When I was a little girl I dreamed horses, played horses, watched horses. I was born the fourth child in a family of five. My father was a Congregationalist minister who worked six days a week for a feed and fertilizer company to support his family and on Sundays he pastored a small and struggling little church.
I grew up before cell phones and I-pods. Before Sponge Bob and MTV. I watched My Friend Flicka and Fury and partnerships like Roy Rogers had with Trigger. I knew I wanted to ride horses and have them be my friends as soon as I was old enough to sit crosslegged in front of our TV.
Freelove, bra-burnings and LSD were in all the newspaper headlines. High school guys I knew were thinking about a place called Vietnam. I was going to sit-ins and peace protests with my hippie brother. Peace sign earrings, bell bottoms.., yes I was a true flower child of the seventies.
I was offered a literature scholarship but I was certain we were not a family who could afford college even with that kind of help. I may have been wrong about that but I never even told my parents. Instead, I put an advertisement in the back of a magazine call Arabian Horse News. I was looking for an apprenticeship to learn about training horses. I had been told that no one would hire a kid who nothing about horses but I sent the ad in anyway. I had responses from all over.
I got a job.., I learned about horses. I trained hard.., played hard. I fell in love. Then my father got cancer. I eventually got married to that boy I fell for. I kept training horses and then I took that job in an office. I got disillusioned by the Arabian show circuit. I quit training horses for others and began competitive and endurance riding. A lot of years went by.., we lost both of his folks. We bought our beautiful farm and started pouring heart and soul into it. I kept riding. I found the Parelli Natural Horsemanship program. I wanted to start training and helping other train rheir own horses again. That pretty much brings us up to the present.
So now I'm wondering.., can I find that brave and adventurous girl who placed an ad in a magazine? Who went off to a place where she knew no one and began a new life and learned about something she loved. Who didn't let other people tell her she couldn't do something. Any one with experience in finding lost souls please leave me a message. I'm not sure if I remember how to do this but it is starting to come back to me.
Land appeared beneath her feet where there had been none.., because she dared to step.
