Watering My Pony In The Winter

Interstate 94 in North Dakota in the heart of winter.

Watering My Pony In The Winter
Concurrent Lives Throughout Time

By Dakota Wind
BISMARCK, N.D. - Sometimes when I’m doing simple mundane things in my car I like to imagine instances of myself in another time. For instance, yesterday was bitterly cold, the kind of cold that numbs your face and mouth making it difficult to talk, like your mouth is full of cotton, that you can’t pronounce anything correctly, almost like you’re unintentionally doing an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Godfather impression. It’s that cold. I digress.

So I was filling my car, and I imagined for a moment, myself in a field of snow and frozen grass on a day as cold as the Godfather, with a horse. A grey pony, because my car is grey, prancing in an earnest attempt to keep himself warm in the bracing cold, and instead of gassing my car up I’m breaking ice down by the river so that my pony can get water. I’m watering my pony.

 Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins. Interesting movie.

Say that I have an active imagination. I like to tell my boys that I wanted to give them names like Magneto, Wolverine and X, or Mayhem, Maverick and Havok, or Han, Anakin and Lando. I like to tell them stories about how I found one in a field in a smoldering crater, another was a government experiment thrust into my wife’s arms to raise but one day The Man will come to collect, or that the youngest was a vampire named Barnabas Collins.

Maybe I’m a reincarnated brave from the days of warriors. Maybe I’m a soldier from the French and Indian War. I can’t say with any certainty that I believe in reincarnation, but I dream of long ago battles, long ago love, and long ago death. Maybe dreams transcend time and I’m living multiple lives concurrently throughout history.

In the days of tradition, a good hunter could bring down a bison with five arrows. A braggart would say that he brought one down with three. 

When I came back to reality, shivering from watering my pony, I replaced the fuel nozzle and twisted the gas cap back on. The warrior from long ago would have patted his pony, threw his bison robe over his shoulders and adjusted it for maximum warmth before mounting up – I turned my ignition and adjusted the heat to blast my windows and feet. I to go work to sit at my computer, and the warrior goes on his hunt.

What makes for an interesting twist here with my curious imaginings is that a few weeks ago my youngest son told my beloved bride that he dreamt I was riding horse and hunting bison.

It made me smile. I’m in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing.