He ate a whole handful of baby carrots.

I still don’t know the ending to the story. Tomorrow, I will still walk out to the field with my heart in my mouth if I can’t see him from the house. We may have him for many more years, or we may have him for a matter of days. Either way, he will be with us forever.

Everyone has their own way of preparing for a horsemanship clinic. Some people work their horses like they are getting ready for a show, or a test. Some people read everything they can get their hands on about or by the clinician. Some people shine up every inch of their horse and their tack. Some people plan their outfits. Some people buy new tack, because who doesn’t like an excuse to go the tack store?

Many of us who don’t travel with our horses regularly (and even some who do) spend some time working on – or at least fretting over – the horse trailer. Will my horse get on it this time? Do I need a backup plan to take a different horse if the horse I want to take won’t get on? If I need the clinician to help me work on getting my horse on the trailer, how do I get my horse on the trailer so I can get it to the clinic so the clinician can help me get my horse on the trailer?

Rose and I are going to a clinic soon and we are on the step before the step about the horse and the trailer. If you have ever put together IKEA furniture with your spouse, or hung wallpaper with your spouse, you may know the step I am talking about: hooking up the horse trailer with your spouse.

We have not taken the horses anywhere for a lot of years, and in the interim, we have acquired a new horse trailer. It is much better than the old horse trailer, and I look forward to not coming home with more stories from the horse trailer wars. However, hooking it up is a learning experience. It has led to some of my less proud moments – the kind of moment when you hear yourself saying things like “We really need to work out some less frantic hand signals,” or “No, I CAN’T see the exact middle of the tailgate because I’m DRIVING THE FUCKING TRUCK, not perching on top of the cab!”

And of course after this we want to go get the horses from the field and calmly load them.

One thing I like about clinics is that no matter what I go there to work on, I always wind up learning something I did not plan to learn, or did not even realize I needed to do better. How lucky for me to have the learning start before we even leave our driveway.