Frida’s story

Frida/ aka Betty

In March of 2017, I took a long drive to New Mexico, south of the Colorado border to pick up a donkey. She was on craigslist. Not her of course, but the sweet Hispanic man who owned her posted a picture and a blurb explaining that he could not take care of her anymore despite the protestations, the keening, and crying, the lamentations from his wife and two small children, she was for sale as they were moving somewhere that would not allow donkeys. He priced her at $500 and after a lot of back and forth via text messages where I asked things such as, "Is she friendly? Good with kids? Can you ride her?" he sent in response a video of her, a dusty white donkey standing frozen in their backyard while his three-year-old sat beneath her small belly, his five-year-old tugged at her whiskers and four scraggly ginger-colored cats played around her back feet.

We met in Raton. He drove a trailer from Farmington. I arrived in my old Honda pilot pulling a small two-horse trailer from Lyons, Colorado. I knew nothing about donkeys. In Australia, growing up with horses, and passing paddocks full of sleek long necked thoroughbreds grazing I would occasionally spy a donkey, often a dark color, similar to rusted tin or the grey of thunderclouds, alone, far from the majestic horses, looking maligned, outcast, but somehow distinguished in their aloofness as if to say, "I would not join a club that does not want me as a member." The words I had heard from the farmers, the graziers, the gentrified land owners of former free settlers from England and Scottish and Irish heritage were that donkeys were stubborn, often mean, not be to be trusted and beasts of burden. I heard this as a child and would unlearn this as a woman far from Australia. Their vagabond, exiled, displaced identity appealed to me after my own years of roaming alone through the world.

So in a Safeway parking lot, I paid $500 in cash and my donkey, a mottled cream female, perhaps six years old (my Hispanic friend saying Cinco, seis, then siete while smiling and shuffling his feet) loaded calmly, without haste, without fuss, into my trailer, and while tying her big head to the left front railing I whispered into into her impossibly long, cone-shaped, white fur covered ears, that she was safe and would be loved.

It was later, much later, from a knowledgeable friend in California that I would learn donkeys like to ride backwards in trailers. Everything I knew about horses did not apply to donkeys.

I named her Frida after Frida Kahlo, whom I and the rest of the female world, had adopted as a mascot, a goddess of art, forte, flair, suffering, savvy, justice, and independence.

Those first few months in Longmont on the rented property, Frida lived with Maitai, my sixteen-year-old thoroughbred mare who had played polo for years in California and was now my everyday riding horse, my trail horse, my dependable steed that I could canter around bareback or entrust with children with small hands and short legs clambering and clinging as Maitai surged into a trot, twitching her ears and snorting with resignation at the children's high-pitched squealing. She was endlessly patient with a coat of deep brown that dappled in the Colorado summers like mottled leather after being worked to a sheen with oil.

They were a disparate pair, the long-legged, dark mare and the small, off-white burro standing side by side in the faint blue haze of morning against the black shapes of the mountains in the distance.

Then winter came, and Frida and Maitai ran with the horses that came down from the mountains from the dude ranches and where Maitai made new friends, male friends, that followed her as she lifted her tail so that they wrinkled their top lips, revealing thick yellow teeth to the sky with delight at vague sexual enticement. Maitai was a flirt. Perpetually in heat and foolishly dumping her faithful friend, trotting off with a band of geldings like a teenage girl after two tequilas at a bar.

But Frida held her own out there in the fifteen-acre field, finding other misfits, other outliers, forming her motley band who grazed shoulder to shoulder, wither to wither, and answered her plaintive brays with their wobbly whinnies. Her fold, her incongruous crew aligned devotedly, recognizing a leader. The shaggy mare with Cushing's disease, the one-eyed pony, the sway-backed paint gelding, and the stiff-hocked buckskin all cleaved to Frida's steadiness, her lack of drama, taking advantage of her ability to scrap, to find the succulent weeds and dry grasses amidst the piles of snow, basking in her savvy, her survival instinct and her assiduous ability to adapt.

And every other day, I ventured from the house, stumbling in rubber boots through the deep snow, singing lyrics by Beck if I felt particularly feisty: "I'll feed you fruit that don't exist

I'll leave graffiti where you've never been kissed,

I'll do your laundry massage your soul

I'll turn you over to the highway patrol,"

or if I felt a little cloudy, maybe these from Jeff Tweedy:

"You and I, we might be strangers

However close we get sometimes,

It's like we never met..."

I sang while straining to spy the herd in the far reaches of the field, casting my eyes to the copse of cottonwoods, to the hollow where they drink from the murky pond, singing louder, tunelessly intoning the lyrics into the frigid air until she heard me, Frida, she always heard me, those long ears adapted for hearing other donkeys in a vast desert where donkeys first grazed, often so far apart so as to find the sparse grasses and weeds, that their ears became antennae, alert for the deep, sonorous eee-aws of their companions who might be a mile or more away. And Frida, hearing my warbling, would run, at a fast-paced trot towards me, an excitement in her gait, her head high, her tiny coal hooves prancing across the snow, those white ears, elegant despite the shag rug of winter fur pointed towards me with a desire to reach me, and always I felt joy, a ballooning of jubilance, a gleeful gratification as she approached. And then we stood, her long jaw placed gently on my shoulder as I scratched her chest, my fingernails digging through the shag into the itchy places, her head increasingly heavy as she melted into my shoulder and breathed silvery plumes against my ear, listening as I whispered the nonsensical and incessant words of affirmation, praising her beauty, reiterating my love for her, both of us filled with a peaceful sensation and a quiet reverie for our bond. Later, I was to learn about cortisol levels and nervous systems and how donkeys read energy and calm these frenetic hormonal, emotional stress-like pulses that surge through humans, and I would come to understand that she was not only my friend but my medicine.

Like an anchor, her head resting, her jaw bone like the hull of a ship balanced and aground on the bar of my shoulder. And the significant weight of her head and her unquestioning loyalty steadied the flighty feelings, the rattling anxiety that often unmoored me. To our left, a windmill turned. A creaking, metallic sound that we heard and did not mind. And as we stood, her cheek warm and fuzzy against mine, breathing in the cold mountain air, it was as though we had known each other before from some distant time, some past journey that we had endured and survived together and, in those moments, our gypsy souls could rest a while, take comfort in our togetherness, married against the clamorous unknowing, both looking forward towards the high wild ranges in the west.

And when I left her and headed back to the house, to the many things that awaited my organizing, the children, the work, the phonecalls, the arrangements, she stood still and watched me retreating and I could feel her watching, and I could not look back because she would run again towards me so, I walked on, and I whispered to the day ahead the words that I remembered from Louise Gluck:

"Today, he wants to sit; there's a lot to say,

Too much for the meadow. He wants to be face to face,

talking to someone he's known forever."