It’s a plain house, an unremarkable house, a completely average house, except for the yard. What little yard it has.
There is a patch of grass in front and to one side of the house. There is a driveway to the other side of the house, but it is old and crumbling. There is a five foot strip of withering grass between the back of the house and the neighbor’s fence.
It’s not even enough room for chickens, if the city allowed chickens, which they don’t, and certainly not enough room for a horse, a real horse, not a pony, which is what Naomi wanted most in the world. A big, brown horse with dark, chocolate eyes and a gentle disposition.
Her mom thought she was crazy to want a horse. “They’re too big, they smell bad, they make me itch,” she always said. But Naomi didn’t care. They were big, and strong, and free like the wind. Horses took you places, were your friend, gave you something—someone—to do things with.
Naomi’s Grandma Pam, who was really her aunt practicing to be a grandma someday, said that horses are ‘good medicine’—that they are symbols of strength and freedom and power, that the Indians of the plains revered the horse and relied on them for food and shelter, to move from one hunting ground to another, to fight—or flee—their enemies.
And Naomi knew it was true. On lazy summer afternoons in the field by her friend Brandy’s house, when the wind would blow and the long, weedy grass would dance, she could imagine herself, one of the people of the wind, riding across the plains, her hair streaming behind her in the wind, her horse straining beneath her, freeing her from thought, from worry.
The horse, her horse, would turn as if by reading her thoughts, striding toward the horizon, as if he could actually reach it. They would race to the river where she would gather wild berries for herself and her horse while the horse drank his fill.
But then she would hear her mother call and have to go home to her house, her plain, boring house with no backyard, with no wind (except for on the porch swing, if you swung high enough) with no horse, to live. And long for a horse, a horse to move her, to make her free as the wind.
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