When we bought the farm (or the farm bought us?) we wanted to leave it “blank” for a little while, meaning we didn’t know, at first, the purpose of the farm to be or how to populate it.
The previous owner kept horses, high-dollar endurance horses: think ultra-marathons for horse and rider. We didn’t know anything about anything relating to horses – for my growing up annual 2-week summer Girl Scout stay-away camp my mother informed me that we couldn’t afford the horse riding track, so my best friend and I did canoeing each year (I’m an excellent canoer). Glen grew up riding a horse every once in a blue moon. We marked it off the list of options for the farm.
When we’d been here a few months, our neighbor and her son asked if they could “keep” their two horses in our pasture for a while to replenish their grass supply. We had plenty of grass, so Bucky and his dad Flash came to the farm. It was nice, very nice, to have life in the field and even though B&F as we came to call them weren’t exactly trained, or easy to love, we liked having them here.
When our neighbor called to say that his mother was missing seeing them out of her back window and he was coming to take them back, I was sad. Overly sad. I tend to get attached.
My husband the fixer wanted to fix me being sad. He disappeared into our bedroom and searched Craigslist until he could come out and say, “Honey I found our horse.”
A horsey friend I have said, “Look, I don’t want to tell you what to do but you Never, Never, Never, Ever buy a horse off Craigslist. There are too many things that can be wrong. You never find a good horse that way.”
A nice couple delivered Toby the next week. When he came off the trailer, it was love at first backside glance. He is, by all accounts (even my horsey friend), the one good horse on all of Craigslist.
Hello Toby.