I wish my first horse would come back so I could spend the rest of my life (and her life) making up for all the dumb kid things I did –
- – I fed her clover hay because it had flowers in it that I thought were pretty.
- –I fed her ear corn because I liked corn on the cob
- –I only had her shoes done when she wore out her old shoes because that’s when I got new shoes!
- –I used an old bedspread as a saddle pad because that was all I had
- –I don’t think I ever had her wormed or vaccinated (1965 or so) --not sure how/when worming or vaccinating became something one did --may have been after I got my second horse in 1976
- –Rode her onto an ice covered pond, we fell through and both nearly drowned (January)
And yet she was a saint. She carried me all over the county on back roads with my friend and her pony. We never thought twice about where we were going or how long it would take us to get there.
In hindsight, my ma should have known better than to just hand a horse to a twelve year old kid and expect she’d have any idea of how to care for it. But ma was starting her own newspaper then --writing news stories, getting advertisers, and doing everything to make it a go. Still, ma knew something about horse --hard to believe she never noticed what an ignorant owner I was.
I did keep Ginger fed twice a day, she always had water and hay --even if it was clover. I cleaned out a neighbor’s old stone building so she would have shelter, and at 12, I put up a fence using an old mallet and T posts --one at a time --then strung barbed wire (I don’t think electric fence was common back then where I lived.
Ginger died my sophomore year of college --I’d taken her with me and kept her at the college stable in return for giving lessons to beginner riders.
Ever since then, I’ve tried to give each of my horses the care Ginger should have had. I’ve had 17 horses since then.
