So here are some basics on my childhood......I am the youngest of 4 children. My parents are still married after many years. Anyway I grew up on a ranch, with horses, cats, and dogs all about. I loved riding my horse Dixie, she was the most amazing horse EVER, if I was being stupid and oh I don't know riding backwards bareback and goofing off, she'd buck you off and then stand there and wait as if to say "straighten up and get back on"......she was a babysitter really, cranky as all get out but a wonderful horse. She knew all my secrets and she listened to all my problems and dried all my tears.......I could run like the wind on her and I loved her dearly. She was tragically hurt in a cattle guard when I was 16yr old and I think part of me died that day when I had to make the decision to put her down because her injuries were just too deep. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to live thru, she helped me thru so many things in my young life and when she died suddenly I had no way of coping with life anymore......she WAS my childhood.
I can still remember her speckled quivering muzzle as she laid there in the middle of our county road cattle guard, we were both in shock. I just did not want her to suffer anymore, I wanted her pain to be over.......I had to say my final goodbyes fast....... but how do you say goodbye to your everything? How do you thank her for all the hours of rides, and the tender sneezes while grazing, all the sunsets on horseback, all the wild rides thru the trees, and the tender nudges of her soft but prickly muzzle when I cried....that same muzzle I was looking at in her last minutes alive? I left before they actually gave her the shot I could simply not watch her die like that. My Dad burried her under a tree not far from our house and placed a HUGE boulder over her grave. I still go there sometimes and it still hurts on some kind of deep level I can't explain.
Now Dixie was nothing spectacular in the looks department, she was an uptight appaloosa mare that had a cranky PMS problem all the time (she was spayed and evidently was stuck in cranky mode) she had horrible skin and was allergic to everything, her main was so unruly and stiff it almost always had to be shaved off (think mohawk), she was still beautiful to me though. She was elegant in a strange kind of way, she was ladylike in her manerisms, she was THE BOSS around the barnyard. There were many forms to her crankiness......when saddling her she'd purposfully try to step on your foot....she really hated being cinched up, or when hearding cattle she'd reach out and take a chomp out of one of the cows just because she could.
Good old Dixie......there may be more from our story to come you never know...........Maybe I will go searching for a pic of her so I can show you my childhood horse. I think I am done tearing up for a while though.
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