Dear Mom,

Thank you for saving everything ever from my childhood. I love rummaging through all the bins in the grey basement and discovering I had a tiger that looked like this.

Where on earth did we get these animals?

In addition to these delights I found the bin of my horses. I had the most fabulous collection of horses. Horses, horses. From ages 4-14 I lived, breathed and sometimes smelled like a horse. I can recall spending hours in the basement of our house in Massachusetts playing with my horses. Setting up jumps, creating Dressage routines, imagining complicated scenarios between the horses, their riders and their owners. I was big on drama from the beginning.

It was surreal to hold them once again. It was strange to realize, wait, I can't recreate my feelings from before. It's a plastic toy now; a beautifully crafted plastic toy that I cherish.

But if you look past that, past the desire to be seven again, past the relationships between yourself and the horses you once rode, you discover these plastic objects are vessels. Vessels to tap into memories that get lost in the mess of the mind. Have you ever seen the film "Donald in Mathemagic Land"? Most likely not. There is a scene where they clean out his brain. It's a mess of filing cabinets, cobwebs and dust. A great visual for how I feel my mind operates.

These horses are my "search tool," my command f, my tangible reminder that I was a child and I lived a life prior to this one and for those few days of being at home, in my flame pajama pants and small, paint splattered hoodie I can reflect on how those days were and apply that new knowledge to the days to come.