It was a glaring afternoon, when all the snow reflects the sun into your eyes, and through your squint it almost seems like everything is black-and-white. He was alone in a small pen, pure white and prancing, a shaggy extension of the knee-deep snow. As the riding instructor grabbed my skinny six-year-old leg and tossed me into the saddle, the pony seemed giant, although in reality he was only four feet tall at the peak of his shoulder.
My mother, a lifelong horse person, had bought my first pony, a tiny Shetland, before I was even born, and she had me riding before I could even walk. Burned out from the early 1980s New York City art scene, my parents had done what many artists seeking space and peace did: bought a farm upstate. Way upstate—just a little too far from anything (an hour from Albany, an hour from Saratoga), Hoosick Falls occupies a forgotten corner of New York scattered with struggling farms and shuttered factories. My father turned the sheep barn into his studio; my mother took the corncrib and slowly began transforming the cow barn into a horse barn. The first equine to occupy the farm was a thoroughbred filly named Lilly, my namesake. By the time I was six, I had outgrown the Shetland pony and we were hunting for my next steed.
I asked the shaggy white pony to trot, and we bounced around the riding arena well enough. But then a black cat shot down the barn aisle, into the arena, between the pony’s legs and out the other door. Frightened by the flying feline, my fuzzy friend leapt sideways so spectacularly fast I found myself hovering in the air like a cartoon before dropping hard to the ground. Tears of embarrassment pricked my eyes, as I lay flat in the dirt, blushing with my failure. The riding coach brushed me off and threw me back up on the now wild-eyed pony. I didn’t fall off again, so naturally my mother bought me this rather acrobatic creature.
We learned that Andy the white pony had a paralyzing fear of adults, likely from years of previous abuse. Andy would run endless circles around any adult who attempted to capture him in the pasture, snorting, his head held high like an Arabian. Sometimes he would let you get so tantalizingly close, only to bolt off again, white tail streaming away. But I, a timid small child, could catch him. And he could read people. He knew I meant him no harm. That isn’t to say he never left me hovering in the air again, landing flat in the dirt and watching him streak out of sight.
A few months after we bought Andy, I was riding around the corner of the barn just when a repairman was folding up his ladder. That repairman must have looked like the devil himself because Andy took off at a full gallop. Being an extremely stubborn child, I refused to watch his rear-end sprint away from me once more. So as I was falling to the ground, I grabbed the reins and did not let go. That pony dragged me about a mile, at full tilt, across two meadows and into the woods. It proved difficult even for a pony like him to dodge trees and drag a small person, so he began to slow. I finally let go and he stopped, turning and peering at me quizzically. My face, chest, stomach and legs were streaked with bloodied drag marks, and I couldn’t move my right arm. Turns out he had damaged the growth plate in my wrist. Courtesy of Andy, my right arm will always be slightly shorter than my left.
About a year after that, a lawnmower came around the corner of the barn, spooking Andy, who then dragged me the entire length of our half-mile gravel driveway, gracing me with a scar that runs most of my left forearm. But after that incident, Andy never dumped me again. This was in part because I was older and stronger and had developed an incredible knack to cling to naughty horses like a stubborn spider monkey. But Andy and I also developed an immense bond—the frightened abused pony and the lonely only child, growing up with few friends in an isolated town of 3,000 people.
Every day after school I would leap out of the car to go see Andy. He and I would wander my family’s farm until we knew every creek, clearing, wood and meadow. I rode him without a saddle or bridle, only a rope around his neck. I let him pick his way through the fields, stealing mouthfuls of grass and watching the deer bounce by. Our meanderings were always at the golden hour, when the August sun streaked across the yellow hay fields. I rode him until I was really too big to be doing so—fourteen years old, about to leave the farm for boarding school, with long legs that could almost wrap around Andy’s belly. On one of my last days there, I rode him until dusk, and as we came out of the woods into a clearing resplendent with fireflies, we stopped and looked, a glittering goodbye.
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