What A Sight We Must Have Made (Part 1)
“When I was 6 years old, I took weekly riding lessons with a tiny, ancient lady named Ms. W. She was notoriously grumpy and incredibly loud. At least once a month she’d scream that her dog could ride better than us girls, call us all into the center of the ring, and toss her Jack Russel up into the saddle. And the damn thing would balance perfectly while she lunged the horse at a canter.
One day, she lined all of the little girls up in the middle of the ring and had us take turns pulling on a stirrup leather while she held the other end. You see, Ms. W had a problem: there were seven little girls in the lesson group and her seventh lesson pony was lame. I was deemed the strongest of all, and rewarded with a new mount.
His name was Hands. He was the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. He was impossibly huge. There is a photo of me leading him, and I barely come up past his knees. I looked absolutely comical mounted on him; my legs didn’t even cross the midline of his barrel. I couldn’t get on him even with a mounting block. The stirrups were still high above my head. I had to be lifted up, or, as I discovered, climb up to the top board of the fence and clamber aboard, though not while Miz Wells was watching.
Despite the fact that I was six years old, tiny, and unable to give him any kind of proper cue, Hands was an angel. Though he did figure out that if he pulled the reins out of my hands, I was too small to reach down his incredibly long neck and retrieve them, so he was able to graze at will until an adult came over to get the reins back. But other than that, he did pony school amazingly well. He walked, he trotted, he lined up in the middle of the ring. He rode down the gravel paths. He leapt over cavaletti poles in one jump and made all the adults laugh, though I didn’t know why.”
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