Chapter 28
What a Difference 40 Years Makes
I cried all day.
Mom eventually got tired of my crying and told me to stop. When I was younger and cried, she told me I was feeling sorry for myself, so I learned not to cry. That day was different. I deserved to cry. I should have cried as long as was necessary. I was feeling sorry for myself. I was grieving over a lost love. It was the most significant loss of my life. And it wasn't through death, as was the loss of my dog, Silver. I was abandoning Boots.
Boots had been living with a group of horses at a farm across town, and the new buyer picked him up there, so I didn’t see him go. And I have learned since then that crying is a healthy way to release tension. I’m sorry, but sometimes parents get it wrong.
“Forty years later, my daughter asked me, "Mom, don't you want a horse again?'
She was thinking of getting a horse and was tempting me to do the same. I decided that, yes, I did want another horse.
I found her on my birthday. After driving to Portland to look at my Uncle Al’s Morgan horses and not making a connection with them, a girl visiting his farm told me a young girl was selling her elderly mare because she wanted to move up to a jumper.
Sweet Duchess. I fell in love with her. I couldn’t ride her bareback, though; her backbone would kill me. The day I finally decided to buy her, after looking at other horses to make sure she was the one, I lay in bed that night telling myself, "I'm going to be happy all the days of my life."
I thought I was finally relieved of my grief over selling Boots. Duchess was 24 years old, which is old for a horse, but she had Arabian blood, and Arabians are known for their longevity and endurance. She could out-walk any horse in the valley. However, a few years later, I noticed Duchess's hip occasionally jerked, so I knew I couldn't ride her much longer and decided to get a young horse and let Duchess raise it.
DD and I went to the Hermiston Horse Auction in Hermiston, Oregon. That Auction used to be such fun. One of the auctioneers had a gallop in his voice. Once, three guys played musical chairs on two Icelandic Horses, hopping from one to the other, one guy on one, the other pulling him off, ripping jackets, and setting the audience into a roar.
DD bid on one of the Icelandic horses, but another outbid her.
The Hermiston Auction held an extra bonanza horse sale in February, and for a couple of years, DD and I used it as our birthday celebration, as her birthday and mine are two weeks apart. One year as DD entered the motel room from getting snacks, I said, "This television has gone psychedelic."
"Oh no,” she declared, “it’s gone Ice Cream Cake!"
We had put an ice cream cake on top of the TV to keep it away from Cherish, DD's Great Dane dog.
I called the office and told them their TV didn't work—sorry.
DD "flipped" a horse once. It was a sweet little mare named Sweetie. DD bought her at an auction in Eugene, we drove her to Hermiston, and sold her for a profit. The owner had neglected her feet, and the Ferrier I hired to trim them said, "You're too sweet a horse to have this happen to you." (When hooves grow too long, they can cripple the horse.)
A mother and her little girl bought Sweetie, and a few months later, the buyer called DD and asked what stallion had bred her. During the night, Sweetie had given birth to a foal.
They were delighted. We were shocked.
When I spotted a beautiful six-month-old filly whose coat looked like charcoal brown velvet being led down an aisle, I decided she was my horse. But first, I had to outbid another person who also wanted her.
I was so nervous bidding that DD held up the numbered paddle. I would nod, and DD would hold up the number. Someone else would bid. I felt I was going over my price, but I wouldn't give up. The auctioneer would look at me, and I would nod, and DD would hold up the paddle. I outbid my competitor—put her on my American Express card and got frequent flyer miles.
We were exuberant. The crowd applauded.
Afterward, a cowboy approached us and said, "Watching you girls buy a horse was more fun than buying one myself."
A year later, I bought/adopted another six-month-old filly, a Mustang, from the Bureau of Land Management in Burns, Oregon. That was Sierra, a curious gem of a horse. The sweetest thing.
She was born at the Burns facility, so it was apparent that the mother had to do the run while pregnant. What a character that horse was. My pickup truck’s hood carried "Monster claw marks," aka Sierra’s teeth marks for the rest of its life. People thought they were funny, so I kept them as a conversation piece.
Duchess became the matriarch of the herd living until Sierra was five and Velvet was six and is buried on Davis Mountain.
I would turn the horses loose, and they would stay around the house. (We lived in the forest, so we had privacy, a cleared area around the house, and access into the forest. However, I kept a close watch on them, for once Velvet and Sierra ventured along a path up the hill into the forest, and when Duchess and I went searching for them, a man had his tee shirt around Velvet’s neck and was leading her to his place. He thought he was rescuing them. I said it was a white man’s thing: a horse must be confined. (I trust they would have come home for dinner.) Later I worried about what would happen if he had confined them, and I wouldn’t know what had happened to them. I was always outside with them after that.
I fed them morning and night and kept their 12 x 24 run-in barn and paddock clean. My morning meditation was with the horses while they contentedly munched their hay. That was after they had greeted me with a whinny and raced across the paddock coming to a screeching halt at the gate. I held two grain buckets on the six-inch diameter log that served as our gate, and kissed the tops of their heads while they licked and slobbered the rubber containers clean. After pushing a wheelbarrow of hay under the log, they would politely walk with me, not stealing hay along the way, to the barn where I spread their meals. The three- sided barn was easy to clean as it had rubber mats on the floor, and the horses used one side for a toilet and kept the other side clean.
A freed horse is such fun.
They would race up the gravel drive that served as an emery board for Sierra’s strong mustang feet. Velvet’s not as perfectly formed Quarter Horse feet had to be trimmed, she, though, could do a perfect Lipizzaner leap from the hill above the retaining wall down to the driveway below. Both horses would roll in the Oregon red soil, crack their knuckles, and settle down to graze the green grass that grew around the house.
Those were eight happy horsey years.
