Greenhorns
This exquisite image entitled "Day Dreamer" by doppelganger on Flickr is worth thousands and thousands of words. Check out all of doppelganger's images. Beautiful, breathtaking stuff.
Some draft text from the book--
Just two years ago, when we’d been looking around for my first horse, we’d nearly been duped into buying one that was chronically unsound.
The owner, another work acquaintance of my dad’s, had the gray mare so drugged up with phenylbutazone during my test ride that we never knew. That mare rode as smooth as silk on top of all that bute, and I fell head over heels in love with her on the spot. Having been plunged into the alien territory where many parents with expendable income and a horse-crazed daughter often find themselves, my mom and dad—who had trouble enough with our neurotic dachshund—had decided to forego a pre-purchase exam by a vet.
So there I was, brimming with excitement at the fulfillment of a lifelong desire, the dream of so many girls, basking in the congratulations from the mare’s now previous owner on my acquisition of a really fine horse, when my dad, armed with the full power of his good looks and all that cultivated charm, asked the owner for the check back, just for a moment, purring in his slow, Oklahoma drawl that he needed to make a notation on it if she didn’t mind.
Well, that lady didn’t mind at all. In fact, she seemed perfectly tickled to hand the check over to my father, until he folded it neatly in half and stuck it in his pocket, advising her in a polite but firm tone—the kind with which no one would dare argue, at least at our house—that we’d decided otherwise.
The word came at me like one of the sucker punches I’d eventually find myself receiving from my first husband, who was more than a decade away in my future. I was speechless, dumbfounded, as my mother ushered me to the car, her arm around my shoulder. She was always the one who consoled me through the stuff like this.
As we drove off with me on the verge of tears in the backseat of her new Buick LeSabre, my dad explained that one of the college students who worked at the stable and who’d seen me taking lessons there from time to time had pulled him aside after he’d paid the gray mare's owner and warned him about her lameness.
She would never be sound, he said. The college student said that the owners had been toying with the idea of putting her down.
In between the sniffles that I wasn't supposed to let loose, because we had after all just escaped certain disaster by the skin of our teeth, and I should look at this from a practical perspective, I decided that this must have occurred while the woman, with all the enthusiasm of Pandora herself, was showing me the tack box that was also part of the deal.
