Horse Girls Part II

Today I went to a friend's baby shower. This is a friend whom I have known for about 15 years, since she was a little teenager running around the barn where I got back into the horse business. My friend who I make my trips to Wyoming with, whose mother was my mentor when I went to manage CHC. I used to sit in the barn office in the evenings and talk to her while she did her homework and my younger son, James, was learning to post on Chocolate Chip. Now she is getting ready to have a baby of her own ~ a boy.

Kate runs a farm like I did when I had Parker, my first son. I gave her the same gift someone gave me which allowed me to continue to work in the barn while Parker was snuggled up right against my chest in his carrier.

Most of the people at the shower were "barn people." Horse girls, all of us. Some of us in our 70's and still riding (Tammy's sister Jackie, for one). Nany of us middle age, not riding as much as we used to if at all. Then there were the younger girls who wear ankle bracelets and dangly earrings and flip their hair the way horse girls do. One of them, an adorable teenager named Michaela, was a toddler when I first met her. She ran around the barn after her mother in her diapers and boots, and rode an old pony named Watergate. I was stunned to realize she was who she was because in my mind, she should only be about 10 years old. She's close to graduating from high school now, I guess.

I realized something while I was there. The job I have now, at the florist, I try to create bonding outings or get togethers with the girls who work for me. It is important to a team, I think. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But when I managed the horse farms, I didn't have to create anything. I never had to worry about one of the girls getting sassy with me or copping an attitude when I asked them to do something. So completely different. But the thing is, the common bond we all share is that we are all horse girls. We are there because we want to be there, not because we have to be there.

It is all the same, I can see. It hasn't changed. Horse girls are horse girls are horse girls. Tomorrow I will write about one of my ancesters who read Black Beauty, then saw a horse being mistreated and stood up for the horse in court. That was back in the 1800's, so apparently horse girls were the same back then.