Cold Snap’s birthday

Did you know that I used to have horses?  From 1993-2002, I had one or two horses.  When I was in middle school, a friend won a horse by putting her name in a drawing at a mall hair salon (amazing huh?).  I spent a couple years visiting the barn with my friends, and eventually I started taking lessons.  Then in 1993, when I was a junior in high school, the woman from whom I was taking lessons was moving out of state and was looking to quickly sell her horses.  And so it came to pass that I ended up with my very own horse – Valentine.

It wasn’t until about 9 months later that we learned that when we bought Valentine, we actually got a “twofer” — she was pregnant!  So, in January, 1994, I had two horses!  Cold Snap, Valentine’s foal was born on the night of January 14, 1994.  As his name suggests, the weather was chilly.  In fact, it was a bitterly cold couple of weeks, with temperature around -20 degrees and the wind chill plummeting to something like -60.  Not a great time to be born in a barn.

We wrapped Val’s stall in thick plastic to try to keep the drafts out and had a couple space heaters going.  I spent hours and hours at the barn that week, and at least one night, I stayed overnight with my mom and another friend.  It was so cold that even wearing my super-warm barn boots, I couldn’t feel my feet.  One time, Val stepped near me and I heard a “crack.”  I wasn’t sure if she had stepped on my foot or not and ran off to take off my boot to check my foot for injury since it was totally numb (my foot was fine).

It turned out that Val wanted privacy for her birth.  No one was in the barn when Cold Snap made his entrance.  I remember my mom calling up the stairs to me when the barn-owners telephoned us on the morning of the 15th to tell us that he’d arrived.

Oh, he was so cute!  We had him wearing a big sweatshirt and/or a flannel shirt for the first week until he put on a little insulating weight.  What a silly guy:)

When I graduated from high school, I took both my horses in a trailer up to Carleton College (in Minnesota) with me, and they made the trip up and back many-a-time.  During my junior year of college, I sold Val – spending enough time with the horses had become more and more challenging.

I have such fond memories of my hours in the barn.  The smells, the touch of a horse’s sweet nose (I’d often come home with a very dirty face from kissing all those grubby equines).  Good times with friends.  Meditation.

I hope to have my own farm some day.  Someday, some day.

There are seasons in life for many activities.  My teen years were so much richer for the hours I spent at the barn in the company of horses.  I hope that a future time in my life includes a similar season, full of sweet-smelling hay and grain, leather saddles, dirty jeans, and horsey kisses.

I have a poem about horses on my refrigerator, yellowed and curling with age.  Mom sometimes cut out poems or cartoons from the newspaper.  This is the last one I have from her, and I’ve been a little loathe to take it down.   Maybe if I share it here, it’ll feel OK to move it along.

Kissing a Horse by Robert Wrigley

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red —
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years — who’d let me
hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain
up the head to the eyes.  He’d let me stroke
his coarse chin whiskers and take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just
so that I could smell
the long way his breath had come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the heart,
from a world that meant no harm.

Ahh, good stuff.  Cold Snap is 17 years old now.  A middle-aged man.  I wonder if he’s still as fast and furious and fun to ride?  Perhaps he’s still at Hell Creek Ranch in Michigan…riding the trails and living the good life.  Happy birthday, buddy!

Here’s some pictures when he was less than a year…

And here’s him all grown up…  He’s a horse of a different color!