One of my favorite pics of my mom.
And it got me to thinking about horses in western stories.
Mom wasn’t a horsey girl. She rode ‘em on the farm, but she didn’t have equestrian rugs, embroidered colt wall hangings or cross-stitched pony throw pillows.
For those of you who remember ‘70s AM radio: on a cold Nebraska night, she was not one to run calling “Wildfire.”
Again, that’s not to say she didn’t care for them or know how to brush one down.
She just wasn’t all that into them.
Some western writers cast their characters with extreme horse sense or the exact bumbling opposite. Men can either nurse an animal back from the gates of horse heaven or drive them there through ignorance and mean indifference.
I’ll bet most folks in the old west were somewhere in between, more like Americans today with their cars. They can put gas in ‘em, know when to get them serviced, but very few are under the hood on a Sunday afternoon.
Your post makes sense. I’m that way about my car, completely inept.
Your post also reminds me of the last time I was on a horse. I was twelve and a friend and I were riding bareback on a single horse. It was running across the field and I, being on the back, went ass over head off it. I bounced on the ground and jumped right up. Oh, the resiliency of youth. Something like that happened today, they’d be scraping me off the field.
I did like Wildfire. Lovely horse and she looks very happy.
By the time I showed up, my father didn’t own any horses, and I could never get a satisfactory answer to why not. My guess is they were just too expensive. We did have cows, pigs, chickens, etc., but I was never allowed to get up close and personal with a horse, even though I’d had some experiences with them growing up, since everyone else around owned horses. But I do regret not having had a couple in the family.