Autumn

Sorrel Roan Tobiano Pinto Tennessee Walking Horse mare. That description is bigger than she is. But there's a lot packed into that small package.

So, she was the opposite of a common sense purchase for a first-time owner...especially one who had a lot of grey hair. She was a "she." She is a mare. Mares have heat cycles and hormones and lots of opinions. She was small. Small often translates to quick and agile. She was young: 5 years old. That means she hadn't had a lot of experience and/or training. In human years, she was maybe 15. An adolescent. A hormonal teenager.

I was thinking about this. I wasn't completely uninformed and I wasn't completely foolish and I'd never describe myself as an adventurous risk-taker. However, I chose to trust my heart and my instincts, which told me that she had come for me. Now, I had found her.

It's a good thing we can't see the future. Sometimes if we have any idea of what we are getting ourselves into, we might reconsider. I've done that plenty of times: try to imagine every last detail and outcome of a possible choice, and then talk myself out of it.

Not this time!

I didn't exactly leap before I looked, but leap I did.

So -- I became the owner of a horse. The implications of that statement were enormous, and still are, to this day. The thrill of a life-long dream fulfilled, the anxiety of hoping you are up to the task, the joy of a new partnership, the fear and realization of knowing that you don't even know what you don't know...life lessons were going to start coming hard and fast.

And when I say hard and fast, I ain't kiddin'.

She was fast and the ground was hard.

Not knowing much about her background (which is often true of horses, cats, dogs and people, I suppose), I was left with guesses and observations from more experienced horse people. Best guess: probably some kid had gotten on her and just taken off. Not much training. Get on and go! Oh, to be 14 again. 14-year-old girls have to be the best riders. They're limber, athletic, fearless and mend quickly.

Autumn seemed overwhelmed by her new life. Part of the guess-work about her background was that she'd lived in smaller places with fewer horses and less activity and noise. This was a big barn, with lots of horses and lots of noise and lots of people. She now lived in a stall at night, with other horses around her. During the day, she was turned out with the other horses.

Even if you go visit your boarded horse every day, that leaves a whole lot of the day that she's living her own life. She has to make new friends, figure out the routine, find out who to stay away from and who will protect her, and learn how to play well with others. Those things she has to do on her own. The rest, like how to become curious instead of fearful, and figuring out what to do when I'm on her back, was part of my job to teach her.

It's said that you are always teaching your horse when you're with him or her. You're either teaching them something positive or you are teaching them something, shall we say, less positive. There's no neutral ground. It takes a whole lot more time to undo the not-so-positive stuff than to teach it right in the first place.

Patience is called for, lots of it. Time is something that is measured by progress: it takes as long as it takes. Persistence, doing it over and over, consistently is also required. This is part of the very large commitment of owning a horse.

Oh, you don't have to do it that way. You can get on and go, kick and yell when they do something wrong. You can blame the horse for bad training or a bad attitude or being lazy or whatever shortcomings you perceive. You can decide you've bought the wrong horse, so you sell it and buy a different one. The horse never gets any better and neither do you.

Or, you can look at this as a relationship. Women are more likely to see it this way than men do, I suppose. We like that kind of stuff. That's how we see the world: one relationship at a time. The horse, however, is half of that relationship. You cannot decide the relationship you will have. You need to get to know one another, each one's fears and strengths and weaknesses. Your goal is to create a relationship where each is stronger within that relationship than outside of it. Hmmm....kind of like life?

Autumn had now entered my life, and I had entered hers. What kind of relationship were we going to have? Patience has never been my strong suit. I knew nothing of training horses. Physically, I was in the worst shape of my life.

She was going to have to tell me what I needed to know. I was going to have to learn how to listen.