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here’s
little that sets a horseman’s heart a-twitter like a new horse, even when the
new horse is an old horse. In my case, it’s not only a new old horse, it’s
a new former horse come home to roost.
By
now all of my Facebook friends are more than aware that my daughter sent her TB
mare, Dolly, back home last weekend to live out her days as an old lady’s
partner and friend. Not that I needed
another of either of those. I have been
happily riding good old Leo, feisty Zip, and chunky Dakota with occasional
forays on other people’s horses when the opportunity arose. And I’ve been riding Dolly. I’ve had lessons on her, done clinics with
her, and had a few hours of free play time with her at her last digs while she
was still my daughter’s favorite cathected object. This is in no way a Putting Out to Pasture
for either of us, and that’s what got me thinking.
Jess and Dolly doing things that I don't do |
Of
late—ever since my daughter announced her intention to pull up stakes and head
for the wilds of Indianapolis—I’ve had cause to reminisce about times
past. There were the frantic shared
rides on my first horse, Cowgirl, whose attitude ranked negative 5 on a scale
of one to ten. Those scary moments when
I stuck my child on a horse that pretended not to see us when we entered the
barn where she was boarded weren’t nearly as scary as the ones when I stuck my
own body up there without benefit of an adult on the ground to catch me
post-launch. That was the longest seven
months of horse ownership of my career.
More of what Dolly and I won't be doing |
There
were the horses that came and went, and the ones that came and stayed. There were the twenty-mile trail rides, just
the two of us and our happy horse buddies, that we thought nothing of doing on
a weekly basis. And there were the
bareback races on the railroad bed and the barrel races in arenas. There were the hunter paces when we partnered
up and the local shows when we were adversaries.
What
there never were were times when I thought this whole horse thing was a
craziness that needed to pass before it killed one of us. It never did…pass, or kill one of us. It did offer a few ER visits and some time
off for assorted reasons, but no real loss of momentum or body parts.
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What we can still do |
So
when Dolly got off the trailer and the herd went nuts, so did I. The flood of memories was topped only by the
flush of excitement. Years ago, I wrote
a chapter in a book and described my lust for this particular horse with her
pretty movement and her frizzy brain hairs and my wise decision to let someone
else have her, a nod to my aging corpus and her need for thrills. She scared the bejeesus out of me! As it turned out, no
suitable (by my daughter’s standards) buyer popped up, and Dolly stuck around
for nearly 17 years. How ironic that the
horse I thought would be beyond my abilities a decade ago is now, when I’m a
decade older (not wiser by any means), crankier, creakier, and less energetic,
she’s mine after all!
So
twitter-pated I may be and I’m totally okay with that. There won’t be any four-foot jumps in Dolly’s
life from here on, but we’ll find a middle ground somewhere between my lame
dressage work and her lust for the Big Time, and if a couple of cross-rails
happen to be in the way, we’ll do that, too.
Sometimes
the best of the past is still ahead of us.
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