August 31, 2006

Give Stormy a carrot, or apple, or a palm of beer and he'd give you this.

Our real trouble maker was a horse named Stormy (I still have a portrait of him in my office/dining room). Stormy spooked soooo easily..I was thrown off him once a week...the most notable was while I was riding him on our dirt road which was dug into hills, so if a car came you had to dash up a drop off and sometimes I would just stop him and let the car pass, the entire time yelling at the approaching car to slow down. Well, one car was not slowing down and the drop off was too high to get him up. I don't know if all spooked horses act the same way, but Stormy always, at a strange angle, stiffly trotted TOWARD what was scaring him. So he heads for the car, sideways.....I've got my hands up and screaming for the driver to stop until I could get him under control and Stormy, with me still on his saddle, LIES DOWN on the hood of the car and then gets up and runs home, leaving me looking at the driver through the windshield. He was a loner too, couldn't be paddocked with any other horse. When I came home for Christmas break in my first year of college..Stormy and I had been together over a decade...I went straight to see him and he turned his head away from me, wouldn't let me touch him...he was mad that I had left him. When my parents retired upnorth, Stormy was our last horse and had been with my family 21 years. My dad gave him to our shoer on the condition that the shoer (who looked like Elvis) never mention Stormy to him again. My dad didn't want to hear that Stormy had died etc...he just wanted to remember him as a great horse. I want to add..doesn't falling off a horse and surviving give you that little rush, first fear and then WOW...that was a close one?!