In Our Words Canadians Reading Together

She knew internally that the pain of her depression was lessened when she was with her horses, and sometimes had to fight to remember the hell her life had been before prescriptions. Never was she anxious to return to the human populous outside of the rickety old gate. More importantly never to the helplessness and turmoil’s she and her family had endured. Weeks on end she laid in bed unable to find a way out of the darkness, pushing the people who loved her farther and farther away. Margo even tried to convince herself that the anti-social behaviour she was exhibiting was normal and must be part and parcel of her true character. She had faced a possible divorce without any real emotion, unaware that her condition was destroying them as well. Not until Margo heard about an acquaintance who had a break down of sorts and discovered the symptoms were strikingly familiar, did she seek professional help.

Margo took the feed buckets away when the horses were done eating. Star, a no-nonsense quarter horse, meandered slowly beside her as they made their way back into the pasture. Margo stretched her hand over each horse as it went by and inhaled their coupled scent, a smell that is both musty and sweet and loved by all good horsemen the world over, few of which would apologize for wearing it. Margo thought to herself. “Go on you slow pokes. I’ll see you all tomorrow. Be ready to ride,” was all she said, as she hooked an orange handle, with wire in toe, back onto the live electric fence. They would ride the wind and would willingly endure the weight of her and the cues from her legs and hands. Her body would squeeze and encourage each horse she rode with only enough pressure to gain the desired reaction, until the harmony of rider and mount was realized.

It was beginning to cloud over and Margo’s small frame shivered inside her canvas jacket. Spring weather had not yet arrived in Cape Breton and although the fields had managed to grow enough for the horses to forage on, the air on many days remained bone-chilly and damp. Margo began walking the path to her farmhouse. She didn’t mind the solitude of time spent alone. In fact she reveled in it, feeling only a little guilty. Only when chemicals became unbalance within her, did she become fearful of becoming despondent. Her family deserved the wife and mother that the medication allowed her to be. She would go home and down the needed pills that sometimes she would try and do without, only because she would feel a false sense of control brought on by an increase or decrease of imbalances within her.