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Show 3 she sat, but over all these years, and there are plenty of them, I can still recall with the heart's amazing clarity how I would stand at the bottom of the school's front stone steps while the recessed kids came flying down around me, nearly all of them older than me but them parting around me while I stood my ground with eyes only for Kate, Kate skipping to the top of the steps, Kate finding my eyes and starting down, Kate skipping, bouncing, falling down the steps and into my arms. How I saved her! And how I held her to kiss her, me delighted to mean it and her small face rosy and shining with joy. We hid nothing. I was five by then, she already turned six, yet we ignored the looks and taunts of the others. Stark naked we all come into the world crying for life, vulnerable to love, and it takes a while before we learn to cover up. I was slow to learn. A hick. Up to my elbows in the mess. Of course, with time I did learn, too bad for me. My own mother taught me to save for an emergency when all I wanted to do was spend, spend, spend. I rode to school on a horse behind my big brother Henry. My twin sisters, older yet, walked. Every morning Henry would saddle the horse, a patient grey mare turning patiently greyer, and he would lean down from the saddle for me to grab his hand and would hoist me with much grunting, me grabbing leather and scrambling up, my toe searching for the stirrup, on up behind the saddle and holding on. We walked or trotted out to the road, and had to walk up the side of the mesa, but once on top we burst into a gallop, catching the twins and passing them almost every time just before they got to school. When the mornings got cold I pressed my face up against Henry's back and out of the cutting wind, my arms around him, my hands gripping into him for warmth. I hugged him for everything we hug people for, warmth and life and love, and he carried me off to school and home again. During school the grey horse stood patiently out back with a few other horses under the row of |
