Draped like vines over oak beams in grandpa’s barn, horse tack, untouched for years.

Dry and cracked, gathering dust. Layered straps of leather, metal rings, fragments of

a time I longed for and he was glad to have moved beyond. At 13, I settled in that barn to draw and write, avoiding the adults in the house, wishing for a horse and imagining the tack fresh, bright, leather polished and brass shined. He startled me when he came out to get potatoes, found me huddled there, staring at tangles of the past. He hesitated, stroked a piece, and then named the parts. Some I knew from wishing and planning for a saddle horse: brow band, nose band, throat latch and chain, metal bit. But then he identified parts of the wagon harness, exotic and dangerous names for tack I’d never heard: wooden shafts, deep V breast collar, tugs and lines, terrets that looked like wedding rings for giants and sounded like bells when gathered together. A wooden tongue, D-rings, hames and hooks. The oddest one had canvas loops and steel bars: Leg spreader, he said, to work on problem gaits. I had a mare whose knees would knock until she was sore. That was for her. Then he turned to his workbench, opened a sticky drawer, pulled out a round, flat piece of brass the size of my palm with the image of a cat cut in the center. This? Horse brass. It went on the breast collar just for show. You can have it if you want.

I took it, of course,

watched him walk toward the door

silhouette in sun-specked dust.