Lisa Geichman Prosek

The smell of saddle leather thrilled me as Patches, my very own pony, stepped along the gravel road. Her brown and white head slowly bobbed up and down next to Pa’s as he led us around the block on which sat the little green house he shared with Nanny. Short for six years old, I could hardly stretch my legs down far enough to reach the stirrups. Still, I felt as much like a wild cowboy as a little girl in West Portsmouth, Ohio, could.

In my beloved cowboy hat and boots, I nearly lived my dreams during the latter end of several Augusts in the mid 1960s when I punctuated the long luxurious summer breaks from school with week-long stays at my mother’s parents’ home.

One day, as Pa, Patches, and I walked around a corner, I heard a neighbor’s male pony begin to call out. Patches forgot herself and started rearing, which she’d never done before. Pa jerked the reins to regain control, grimaced, and jumped around trying to stay out from under the pony’s hooves while still managing to reach up and readjust his striped engineer’s cap. My little hands clung to the pommel, and my knees squeezed the fenders.

I’d seen enough episodes of Gunsmoke and Bonanza while visiting Pa and Nanny to know that a horse could suddenly go wild and throw its rider, which almost always ended in a painful death, at least in my imagination. So, I did what any cowboy with a will to live would do.

I jumped off while the pony’s front legs were in midair, somehow landed full on my feet, and lit out down the hill towards Pa and Nanny’s house emitting a piercing scream that would put a siren to shame. My running down that steep, slippery, gravel slope at full throttle without skidding on my face for several yards seemed like a miracle to me even then.

When I saw Nanny burst out of the house, her expression told me she thought she’d find me bloodied and Pa dead. In an instant, I found myself gratefully enveloped in Nanny’s arms and knew I’d survive. I never even bothered to look back to see about Pa’s fate, but soon I heard his high-pitched laugh–“Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee–as he led Patches back into the yard.

Later that afternoon, while the cicadas sang in the afternoon’s heat, Nan and I perched ourselves in the living room, watched her TV “progrums,” snapped fresh green beans, and chatted. I told Nanny lies about mean things my mother had supposedly done to me, and she feigned sympathy while the smoke from her Salems danced in the light streaming in through the picture window’s once-white sheer curtains. “I’ll have to speak to her about that,” Nanny said in the tone mothers use when they need to discipline their children. She suggested sneaky ways I could get back at my mother, and we giggled while reflecting on the ramifications of such bold actions, knowing full well they’d never come to fruition.

An hour or so later, a hunk of fatback joined the beans in a pot to simmer while Nanny boiled ears of corn, sliced rich red homegrown tomatoes just off the vine, and made corn bread from scratch. Soon, we drank buttermilk with our supper and thought we dined like royalty.

By 9 p.m., we snored in bed, exhausted.

Maybe the next day Pa and I went “downtown” and had a milkshake at Smith’s Drug Store as we waited to pick up Nanny after her shift in the men’s clothing department at Montgomery Wards. Maybe we went to the hardware store, where I begged for a new stick pony and penny-pinching Pa relented. Maybe Nanny encouraged me to run my fingers through her sparkly jewelry and let me wear some of her clip-on earrings. Maybe Pa and I sat on the stoop in front of the little green house as he sliced an apple I picked off the tree, and we munched while I soaked up tales about Billy the Kid’s adventures, which I hoped to emulate someday.

As the glorious days passed, I longed more and more for home and looked forward to the new school year. Still, I left Pa and Nanny’s hiding tears from my parents as we drove home to Dayton.

Though the annual trips to my grandparents’ home lasted only a few more magical years, Pa and Nanny gave me dreams and memories that still buoy me in times of sadness. Only later did I come to understand that my grandparents treasured our visits as much as I did because those golden days offered respites from the vicious inner demons that haunted them, some from as far back as their own brutal childhood years.