Sometimes

when I walk down Day Lake Road, past the gate, the horse watches me, holds me in her stare, and suddenly I am 6 again, enthralled by Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Penny, and Annie Oakley, their make-believe worlds, the first I remember, an Old West of open vistas and craggy rock formations and tumbleweeds.

I saw one once. A tumbleweed tumbling, in the middle of a desert somewhere in the Southwest, my brother and I quaking in the back seat of our father's Buick which he drove, as he often did, nearly on empty. 

That weed tumbled and tumbled, and Daddy kept saying, "We're going to run out of gas," and I wished a horse would appear out of nowhere, look at me, as if to say, "It'll be all right."

Like this one.