Last week, some friends asked me why I rarely write about my horses anymore. (I have been part of an online journal writing groups with these friends for over ten years.)
Hap was an adventure. As much as I dote on him, I sometimes felt about Hap like the Ashley Brilliant postcard epigram: “We’ve been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.” Hap was so quick that half the time when he ditched me, I would land standing, not really aware there was a problem until I was on the ground. I finally learned to stay with him through most of his big moves, but it never failed to impress the hell out of me each time I managed to do so. (Impressed a fair number of onlookers, too.) Hap was the horse who could be behaving very badly at a show and people would come up and compliment me on how beautiful he was. I would be thanking them through gritted teeth and thinking “handsome is as handsome does.” Hap was good copy even when he was an intimidating mount.
Hap is currently semi-retired on our five acres. I mainly ride Lily, my twelve year old Paint Breeding Stock mare. Lily has been a different sort of frustration. I bought her as a four year old, and things were going quite well, and then we just got stuck. People who do the sports horse types of things that I like to do are very keen on having a horse go “forward.” Lily didn’t. She was lethargic and didn’t seem to be very comfortable. She acted colicky a lot, and we tried all the stuff that the vets recommended, and she didn’t improve. We spent a lot of money on vet visits when she had her spells. My trainer and I thought it might have something to do with her cycles, but no vet ever thought too much of that idea. I had just about made up my mind to haul her to one of the major diagnostic centers here in Colorado when she bowed her tendon while playing one day.
A bowed tendon is a big deal in a horse. Some horses never recover. We nursed her through her immediate convalescence when she had to be kept in a small area while she wore a gel cast, and then through the hand walking endless circuits around the arena. When the vet said I could walk her under saddle I did so once. Then I brought her home and put her out to pasture for six months. It was getting on toward autumn and I couldn’t deal with her any longer.
Unfortunately, right before she bowed her tendon, I came off of her in a rather nasty fall, only the second time I haven’t been able to get right back on the horse. I didn’t ride for several weeks, and then she got hurt, so I had a lot of worries stored up between me getting hurt and her getting hurt.
When I started riding her again in the spring, she was a lot more forward than she had been. However, as she got better I got worse: three summers ago I had so much heel pain that I was unwilling to dismount from a sixteen hand horse. Plus, as she got stronger, I felt more and more over-horsed, and since I wasn’t riding enough to develop my strength we got in this vicious cycle where I would feel intimidated by her and ride even less. One circuit of the arena each direction at a trot and then at a canter doesn’t get you very far. Lily’s spooks were actually easier to deal with than Hap’s, she would just levitate and hang in the air for a while, then carry on whatever she was doing. However, despite the fact that it looked worse than it felt, I didn’t have people lining up for the opportunity to ride her.
This year we finally seem to be getting in sync. There were a few times in the early spring when I decided, after longing her, that I would put her up and go ride another horse, but I progressed to riding her consistently a lot sooner in the year. In past years, I kept telling myself I would lesson with my trainer when I became a little stronger, and ended up taking very few lessons. This year, I decided that I would lesson even if I wasn’t in good enough shape to make it worth while. And I found out that after the first ten minutes when I want to whine and quit and apologize to my horse for being such a crummy, overweight and out of shape rider, that we just get past that and start getting some pretty damn decent work.
And I am sure, from Lily’s point of view, she thinks, “We’ve been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.”