Ever since our mom died last month, my brother has been cleaning out her house in preparation to sell it. Every few days, he sends my sister and me a picture of some interesting find: a photo of our dad in a navy uniform; a ballet certificate from when I was six; a picture of one of my sister’s high school term papers, titled “Speculations,” on which the teacher scribbled, “You tend to ramble a bit.”

Had I not been so busy with ballet, I might have asked the teacher what she expected from a paper called “Speculations.”

Last week I went in for a day to help my brother and brought home a huge box of my old letters, and a bag containing my old collection of model horses and horse books. In the box there were sweet notes from my older sister, who was at summer camp, perfunctory postcards from friends on vacation, and long letters from my old college friend Jack, who was struggling to come to terms with his self-described mediocrity. But my favorite find was a thank-you note turned ransom letter I’d penned to my grandparents just after my seventh birthday.

“Dear Zadie and Dina, thank you for the $10,” it began. “I am going to save it.”

What a kind, forward-thinking young girl I was, I thought. Then things took an ugly turn. Maybe I was aware that $10, even in 1968, wasn’t enough to buy myself a new model horse. Or maybe I just wanted to see how far I could push things.

“Make 100 pieces of taiglach and send it here,” I demanded. (Taiglach is a sweet Rosh Hashanah pastry.) I did not stop there. “And make 4 pieces for my dog.” I stopped short of  ‘or else,’ but negative consequences were implied.

My grandparents were from the old country. Their weathered faces and thick Russian accents scared me, and everything I remember about our relationship centers on the time I offered my grandfather a sip of my Coke and he drank the whole thing. This I did not stop talking about for days, possibly years, so stunned was I at his disregard for what was clearly mine. Maybe that was how they did things in the old country, but that was not how we did them in Atlanta. Possibly my taiglach demands were meant to even the score. But nothing ever came of it, because my parents intercepted the letter before it could be sent.

I put away the box of letters and turned my attention to the bag of horses. There were about twenty-five of them, in all sizes and positions. A couple had articulated legs and real horsehair. One had tiny wheels embedded in its hooves. One came with its own divided stall and tack room. I recalled spending long afternoons on the floor of my room concocting backstories for each horse: The lying-down appaloosa foal was calm and sweet; the cantering horse was a show-off. I had a love-hate relationship with one horse I’d named Candy; she was cheap and had no particular skills other than standing around looking pretty, but all the stallions were attracted to her. This vexed me, probably because it mirrored what was beginning to happen in my classes at school.

I was fourteen when I stowed the horses away in my parents’ basement. I know this because of the date on the newspapers they were wrapped in. By then I had a real, live horse named Sheba, and I was beginning to experience the world as a place of both promise and heartbreak. I was in high school and looking forward to getting my ears pierced and my learner’s permit. At the same time, my best friend Bobbi was moving away, and I was bereft. 

I set up the decades-old model horses on a table in my garage and snapped a picture of them, along with the horse books, including Black Beauty, King of the Wind, Misty of Chincoteague, and The Horse that Swam Away. I uploaded the picture to Facebook with the comment “My childhood in a nutshell.” 

A floodgate opened. I was inundated with over four-hundred likes and comments from friends and strangers, who said they, too had collected horses and horse books. Some still had their collection; some were still adding to it as adults; and some had given theirs away or lost it to time. But all remembered their model horses and books with a love that approached worship.

As for why my horse collection struck a nerve with so many people, I can only speculate. Maybe horses came into our lives at a time when we were lonely and needed them most. Maybe they lifted us up and out of the murkiness of childhood and gave us a world we could understand, even if we did not yet see ourselves in our horses’ motives. Or maybe horses were a symbol of freedom and control, both of which we, on the heady cusp of growing up, felt ourselves desperately in need of.

 About all of this, I can only speculate.

**********

Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist, and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. Publication history and more at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].