the bravest thing I've ever done

I was probably eight, and playing
in the yard because it was springtime
and my mom told me that I had to stop reading
the Bible because it was just a bunch of begats and begots and
it made the church ladies very nervous.

You sent me outside to get some fresh air, which
was not so mean, because I was losing track of the order
of the biblical stories; some were clear-cut and concise,
 others were pieced together, like
the yo-yo quilt we had hanging as a shower curtain in
the only bathroom of the house.

So I was pretending that my cat was a
pilgrim on his way to the holy land, and
I followed him over limestone outcroppings,
avoided the places where Ellie said there was poison oak
down to the path behind my house owned by a man
who mumbled to himself and rarely washed
his hands.

and he still owns fields where
he keeps dozens of horses; the setting for
a fantasy of a girl of eight who thinks
that reading the Bible is a satisfactory
activity on a June day.

We pass old Fords and boxcars and budding wineberry bushes
and black-eyed susans and I lose track of my
white cat, Snowball, named in an age before irony was
 the common tongue spoken in our home.

 I do not know the way and I keep walking, never thinking about
who might have written the graffiti on the trees, and why someone
would dump a rusting 50's style car into the woods, or how long ago
the pile of ashes in front of the boxcar had been a fire.

At the end of this seemingly endless path, there is a gate--
and in the gate there is a field and in the field there are
probably five unbridled horses running and walking, but
mostly just standing around.

So, of course, I climb under the fence and enter.

I walk to the top of the hill and just sit in the field, and watch
the horses do their horsey things, I think about how
this is freedom because I didn't have to spy through
the slatted gate or step up on my tiptoes to
pet their velvety noses, I just had to sit quietly
and wait for them to come up to me, and some
of them really did.

And that is the bravest thing I've ever done.