At the next show, I will definitely ride Willie. Or, failing that, definitely Sam. Or possibly Casey, Or even a totally unknown, borrowed horse if we run out of mounts for the Championship class. So far, I’ve had the same results (1st & 2nd) on four different Stepping Stone Farm horses. So in the lap of the gods – or at least the hands of my instructor – I leave it.
They keep asking my opinion about matters saddleseat. I’ll get on, a kind soul will adjust my stirrups and ask, “How do they feel?” I dunno. I suspect “Really weird” is not the answer they are looking for.
One of the munchkins asked if I knew how to tack up a horse yet. Good question. Mine yes; yours, not so much.
[Not that I’m the least bit superstitious – touch wood – but I did worry that recounting all this good fortune would be taunting the universe. However, I prefer to see it as narratively balancing all the whining I did last year and am sure to do in the future.]
I hit my 500th post soon, May 11th if my math is correct. I was excited about 100 and relieved to reach a year. However, 500 feels like an arbitrary collection of digits. I could be equally excited about the progressive symmetry of 468. Or 343 as a palindromic cube.
Some numbers matter
The difference between 1st place and 2nd.
The last 10 minutes when I have promised to swim for 1/2 hour instead of 20 minutes.
The word count requirement on my latest assignment.
Some numbers don’t
Hubby and I have both forgotten our anniversary, 6th & 12th respectively. I felt amused rather than unloved. Hubby appears to have survived my defection (recounted here), with possibly a trace of relief that we are now even.
Years ago, I called my father to wish him a happy birthday. He said, “Thank you. It was two weeks ago.”
Why carry on?
If accumulating a high number of posts isn’t the goal, what is? First, I found I missed the blog during my holiday break. Second, it amuses me as a problem-solving exercise: can I come up with a diverting horse-related tidbit each day? That tells you all you need to know about my pursuit of writing as an artistic endeavor. I’m an information junkie. It’s what I read. It’s what I write.
*My* Old Kentucky Home Illustration by Spence Millard
Another Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event has come and gone without me. Am I sorry? Of course, but not as much as I thought I would be. From 1998 to 2010, I went to Lexington for the week to work, to write, to run about. It was always a blast. Then life changed and it seemed a good time to move on to new ventures.
Last year, I watched a lot of livestream, but then, I was sitting in the barn with Mathilda. This year, I caught some live, some on video, but also had a lesson, worked my horse, went swimming, and generally got on with my life.
Would I go again? In a heartbeat, provided I had a place to stay and a reason to go. Short of that, I’ll look at the pictures from the Kentucky Horse Park and be thankful I had so much fun there over the years.
My vote for the most impressive horse on the grounds goes to an unnamed horse that you catch a glimpse of as the competitors whiz past. Local KY riders spend the day as outriders, in case of a loose horse or other crisis where a mounted rider could lend a hand. When not needed, they hang out – as horses gallop, as people mill, as loudspeakers blare. I’ve never had a horse who would keep his or her sanity for five minutes under those conditions.
Red Saddlepad
Irish Diamonds ridden by Micheline Jordan
Yeah, they trailed the field, but let’s see you do what they just did. Modeled on the website Tour de France Lanterne Rouge, “Celebrating the last-place rider in the General Classification … because you couldn’t hang on his wheel for 30 seconds.” Results.
“Mushroom hunting is not simply a matter of traipsing through the woods after it rains. It is an art, a skill, a meditation, a process.”
Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms by Eugenia Bone [Rodale 2011] page xv. Quoting David Arora, author of Mushrooms Demystified:A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi.
Riding correctly is not simply a matter of sitting on the horse holding a certain position. It is an art, a skill, a meditation, a process.
Cows across the street. We used to trot up & down our long driveway for conditioning hacks. The only thing that made him more nervous than the cows across the street was the empty field where the cows had been on the last pass. Which way did they go? Which way did they go? When the herd would start with the cow noises, his ears would go straight up. He would tense every muscle in his body in an attempt to decode the bovine plans for world domination.
Cows in the field. Once a small herd of lost cows ended up in our front field. Mathilda was startled, but got over it. Previous Horse passaged around the pasture for days after the cows had gone.
Cows at the show. We unloaded and the farmer next door let a herd into the next field. My senior horse ended up with a stallionesque chain through his mouth as the only – the only – way to keep him on this planet.
I still get misty-eyed when cow radio comes on.
Last Sunday, cows moved in next door. When I went to the barn in the morning, Rodney was frantic in his stall. I gotta get out. I gotta get out. He gets full marks for permitting a halter, walking out reasonably well, and sticking the dismount. The microsecond he was at liberty, he was GONE. Not Previous Horse’s fear as much as a need to be on top of the situation. So, Rodney thundered around the field. Mathilda thundered around the pen. It was a long morning.
We appear to have gotten over the new neighbors. There are still the occasional noble looks into the distance. In the horses’s collective defense, when the cows are in the part of their field closest to our barn – that’s a lot of cow not very far away.
For this week’s Sunday Stills Challenge: Flowers and Wildflowers. There was a lovely moment of a black horse amid the yellow flowers. Given Mathilda’s camera phobia, I couldn’t take the picture.
Virtual Brush Box 