When we were building our house he would ride his horse up the hill to say hello, to chat. It would be at dusk, as he and Max were finishing their ride, and it would eventually get too dark to see and he and Max would pick their way down the hill and across the street, and we would go home to our old house.

When the fence went up he and Max would ride up to the fence and he would holler at us. We would come out and talk when we could, when we weren’t doing something like holding the lamp for the tile man who was trying to finish the job in the dark.

There was a flurry of long busy days when we were moving in - first it was “Where does this box go? How about this chair?” Then it was “Where shall we put the silverware? The coffee maker?” It was several days before we saw him. We were walking our dog -  he was lying in wait.

“You sure have one stubborn horse” he pounced as we walked by. “I stood at the fence with carrots for ten minutes, talking and clicking. He wouldn’t budge. Can’t believe you’d keep such a cussed stubborn animal.”

We looked at each other, stupefied. At first we couldn’t believe he was serious. Then we couldn’t believe he had been sober. 

One of the big moving-in decisions had been where to put the metal horse. The life-sized metal horse. He was a blue-gray color, and apparently we had put him too close to the fence. Or not close enough.