When I was a kid, my sisters and I would go out at dusk and ride horses in the summertime. It was usually too hot during the day to enjoy riding, and though we often rode anyway because the ranch work required us to, the evening rides were always the fun ones. We would ride out through the alfalfa fields that had been cut that day, the long windrows laid out in their patterned stripes across the length of the field. Our horses would time their canters as we crossed the windrows so they leapt them effortlessly. I can still recall the smell of the fresh-cut hay, and it always reminds me of those summer rides.
I remember one night when I was almost to leave for college, riding my horse Rudy down the road like I had a million times before. I had no idea at that time that I would never get to experience that again. My parents sold the home place when I was just out of college at my first teaching job in Iowa. They moved west to Idaho, and the ranch in the Sandhills was sold and forever out of my life.
These words always take me right back to that time and place, and I can feel it all over again. I wrote this poem that summer before I went to college:
You know how it is on a summer night,
When it’s almost time to say goodbye?
A singing pond throws back the light
Of a thousand stars in forever’s sky.
You know the way the hoofbeats sound
As your horse moves through the fresh-mown hay,
As if there were no earth or ground,
But only stars to light your way?
You know how summer’s breath can feel
As you gallop towards some distant crown,
How the air is warm at the top of the hill,
How it rushes cooler as you go back down?
You know the way your horse turns home,
As you know your heart will long to do
When the busy days of fall are come
And the distance more than a mile or two?
You know how it is at the old barn door
As you bid farewell to your dearest friend?
Tonight it leaves me wishing for
An August that will never end.
© Kerrie Tischer
