Piper, Once & Again

by Caroline E. Zani

  This place

  I feel it

  Once my home my comfort

  Now a stranger to me

  I fit in your arms

  The light so clean

  Young eyes, aged visions

  Generations call to me

  Days never ending

  One into another

  Drawing on my time

  My purpose revealing itself

  Doors closing fast

  This training ground

  How far I ran

  Knowledge erasing wisdom

  Turning my back on the past

  Laughing at time

  Winnowing my way into yesterday

  Through this window

  Pain and joy as one

  The cruelty of birth

  Where are you

  My love, my joy

  Memories painfully sweet

  Rivers of gray I wear

  Skin dry as flint

  The light is fading

  Sage cut and burned

  Take me home once more

  In a cradle far away

  Young eyes, aged visions

  When she was finished, she looked down at the words and suddenly realized how tired she was. What does any of this mean? Does it have to have a meaning? Why do I write at all? These thoughts were swimming in her mind when she finally fell asleep, unaware of the weightless hand resting on her shoulder.

  When she awoke the next morning, she assumed it was Paul who had underlined “My love, my joy.” Piper smiled and got ready for the day. The scent of lavender lingered behind her nose for hours.

  Chapter 9

  YEARS HAVE A WAY OF SLIPPING by unnoticed, seeming shorter and faster as one gets older. Paul explained this to his wife one day as they were weeding the multiple flower beds they had cultivated over the three years they had lived on their farm.

  “Isn’t it funny how, when you’re five years old, a year takes forever to go by? I think it’s because it’s a huge chunk of your life—a fifth of it, when you think about it.”

  Piper looked up from under her Red Sox cap and smirked. “Your brilliant way with numbers is what made me fall in love with you, ya know.”

  He tossed a handful of weeds at her, hitting her in the face by mistake. She coughed dramatically and spit on the ground. Not one to sit idly by and be assaulted, she grabbed a handful of dark soil and ran after Paul who knew he had it coming. She knew she couldn’t catch him, so she pretended to trip and twist her ankle. Paul doubled back, brow furrowed, concern on his face. That’s just one of the many reasons she loved him so much—he actually hurt when she did.

  He knelt down and said, “Honey, are you okay? Let me see.”

  She looked up at him, smiled, and shoved the handful of sweet dirt down his white t-shirt, patting his chest several times to rub it in, thinking it was his week to do the laundry anyway. Then she pulled him down onto the ground next to her. “Yes, I’m fine thanks, and you?” she answered. They looked at each other and giggled like kids.

  He looked into her eyes and said, “You might not like this but I’ll say it anyway. Hell, I’m a mess already, how much worse could it get?”

  She gave him her “You must be kidding, right?” look, but he continued. “You get more and more beautiful as you get older.”

  She looked back at her husband and tilted her face up to the sun, closed her eyes, and let the light color the inside of her eyelids red. She could hear everything around her, but the sound she loved the most was her husband’s voice, and closing her eyes allowed her to block out everything but him. He could still make her heart skip a beat. He leaned over and hugged her next to the dahlia and gladiolus bed, the one Piper had decided would be her cutting garden. After it began to bloom, though, Paul teased her because she couldn’t bring herself to cut any of the flowers. The profusion of pinks, yellows, peaches, and whites that set them ablaze was dramatic; she loved to sit in the Adirondack chairs they had bought at the Brimfield Fair before they were married, and let herself get lost in her thoughts staring at them. She hugged him back and said, “I love you, sweets.”

  When she opened her eyes, she didn’t see Paul at first. The sun was in her eyes and was so bright she had to close her eyes again. When she reopened them she saw a man with light hair and eyes that mimicked the sky. His sad, sweet smile struck her heart and made it thump hard in her chest. She wanted to close her eyes and concentrate on the scent-ache but was afraid he’d disappear. What is it? Who are you? Her body tingled and she knew if she looked at her arms they would be covered in goosebumps.

  He was there for a fraction of a second, just long enough to register and when she blinked he was gone.

  Paul was there, smiling. She winked before she kissed him.

  “What would I ever do without you?” she asked.

  “Well, for starters, you’d have to find someone else to pick on. After that, I guess you’d have to clean the stalls yourself and carry hay bales and grain bags and water buckets and ….”

  Piper rolled her eyes as she got up off the ground. “Blah, blah, blah … did you say something, dear?”

  He smacked her backside and stood up, too, holding his lower back. She said, “Well, at least your gray is distinguishing.” She had one hand on her hip and was looking him up and down, frowning.

  He winked at her, knowing well she found him attractive; she was just in one of her goofy, playful moods that meant she was happy and not worried about a thing. He loved that he could provide a good life for her and that she was content. She was truly the best thing that had ever happened to him. They walked back toward the barn with their tools and bountiful harvest of weeds. Paul slowed, turned and said, “Piper, honey, may we talk about something?” Most people get a little nervous when their significant other starts a conversation with such a line, but she knew better. Though they joked a lot with one another, all it took was a question like this to let the other know it was time to move on to a more serious subject.

  “Mm-hhmm,” she answered.

  He motioned with his hand for her to come closer. She put her armload of shovels, rakes, and gloves down. He turned her around, stood close behind her, and pointed out to the fields for her to see. “What do you think of this idea?” She loved the fact that Paul had become more the dreamer than she had ever been. He said it was something about the land, the vastness, the space, the potential, and the way the sun lit up the fields. “I have been talking with some people and doing a little research … and I was thinking, well … what do you think of starting a vineyard?”

  She took a breath, not wanting to react. She took a deeper breath, held it for a few seconds before letting it out. She turned around to face him and kissed his scruffy cheek. “You’re crazy, that’s what I think.” But then she saw the look on his face and was reminded that he was, through and through, a business man. She had turned him into a horseman and a gardener, but in his heart, he was always looking for the next big project. She loved his ambition and was rarely disappointed in his ventures. Together they had built a successful and lucrative equine insurance company that brought business from all over New England, and because of it, they could afford to explore just about any investment they wanted. She looked deep into his eyes and asked, “You’re serious, right?”

  He nodded and smiled.

  “Well, I guess … then … umm, I guess we check it out?” she said.

  He hugged her and picked her up off the ground.

  “You’re still crazy, though,” she said.

  “Crazy about you,” he whispered in her ear.

  She kissed the side of his neck and inhaled the smell of his skin she loved so much. To her it was home. When she hugged her husband, she fit right into the crook of his shoulder and when she turned her head, she was right where she belonged. No other place felt so safe or so right to Piper. But why does it feel like something, or is it someone, is missing? She would die for Paul, and she knew he would do the same. It made her think of a few lines f
rom one of her favorite songs, “When Love and Death Embrace.” When she listened to it, she understood it on a spiritual level. It was one of the songs Paul teased her about, calling her a closet Goth girl.

  “Who listens to Finnish rock bands … besides you, I mean?”

  She and Paul were the envy of a lot of her friends. They had such a way with each other that even passersby would notice their obvious affinity for one another. One thing Piper never got used to was having a man approach her and flirt openly in a grocery store or a coffee shop. It actually made her really upset. Her thoughts would spin and she would think, How dare you disrespect my husband like that? On the occasions that she told him about these advances, he would smile at her indignation and say, “Honey, it’s okay. It’s you I trust, so I know I don’t have anything to worry about. But just in case, I’ll do the shopping from now on.” She loved the way he could make her feel better by making light of things, and it was true: he did trust her one hundred percent.

  “Okay, Mr. Vintner, tell me this grand plan of yours. How are we going to fund this bad boy?” This was Piper’s way of letting Paul know that she did indeed think this was a crazy idea, but she was more than willing to hear his ideas.

  Paul responded with a deep breath and a raised eyebrow as if to suggest she might not want to hear the entire plan all at once. He said, “Well, I was thinking we could go out for a bite to eat and hash it over together. I don’t want you to think I have it all mapped out without you or anything.”

  She looked knowingly at him and winked. “Uh-huh, you want me to believe that you haven’t figured out where every penny will come from? Come on, Mister, give me a little credit here.”

  He smiled and said, “I just thought we could go out tonight and discuss it over a nice bottle of wine and a couple of steaks; but if you want to stay home and eat leftovers, you go right ahead. I’m still having my steak.”

  She cracked up and said, “Oh no, if you’re having steak, I am, too. And you’re paying, my friend.”

  Just then, the horses began calling to them from the meadow in the woods, letting them know that they were hungry.

  “I’ll feed the kids, you go wash up; you’re such a slob,” she said playfully, smirking at his soiled shirt.

  When she was a few feet from the barn, the smell of the pine shavings, hay, and horses flooded her senses, and she felt happy. Really happy. She had everything she could ever want except the one thing they truly were missing: babies. She pushed the thought from her mind as quickly as it had entered. There was no need to ruin a perfectly nice Saturday with the despairing thought of being childless her entire life. She grabbed the grain scoop inside the feed room and called to the horses that she was coming. Opening the grain and inhaling the scent of molasses always had an immediate effect on her. It calmed and comforted her. She dropped the scoop inside and dug her fingers through the heavy, sticky grain. Scooping it into the feed buckets, she remembered how her grandmother mixed ingredients.

  “You don’t need measuring cups, Sweetheart. Just a handful of this and a pinch of that. See? Like me.”

  Piper mixed the sweet feed with the pellets, added a handful of oats. She liked her horses to have a bit of get-up-and-go. She took the grain buckets and hung them in the stalls. Back into the feed room, she cut open a new bale of hay, the sweet scent reaching her nose and making her smile. There was nothing like the smell of fresh hay that was cut at the right time and properly dried. She shook out two flakes of hay for each horse, because although they had grazed all day in the meadow, they would soon need more.

  She walked out of the barn, stopped to grab a couple of lead ropes, but thought better of it. She knew she didn’t need them. She walked quickly along the trail through the woods to the meadow gate which she and Paul had fashioned after one they saw in an old Grimm fairytale book they found in Brimfield. It had wide boards that were cut into an arch, the ends held onto the granite gate posts with iron hinges. They had made the handle from a draft horseshoe.

  The horses were pacing behind the gate, timekeepers if any animal were. Valo, the alpha male, whinnied to her, the first at the gate. She loved this horse almost as much as she had loved Victory. Pure muscle, he was a beautifully built Baroquetype Friesian, 17.2 hands at the withers. She named him for the singer she admired most, the one Paul teased her about. He once told her that she was born in the wrong century, and if she wanted to be with a man who had long hair, well, she should buy him some Rogaine. Paul surprised her with Valo for their wedding anniversary. Shortly thereafter, he developed a bad case of buyer’s remorse when Piper started spending hours and hours in the barn and the fields with this new horse. The laundry piled up, and the dishes didn’t get washed for days. At that time, they had two horses, but Paul knew that she really longed for a Friesian, and he had to admit that once you rode one, nothing else would do. He consoled himself, sometimes quite loudly, with the fact that she was cheating on him with a horse and not another man.

  She unlatched the gate and pushed the horses back with mere gestures. She asked for space with only her hands and three sixteen-hundred-pound animals stepped back in unison. She opened the gate, walked through and greeted each one as she closed the gate behind her. Valo stood his ground, not stepping any further than she insisted. Dragon hung back a little until she held her hand out and offered him a few raisins from her pocket. He was a stunning black Percheron-Thoroughbred cross that Paul took along on drag hunts and hunter paces. He took care of Paul and seemed to know that he was not a very experienced rider. Standing next to Dragon was Oliver, a distinguished and proud Oldenburg gelding who was given to Piper by a client who no longer had use for him.

  Piper loved all her animals, but Valo without question captured her heart. His mane hung past his shoulder at its long point, his forelock covering one eye completely. Her girlfriends would often comment that women would kill for hair as curly and as beautiful as her horse’s. Cowboy Magic and a Miller beer, she would think but had learned over the years to keep these little bits of wisdom to herself, knowing that even though she was perceived by others as elegant and sophisticated, on the inside, she was a farm girl through and through.

  Valo stamped the ground with one foreleg, the feathers rippling as he did, and reminded Piper why she had come to the meadow. Again she gestured to them to give her space, and they heeded, knowing that dinner would only be served once they obeyed. She opened the gate, walked through, and clucked her tongue to signal that they, too, could step through. She stood aside and watched as they broke instantly into a canter, heads tossing, tails in the air. This was their routine, and they knew it well. Valo would enter his stall first, then Dragon, and Oliver would pull the end, the pecking order seldom challenged. Their stalls were their refuge, and dinner was always there before they came in from the meadow. She needn’t hurry to close their doors; they were content to be in for the night.

  She stopped before latching the gate, the sunlight falling at an angle making her want to linger here in this quiet place. There was something special about this meadow, something deeply comforting. She knew it the moment she had seen it the day they drove out from Marblehead to walk the land. She scanned the stone walls at the perimeter, hoping to see the fox kits that were born a couple of months prior, but they weren’t there. She did, however, see a big, round skunk scuttling along the edge of the eastern side of the pasture.

  She recalled the night Viceroy had come back from the meadow late one evening, smelling so horrible from his encounter with a skunk that they simply couldn’t allow him into the house. Paul lovingly bathed him in a galvanized bucket they had used the previous Memorial Day to hold ice for their annual barbecue. He used everything from tomato juice to baking soda and vinegar until Piper asked, “Do you think you’ve marinated the dog long enough? I’ll light the grill.” The dog had to, for the first time in his life, sleep in the shed. Piper made a little bed out of rags and old bed sheets to make him comfortable and apologized profusely when he whined
, but she explained to him there was no way she could let him stay in the house smelling like that. He looked at her in a way that made her feel she was betraying him. She reminded herself that he was, in fact, a dog and would survive the night, although the yelping emanating from the back yard that night made her wonder.

  She smiled, remembering that night and how Paul was so sweet with him, bathing him, and giving him sound advice for the next time he was out wandering in the field and picking up dangerous women. The man certainly did have a sense of humor. And she remembered how she had commented to him that he would make a wonderful dad one day. Again, she pushed the thought from her mind and closed the gate.

  Walking back toward the barn, she was filled with a sense of excitement and anticipation. Not much time went by without either she or her husband feeling the need to try something different, to spread their wings a little. She knew that he must have done a lot of research and talked to more than a few people, and she was looking forward to hearing what he had learned. Paul was a great teacher, though she an impatient student; together they had a way of making things work. To her the idea of a vineyard was romantic, and she pictured her and her parents and in-laws taking turns stomping grapes in huge wooden barrels. This image made her giggle out loud and shake her head. Through the corner of her eye, she saw movement in the woods. She turned and saw only trees, leaves just beginning to change color. She had the feeling that someone was watching her, or rather watching over her and she turned back toward the barn breathing in the cooling air and letting it give her a second wind. She shivered but she knew she wasn’t cold. She turned back toward the house. I hope I’m not getting sick. She shook off the thought and turned back toward the tree line.

  Piper.

  “What?”

  She turned to the house and back to the barn and then the trees again. “Paul?” She realized it wasn’t Paul’s voice but couldn’t think who else it could be. No intonation, no gender. Just her name.

  She picked up her pace a little, not afraid but wanting a shower. Another shiver. She took a deep breath.