Sally

I think Sally was the first horse I ever fell in love with.  I was 10.

She was a sorrel quarter horse mare with a big star on her forehead, and she belonged to my friend Mo's mom.

She must have been in her teens when I met her for the first time.  She was one of the patient types, and she trucked me around everywhere while I held the reins wrong and swung my feet out of the stirrups.

Mo and I always rode in english tack.  I think it was a point of pride for us.

Occasionally we'd crank our legs way forward by our horses shoulders, throw our arms straight ahead with the reins high in the air, and declare we were "Westurn riders".

Mo and her parents lived in an awesome house on 60 wooded acres outside the tiny town of Walton.

Every time I went there I felt like I was escaping everything else in my life.

It was heaven.

We spent most of our time sleeping in, then quickly making sandwiches and rushing out of the house with the compost down to the chickens, who we pestered for a while on the loop down across the creek and to the barn.

We'd get the horses to come over by rattling a few rocks in a grain bucket and yelling "SALLLL-ly!  JUNNNEEE-ior!!" at the top of our lungs.

If they didn't come right over, we'd track them down, then lead them with pieces of orange baling twine or whatever we had on hand back to the tack room, where we'd sit on the heater for a minute and try to warm up our hands.  We'd saddle Sally and Junior up and hit the road.

We were gone all day, meandering along the creek, up logging roads, and across thickets.  Sometimes we'd ride all the way to the highway.

Thinking back on it, I can't believe her parents let us do this.

But Junior always took care of Mo, and Sally always took care of me.

I remember one particularly ill-conceived plan we had to build a jump.  We tied the horses up with lead ropes and baling twine to small fallen trees and had them drag the logs to the chosen part of the pasture.  How they let us do this to them, I'll never know.  But it seemed like a great idea at the time.

We got the jump built with our stack of logs.  I do remember we got in some trouble when Mo's mom found out we were trying to jump without stirrups.

Every time I smell rain and pine trees and horse sweat, which horse people know is a rather pleasant smell, I think of being in the tack room with Mo after our ride, wet blankets on the saddle rack, warming our hands by the electric heater with the horses hanging around hoping for a tidbit of something.

This was my first consistent introduction to how great a companion a horse is.