For a couple of weeks, we lived in Chestnut Hill near Boston with my aunt Audrey, uncle Abbey, and cousins Paul and Douglas until we could get settled into our new house in Orono, Maine.
One day, we all stopped at a Howard Johnson restaurant to eat. I didn't talk much. I just didn't really care about much of anything. I just wanted to go home to Normandy. Then, at the register, I saw a display with several Breyer horses. One of them was a black stallion. I made a comment about it, and the next thing I knew, the horse was mine. My dear uncle Abbey realized that it was just what I needed. I took that horse everywhere with me. I made him a coat and a halter.
When we moved to Maine, I found a nice cardboard box and made him a stable. There was a stall and a tack room. I made him a saddle, bridle, and a couple of different colored halters, along with some blankets and coats. I went out into the fields around our house and cut the tall grass and made him some hay and some hay bales. I found things to use as buckets for oats and water, etc. The stable had four walls, a window in the tack room, a door, a floor, and a ceiling so I could close it up when I wasn't playing with it. I kept it in the barn because I got in trouble when the 'hay' fell all over my bedroom floor, and I played with it outside. I had set up a spot outside I had made fences and paddocks. When I took it out and set it up, it was perfect.
Every day I would go to the barn and get the stable and play with my horse. It turned into quite a project and I was very proud of it. My mother was pretty impressed, too, in fact, she made curtains for the tack room window.
One day I went out to get my stable and it was gone! I looked everywhere. It was nowhere. I cried all day. When my dad got home, we asked him if he's seen it. He got a stricken look on his face and asked me where I kept it. When I told him, he looked sick. He said he was going to go fishing that weekend and the day before, he had stopped on his way home and gotten a big batch of nightcrawlers. "I found a great box out in the barn right by the door," he said, "didn't even have to turn the light on."
He took me outside and showed me the box of nightcrawlers that he had covered with a tarp.
My beautiful stable was full of nightcrawlers. He felt terrible. He offered to make me a new one out of wood, we would make it together. But I just didn't have the heart. My beautiful horse was homeless from then on.