Eventually, though, the horse did move on, and my great grandmother dried her tears and hobbled back home.
Her secret remained a secret until that evening at bath time when her swollen, bruised, and broken foot was revealed. “Oh my goodness, what in the world happened to your foot?!” her mother asked, gently examining the wound. And my five-year-old great grandmother, who still loved those horses so very much (and, let’s be honest, did NOT want to get in trouble), responded, “Oh it was awful. It was stepped on … by a chicken.” Needless to say, my great great grandmother did not believe her daughter’s story, and while she agreed that the mangled foot was punishment enough for the misbehavior, something surely had to be done about the lying. Clearly, forbidding my great grandmother from ever seeing the horses was not going to work; she had to be taught how to be around them safely. As a solution, my great grandmother got a new chore: feed and brush the horses, under supervision, while they were in their stalls. The compromise allowed my grandmother to still see the horses, and also to learn how to move around and work with them in a safe environment, until she was old enough to manage them herself. My great grandmother’s love for horses never changed, and she grew up with a strong sense of responsibility and accountability for herself and those around her. Perhaps the one I should find inspiring is not my great grandmother who did something wrong and lied about it. It should, probably, be her mother who patiently understood her and found a solution to her stubborn daughter’s willfulness to break the rules. But, perhaps having inherited some of that willfulness myself, I choose to remember more the young child who found a way to get what she wanted when she didn’t have the words to explain. The lessons I take from this help guide how I approach life:
1. We should be passionate about what we do and what we love … but not to the point of self-destruction.
2. We need to honor our boundaries and those of others.
3. Policies and procedures and rules are in place for a reason; if the reason isn’t clear, ask. If the policy, procedure, or rule isn’t accomplishing the goal it is meant to, or perpetuates a known or unknown injustice, we fight to make it right.
HVWP COMMONPLACE 60
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