Call it hope. Call it...
Illustration
Call it hope. Call it a dream. Whatever you called it, it had begun at her father's knee when Carrie was just four years old. She no longer remembered the name of the book nor its author, but she remembered the picture that the author's words had painted in her mind that wintry Sunday afternoon as her father read to her. It had become a special time for the two of them, those Sunday afternoons. When her mother would begin to clear the table from their noon meal, her dad would look over at Carrie with a twinkle in his eye say, "Carrie, me girl, how about a story?" She could hardly excuse herself from the table quickly enough, racing to the bookshelf in the living room, trying to remember whose turn it was to pick the book. That Sunday, it had been her father's turn. And whatever book he had selected, it had made a lasting impression. He sat in his easy chair and Carrie crawled up into his lap. "This," he said with emphasis, "is a book about wild horses." As he read, Carrie was mentally transported to a land of high mesas and deep canyons in which horses roamed wild and free. The words were so vivid, she could almost feel the wind on her own face as the horses raced in thundering abandon up, out of shadowed canyons, onto wide-open flatness, following the lead stallion to the fresh, new grass of spring. That Sunday afternoon, curled in the warmth of her father's lap, Carrie knew that someday she would visit the canyon-carved country, drawn so vividly in her mind with words. Now, as she stood at the edge of a sprawling mesa, peering into the shadows of the canyons below, she realized it had been 57 years since her father had read that story. Not once, in all that time, did she ever doubt she would see this place with her own eyes, though it was still a bit hard to believe she had finally come. "Well," she half-chuckled to herself, "maybe I'll see some wild horses, too." -- Fannin
