smellshorsey

Six Things I'm Afraid of and Probably Shouldn't Tell

I can't believe that I haven't posted in so long -- I think it's a record. Thank you, Jackie at Regarding Horses, for looking for me and for tagging me with this meme. I'm supposed to post the rules, so here goes:

• Link to the person who tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Write six random things about yourself.
• Tag six people at the end of your post.
• Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
• Let the tagger know your entry is up.

Jackie chose to make all her things about horses, but I'm going to make them about my fears. Here are six things I'm afraid of:

1. I'm afraid of smelling like an old person. In fact, I'm afraid of smelling like any kind of person (horses are okay) at all. My defense against this is to bathe regularly, etc. And to wash my clothing, bed linens and everything else a lot. This has led me to become a detergent and fabric softener connoisseur. Because your nose can get used to scents, I keep about three kinds of coordinated detergent and softener pairs going (plus who wants to have shelf space in their laundry?). I use them at random but never two loads in a row. Current favorites are Gain original, Tide with baking soda (chamomile and lemon verbena scent), Tide with Dawn (sometimes you just need something that cleans the dickens out of your dirty laundry) and some high-priced purple bottle (Downy amethyst something?) that doesn't say what "flavor" it is but smells woodsy and wonderful.
2. I'm afraid of trailering horses. I know, I know. I've been doing this for decades but it still makes my pulse race. I haul once a week to a riding lesson (really a non-event, but I skeedaddle before dark and get nervous if it's dark because, you know, horse trailers and trucks automatically break down when the sun sets). I'm afraid that the horse will fall through the floor, since I've heard about that happening to local people. I'm afraid soem speeding redneck will rear-end me and break the horse's legs. And most of all, I'm afraid of breaking down. Because heaven knows if I broke down, the horse would turn upside down in the trailer and we'd never get him upright again. (Actually, he would keep eating and I'd be the one to turn upside down.) Having said all that, I do have a vivid memory of one of our horses trying to climb out of an open-topped trailer when I was a child. Fortunately, the trailer was parked. My father stood in the bed of the truck and used a crop on the horse's face to get her to put her front feet back inside the trailer and onto the floor. I remember seeing the horse fall into the trailer, and while floundering around, slit open her back hoof. It became a cloven hoof and the blood, oh the blood. Fortunately, the hoof healed and the horse lived to die of old age. (And we got a closed-top trailer.)
3. I'm afraid my daughter will discover boys. See this post. For this reason, I'm hauling her and her horse to Pony Club this Saturday even though it is quite far away and we don't have our new trailer yet. Me, one horse, one girl. Too bad it's a bad idea to take Xanax and drive.
4. I'm afraid I'll never finish my novel(s). Or that I will, and they'll stink. Here's one thing and another. 
5. I'm afraid it is possible to weigh 500 pounds. If I eat everything I want, how big will I get? I'm afraid it is possible to weigh 500 pounds. I'll stop indulging -- right after I have this piece of homemade Christmas fudge.
6. For my last "I'm afraid," I don't know what to choose. Should it be something real and serious, like, "I'm afraid you really can wreck the U.S. economy and we can become a third-world country" (true). Or some other scary thing like, "I'm afraid that there really are people in this world whose religion says that they have to kill us." (true). How about this instead: I'm afraid of cows. Actually, I'm not afraid of cows. Oh, I've run when I was in Ireland in a pasture full of cows and they started ganging up on me, but I don't think they're mean or dangerous. I don't know what to do with cows. I don't know how to look at them. They don't look right. They look, to steal from Terry Pratchett, like a sack full of coathangers. What's with the bony hips? Can I feed you and get those covered? They stick out in all the wrong places. And what are they thinking? I can't read cow faces. They all seem to have the same expression, which appears to be, "Where's lunch?" Think I'll stick to horses. Plus, who wants to smellscowsey?

The Old Pictures Meme Part Two

There were several horses after Spot. Joe was the one I had the longest. He was too fast and too hot for the camera to capture him, so I'm not going to show any photos. He was out of a mare who won the South West championship as a polo pony. Joe was fast and agile like his mother and was being trained to be a polo pony (and had already been sold) when they got to the final stage where they actually used a mallet.

Nothing doing. No mallets for Joe. No nothing for Joe. You couldn't even move in an unexpected way while on him. So they trained him to jump and I ended up with him. My father loved him. Joe was athletic and crazy. I didn't know enough to know I should have said, "This horse isn't working." Instead, I rode him for the next 15 years. I got him when he was five and I think I was in ninth grade. Even when he was 24 he was still hot. When I was young, I would lie in bed the night before fox hunts and shows, wondering if I would be killed that day. Why I never told my father I don't know. Joe would go nuts if I had a cold and had to pull a Kleenex out of my pocket. You couldn't do anything on his back. He couldn't walk. Jig jig jiggity jig. I tried every bit known to man on him; the twisted wire snaffle bloodied his mouth but didn't slow him down. I finally settled on a plain snaffle because it seemed to upset him the least and the others didn't work. I just relaxed as much as possible, chose my battles, and realized that though he rushed like a maniac, had no brakes and might do anything at anytime, he was going to stay upright. Great athlete. Terrifying ride.

One thing that Joe taught me was that there are times when it doesn't do any good to fight. You may as well relax, realize that this is the best it's going to get, you lived through it last time and to enjoy what you can. I learned how to survive. I think that lesson about relaxing when my horse was not relaxed really helped me later, with the best horse I ever, ever had: Jack.

When Joe  got too old to hunt (but was still too hot to enjoy) I rented a yellowish, long-haired, compact "grey" horse to fox hunt. It was a random thing. You call up the hunter barn, say you want to hunt and they've got a horse for you when you get there. It was like a blind date. He was also hot and a rusher and couldn't stand still. There was some jig jig jiggity jigging going on with him, but it wasn't out of craziness -- he was out having fun. And so was I! I had the best time I'd had in years with this strange little speedy, bold jumper. I asked if he was for sale and he was. I think everything was for sale. Since I'd expressed an interest in him, the next time I rented him he was clipped and bright white. We wheeler-dealered and I bought him. I changed his name from Popcorn to Ivan. (Please notice I was back to using saddle pads.)

About that same time I became interested in dressage. Ivan didn't take to dressage. His tests were very forward, he was smallish (around 15.1 hands) and his movements were average. But here's the funny thing -- at shows and events people would ask me if there were other Lipizzaners that I knew of in the area. I almost fell over. The German  Bereiter I was riding with at the time didn't like Ivan.  He wasn't a fancy big warmblood. (He greatly offended her with his habit of pooping in his bucket and rolling in the mud. She called me one day at work to complain, "Your pony is a PIG." She wanted to charge me for daily cleaning. I told her it didn't bother me if he was dirty. It bothered her so much that she cleaned him every day for free.) Anyway, here's a photo of us in the show jumping phase of an event. Notice the duct tape. I always ended up using duct tape with those boots. I think the buckles were cursed, even when I replaced them I ended up with duct tape. (You'll notice them in Jack's photo tomorrow. I can't quite seem to get it all together. There's always something taped or jerry-rigged.)

This is one of my favorite pictures and memories of Ivan. I had worried myself into a stew over the cross-country jump before this one. Ivan didn't even notice it, we sailed over flawlessly and by the time we got to this jump, I was full of joy and relief. During these years the eventing rules only had time penalties for being too slow. That was never a problem. Ivan would jump banks, ditches, water, the moon, whatever. He just wouldn't jump them slowly. Three strides before the jump I had to give up whatever control I thought I had and let him do it. He was great fun if excessively thrilling. But I got really tired of fighting with him in dressage and we weren't going anywhere, so I sold him and found Jack.

To my credit, I never claimed he was a Lipizzaner though the temptation was there. His next owner also enjoyed him.  He died several years ago. I would not clone him for Lily, but I have fond memories. He was a great gentleman on the ground.

The Old Pictures Meme

I got tagged ages ago by Jackie at Regarding Horses  and also by Strawberry Lane with what I'm calling the Old Pictures meme, which was started by Transylvanian Horseman but I think in that iteration it was more of a pictures from a previous life. Transylvanian Horseman has me beat because he was a London subway engineer before moving to Romania.  Of course I can't find the pictures I've been looking for for over a month (swimming with horses in a pond and in the ocean, riding as a baby in diapers, those kinds of things) so I'm going to go for quantity. I hope you enjoy them, though this feels very self-indulgent. You can click on the photos to enlarge, but my position and turnout will not bear close inspection.

Here I am in my cowgirl outfit, complete with plastic pistols, in a pony cart with my mother. Though my pony Dan would pull the cart, this is Diablo, a pony owned by friends. Diablo was well named. My mother seldom had anything to do with the horses, so this is a rare photo of a rare event.

In fourth grade (I think) the horse I was riding, which was Non-Saintly Brother's abandoned barrel racer, gave birth. Here I am showing my foal-handling skills with her filly. I lost this tug-of-war.

Please notice the crowd my performance has drawn (and the hair! I needed a riding teacher). I was probably in eighth or ninth grade and this was my fabulous horse, Picturesque. Her barn name was Spot. This is the horse I wish I could find for Lily, but of course this horse died years ago. Note also the boots, which my father bought large enough for me to grow into. I have yet to grow into them and threw them away last year.

We got Spot from Dale Thiel, a really nice guy and fine horseman who for years ran the Carolina Cup and Colonial Cup Steeplechases, was MFH of the Camden Hunt and a former jockey.  I tried her out in Dale Thiel's ring one day, and the next day I took her foxhunting. I asked Dale what I needed to know. He said, "Keep one leg on each side. Doesn't matter which way you face."

I think everybody owned Spot at one time or another. I would
sometimes be at hunts or shows and people would walk up to the horse, call her by name, pet her and talk to her and not say one word to me. Very, very strange. Especially for a shy teenager. The highest I ever jumped was on Spot -- in a jump-off at a show against my best friend. At 4'3" my friend pulled a rail and Spot didn't. I never tried to jump any higher. Spot was a fabulous horse but not an athlete. She's the only horse (so far, please make it ever) to fall with me. She slipped when she landed after a jump and turned a somersault. Fortunately, I rolled out of the way. Her hindquarters crashed where I'd been. I believe very heartily in rolling away from the horse when you fall.

I don't think Spot was ever lame. She would refuse, she snapped as if to bite when you tightened her girth, and though she was never mean, she wasn't affectionate. We bred her once (at Dale Thiel's suggestion) to a nice TB stallion who threw a lot of color but she never "took."

I gave her to my niece when I had moved on to fancier, more complicated and much scarier horses. She's buried at a farm near here.

She was a horse who should have been cloned. Oh, how I wish Lily could have had her.

More pictures tomorrow. Some even in color!