Horse Crazy

Like so many little girls, I was crazy about horses. I don't know exactly when it started...maybe from watching westerns on television. Roy Rogers and Trigger were on Saturday mornings. Gunsmoke was on at night, along with any number of movie westerns and lots of other television westerns.

The sound of those running horses always intrigued me. That fast clippety, clippety, clopping was like no other sound there was. Heroes were always galloping after bad guys, going through deep canyons and mountains and rivers and open prairies. Those ranch houses so often looked like places where I wanted to live and have a horse and grow up and marry a cowboy.

The horses were just at the heart of it all, in the middle of the picture I wanted to step into. When I was younger, I so much wanted to go to Montana and have a horse ranch. I was reading Zane Grey and William MacLeod Raine and Charles Alden Seltzer when my friends were reading young romances. These were romances, too! Romances of the West!

Later, as I got a little older and saw other movies and read other books, I thought it might be better to live in Kentucky and have a horse farm. Then I would go to the Derby and have hunt breakfasts and be landed gentry. Now that's how a person is supposed to live, I thought.

My family didn't have horses, so I had to content myself with looking at pictures of them and making do with the sawhorses in the garage. I'd throw an old rug over one, make stirrups out of a rope by making a loop in both ends, and make a bridle out of another rope that went around the front. I'd sit out there for hours, just imagining what it must feel like.

My nickname was "Black Bart" and for awhile I had my Annie Oakley outfit that I wore. Then there was the summer my mother couldn't get me out of my cowboy boots, which I wore with shorts.

As much as I loved those cowboys, all tall and lanky and suntanned, I really admired the Indians. After all, they didn't ride with saddles, and boots and all those trappings. They just got on their wonderfully painted ponies and rode like the wind. I figured they were onto something and must know a lot those cowboys didn't.

Time marches on, however, and little girls grow up. They go off to college and start going in some direction that they think leads to where they want to be. Or they get married, or do both, or neither. In my case, I started to believe that horses were something that other people had. That picture was a picture that had other people in it. I had a different picture.

Horses cost money. That fact is a big one. They ain't called hay burners for nothin'! So when life intrudes on one's dreams, money is so often the consideration that defines those dreams. At one point I had the money...but I didn't have the time! I thought about learning to ride, which I never had. (Only in my dreams.) But, I thought I was too old. I was probably in my thirties. I saw other people going on trail rides or riding horses on vacations, but I never did.

It felt like a club to which I did not belong. Some part of me knew that, for me anyway, it was an all or nothing proposition. I couldn't be just a little involved with horses. I didn't go to horse shows. I didn't see more than maybe one rodeo. I didn't know anyone with a horse, except for a woman with whom I worked. She used to drive a fairly long way after work to go ride her horse. That rather amazed me.

So what finally changed? What finally got me to the point where I knew it was time to bring myself into the world of horses?

Amongst other things...I turned fifty.