Hi-Ho Silver

When we were kids, a long long time ago, my sisters and I had horses {lots and lots of horses}. Most of the horses ran out back with the cows on the 160 acres of our farm. There were the few friendly ones that you could actually touch and ride, but for fun, we used to take lariats and buckets of corn and catch the wild ones. What a thrill to actually get that rope around their necks and then hold on for dear life until you could stop the mighty steeds by wrapping the other end of the rope around a tree to hold them. And then the struggle that followed to try to drag them all the way back home to hope that they would stay contained in our little pasture.

The best thrill of all, though, was the day that you could actually walk up to such a horse and pet them without first roping them. The day that they trusted you to handle them and lead them and care for them was monumental. We thought all kids grew up that way with such adventures to entertain themselves without colored television or Atari's.

My current horse, Lightning, is a descendant of those long ago horses. Her mother, Magnum, a black and white paint, was the prize catch of the farm twenty five years ago. In a round about way, after all of the animals eventually got auctioned off, we found Lightning as a foal living wild in somebody else's pasture and were able to buy her when she was five years old. Supposedly she had been professionally trained, which we have questioned more than once since the previous owners delivered her to our farm.

When we were little girls, our riding skills pretty much consisted of just being able to stay on top. Today, I am content with the same thing: just being able to stay on top. I used to long to have real saddles, and bits, and barns which I thought would make me a real cowgirl. But, it turns out, even though I now have those things, I have not strayed very far from how I grew up. Neither in location nor horsemanship.

The saddles sit on their shelves most rides, and no bits are to be found. The horses once in a while get a stall in a goat barn until a real horse barn makes it's way to the top of the list. We grab the hackamore's, jump on bare backs, and hold on tight. It turns out two young ladies have followed suit. And every once in a while, just to make me feel like a teenager again {I am sure}, Lightning even obliges me with the long-forgotten hi-ho-silver-and-away rear. Thus far, knock-on-wood, I have still been able to stay on top.