I broke my back in a riding accident fourteen years ago, when I was 30.
One moment the horse and I were enjoying a hand gallop through the deep sand of a New Mexico arroyo (wiki), and the next, we were tumbling headfirst into a 10-foot hole that hadn’t been there the day before.
Neither one of us saw it as we galloped right into the abyss.
Colleen over at Simply Coll writes about the two weeks every summer that she and her sisters, all city girls, spent at her aunt's farm near Binscarth, Manitoba. While Colleen's "real life encounters with actual horses were few," she dreamed of having a horse of her own.
Funny, it doesn't seem to matter if you're a little girl from Manitoba or Oklahoma, you can share the same dream.
Colleen describes hers—
"The summers offered me a tiny window into my aspirations...
My husband's Arabian mare, Morningstar, is the first to greet me in the pasture. She plants her teacup muzzle into the palm of my hand to confirm that I don't have anything delicious hidden there.
It's an inky black morning. I swear I could pluck Orion's belt from where it hangs in the southern sky above the mesa and clasp it around my waist. Our ranch sits at over 7,000 feet, and I sometimes wonder if northern New Mexico is one of the few places where you can still see the stars in the sky. I'm quickly grateful for the thousands of lights piercing the darkness above.
A horsewoman rides during the opening ceremony of the International Horse Show in Seville November 23, 2005.
Our horse blogger enters with slightly less ceremony—
The cold burns in my throat and lungs as I head down to the barn, my blue heeler, Matilda, at my heels. At 5:15 AM, she’s all business. This is what she lives for—horse chores at dawn.
