A Horse and Her Girl: Part One

This time of year, with the crunching leaves and crisp edge to the wind, always makes me think of horseback riding.   And this year, it's reminding me of my horse, Eclipse, in an extra way, because it was right around this time last year that we had to say goodbye.   My mom wrote about this at the time, but for me there wasn't a lot to say. Now, however, over a year has passed, enough time to want to, and be able to, tell the story of the horse that grew with me from a child of ten, to a wife with a child of my own.  However, it's a longish story, encompassing seventeen years, so even a brief telling of the tale will take a couple of parts.

Part One

Eclipse was technically an accident, the product of an escaped stallion, a late night rendezvous, a moment of unbridled equine passion.  Her mother was, at the time, my absolute favorite animal on the planet, a thoroughly patient, devoted, loving mare named after my grandmother Norma.  N.R., as she was referred to, was never formally trained, but she was still the safest horse in the pasture on whom to learn to ride.  The stallion, Praise Song, was a fiery young stud who, shortly after the rendezvous in question, picked my father up by the hood of his sweatshirt and actually shook him (my dad later liked to show us the sweatshirt with the teeth marks, evidence of a close brush with death).  Needless to say, Praise Song didn't get to stay a stallion long after that incident - he was actually gelded the very next day.

So Eclipse was a one-and-only from the moment of conception.  Then came the night of her birth.  If you search for June 15, 1992, you'll find that there was a partial lunar eclipse on that night; that night she was born, with her forehead marked with the crescent moon.

She was essentially mine from birth; my aunt, who owned all the horses, had promised each of her nieces and nephews a horse of their own choosing at their 13th birthday, which they could either sell (reaping the proceeds), or keep and train.  Horse-crazy basically from childhood ("see! see!" was my early word for horse), I of course chose the latter, and the only filly born in years from my favorite mare was an obvious choice. But, at 10 years old (and not yet weighing the sixty lbs that my elders has arbitrarily deemed the weight at which I could ride alone), there wasn't a lot I could do with her.  I halter trained her, of course, and when she escaped her pasture, I was the only one who could catch her to get her back in.  I have a shadowy memory of a young, dark filly on a sunny lawn, friendly ears pricked towards me as I confidently walked up and put a lead around her neck.  And another memory of then weaving, with my mom, a "baling twine barrier" all up and down the fence, so that she couldn't escape again.  Hours of work, a complete visual eye-sore, but effective enough that it stayed for probably a decade after we put it up.

Over the next three years, she and I both grew, and the storms of adolescence hit.  She began to exhibit a temper much like her father's; I was rather broody, melancholy, and while becoming an accomplished rider, still very green and uncertain.  Probably as with any horse trained by a young teenager, she developed some quirks right from the beginning that took years to go away: spinning into the circle on the lunge, rearing to get out of things, tossing her head at bridling.  If things had continued in that vein, I might not have had much luck ever riding her, but fate, and illicit rendezvous of her own with another escaped stallion (this is a trend on our farm.  Stallions, rams, "I don't think anything happened" and then several months later, offspring; great for reproductive education but not so great for keeping herd size down), intervened.  Over the course of a few months, her mood inexplicably mellowed, until one day, as I was brushing her, I felt something move.

Unbridled Passion, as I named the foal, was born a few months later.  Before he was born, I took great advantage of Eclipse's more mellow disposition, and the weight of the foal inside her kept her a lot slower and easy to work with (having now experienced the last trimester of pregnancy, I now realize it was awfully unfair to take advantage of her condition, but it did help).  Of course, the whole situation was far from ideal; if she'd been a human instead of a horse, she'd have been starring in the movie Juno, because age-wise she wasn't out of horse-high school yet.  The stallion in question was a cousin of hers, so the genetics weren't great, and the foal never amounted to much (he actually had to be put down after he broke his leg in a pasture accident when he was two).  But the time allowed Eclipse and I to grow much closer, and for the first time in my life I was riding on a daily basis.  Riding - to this day, there's still nothing quite like it, and back then, I was riding my equine best friend.

If there's any interest in part two, I'll continue soon.. :)