In my next life I want to be a cowgirl. Now...I know I don't get a "next life"... and even if I believed in reincarnation, I'd be more worried about coming back as a goat or a cockroach or some other lower life form - like a politician. No, I'm just talking here about choices and fate and the always-popular "what ifs". You see when I was a girl I was in love with horses. My cousin Melanie and I shared this love of horses and her mother (my aunt Luanne) even gave me a subscription to a horse lovers' magazine one year. I enjoyed receiving it and pretending, just for an afternoon or so, that I owned my own darling horse and it was right outside in our barn.
At this time my family and I lived south of Miami in the suburbs. No barns. No pastures. Streets were laid over drained swampland; houses were built and 3 saplings were planted in front of each house. There was a field behind my house, but it didn't belong to us. The only purpose it seemed to serve was to separate our house from US 1. Later on my dad and adjoining neighbors started mowing into the field - extending our backyard and theirs - and the field became a softball field for us.
The closest horses to me (I believed at the time) were the pony rides that visited Cutler Ridge Shopping Center from time to time. I was so horse crazy that I begged my parents to ask the owner if I could work for him taking care of the ponies. You know - scooping poop and bringing them water. They said no. I was 11. My world was very small then. Little did I know that just south and west of me were acres of horse ranches. I thought all the horse ranches were "out west".
Melanie lived "out west" in Oakland, California. When I found out her parents had gotten her a pony I was wild with joy and envy. She was so lucky! She and I wrote back and forth and she told me all about her pony and I told her how cool it was that she had one. Why, oh why, couldn't I live "out west" where horses were as plentiful and available as dogs or cats?! Someday I was going to live where I could have not just one horse, but a whole stableful of horses!
The summer I was 16 my parents let me fly out to visit Melanie for two weeks. I was beside myself with excitement. Flying by myself! Two weeks in California with my cousin Melanie! And the icing on the cake was that I was going to help Melanie with her summer job: exercising her neighbors' horses! This suburban girl who had only ridden ponies around in a ring soon found herself roaming the hills (we'd call them mountains back east!) on horseback. Melanie taught me how to saddle up and how to ride. Up hill and down. And how to take care of a horse - not get them all lathered up and hot - not run them - take care of them. It was great training and a real high for a horse lover like me!
So what happened after that? Life. High school. Boyfriend. College/Marriage/Kids. My dream resurfaced when my older daughter Mary Lee showed an interest in horsebackriding when she was about 10 or 11 years old. I found a stable that not only taught kids to ride, but also taught them how to brush and take care of horses. Mary Lee gave it her best but finally told me tearfully that the horses scared her and she didn't want to go anymore. I was heartbroken for her and for myself.
We moved out to the country a couple of years later and my dream flickered alive again. There was a nearby boarding stable and I started to do the numbers and came to believe that we might just be able to afford to buy and board a horse less than a mile from our house. What happened? Life, work, divorce, etc.
Today I live near the beach in a condo. I'm filling my car's tank with gas and a great big old pickup truck pulls in. A man gets out and starts filling the truck with gas. And a woman gets out of the passenger side - she's wearing a cowboy hat and jeans and flipflops. (Hey, it's Florida, ya'll) She grabs the window squeegee and hops up on the truck's running board and starts cleaning the windshield. The license plate says Florida/St. Johns County and I assume they live on some property west of St. Augustine where there are potato farms and horse ranches. I can tell it's a work truck - there's a toolbox and equipment in the back and I even think I see some hay. And I start wondering...what if?????
If I remember correctly, before you got there, we rolled out a sleeping bag atop a cot out in the middle of the horse pasture. We set out a night stand with a oil lamp, tossed a pillow on the bunk and surrounded the whole thing with a rope "to keep out the snakes."
ReplyDeleteAnd you were perfectly okay with it.