I park the Nissan Cube we've replaced our totaled Toyota with outside what appears to be a covered riding arena. It's the first time I've come anywhere near an equestrian facility in over thirty years. The dirt gives way under my car tires: it's been a rainy fall. I'm not at this barn in northern Massachusetts to ride--or so I tell myself. I am here to research. With the September 2015 deadline for my second novel missed, I'm trying to play catch-up. There is a male character in my manuscript who is a dressage champion with a horse-breeder mother who works out of a barn near the ocean in Cape Cod. I know precious little about either of these undertakings, and so I've driven two hours north from the Berkshires to talk to someone who does: Amanda Traber, a famed dressage trainer whose barn is near the Cape but not on it, because one of the first things Amanda will set straight about my fiction is that it costs an unholy fortune to have a horse barn by the sea.

To quiet the sheepishness I feel about imposing my quest for fleshed-out characters onto a busy stranger, I run through the questions I've prepared. What makes a dressage horse talented? How did Amanda get into the sport? How does she talk about her passion to people who don't ride? I feel both ill at ease and excited to be at a stable as a writer instead of as a rider. It steadies my nerves to focus on the writing part. Amanda is waiting for me just past the stall mats in the facility's entrance, and the short walk gives me several beats to collect myself after the smash of the barn smell. Once I actually start riding again, I will talk with women who were pulled back into horse madness by the siren of that smell alone. In terms of the perfume hitting, there is the animal musk first--the sun-warmed, dirty honey of the place where large head meets muscled neck, the encapsulated summer scent of flaked hay, peaty manure, the reek of riding gloves that never truly dry, the stench of humid fly sheets folded by horse stalls. But underneath these organic smells lie the deeply personal: the acrid punch of the oil dripping underneath my mother's waiting Wagoneer, the sudden tang of cologne wafting up from the front hall, which meant my father was home from Wall Street early. The smell of the linseed oil my mother rubbed and rubbed on my giant Christmas present in hopes that the wooden horse would be easier to rock.

"Remind me what you need again?" Amanda asks. "Did you want to ride?".