The Love of Foals

Spring is here, the annual rebirth. Along with red-breasted robins and roadside daffodils, foals are sure signs of the new season: their tufted forms bouncing around their grazing mothers or laying flat in the grass in deep, unhorse-like slumber.

I love foals. They make me laugh; cars don’t. The love of foals is apart–or rather, in addition–to a love for horses: foals are only tangentially related to the mighty equine race. They are aliens recently landed, not yet quite here. Their parts are missized. They glow with innocence and promise, at sea in a tangle of legs.

Foals usually have a curious, quizzical look. Prone to mania but easily overpowered by their own machinery, they fling into sudden contortions and startle themselves … and hide behind their mothers. Their cartoon tails jerk in spasms as they nurse, until they pass out on the grass like a spent balloon.

Foals are an old love, one that excited thousands of generations of mankind before this one. It was a love we had in common. For many, those ancient rhythms are just a rerouted echo now mimicked by new car models (foals), which make sure to arrive as faithfully as the foals every year.

Not all have forgotten.

Perhaps it is inevitable, for our kind, that such an old love would be taken for granted. Perhaps the gift remains granted: foals still bounce, grass still grows, the Spring still comes. The annual dance of new foals shows the motor’s roar hasn’t quite drowned out the soft nickers.

Maybe that’s another sign of Spring.