Partners In Folly

Three of a kind for as long as we can remember. Parents would shake their heads, wonder when we’d grow up and get serious about serious stuff. We egged each other on. “Did you see that strawberry roan in the field on the way to school?” “I’ll loan you my book of ranch-girl poems!” We loved dogs and anything with hooves, and words that rhymed or not, that made sense in a westwind sort of way. We rode our imaginations bareback. We never grew up. And now it’s come to this – no Cowboy Poetry this year for the old-west Wagon Train event. We’ll meet on Main Street anyway, to watch the teams come into town; stand on the corner, listening for hooves on pavement drumming to the heart. Just the three of us reading horse poems to each other and anyone who cares to listen. And when the first big black Percheron comes into view – a wagon-teamster’s Pegasus – we’ll be flying 17-hands-high on the horses of our never-grown-up dreams.