Mom can tell you everything about these. When and how they were made. Sometimes even by who. She had acquired all the horses before I was born. As a result, some of my earliest memories are of these horses. I remember spending long stretches of time studying one isolated pattern until I had completely familiarized before moving on to the next.

At different times in those early years of pattern recognition the shapes and colors came to mean different things. Characters wandering, lost searching for a fairy tale or buttons on a television set. Of course, my height changed as the context did. The saddle edge eagle and the mane, once so elusive were eventually at eye level, yet the mouth and ears remained out of reach. Growing taller meant gaining eye-level access to additional details. Returning to the horses now, as an adult to photograph all these familiar details made me sad beyond belief. Mom can’t keep them, as she had always planned on doing because she’s moving into a smaller house. Thus, they need to be sold. The horses —made by Hershel and Parker— are the real deal. Mom went to great lengths to get them restored properly. The bunny and the frog are smaller recreations of the real deal. Now I’m sad all over again. A Velveteen bunny type sadness. Well, okay, so long as they end up at a loving home or a place where they are appreciated as deeply as they have been thus far, I’m okay w/ it. Not like the wooden carousel horses are gonna know. Okay, look, its just plain weird being a human being, sometimes.