“Wild Horses”

“Wild Horses” is a song recalled by Elfrieda Von Riesen and Yolandi Von Riesen through an earlier performance together. In the present, Yolandi offers the memory as a way to reach her sister, but Elfrieda recognizes that the anecdote carries more than its surface details and asks her to leave.

The nursing-home performance

At their mother Lottie’s request, the sisters took part in a celebration for the town’s oldest married couple, marking the couple’s seventy-fifth wedding anniversary. They chose a slow, aching version of “Wild Horses,” which they considered both strikingly cool and fitting for the occasion. Elfrieda played piano while Yolandi sat beside her and sang with her. Their audience of elderly Mennonite nursing-home residents, gathered in wheelchairs or standing with canes and walkers, responded with bewilderment rather than the sisters’ sense of the song’s appropriateness.

A memory with a second meaning

Yolandi brings up the performance while speaking with Elfrieda, hoping the memory will make her laugh. Instead, Elfrieda understands that Yolandi is using the anecdote to approach something beyond the performance itself. She names that intention and asks Yolandi to leave. Yolandi promises not to talk about the past—or anything else Elfrieda does not want to discuss—as long as she can stay. In this exchange, the song’s remembered performance becomes both a shared point of connection and a sign of the difficulty of reaching Elfrieda through their history.