February is by far the worst month. I won’t take up your time describing why that’s true, because it’s just a fact. It has no redeeming qualities. It’s the worst month.
I was born in February, in the middle of a tornado. Eight years later, I had a slumber party to commemorate the event.
At some point during that slumber party, after the cake but before my best friend Lauren helped me convince everyone there that I had a dead brother who haunted the guest room (eight year olds are idiots, and Lauren and I knew it), my parents blindfolded me and led me outside to get my gift. There are pictures. That side pony tail will live in infamy forever (any parallels with Pearl Harbor that are caused by the use of the word “infamy” are both intentional and admittedly distasteful, although I maintain that seeing pictures of the side pony tail in question caused a lot of psychological damage for me in later years).
My gift was to this day my favorite gift that I’ve ever received. I loved it. I still do. I’ve had it now for almost fourteen years, and I still play with it every time I go home.
It was the best game of scrabble that you ever did see.
Not really. It was a beautiful chestnut colored horse. I was in love. Still am.
Although I had spent months of my second grade year (I was born knowing how to spell, so second grade didn’t really do a lot for me. I had a lot of free time) drawing pictures of the horse that I would one day own and writing (in my most careful handwriting) the name “Marble” underneath it, I decided to let her keep her previous name as not to confuse her. She would (continue to) be called Sandie.
This was a mistake. Sandie is an awful name. I wish that I had changed it, but I did not. I felt a great sense of friendship, almost equality, with Sandie. We were going to be a great team, just like Ashley and Wonder in the Thoroughbred series (this was a children’s book series much like the Boxcar children but for horse lovers. It greatly affected my perception of the world, for better or for worse). Who was I to change her name? She had come to me already named, and I did not feel at liberty to change it. She wasn’t going to change my name, after all.
Again, mistake. Not my first or my last, though, and life goes on the way it does.
I hopped into the saddle and Sandie and I walked around my driveway. It was wonderful. My side pony tail bobbed with her every step, and I grinned from ear to ear.
The second time I rode Sandie another horse bit her on the rump and I got more or less bucked off. I say more or less, but it was actually less. She bucked so much that I was eventually unseated and flew into the air, only to land on her neck, in front of the saddle. I eventually rolled off into a sort of manure compost. These things happen.
As the years went on, Sandie has been a constant for me. We had adventures and learned lessons, together. Most of those lessons were just real world corrections of my incorrect perceptions of the world that I had learned from the aforementioned Thoroughbred series.
I learned that Sandie hated having her ears touched and did not respond well to men. She learned so much about me that she couldn’t be easily ridden by someone else, because we had our own little set of signals of which only we knew the meaning. This would eventually make me a worse rider, because I forgot how to tell horses what to do, and eventually became too lazy to bother with things like saddles.
When my church hosted it’s annual drive through nativity scene, Sandie and I dressed up and played the part of a Roman guard and her (his?) horse, running the audio cassettes and CDs back and forth from the exit to the entrance.
Sandie put up with a lot from me through the years, as I often decided that there were things I thought we should do in which she had absolutely no interest. For example, I taught her to stay still when I ran at her full speed so that I could eventually sort of vault up onto her back. I also put up with her when we went on a trail ride behind my house and she proceeded to buck me off and then run home without me. Like good friends do, we made up each time. I would give her a piece of an apple (she’s always hated carrots) and then let her lick my hand, which she’s always weirdly loved.
When I cried, I would run out to the stable (it’s a barn, but stable has such a ring to it) and sit in her stall. She would nuzzle my face, and I would feel overwhelmed with love for my big red horse.
When I was sixteen, Sandie was bred. I was thrilled. That was the most agonizingly long period of my life, since the gestational period of a horse is approximately one lifetime.
Early on the morning of March the 16 of that year, our next door neighbor called us to ask if the baby horse was supposed to be let our our not. Having absolutely no knowledge of the existence of the baby horse, we rushed outside.
He was beautiful. I spent the whole day in the stall with that little baby horse laying in my lap. I petted him like a dog, and he nickered, pressing his velvety white nose into my face. He pranced like a dancer, a painted white and red ballerina. I was ecstatically and transcendentally happy. My dreams of living the life of Ashley (of the previously mentioned Thoroughbred series) were reignited in a hot minute. This little baby and I were going to be best friends. I would come home from school and spend my afternoons in his stall, and we would fall asleep together in the dimming light of the Mississippi sunset. We would play together, and I would feed him carrots to reward him for learning new tricks. I would teach him everything there was to know about being the perfect horse, and we would race throughout the countryside the way only a young girl and a young horse can.
The next day, he tried to kill me.
I went to the stall, and he was in attack mode. Brand new teeth bared, gangly limbs flying, he was ready to end my life. I began for the first time to learn that terror and broken heartedness are feelings that keep each other’s company more often that not. My dreams were dashed. For months, I tried to tame that little horse. At one point, he actually rose up on his back feet and put his front hooves on my shoulders, trying to crush out my very existence.
Understandably, I gave up. I would never forgive myself.
As a few years went by, the little horse that I named Jag (there is no reasoning whatsoever behind this name) became the very large horse that I named Jag. Age mellowed him a little, and one day my uncle, who has always in my head been a real life cowboy, came to get Jag to break him.
For those of you who are not familiar with the equine world, breaking a horse means teaching them to wear a saddle and bridle and be ridden. There is no actual breaking involved. It is not, however, a pretty process. Watching Jag being loaded into a trailer for the first time was painful. It took four men and I think everyone, including Jag, was minorly injured in the process.
For several reasons, Jag is still at my uncle’s farm, over two years later. I drove down last weekend to see my uncle’s new twin boys, and convinced his daughters, who are eight and six, to walk down to the barn with me. We walked down the the pasture that Jag was in, and I let myself in through the gate. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Jag and I never developed the close bond that I had dreamed of, and it wasn’t like this horse had never tried to kill me before.
I tentatively walked up to my big red and white horse, and he stepped toward me, somehow authoritatively. My heart beat a little faster as he walked right up to me, and, in a move that his mother had made hundreds of times in my childhood, rested his neck on my shoulder with his head against mine and his chin on my back. We stood together and breathed as I rubbed my arms up and down his neck. I felt like a little girl again, completely in love with something bigger and more powerful than me, something that loved me back.
In a transitional period of my life that is filled with more questions than answers and less certainty than doubt, it’s really the little things that count.
You find peace in the strangest places.
