My horse's home is for sale. A beautiful old horse property, put on the market and priced to sit long enough for me to forget the Sale sign is up. No, I can't afford it. I don't even know that I'd want to. Boarding gives me such freedom, and I don't know that I want to be tied down to this place. Don't think my ears have been closed when barn owners talk about their to-do list and how tired they are. Not for a moment. And managing a boarding facility? Sounds like herding cats. Not the LOL cats, but semi-feral hormonal cats.
So conversation casually turns to what would happen to the place after it sells. Barns torn down and a new shed put up? Gross! Everything torn down and a subdivision built? "That would be really ghetto," I said. The words came so fast I forgot I live in a subdivision. I covered my tracks easily: "The last thing this place needs is another goddamn field of beige houses"
I'm a pretty hands-on owner, in that I don't like to let more than a day go by without seeing my horse in person. He can be in the best possible care, but if I don't see it with my own eyes, it's all imaginary. Thanks, ancestors before me that passed on the worrywart gene. I've seen the family records and photos, by the way, and their toes looked a tad long.
Came across a quote the other day: "You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far." - Uncle Remus.
Oh YEAH? Well. Some of us got into horses because we wanted to at least try to outrun trouble. Sometimes you go as far as possible from where the trouble started. Sometimes you need to physically, geographically, leave the scene of the crime.
My greatest fear isn't that I'll die riding a horse, it's that I won't be allowed to. And I'll be the old woman leaning over the back of a ship dropping jewelry into the sea.
