Dropped Threads 3 Read Online Free Page A

we’ve been somewhat embarrassed to acknowledge. It’s a passion that gets ridiculed. With homosexuality now out in the open in Western culture,
this
is the new love that dare not speak its name, especially in our patriarchal world, where it’s seen as somehow soft to love animals. Animals are for hunting down and eating, for God’s sake. And if you’re a woman, you’re soft already, so better shut up about critters.
    Picture this: I’m visiting a ramshackle house in the Southern Ontario countryside. I walk in through the screened-in deck, where thirty-odd cats laze in the sun. At least ten eagerly rush over to me, like a horde of feline Wal-Mart greeters. I enter the kitchen, where another twenty or so drape themselves over every flat surface. The living room is wall-to-wall felines, the bedrooms too. About two hundred rescued or abandoned cats live in the house, and the bigworkshop building outside holds another two hundred. One human lives on the property. Do I hear you thinking “crazy cat lady”? You’d be wrong. The person who runs this rescue shelter is a man named Larry, but who ever heard of a crazy cat gentleman? We have no such phrase in our culture.
    Same with “horse crazy.” It’s only girls and women who get labelled that. Was Roy Rogers, despite his singular devotion to Trigger (he even had him stuffed after the animal died), ever called “horse crazy”? Is Ian Millar, Canadian Olympian, World Cup show jumping champion and partner to the illustrious Big Ben? I think not. And that’s telling.
    But never mind, ladies. Whatever they call us, science is on our side, proving through countless studies what we already know: that the human-animal bond is good medicine. Nobody is sure why contact with animals reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, banishes depression, increases longevity and just makes us goofily happy. But it does. I own a horse now (are you surprised?) and where I board him, there are twenty-nine other horses—all owned by other contented women. Why, you can practically smell the endorphins when you walk past as we groom our steeds. And I know that for many of those women, their horses function as Beau does for me: part buddy, part fitness coach, part entertainer, part therapist, part teacher, part priest.
    Yes, priest. The researchers don’t seem to talk about animals and spiritual health, but for me, that’s part of the bond too. Lacking that religion gene, I have tried but failed over the years to find a faith or philosophy that spoke to me. Of all the paths I explored, Buddhism was the most compelling, but though my head was intrigued, my heart and soul remained unmoved. Besides, every time I tried to meditate, I fell asleep.
    Still, I longed for inner peace. Throughout my twenties and most of my thirties I spent hours in therapy dissectingmy drearily unoriginal dysfunctional family. I constantly struggled with depression and rage. The world seemed a dark, chaotic and terrible place, and contentment largely evaded me—except when I was either writing (songs, plays, anything), happily in love (a stage that rarely lasted more than ten weeks) or when I was around animals. Then I felt calm and whole and
—right
.
    And it’s always been like that. Not surprising then that, regardless of circumstances, I gravitate toward non-human species. I’m the six-year-old kid who bawls for days when her turtle dies. I’m the teenager at a convent school on Lake Nipissing who spends lunch hour alone by the water luring seagulls with sandwich crusts, because she loves to watch them wheel and dip around her. I’m the woman at the sparkling soirée in a Rosedale mansion who’s ignoring the famous guests in order to crouch down in a corner and commune with the family hound.
    And shadowing me through all my years are horses, horses, horses—those creatures so magnificent in the flesh and blood, so rich in mythic dimensions. I had a pony for two years as a kid, and a horse for three years as a