Ready to Ride

When I was about 10 years old, my Mom got me the second best gift next to a pony: a summer-long pass to horseback riding camp. I loved it all: from the trip to a specialty store to get jodhpurs, to learning the fine art of horse grooming, to the smell of hay. One weekend we actually rode horses miles and miles through fields of wildflowers to a grassy clearing, camped there overnight, and rode them back in the morning. If Harry Potter were to look at that memory in a pensieve, it would be clouded in a heavenly gold haze. There were 2 different horses that I rode that summer, one named Peaches, and one named C.J. Splash. I loved them both equally. C.J. was a tall, powerful, and fast paint horse; he was extremely sensitive and responsive to touch. As I was learning the different between asking a horse to trot and asking a horse to canter, I accidentally asked C.J. to canter a lot. I am afraid I may have peed my pants while riding him several times. Peaches was the other horse. I shouldn't say she was a horse, she was technically a pony, and she was basically the pony you see at a children's party. She had very cute horse bangs and was very lazy. I was allowed to feed her Smarties and orange soda from my hand, which I am pretty sure was a large part of her diet considering she was pretty fat. You can easily ascertain that she was also pretty slow. I loved her dearly. She was extremely easy to ride. She was the type of horse that you would want to ride if you wanted to ride a horse through a drive-thru (this is one of my hopes and dreams in life).

My Mom, I think, felt sad I grew up without my own horse. She had a horse named Daisy for a large part of her childhood, that once saved her life (for real), but she sacrificed lots of things to make sure I didn't have to part with Peaches or C.J. when the summer was over and could keep riding. I have a picture of myself all saddled up laying down on C.J. giving him a hug. It has cooled down in Atlanta and today would be such nice riding weather. Sadly, the only animal I own is a corgi. She doesn't have a saddle.

Shirt: Blue Bird, $28
Leggings: Target, $5
Boots: Plato's Closet, $10
Brown Cuff: Boogaloos, $25