It is a warm, still Florida morning, mid-September according to the calendar but fall seems far away. I once boarded a cruise ship that took us through the Panama Canal, and today’s white sky and heavy, tropical air is not unlike what it felt like that October afternoon. The horses have been turned out, and the donkey rests in the corner of his stall, possibly annoyed that he wasn’t allowed to go out with his herd mates. Malachi is easily annoyed. As I attend to the barn chores, it occurs to me that I do my very best thinking here. The routine of filling hay bags and measuring out pellets, scrubbing buckets and sweeping the alley against the drone of the stall fans lulls me into a calm place where my mind wanders free. There is dog hair under our bed and the floors in our kitchen could use a mopping, but when I’m finished out here there isn’t a stray piece of hay in sight. Ask most horsewomen: they’ll move heaven and earth to keep their barns clean but their houses, not so much.
Today, like every day for the past week or so, I have been thinking about Queen Elizabeth. We were in the grocery store when the cashier asked if I’d heard the news that she had passed away. I mention this because it is an American grocery store in a rural Florida community, and it was not five minutes after the news broke that this woman 1) knew about it and 2) felt the need to share it with her customer. I’m not a royal watcher by any stretch of the imagination. I’m aware of a rift between Harry, Meghan and the rest of the Royal Family – how could you not be? I am slightly embarrassed to admit that much of my education about the monarchy comes by way of programs like The Crown. I do remember the night Diana died, awake and watching CNN in the early hours of the morning, trying to process the unbelievable banner running across the bottom of the screen. I thought Charles was a bit of a cad and wondered what he saw in Camilla. I couldn’t dislike her too much because she was a horse person, and decided that it must be true love after all when she and Charles married. But, that’s about all the space that any of their doings took up in my brain. So, I was surprised when I felt my eyes fill at the news of Her Majesty’s passing. Shocked, actually. As the images of flowers piling up in front of Buckingham Palace appeared on the evening news, I, the consummate non-weeper, continued to feel weepy. With all of the ugly politics going on in our country, Queen Elizabeth managed to knock much of the noise out of the limelight for a few hours, a noteworthy feat.
The Queen’s death (interesting to note that you know exactly to whom I am referring rather than Queen Margrethe of Denmark or Queen Letizia of Spain, and yes, I used Google) has dredged up memories of my own mother’s passing, memories I’d imagined buried deeply inside 9 years of careful emotional filing. My mom was a bit like the Queen: always perfectly coiffed with subtle make up, dressed appropriately, able to make polite conversation with anyone. She didn’t swear, she prayed often, and she always knew which fork to pick up first if there was more than one at a place setting. Unlike the Queen, she didn’t love horses or Corgis. She liked animals and was kind to them, but she could live without them. I get the feeling that Her Majesty couldn’t. In fact, I suspect she preferred the company of her horses and her Corgis to many of the heads of state she dined with. I have also been thinking about my grandmother, who was born in 1889 and lived with us on and off for most of my childhood. Bunna (my failed spoken attempt at “Grandma” that unfortunately stuck) was a proper lady who always wore a skirt, a blouse with a brooch, stockings and sensible low-heeled pumps. She didn’t smile a lot and she wasn’t the cuddly, cookie-baking kind of grandmother I might have wished for. She played gin rummy with me and always put dollar bills in my birthday and Christmas cards. She passed on before I was old enough to fully appreciate her situation of dependency on a tiny government stipend and her two grown daughters, having lost everything to medical expenses associated with my grandfathers’ years of poor health. I regret not listening well to her stories. I regret not being particularly kind. I was a kid, yes, but I was a smart one and I could have done better.
I’m not the only one feeling this sense of personal loss; I’ve read posts on Facebook and heard snippets of conversations on the news; women on both sides of the Atlantic are remembering their lost moms and mums, grandmoms and grandmums, and feeling generally unmoored. I’ve mentioned it to a few friends and they too are puzzled by their intense feelings about the Queen, seemingly bubbling up from nowhere. Most of us are of a certain age, and Elizabeth has been the Queen for the entirety of our lives. Presidents have come and gone, but one could always count on Queen Elizabeth to show up in a matching coat and hat and flip a royal wave towards her subjects. I suppose it’s no wonder that we all feel a bit lost.
I plan to watch some of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, and I expect to be weepy all over again when they play God Save The King. There will be more pictures of her with horses and dogs, and someone may mention that she was interested in a different way of horse training when she asked an American cowboy, Monty Roberts, to come to England and personally demonstrate his methods to her. The news anchors will tell us again about her decency, her work ethic, and her dry sense of humor. I’ll be in the barn later that evening doing a final check on the equines, feeding the elderly Lulu, putting hay out for The Barn King, Shawnee, and tossing Malachi a few timothy pellets. I’ll give the alley a final sweep, I’ll check that the gates are locked and the buckets are full, and I’ll be having some of my best thoughts. They may be about a woman who loved duty and horses and dogs and most likely a tidy barn. I’ll turn off the light, and say goodnight to my beloveds, and wonder if she used to do that too.