Back to the Beginning, Again

And what you have to understand is, he changed everything. Everything, overnight.

He stepped off of the trailer the morning after we met him, at seven o'clock, the sun barely up and the mockingbirds just beginning to stir. It was cold. It was muddy. He barely had any hair. I wonder, on this hot June afternoon, how he felt on the stock-trailer ride up I-95, without a blanket to block the December wind.

I took the cotton lead rope from Curtis, the Plum Crazy Cowboy, and there he was, my horse, blinking gently in the sunrise, ears pricked, looking from empty fields to the double barns and the sounds of breakfasting horses.

There he was, my horse.

Poor Smuckers, it was like he never existed, his quiet lack of personality, his ambling walk, his gentle acceptance of everything except rolltops. He was forgotten. I remember so little of Smuckers, and the amnesia started that morning.

Rillo - we already called him Rillo, we named him that on the drive home, there was never any thought of changing his name from Amarillo - Rillo walked quietly beside me into the barn, into the first stall on the right, and I took off his halter, handed it back to Curtis, and wrote on the dry-erase stall sign. "Amarillo. Owner, Natalie Keller." I hung Smucker's leather halter on the peg, and the red-and-white striped nylon lead rope. I hung an anti-sweat sheet on the blanket bar. I did everything I could to personalize the stall, make it look like the other ones in the barn, to shout, "Here is MY horse, and here are HIS things, and he is just as good as your horse!"

Curtis sold my mother a bareback pad he just happened to have in the truck - I needed one because one of my friends had one, and they were very much in vogue in Brevard County pre-teen hunter riding circles at the time. I put it in my locker, with my cheap little wide tree close-contact that had fit Smuckers but would probably not fit Rillo, and my $19.95 Essex bridle with a plain raised noseband and laced reins from State Line Tack, fitted with a loose-ring snaffle that looked a quarter-inch too small for Rillo, and a couple of Grooma brushes that said "Smuckers" in permanent marker on them. That was my locker. It wasn't bursting full like the other boarders' yet, but I had good faith that it would in time.

I went back to my horse and watched him look out the window, watched him eat his hay cautiously, pressed my finger to his nose everytime he blew at me through the bars.

My horse, my horse, my horse.

I am tearing up a little thinking about him.

The picture is from Canterbury Horse Trials in 2000. I am laughing at a rank bay trying to buck Ralph Hill off on the other side of the warm-up ring. Ralph was laughing, too.