If Wishes Were Horses

Pencil and paper – that’s all an artist named Sally needed to make a lasting impression on a 9-year-old horse-crazy girl with little to do one summer. Sally lived in one of the apartments in an old New England shingle-style mansion that had once belonged to a duchess, we were told. My mother managed the rentals as well as a rocks and minerals business there in the basement. The interesting collection of people and things to do lured me from our own home a block away. I often helped my mother with sorting the rocks into packages for hobby shops, and often visited with the tenants.

One was a French Canadian man who taught me French words and lived in a studio apartment that had been the duchess’ billiard room.  A second floor apartment with a mahogany-paneled fireplace was home to a family whose daughter was my occasional babysitter. She introduced me to Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. She took me with her once to pottery class, where I made a misshapen but shining and bubbly turquoise ashtray that I proudly presented to my mother.  A young couple in another apartment, doting parents to a tow-headed toddler, invited me in regularly to play with her and to eat warm, homemade cinnamon raisin bread. 

But my favorite tenant was Sally, an artist in her early 20s, who lived upstairs with her husband and a friendly German Shepherd. She had a new litter of puppies to show me when I first met her, but I was more drawn to her bookshelf where I discovered a series of thin matching books with pages of stories that Sally had written and illustrated. There were pencil drawings of squirrels, chipmunks, birds, flowers, and horses.  When I asked her if she could teach me how to draw like her, she let me decide what I wanted to learn first.  Without hesitation I chose horses.  She guided me in tracing the shapes of those long jaw bones, pert ears, and hooves, showed me how to shade the muscles along the neck, detail the spiral of fine nostrils, and fill in flowing manes with pencil.  I practiced constantly in my own sketch books at home and wrote stories about the horses in the drawings. Under Sally's tutelage my drawings improved, and then we added trees. To this day, those are the only two things I can draw that are somewhat recognizable. 

I was her willing pupil. Sally invited me to ride my bike with her along the quiet streets of our seaside town to some woodsy trails where we stopped to look while she pointed out different birds to me.  Later, we would talk about all we saw and heard on our adventures.  Once she showed me a Wood Thrush in her apartment. She'd named him Robbie and was caring for him until he could be released back to his family in the woods where we'd been. 

It was a great gift that Sally gave me that summer, recognizing in me an undeveloped love of nature and the need to create. She was the perfect teacher and an inspiration.

I started 5th grade and the days became shorter and more filled with schoolwork.  My birthday was in November, and my mother gave me a new winter coat she called a ski jacket, and my birthstone, a yellow topaz. A friend of hers gave me some books about horses.

And then my mother presented me with a gift from Sally. 

I was surprised that Sally had known it was my birthday, since I hadn’t been to see her for a while. I opened the package carefully, and suddenly there I was in graphite on paper, riding on the most perfect horse wearing an English bridle and saddle, tail flowing out behind him.  My pencil-stroked hair blew freely in the wind and I was wearing real riding boots.  Sally had named the drawing "Stacy and Foxtrot," but I knew it was me who was Stacy, and Foxtrot was the horse of my dreams.

For Pam, it said, and though she signed it, I can barely read her last name now. We moved away the next summer, and I never saw Sally again.  The picture hangs on my wall, framed, and across from another graphite portrait, this one of the real horse that eventually came into my life, Dory.  This portrait was also a birthday gift: my husband commissioned it from an artist we met, Gretchen Almy.  Countless, careful pencil strokes on paper – that’s all it is – yet through the artist’s skill it captures the essence of who my very own horse was – and who he was to me, my wish come true.

Two artists, both at different times in my life, have created two of my most treasured gifts. But Sally was perhaps what I would think of as my special angel when I most needed someone to give me the gift of myself.