walked the paces like the sort of champ who can carry a 21 month old being braced into place by a watchful parent. Bella, the child, was on her first pony ride. She was far too wide with wonder to express a like or dislike or fancy about the experience. She was at one with the pony (or she was thinking about chocolate, or what have you--can't claim to be the proprietor of the Psychic Toddlers' Network). It's a bit tried and true to miss that sense of wonder, but I do miss it, a little.
I remember pony rides on ponies both placid and unwelcoming.
Cheap metal cowboy guns, cute felt cowboy hats, boots which only lacked "real spurs". I remember being 10 or 12, in a county fair, where they turned us all loose in a corral full of calves, to try to pluck dollar bills from the calves' tales. My mother has a picture of me at 4, on my first date as consort to "Little Miss Sunbeam", in a "pageant" in tiny Sparkman, Arkansas (pop. 300).
I remember looking at distant nebulae on a cheap plastic reflector ordered from Montgomery Ward's catalog for a really big xmas gift.
I remember being a young teen, being thrown from my grandfather's old horse, the delicious thud of an unhurt body bouncing on the ground. My old friend to whom I wrote an unwise e mail about long ago soap operas wrote me that she's riding fierce horses near her rural place in Virginia. I have no real desire to go to the nearby Frisco Horse Park and plunk down the 25 dollars an hour for
a trail ride, but there's a little part of me that wants to treat everything I do like a gentle ride on a quiet horse.
