Find my New Blog at www.cynthiaderrico.com

Hello Everyone!  If you've read my novel, Ground Manners, you've come here looking for my blog...look no further:  http://www.cynthiaderrico.com is where I've relocated.  I'll meet you there!  Cynthia

I'd Rather Play Solitaire and a note about Andrew Wyeth

...so the book is in print now.  My battles with the publisher, I will save for another post, another day.  I never thought my first work of fiction would be about horses, about their egregious slaughter...about Quebec.  What's interesting is that, as I always found in my new age work, there is synchronicity in all.  I find that not only, like me, did "Wild Horse Annie (Velma Johnston)" have polio, but so also did the model for Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World".  I mention the latter because a few people have commented on the "author photo" on the back cover of my book:  they say that it immediately brought to mind Wyeth's famous painting.  I discovered that Wyeth's model, like me (again), suffered from polio.  Is there something shared amongst us--me, Velma, and Christina--which makes us particularly sensitive to horse abuse?  I know one thing very well--because I remember it vividly:  the numbness in the legs which polio brings may lead one--especially a youngster--to more fully admire and covet the fleet-footedness of creatures like horses.  It may also embed in us a prey mentality, one which would come from not being able to move, much less flee, from a potential predator.  Such a mentality would, at such a young age, imprint a deep vulnerability which--let's face it--only very young children and animals experience.  Piercing perception into who and what one is, I'd say.  Early childhood disability marks one just as fully as early childhood trauma, and I had the benefit of learning from horses directly when I was a child, as well, perhaps, as the lesson of what happens when one loses one's freedom to run (away).