If you’re wondering how I got to be horse crazy, the photo above serves as an explanation. That is my mom, at about six months, on her pony Mickey, with her dad at her side. My mom grew up with horses, and her favorite was a horse named Old Paint, whom she kept from childhood until after she was married, when he died of old age. In high school she dreamed of having a horse ranch someday, but unlike many girls who have the same aspirations, she actually did it. She and my dad began ranching soon after they were married, and are still raising beef cattle and Quarter Horses to this day.
However, my mom’s priorities changed a lot after giving birth to seven children, and she was only mildly involved with the horses, even though her heart was always in it. My oldest sister Kandra was quick to pick up the slack, and at age nine, a generous neighbor, Francis Wescott, gave her a little Arabian Pinto for her very own. She named him Apache Tear, and he became the main focus of her life. She researched every book she could find in the library, made friends with a few horse trainers in the area, and learned as much as she could about training horses. In just a few years, she had trained Apache to run the barrels and was taking him to rodeo camps in the area.
Kandra taught us younger kids everything she knew about horses. I learned to ride by being thrown on the back of a horse and hanging on. The best times of my childhood were horseback, either riding drag at the back of a dusty herd or tagging along as my dad rode pastures, looking for missing cattle. On the back of a horse, there was literally nowhere I couldn’t go, and by age five I spent just about every day in the saddle.
I will always remember the feeling of butterflies in my stomach as we saddled up early Saturday mornings, loaded up the horses in the trailer, and drove to some distant field to start a long cattle drive. The anticipation and excitement of spending a whole day riding just welled up inside me to where I almost felt sick from it. I remember days when my ankles hurt so badly from standing in the stirrups to trot (trotting was my dad’s favorite gait—it was fast enough to cover a lot of ground and get to where you needed to be to work cattle, but it wasn’t as tiring on your horse as a full-out gallop.) There were winter days when I thought my feet would fall off in blocks of ice before the long cattle drive was over. But I would gladly have sacrificed my feet before I would have stayed home.
The horse craze extended to every facet of my life. I sang songs about horses, I drew pictures of horses, I lined the walls of my bedroom with nothing but huge posters of horses. When my sister and I were little, we galloped everywhere with one hand holding imaginary reins in front of us. We whinnied to each other and made up names for the horses in our imaginary herds. Horses consumed our lives.
That’s how I got horse crazy, it just kind of caught hold of me and never let go. When I see my girl riding her horse, talking to her about everything under the sun, so happy to be spending time horseback, I know the craziness will never end.
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