It is embarrassing, but sweet. I have not been an adult too long to recall how an imagination, just ten years old, might transform a neighbor with long hair and a gray horse into a princess astride a milk-white steed.
“You know what?” the girl asked one day, when I paused to let her stroke my gelding’s nose. “Horses are my favorite animal.” She cradled this truth in conspiratorial voice, as if it contained a wish too great for hope.
That was two summers ago, but I thought of it today when I passed that house to discover in the pasture something like a pony. It’s an awkward little beast of indecipherable heritage, stitched together from breeds that ought never to meet, yet blessed with a coat of palomino dapple that might as well be solid gold.
I’ve smiled all afternoon, thinking of that girl. Though stifling hot and thunder torn, today is, for her, that perfect day. It is magic, but it is real!
She knows nothing of devastating colic, mysterious lameness, a crushing fall. She’s never borne the weight of a thousand training hours destroyed by one bad step, a gate left open, a twist of wire in the weeds. She sees nothing in that pony but her fondest dream come true.
I had that magic once. We all did. And yet, somehow, it slipped away. It vanished in silence by the same, subtle shift that degraded running and jumping from play to exercise, contorted sleeping on a friend’s floor from adventure to nuisance, and ravaged the sensuality of meals with stomach-turning guilt.
Working our horses has become a duty. We want not so much to ride as to have ridden. Because we are supposed to. Because we said we would. We focus so hard on the minutiae of tack fit, of hoof care, of speed and feed, that we forget to cast our hearts over the horizon and ride to find them.
And so, our hearts are simply lost.
I was recently gifted another chance. Two weeks after our last endurance ride, my mare tied up. It was my fault; I cut her grain ration while she vacationed post-event, but I should have eliminated it entirely. The excess carbohydrate crashed her system only a few minutes into our first warmup as we started back to work ~ and the result was a month of no work at all.
Disaster! Disappointment! The angry slap of goals thwarted again. Again. Again! All the things of which my little neighbor is innocent, because she knows things that matter more.
My mare is recovered now. Today, as we trotted beneath shifting skies with wind abluster, I pondered that girl and her shambles of a pony. I may have finer horses than hers, newer tack, stronger technique. But she has something better still.
She has, in full measure, that which I clasp like water in my hands: The sunshine sense that a horse ~ any horse! ~ is spun of purest joy. And to have one of your own? Such is heaven, most of all.
[Originally published in The Barb Wire, July 2010]
