‘We’ had a lazy fall day yesterday, except the ‘we’ was not I, nor was it My Loving Spouse. It was our beautiful Beau. The weather has been downright glorious, warm in the day..70 degrees, with blue skies and colorful leaves everywhere! I wanted to ride my horse up on the trail and enjoy the beautiful day and the fall colors from a different view. I scurried through my work and proceeded to saddle up Beau. Beau already has started to grow a woolly winter coat, so I’d thought I’d made a good choice to take advantage of a ride while we still could.
I often feel as if I should pinch myself, when I think “I have a horse“! No one on the streets where we grew up had horses. Horse ownership in the town was available to only the very rich and those owners were knowledgeable and able, about what needed to be done in order to ride. To find myself as the horse ‘readier’ still catches me by surprise, especially when I clean their hoofs and think how far I’ve come!
So with the fall beauty everywhere, I readied us for a wonderful peaceful ride.
Except it wasn’t… Beau was being lazy. He did not want to go for a ride. He especially did not want to go without the other horses and instead of acting like a the proud and beautiful quarter horse he is, he acted like a stubborn mule (sorry, mule lovers). He did a lot of backing up, when I wanted him to go forward, so instead we went around in circles. I pulling his head around to move his feet and remind him/us who is boss. We did move down the trail, but instead of it being the pleasurably, beautiful, relaxing ride I envisioned, it looked more like we were making figure eights down the trail as I had to keep after him about which way I wanted us to go. By turning him in circles, it forces him to move his feet, especially effective when he is being lazy. Noticeably this post is now lacking the plethora of fall trail ride pictures I’d anticipated.
When we got back to the farm, we did more figure eights. This time around the barrels in our ‘arena’ and we did not go at a walk, but kicked it/him in gear and finally got into a nice ‘racing’ lope around reminding me once again how far I’ve come…even if I do still hang on tight!
I know just how Beau feels!