Saturday, March 7, 2009

Horse Girls Part II

Today I went to a horse-friend's baby shower. This is a friend I have known for about 15 years, since she was a little teenager running around the barn where I got back into the horse business. The friend goes to Wyoming with me, and whose mother was my mentor. I remember how we used to sit in the barn office in the evenings while she did her homework and my younger son, James, was learning to post on Chocolate Chip. Now my horse-friend Kate is all grown up and getting ready to have a baby of her own ~ a boy.

Kate manages a horse farm like I did when I had my first son, Parker. I gave her the same gift I received, a papoose type snuggly which allowed me to continue to work in the barn while Parker was held safe and secure against my chest in his carrier.

Most of the people at the shower were "barn people." Horse girls, all of us. Some of us in our 70's and still riding. Many of us middle age, not riding as much as we used to, if at all. There were plenty of younger girls who wear ankle bracelets and dangly earrings and flip their hair the way horse girls do. One of them, an adorable teenager named Michaela, was a toddler when I first met her. She ran around the barn after her mother in her diapers and boots, and rode an old pony named Watergate.

I realized something while I was there. The job I have now, at the florist, I try to create outings or get togethers with the girls who work for me as a way to bond, to cement ourselves as a team. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But when I managed the horse farms, I didn't have to create anything. I never had to worry about one of the girls getting sassy with me or copping an attitude when I asked them to do something. It was completely different. Because the thing is, the common bond we all share is that we are all horse girls. We are there because we want to be there, not because we have to be there. We are there because it is the job of our heart, it feeds our soul.

It is all still the same, I can see that in these young girls. It hasn't changed. Horse girls are horse girls are horse girls. Tomorrow I will write about one of my ancesters who read Black Beauty, then saw a horse being mistreated and stood up for the horse in court. That was back in the 1800's, so apparently horse girls were the same back then.

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