A Stampede of the Heart

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

This week I was at the center of a stampede, albeit a small one. Five beautiful rodeo horses raced back and forth around me looking to escape my neighborhood. I never realized before how daunting it is to be surrounded by creatures who outweigh me by several hundred pounds, and who aren’t particularly careful where they put their hooves. But the truth is, I wasn’t alarmed.

Years ago Daughter #1 and my husband were out and about doing whatever?–even then I had no idea, but they called me and said, “You need to come look at this piece of property.”

I laughed. Every couple of years one or the other of us would get a bee in our bonnet and talk about moving. We were dead poor and buying something that cost more than $25 was way outside our “sure that’s possible” zone, but I obligingly met up with them, mostly because it was a Saturday, and I could!

At the time, there was very little development on the south end of 56^th West except for a couple of small farm/ranches. Daughter #1 and my husband had stumbled upon two cul-de-sacs, each with a paved road and one with a prominent for sale sign. Turns out that a dad with a big family had done well in the real estate business and created this small development with four one-acre lots on each circle. He gifted all eight of his children with a lot and stipulated this was their inheritance. They could sell and use the money for college or a wedding, or even choose to keep the property and build a house on it when the time came that they married and needed one. Now the first plot was up for sale.

Until my thirties, I had been an unintentional vagabond, never living more than a couple of years in the same place until we scraped together all our financial resources and bought a little house in Kearns when my husband a got job teaching school. Even though we’d been there for 20 years, in my head it had always felt “temporary”. In fact, now and then, I would get antsy and try to cajole my husband into moving. His response was always fairly hysterical laughter.

 A curious wave of familiarity swept through me as I stepped out of my car, walking the dozen steps onto that piece of undeveloped property covered in weeds. I felt an unexpected draw to this place, as if this spot of land was welcoming me. Irrationally, I had the sense that it had been waiting without protest for years until I came to find it. Next to me husband was gushing about how we could sell our house in Kearns, buy this acre, and finally build a house big enough to house our own eight kids and the ½ dozen grandchildren that had already come our way. I didn’t really notice. For the first time in my life, I felt home.

My husband was unstoppable. He made an appointment with a real estate dealer for the next morning, who turned out to be an affable guy more than happy to talk to my enthusiastic spouse about how we might buy the property. During the conversation, the agent asked hopefully if there was anyone in our current neighborhood who might like to buy our Kearns home. I mentioned that two blocks over was a family with nine children renting a two-bedroom house with an unfinished basement. They could use more space, I said. As I remember, he knocked on their door that same day. The dad had been in the military, and a little investigation unearthed the fact that he had three weeks of eligibility left for a VA loan. It had never before occurred to that father that he could buy a home for his kids. At the end of the week, he owned our house, and we owned a piece of property exactly 20 blocks south of our former address.

Over the last twenty years, West Jordan has grown up around us. The two cul-de-sacs have a house on each lot now, and because they were originally farmland, they are all zoned for animals. I used to say that I had eight kids, so I wasn’t going to potty train any other living creature; hence, we have no pets, but several of our neighbors own a horse or two.

Early one morning this week, I was out mowing my considerable back yard when I was startled to see five horses race along my driveway heading for the exit to our little circle. Something was very wrong. I jumped off the mower and ran toward them, yelling as I ran. My neighbor’s two daughters are serious horsewomen, regularly winning prizes at rodeos around the state. The older daughter is just ending a year as the Rodeo Queen for the city of Lehi where she is currently attending UVU. These five horses were not just the center of their lives, they were expensive, well-trained beauties which together had been part of their family for years. I sprinted,—at least what I hoped  was moving fast enough to be called a sprint—I hollered, desperate to redirect the herd as they sped past me. They ignored me as if they didn’t notice I existed. They were so close, their hot breaths skimmed my shoulders, and their tails whipped my face. From behind them I spotted my back-yard neighbor, a fellow at least as old as I am, who must have jumped his fence when he saw the horses running loose. “Somebody left the gate open,” he called to me as he, too, tried to turn the herd.

Waving my arms wildly, I was determined to halt their direction before they got to the street and found an escape path out of the neighborhood. Ignoring me, the magnificent creatures wheeled, pulling ahead of me. My brother, who lives with me, had heard the commotion and trotted out from the other direction, trying to head them off.  He managed to get the horses to veer around and turn back toward their pasture, but they ran along the fence rather than re-entering the gate that had been wide-open.

I was texting their owner with an update when my brilliant neighbor ducked into the corral and came out a couple of moments later shaking a large bucket of grain which rattled around him as he walked. The horses stopped. Ears twisted in the direction of the noise. Motionless, they listened for a few seconds. Then they recognized that sound. Food! Without even a glance over their shoulders at freedom, they turned and then trotted docilly back into their pasture. While my neighbor locked the fence, the horses circled the feed bucket, emptying it in two minutes flat.

As I stood watching the sun glint off their sweat-covered flanks, I realized some people would be horrified to have horses next door. But I have loved watching from my kitchen window as the girls train them in early mornings. And I love having neighbors whose first thought is to jump a fence to help a friend—clear evidence that my heart recognized I was home long before I knew myself.