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Blog 3

Problem: The size of Precious’s Patoot. Summer grazing has left her looking like this.

Actually last summer also left her looking like this. Could this be the real definition of compound interest? At any rate, the problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Real cowboys boast about having a horse with a rump two-axe-handles wide. But reality says, big patoots are hard on petite “foots.”So Precious is on a diet.

What is this? One cookie on a tea spoon? You’ve gotta be kiddin’!

Stay tuned when the next blog shares Precious’s gynecological problems and the story of the hunt for “Mare Marbles.”

AND our first “Memory Mash” from Wanda, a woman who told me how she gallivanted around the world looking for happiness, and then…….

RECENTLY,

• In the spring of 2007, a camp for children born with “limb differences”-- i.e. missing an arm or hand--came together at Crystal Lake in north Florida. The campers chose Barbaro as their symbol of being champions and showing courage living the lives they have been dealt. What beautiful spirits I encountered there Especially memorable was the story of the kindergarten girl who asked her teacher on the first day of school if she could stand up in front of the class and “give a speech” about why she looked so different.

This child might have been the size of a peanut, but her courage was three axe- handles wide.

Now here’s the story of what we all do—dust off an old passion.

Becoming a cowgirl at the last minute goes like this….

My stockbroker told me never to buy anything that eats while I’m asleep. But in the final weeks before my daughter left for college, I decided to. I bought a horse. At my age, I don’t think this is so uncommon—to reach back into childhood and dust off an old passion and squeeze it back into life.

I went to a local horse show to see if I might come upon a horse that might do. As I watched them in the arena, going round and round, I began to know what makes me so passionate about them. It’s not only their obvious beauty and grace and stoicism. Whenever I’ve read anything written about them, such as the beautiful passages by Comic McCarthy in which he describes man’s attraction to horses because of their “ardent heartedness”--what he calls “the heat of the blood that ran them”-- I know that what I feel for them is quite a bit less refined, but yet no less spiritual. For, as I sat in the arena and watched those horses going round and round, sweating, working something fierce to do whatever the people on their backs were asking them to do, I realized that not one of those horses knew where he was going. Instead, each placed all of its belief that whoever was on their back DID know. And I also knew the human sitting up there didn’t—not really. The people riding were going round and round, enjoying it, but doing so because someone had made them believe it was something they should do. And so there it was—a realization about my own life and the serenity I could gain in accepting it for just whatit is—a ride of uncertain destination.

Horse number 17 walked into the arena. He was going so slow his front leg barely swung out of the way before his back leg came up to claim the dirt where it had been. But when the commands came out over the microphone, he got all of himself going pretty good. Then right after he lined up in front of the judge, he fell asleep.

This might be a horse I can ride, I thought. When he won second place, I followed him out. He was white. He had a teenager on his back. Right away, I felt a connection.

I asked his owners all the right questions. I’m no dummy. I knew how low my ability was. I hadn’t been on a horse since childhood. Yes, his owners told me, he could go down the road and come upon a jogger or someone on a bicycle and not go bonkers and sling me off. He was twelve years old, and by horse years that put him and me at the about he same age. He was a quarter horse, which meant he could run faster than almost anything for a quarter of a mile, and on any given day could catch a cow, if he really wanted to. He’d also been owned by a child since he was four. I knew what that felt like.

His name was Skip, which wasn’t exactly Silver. But it started with an S. And at my age,Silver could be embarrassing. He would also cost in initial investment about the same as 20-year-old classic Ford Mustang, which was a good measure of an acceptable mid-life crisis, and in upkeep, about the same.

I made an appointment to go out to where he lived to try him out.When I walked off, he was still asleep.

He didn’t know it yet, but I wanted more out of him than just a memory of my childhood and sense of serenity. I wanted him to make me take the time to go through the land, to make me take the time to hear and smell and feel the world I am living in. I wanted him to exercise more than just my arms and legs and back. I wanted him to exercise my right to remember who I was after so many years of being a wife and mother—which by necessity and the joy of doing those jobs well—required that my senses be attuned to those I cared for. I wanted him to make me take a SLOW ride.

On that part, he was obviously, keen.

Find a picture of Skip on the web page Books.