This post is dedicated to Bonnie Slotnick with much gratitude for her effort and kindness.

I almost deleted the email.  It looked like some sort of a scam.  The subject line read: “Something of Yours-?”  Annoyed, I assumed it was someone trying to get me to send money to some foreign country, complete with my credit card information.  Fortunately, my curiosity got the best of me as I noticed there was a photo attached.

“I have a cookbook shop in New York,” the note began.  She described how she purchases things that her friend finds at thrift shops to complement her vintage cook books.  Among the items she had acquired was a thirteen inch spoon with an inscription on it that she believed once belonged to me.  It ended with “If you would like to have it, I’ll be happy to send it to you.”

As the photo opened up on my computer screen, it was like traveling in a time machine.  Engraved on the spoon handle was indeed my name, the date 10-16-77, the name Ebony, and the letters “1st W.T.C.”  Sluth that she was, and a fellow horsewoman, Bonnie realized the letters stood for Walk-Trot-Cantor, and that this spoon was a prize from a horse show.  “As a rider myself, I would love to be reunited with such a trophy, had I ever won one,” she said.

Indeed, I was thrilled to see that spoon and hold it in my hand again, all these many years later.  But there was so much more to the story for me, beyond being a practically antique trophy! The horse’s name on the spoon was the first horse I had ever been allowed to take care of.  After years of wishing, dreaming, and making deals with the devil in my mind, my mother advocated for me and allowed me to lease a little black horse owned by a former neighbor who now lived on a farm.  It was the beginning of intense years of riding, working at the stables to pay for lessons, and feeling a sense of belonging and identity.

My mother spent many hours driving me to barns and tack shops (I could spend hours just buying a lead rope).  She woke up at 4 am many a Saturday or Sunday morning to take me to the stable so I could travel with my trainer to a horse show.  She watched countless laps around a ring that must have looked all the same to her for so much of it. She learned the phrases as I did, countercanter, change of lead, and the significance of 3’6” (the height of the jumps in the highest youth division). And most of all, she endured the scrapes, bruises, and broken bones that come with a rider’s life as well as the bruises to the heart as a girl outgrows her first mount or fails to make the finals in the most important of shows.

After the wildfire of October 2016, my relationship with “stuff” has changed.  When you almost lose everything and have friends who actually do, it reorients you to what indeed you want to keep.  When the granny unit that my mother was living in burned down, I lost so much of what was to be inherited of our family memories, especially of my mother’s family history and her own mementos I had always assumed I would have to keep. Bonnie, sitting in her shop in NYC, could have had no idea what that spoon would mean to me – a rare piece of my childhood and a symbol of the bond with my late mother that survived that horrible day.

As I hold the spoon in my hand, I can smell the grass as the hooves of my horse move through it on that chilly October morning in New Jersey. I can feel the leather of the saddle beneath me and the sound of the thud as I dismount. I hand my mother a carrot, and as scared as she ever could be, she would lean over and offer it to the beautiful animal she was absolutely terrified to be near.  But she loved me, and since I loved that horse, she loved it, too. A big thanks to Bonnie, a lover of books and of old stories, who took the time to find me, even to call me, and made this happy reunion possible. It is a reunion not just with a spoon, but with a girl, a love, and a mother’s love that still lives on within me.