The Devon Horse Show is back in town, and last night, as the trainers and jockeys settled their mounts into the stables, I walked unnoticed with my camera. I visited the Horse Show most years as a child—driving an hour with my parents and siblings. When it came time for my own family to buy a new house of our own, we found one just two blocks from the fabled fairgrounds. On Sunday the old carriages will roll down my streets. All next week the Budweiser Clydesdales will be clopped by my garden.
It was inevitable that the horse show take a starring turn in one of my novels, and in The Heart is Not a Size, due out next March, it does. These words set the stage:
At the fairgrounds, the stalls were one after the other on either side of a dark corridor that was so long it seemed to bend and then disappear behind horse steam. The floor was hay and the trainers were busy and the long faces of the horses were practically floating over the wide doors of their slatted stalls. It was like being in church, like joining in the hymn—the sawdust and manure, the sound of horse teeth on carrots and sugar. No one minded Riley or me, and we minded no one either, just walked down the corridor between the horses like we belonged, stopping when we wanted to, to touch the snip or the star on a horse nose. Outside, there were black birds overhead on the electrical wires, and the dogs that come to the show every year had begun to chase each other, dig for old bones.
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