Why Horses – My early years

Why Horses?

I have been asked this question all my life!  I really don’t have an answer. Or, the answer would take so long it would fill a book. 

My mother claimed that my first complete sentence was “I want a pony.”  Truth or family fiction, I can’t say, but I don’t remember an age or a time when I was not fascinated by and drawn to horses.  Some horse people are born to families with horses. Not this one. There wasn’t a horse in sight in our family! No one else had this addiction, so it was not genetically acquired.  Though I begged, I never got a horse of my own growing up.  I did get small ceramic and plastic horse figurines for every gift-giving occasion.  And I made the most of them with my child imagination and a little Brownie camera.  I staged horse shows, farm families and wild horse stampedes and got grainy photos of them all. 

When I was about five years old, we lived in a rented house that belonged to the town doctor.  He had moved to an apartment over his new brick clinic.  But he kept the old house because the barn behind it housed his strawberry roan mare. She stylishly pulled the fancy black buggy that he still loved to drive around the countryside.  The barn was also home to two ponies that his sons had outgrown, and an old groom named Jack.  And if I got up early enough, Jack would let me help him lead the ponies across the bridge to their pasture.  And eventually, he would let me sit on one for the short trip.  Then I could sit on the pony loose in the pasture, bareback with no reins, while she grazed.  In my fuzzy memory, I think I would try to get the pony to move around the field until she tired of it and bounced me off.  It’s a happy memory, true or not.

A few years later, at maybe 7 years old, we moved to our own home with a perfectly good tool shed in the large yard.  Still, no pony.  Though I did not realize or appreciate her sacrifice at the time, my mother agreed to clean house for a local family that gave riding lessons.  In exchange, I became one of their kids and not only got lessons, but hung out with the ponies, and rode bareback through the orchard, and went to Pony Club events with their family. My sister recently sent me this photo she found of a very solemn me at a Pony Club show.  I remember the family’s name as McCabe, the pony’s name was Queenie, and she was a seasoned show pony.  I knew I let her down that day by only getting a third-place ribbon.  

Throughout my childhood, I grasped for any opportunity to be around these fascinating creatures.  I also read every book that I could find with horses as the subject.  Not just the Black Stallion book by Walter Farley and the Chincoteague pony stories by Marguerite Henry, but also the old Horseman’s Bible, the Encyclopedia (remember those?) and any other resource I could put my hands on.  I suppose it’s a very good thing we didn’t have the internet back then!

Do you share my passion for equines?  Tell me your childhood experiences with horses in a comment below.  I’d love to hear it!  Thanks for stopping by!