Honest Tom

Caitlin sent a note in July with the subject line “Horse garland,” wanting to explain more on the phone. There was a Pinterest photo attached, of a horse standing conveniently at a white fence, head turned just right, apparently at ease with the floral wreath of eucalyptus with pink roses around its neck. The horse just happened to be the right shade of dove gray, too.

It turned out Caitlin had no expectation of replicating this image. It was just a concept. But there was a horse who meant a lot to her, and she wanted to do something ceremonial to honor a long-term relationship before the situation became urgent. Tom was the horse, and this was his run for the roses.

“I looked at the photos on your website,” she told me, “and I thought you might understand.”

Caitlin is 34, and Tom, the horse, is 30. They have been together for 24 years, and it would be fair to say that Tom helped raise Caitlin, whose 10th birthday was a happy excuse for her mom bring home an equine companion for the whole family.

Tom is a registered quarter horse, and his name is recorded as Honest Tom. How the adjective got in there is unknown; all colts are honest. Every day I drive past a horse farm up the road and stop to mark the progress of five born this spring, all appearing as smaller versions of their mothers, the one with buckskin coloring most striking to me.

*

Caitlin and I ended up talking for 45 minutes, and I told her about Powder, a horse who had been put to work during World War II and was still living, on the farm where my mother grew up, when my sister and I were babies. There is a photo of us from 1965, in our little coats and red bandanas, sitting on Powder. (This name, Powder, might sound like a reference to gunpowder, but in fact the horse’s name was Powder Puff. He was a black horse with a white star on his forehead.)

I told her about Dinah, too, my white, polydactyl, intermittently deaf cat who, fading away at 15, waited for me to get home for lunch on her last day so I would be with her as she stretched out and made her passage from this life. She was an intimate familiar who saw me through many transitions, and I still learn from her as I reflect on what we went through together. I took Caitlin’s plan seriously and wanted to tell Tom’s story.

As soon as we hung up, I emailed Amber Yoshida, who is a kind of whisperer-photographer. The word “magic” gets batted about a lot in connection with work in the fine arts, but to me, Amber’s images merit that description. She routinely photographs newborn humans, which requires a complex mix of abilities. And she approaches animals with a reverent understanding that human language is not something four-leggeds need to learn just because it’s convenient for us. A geriatric horse? Yes, she wanted to come along.

*

Caitlin sent several photos of Tom so I could get a sense of his looks and personality. This would determine the materials I used for the wreath because I wanted to make something to suit him. Tom is a chestnut with a slightly dirty white blaze. Pastels are not his thing; we needed something richer. I scrolled through the colors on a website for naturally dyed silk ribbon in a pink shade that wasn’t too pale or feminine and finally chose one in a 4-inch width.

It would be a couple of weeks before I met with Caitlin and Tom, so I ran out to the west meadow where there are big stands of timothy grass and cut the last greenish seed heads and stood them in a jar to dry so I could bring a bit of the pasture into the design.

The wreath needed to open at the bottom so it could be laid across Tom’s shoulder’s like a blanket, then fastened—it wouldn’t do to make a solid wreath that had to be pulled across his face. I cut hundreds of ratty leaves off lush vines of green dried hops, harvested three weeks before and stored in the attic, and fastened them around a framework of paper-wrapped wire with loops at the ends, through which we would tie twine and ribbon. With chicken wire, I fashioned forms for the places where I would add flowers to the wreath.

The ‘Limelight’ hydrangea still was loaded with white clusters, and many had taken on a pink tinge and edging during a week of rain and cool weather. I cut a bucket full of ‘Oklahoma White’ zinnias and the best double-flowered, deep antique pink ‘Queen Red Lime’ zinnias in the rows and had more than I needed. Every flower in the wreath went into a flower tube of water, which I hid in the chicken wire forms, and I covered it all with more hops. I fastened small clusters of timothy together with floral crepe tape and inserted them at the edges of each floral cluster. I tied the bottom with twine and brought the roll of ribbon along to the photo shoot.

*

Amber and I took separate cars and brought our masks (it was five months into the pandemic) and got to the place about seven in the evening. In the barn, Caitlin was brushing Tom.

“Would you like to give him a treat?” she asked, holding out the can of alfalfa. I haven’t been around horses much but am drawn to them and remembered how to hold my hand open flat to give him the alfalfa, but I think even if I’d done it all wrong he’d have been careful with my fingers, he was so gentle. I ran my hand over his neck and under his jawline and saw that his eyes were clear, and his appetite and energy and curiosity strong.

“He really likes you,” Caitlin said, and if that was so, I knew it was because I liked him. Amber stayed quiet, as she always does, reverent, barely directing, not needing to. I thought of how she handled it photographing newborns, who can only be attended to.

We waited as Caitlin laid the wreath across Tom’s shoulders, then we followed her through his stall into the pasture and took photos for about half an hour, mostly in the shade of the barn. He was patient with the wreath, and when it finally came off, and I tied on the rest of the ribbon and we had photos of it.

Caitlin and I thought we were finishing up, but as we stood, 15 feet apart with our masks on, still visiting, Amber said something about the sky and slipped back between the fence and barn and headed back out to where Tom was grazing farther off. This was the evening as he chose to spend it, as he had so many evenings in his long years, near the humans who needed him.