This is for my readers who finished The Common Hours and had only a small glimpse of Sarah’s Wind Stallion.
The trees at the very top of a mountain, many miles to the east of Williamsport began to bow under the persuasion of a late-summer wind. Straight across the ridge the wind played with pliable branches. For no reason, maybe just for fun, it changed its course to lower trees whose boughs twisted and turned willfully. Down the mountain, the wind passed through one row of trees after another, a chorus of rustling leaves rising into the air.
Then the wind reached a quiet riverbank. It did not stop to ponder; it pushed across the surface of the still water, sending expanding ripples out ahead of it. On the far shore it reached a wooden dock where is waltzed with dead leaves.
A little girl was standing on the dock. Five-year old Sarah was holding her mother’s hand. She had been watching. Sarah smiled as the waltzing leaves danced across the dock toward her. When the wind and leaves reached the hem of her skirt they compelled it also to join in the waltz. Then the wind playfully lifted Sarah’s wavy locks of hair before it left to play in a nearby meadow.
Sarah watched it disappear knowing the secret that only her and the tress knew. It wasn’t only the wind that had passed her by. She had been in the presence of the Wind Stallion.
Tina Stephens
Author of The Common Hours
Tina D. Stephens 