Winter comes, slowly, easing down upon us like a warm wool blanket with every falling leaf, rising river, dropping mercury and silent stilling along our quiet dirt road. Days are shorter, darker, easier with resting soil and shovels and shoulders; nights long enough to savor spending time together on the old worn sofa beside my husband, cats and dogs and candles and the hum of the river through thin glass panes and rattle of a kettle on the wood cook stove.

With grass still vibrant instead of laid like drying wheat, sky still blue instead of tempestuous grey, and river still low enough to wade through, the season is still becoming. Visitors come and go, bears leave tracks on our driveway, and we let the wood stove go cold mid day. We are not there yet. There is time before dormancy becomes us.

Time to write, both the book and even the essential thank you notes I’ve been eager to share, comes later than I thought it would. All in due time. Give it time. I have time. I say that, then remember these wise words I often hear: If not now, when?

I think often of the many people I met this summer. People I met along the way who allowed my trip to be, shared time and space and stories, meals and home and wisdom, touched my heart, and changed my perspective of the goodness of humanity and the kindness of strangers… for the better. Funny how dear to my heart so many remain. The thought of never seeing you again seems… wrong. Incomplete. Empty.

Yet what do I have worthy of sharing and keeping me connected with you now that I’m home? Just my simple life, up in the hills, off grid, at the end of the road, along a quiet river. I’m not looking to jump to the next latest greatest thrilling thing to capture your attention and keep you entertained. I don’t think you need that. And me, that’s not my thing. I love the simple life, and humbly hope that sharing this will be enough for you. I want to savor silence, seasons, soaking in stories and allowing whatever changes came over me to become me. What I want now is winter, wet and wild, turbulent and somber, quiet and solitary, and a chance to sit in silence and write. And funny because at the same time, I want to share my world with you, and hope you will do the same for me.

There is something so human about sharing stories to heal the heart and soul. Stories serve as a web we weave to hold us as a net, as a thread that ties us all together. This is a story I’d like to share with you now. It is a rather sad and strange story that may not make much sense to you. How could it, when it doesn’t fully to me? It is the story of Canela. I can share it with you now. She is back home, at least in spirit; back with her lover, back with her daughter, and back with my husband and me. In me. A part of my heart and soul that was oddly incomplete. Somehow I feel whole again. A part of this land. Home. Grounded. Maybe it’s just her skull I carried across river and down the trail and was able to bring back to our land. But it’s symbolic. It’s what I had to do.

Canela. She was the horse that was always with us. Hanging around the house, the horse you could count on to wake you on time, always there, always close, for nearly twenty years a part of us, our life, home, family, soul. The horse you could just sit on, lean on, lean into, trust to get you where you needed to go, or go no where, just feel what a horse felt like with arms or legs wrapped about her solid flesh, bury your nose into her musky red hair, connect deeply and beautifully with stable heartbeat and breath. I rode her pregnant mother, Tres, at our wedding, and delivered Canela the following spring in our backyard. She was the first born my husband and I had together from our herd of working stock. At two weeks old, she tangled with a fence and twisted her leg thus always walking with a bit of limp. A reminder that none of us are perfect, the front foot forever remained just a little off kilter, but that never slowed her down. The one part of her I found and brought home after I first found her carcass, interesting it was her distinctive crooked hoof.

Canela was chill. She kept her cool. She wasn’t one to over react. Her fight/flight/freeze response was not easily or often aroused. She was solid and sane. She could sleep like nobodies business. Anywhere, any time. If she wanted to, she would. Even that time the bull moose scared off the rest of the herd, she wasn’t about to wake. Or the time the mountain lion finally roused her and left his claw marks across her flank. Maybe that’s what happened to her this last time, too. Just being her usual chill self. Not slow to respond, just not one to run in fear. How else could bears get my girl?

News that Canela had left home reached me while I was still back at our land in Colorado. Having completed my journey, we were tying up loose ends (and fence wires), preparing to return to California, to her, to home. No doubt I knew she would be missing us all, but at the time, I was more concerned with the old dog. I thought he’d be the one needing me most. And indeed he did. Yet… after all the years of our intimate connection and communication, how come I didn’t hear her? Why didn’t I listen? I did not sense how lonely she had become. I suppose that day she woke and even the caretaker was gone, she decided she would leave too. And so she did.

That’s my girl. Just as strong and stubborn and sassy as me.

There were signs. Black cats and crows and that sort of thing that were easy to write off. Maybe it was the Universe sending me messages. Warning me to get home, though honestly, we got home far sooner than I had planned.

Not soon enough. Maybe I should have listened. To the signs, to the overwhelming sad feelings I kept having, to the twisted feeling in my gut I kept trying to ignore. But I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to. Superstition, synchronicity, serendipity, call it what you will. Signs that something was wrong. I did my best to write it off, laugh it off. Until the day before making it home when an owl crashed into the windshield of our truck and died.

I was enraged. Stop it! Don’t believe these silly signs. It can’t be, I shouted. She’s fine. I’m a fool to believe otherwise. Everything’s okay! But I knew it was not.

The following day we made it home just past noon, saddled up the finally home horses and headed up river in search of my beloved mare. I knew that is where she would have run to. I just knew. I knew her.

There were no signs along the road. No piles of horse poop, no visible tracks, nothing, but still I knew. At the trailhead, we met a woman. A stranger. An angel or apparition? I don’t know. But I know we had never seen her before, which is odd in this little town, and likely never will again. She had taken the trail up river in hopes of a peaceful private afternoon swim, but was scared off by “a family bears,” she said. She was clearly frightened and pale and I felt for her, but I still didn’t get the message.

Bears.

Maybe it’s my spirit totem, or that mama bear energy within me, but I’ve encountered (and chased off) more than my fair share of bears. Likely it’s because I’ve probably spent more time “out there” alone than anyone else I know. And because, as one friend says, seems like I have the best of luck. And the worst.

They say lightning never strikes twice, but you know those are false words used for a false sense of solace. Twenty-five years ago I lost a holstein cow to “a family of bears” in the river by the kids camp where I used to work. Crazy. Impossible, right? People say bears can’t do this, and I laugh and say, I didn’t think so either. Until it happened.

Well, I knew she was somewhere up that trail, but the trail was so blocked by fallen trees that our horses could not proceed. Surely Canela couldn’t have made it through, you might say. Only I knew she had. I know all about determination. So next morning Bob packed a chainsaw, strapped it on his saddle, and cut our way through that trail.

Anyway, at this point, I was not thinking about those bears. I was thinking I was going to find my horse. For some crazy reason, I was trying to keep myself convinced that I’d find her happily wandering out in the woods waiting for me to find her.

Wrong.

For then we did find her. Or what remained of her. Nothing but a pile of bones heaped in the middle of the river.

When I found those bones, something in me died too. My heart broke open and my soul cried out in pain.

God, it hurt. I felt lost. I lost a part of my soul. I lost my soul sister.

Like so many torn by grief, I knew I needed to bring her home. If not all of her, at least her skull. That would be the symbolic gesture that would bring some sense of completion.

But when we returned two days later, all we found by the river was a slightly off-kilter front foot which was so clearly and dearly Canela’s.

We returned time and time again, looking. For her skull. For signs. There had to be more of her out there. Something, Anything. Even signs. And we did get those. A couple of ribs. The stench of rotted flesh in the brambles. A coil of her red hair.

Keep trying.

You know I’m not one to give up. And I didn’t. Two months later, heart and soul still so empty and incomplete, and having returned to that spot so many times, we returned again. This time was different. Her carcass had been dragged out of the brambles and alongside the far edge of the river. The big dog found her first, pulling a leg and pelvis across river to me. That pelvis. The one through which I had caught her babies, after she’d come to me, staring over the the fence into the kitchen window to get my attention, as if saying, “come quick, I need you, it’s time.” And there I would be, holding her, helping her, as she birthed, year after year, four foals, the first of which was Bayjura.

It has to be there. The skull. I was certain. Almost. Still filled with self doubt, but determined to try all I could for my mare, I stepped into the autumn water, crossed the river, wading back and forth, looking for something. My Canela. Her skull. Maybe even a sign. Bob sat on the bank and watched. Silently trusting me, as he does, as he has done so many times before.

If you want me to bring you home, Canela, show yourself to me now. Please. And just then, the sunlight hit her teeth in the otherwise shaded tangled vine of a hillside. I climbed up the bank into the brambles and lifted her head into my hands and I cried. I was not sad. I was glad. I found her. Finally, I could bring her home.

And as I washed her skull in the river before tying it onto my pack to carry her home, something happened inside me. I was somehow filled. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was my soul returning. I don’t know what it was. But it felt strong, powerful, beautiful, elated and etherial and light, glowing from the inside out.

Now she is home. Where she belongs. We brought her home to rest.

And me, I found closure. Completion. And my soul has somehow healed.